SB Nation User Blog: Andrew Heffernan

New Book Alert!

Andrew Heffernan — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:22:08 -0000

Hey Readers! Just dropping by for a quick plug!

Typically I'm not in the business of recommending products sight unseen, but with this book I'm going to have to make an exception.

A couple of years ago I walked into Alwyn Cosgrove's Results Fitness studio, just to sniff around the place and get a sense of how a pro of Alwyn's caliber makes it all happen. At the time the studio wasn't all that impressive looking (they've duded the place up significantly since), but the people working out there certainly were. This was around 11 am, and most of the folks there were 30's-40's women, but I'd never seen so many six-packs on so many women in my life.

Although she hasn't been quite as visible, Alwyn's wife Rachel Cosgrove is every bit the pro--and every bit equal partner in the Results enterprise. Moreover, she's completed an Ironman (!), successfully competed as a figure competitor (!!) AND put up some serious powerlifting numbers in competition (!!!). If that doesn't make her one of the most impressive all-around athletes you've ever encountered...well, I just don't know what planet you're living on.

Well, Rachel has a new book out and I don't care if it's for women--I'm picking it up, and I'm suggesting everyone reading this does too, just to see what this absurdly talented athlete and trainer has to say about getting in shape.

Okay--now I'm really outta here till Monday.

Andrew

Introducing Guest Blogger Randy Booth!

Andrew Heffernan — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:02:21 -0000

Hey there, readers: I'm out of town through the end of the week and only intermittently online...but fear not--I have arranged to have a fellow SB Nation blogger, Randy Booth, sub in for me (check out his Red Sox blog, "Over The Monster."). Randy contacted me a few weeks ago to tell me about an impressive weight-loss venture he's recently undertaken, and I asked if he'd be willing to share some of his experiences on MPF...he was, happily, game! So...enjoy, and I'll be back in the blogging saddle on Monday.

Andrew

A Plea For "Average Guy" Muscle

Andrew Heffernan — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:07:33 -0000

Just received a plug for a new exercise system called the "Warrior Physique" by a couple of guys calling themselves "Lean Hybrid Muscle". I think their program looks great--it's closer and closer to what I think fitness for the average person should be and look like: lots of full-body movements based around strength training, sprinting, sled pulling, tire flipping (not 100% sold on that one yet, actually), some kettlebell work, functional core work, etc. etc., all jammed together in limited time so that it produces some serious exhaustion and CNS fatigue (that's Central Nervous System for the acronym-averse) and serious all-around fitness.

Their sales package has a whole dealio about Warrior Societies and how way back when guys were way more fit than they are now because they were expected to row across the ocean, jump out of their longboats in the middle of the night and ambush the enemy without so much as a catnap and a sip of protein shake. They were, essentially, Navy SEALS, circa the first century BC.

Frankly I'm a sucker for all that stuff. I mean, who wants to work out so they can 'feel better, lower their cholesterol, and relieve stress'? Noble goals, certainly, but the reason that all those books with guys who look like marble statues sell so well, and that the more understated ones don't is that the fantasy of more or less being Supermen and women fires us up and gets us into the gym, whereas the more technical and conservative stuff holds less appeal. Once I pass 50, maybe I'll feel differently, but I doubt it. Lou Schuler's past the half-century mark and I know for a fact that he still gets pretty fired up over working out. He's even still helping crank out books for guys half his age to help them build mighty physiques to attract girls, so there's little doubt that the man still has an active hormone or two coursing through his veins.

Okay, to the point: having started my fitness obsession wanting to look more or less like a smaller-scale version of a bodybuilder, I've now come around to the far more practical goal of wanting my body to more or less be able to do anything. A completely unrealistic goal, I grant you, but so was getting huge. The workouts that I do--and prescribe, and recommend to most people who just vaguely want to get fit--are designed to get me as close to that goal as is realistic in the handful of hours I have per week to exercise.

Now, I can't speak to everyone, of course, but in my experience, training to get big and training for maximum all-around fitness are different endeavors. Not totally different, but different enough so that I really have to choose one path or the other, both with myself and with clients. It's worth noting that the physique of the average Navy SEAL looks nothing like a bodybuilder physique. They're just not that big.

My one quibble with the Warrior Physique stuff as presented, then, is that the images they use to sell their product are bodybuilder-style physiques. Now--the guys in the ads may be Warrior Physique enthusiasts. Their program may have produced some big guys who look like bodybuilders (there's at least one guy in their online videos who looks pretty impressive.) But it looks like the concept they're selling is all-around fitness: a high level of functional strength, good size and leanness, excellent stamina. It's akin to an MMA-style of fitness, and I'm convinced that, by and large, that style of training doesn't produce that kind of physique.

Perhaps I'm just bemoaning what women have dealt with for decades--the notion of unrealistic standards of physical perfection. But--now thinking outside the scope of the Hybrid Muscle guys' program, maybe there's another look that we could settle on that might be both more attainable and more in line with what all-around fitness produces.

Hippocrates Would Be Mortified

Andrew Heffernan — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:57:47 -0000

Things have been getting away from me a bit in blog-world, and later this week I think I'm going to bring in some reinforcements, as I'm off New York City to do some theatre-goin', which as you may know by now is my other passion besides keeping you people amused for an average of 53 seconds a day.

What's been keeping me busy is a little article on Great Exercises You Should Be Doing according to various experts in the field. As usual I'm not going to disclose exactly which exercises everyone settled on as that would upset my editors...something about them not wanting my "e-self" to scoop my "print" self, but I will say this: after all the dust settles (it's still flying) following Mike Boyle's throwdown vis-a-vis the squat, and after an older, less controversial assertion by Boyle, Eric Cressey, Chad Waterbury, and others that flat bench pressing Just Ain't All That Great Forya, I'm sensing a bit of a trend here: a kind of assault (too strong a word...)--questioning, perhaps?--of some of the long-held basic tenets of strength training.

There are still people out there who assert that all you need bench presses, squats and deadlifts for complete fitness. And these aren't powerlifters, either. They're regular folks like you and me, trying to improve their strength and look better.

I'm not saying that's impossible; just that it's not that desirable. At least to me. I understand that people want simplicity; they want an "All You Need Is..." approach, so fitness guys who put themselves in a given box ("I'm a kettlebell guy") often gain at least temporary popularity over guys who take a slightly more holistic approach.

Despite this, it's pretty clear that the body DOESN'T like repetition: too much sitting; too much running; too much benching. The muscle, and connective tissues shorten or lengthen based on the demands of the movement you keep doing, and various overuse injuries become the inevitable results. They're just dumb soft tissues, after all, trying to make your life easier. You're the general, sending them out into harm's way day after day.

The funny thing about all the "prehab/rehab" stuff that's justifiably cropped up in the last few years is that it's often necessary to undo the effects of poor exercise habits. And that's not a euphemism for 'no exercise'--I mean bad programming, bad form, too miuch of this, not enough of that.

The last thing an exercise program should do, friends, is make your life worse. Make your life outside the gym more painful, more inconvenient, less enjoyable. And yet too often that's what it's doing.

No Such Thing As Cardio

Andrew Heffernan — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:37:45 -0000

A lot of fitness folks have a problem with the word "cardio" or "aerobic training" and I'm no different. Up till now, I haven't been able to say why, exactly. It's not because I hate steady-state cardio. I've done loads of it in preparation for triathlons and for general fitness. It just seemed like the term wasn't quite accurate enough. It was a misnomer. And I'm a writer, so that bugged me.

But today I realized it: cardio as most people conceive of it doesn't really exist. That is to say, there's nothing you can do that will make your heart and lungs universally more fit for every activity.

Let me tell you a handful of stories to illustrate my point. As I've mentioned, I recently took up aikido. A fellow student who's got a few years on me in the art said to me recently, "I've got a belt test coming up, it's a tough one, so I better start jogging so I can get through it!"

My hackles went up when he said that, and I almost told him not to bother, instead, to just...do more aikido. Or, absent a partner, do more full-body conditioning moves like burpees and jumping jacks and bear crawls and crab walks--stuff that more closely resembles the kind of full-body, stop-start challenge that the belt test would present him. What I knew for sure is that straight-ahead jogging wasn't going to help him because it's nothing like aikido. He could run till he had the best 10K time in the world and still wheeze and cough his way through the belt test.

Another example: when I first started doing triathons, back in '05, my weakest event was the swim. I could run and bike like a maniac, but I was sucking wind after 50 yards in the pool. Popular wisdom would suggest that all the cardio conditioning I'd done on the bike and on the road prior to that--not to mention all my years of upper-body strength training-- would have helped me in the water. But it didn't. I had to learn to learn swimming technique, and my upper-body muscles and soft tissues had to adjust and figure out what was demanded of them before I became competent in the water.

The cardiovascular system doesn't begin and end with the heart and lungs. When you run, the physiology of your legs changes. It gets more efficient at delivering oxygen to the appropriate extremities. But your arms are more or less unaffected.

For the third day in a row, I'm going to invoke Alwyn Cosgrove and paraphrase his revelation about the best cyclist in modern history, Lance Armstrong, who posted a decidedly unspectacular time in the New York Marathon just within a few months of his seventh Tour De France victory. All props to Armstrong--his three-hour marathon time was still great--but here was a guy who schooled all comers at long-distance cycling for close to a decade (and continues to trounce most of his competition), and he just wasn't anywhere near world-class as a long-distance runner.

What the Sam Hill is going on? With a cardiovascular system like that, why didn't he cruise to victory?

Cosgrove argues here (scroll down to his Monday, November 9 2009 entry on "The Death of Intervals") that Armstrong's system just wasn't as well-suited to running as to cycling. And it's not like Armstrong just jumped into the marathon with no training. As intensely competitive as he is, he trained hard for it for months.

The answer is that 'cardio'--that mythical activity that magically gives you the stamina to do ANYTHING--as such doesn't exist. You can't really get your heart and lungs in shape in a vaccuum--you have to do SOME MUSCULAR ACTIVITY to create that side effect. And that activity--whatever it is you choose to do, be it running or cycling or kickboxing or circuit training--THAT'S what your body will get good at. Specific Adaptation To Imposed Demands.

Sure, there's such a thing as GPP--General Physical Preparation. Assuming you're not specializing in any one sport, I think it's the best kind of training you can do: lots of variety, lots of hard stuff piled back to back, intended to work the muscles, challenge your heart and lungs, teach you to keep moving in different planes at different speeds, through a little pain and suffering. It might involve sprinting and climbing and lifting some weights or doing some body-weight movements. Broadly, that's what I do with my fitness clients. It's probably as close to what the general populace thinks of as "cardio" as anything else: a fitness activity that will prep you, in a general way, for just about anything.

But it's completely different from running on a treadmill, an elliptical trainer, or swimming laps.

Comments? Questions? Flame war? Let's go.

Beware the New Fun Exercise

Andrew Heffernan — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:09:38 -0000

Another interesting fact came out of my conversation with Alwyn Cosgrove yesterday--a kind of corollary to yesterday's point about the importance of fitness pros making things fun for their clients. That's this: People Don't Have Unlimited Time To Exercise.

I made the point that most fitness pros--myself included--are exercise freaks. We love working out. We're fascinated by exercise. Cosgrove said, "I bet the last vacation you took, the first thing you did when you got to the hotel was check out the fitness room." Well, it might not have been the first thing, but he was right.

The point is that the fitness pro needs to put himself into the head-space of a person who hates exercising. Who wants the maximum for the minimum--not into the head-space of another person like him. Most trainers don't want or need trainers because they're perfectly able to push themselves to exercise, thanks very much. They're already motivated. Their clients? Not so much. Not very often, anyway.

So: Given that people don't have unlimited exercise time or motivation, what does that mean for their workouts? For one thing, it means that they're going to have to pick and choose their exercises.

I see new, cool exercises cropping up all the time: wobble board this, cable bench press that. Some are of genuine value: they add intensity to an already effective movement pattern, or they combine a couple of different movements in one exercise. A few have value but aren't really worth the time: there are, for example, a billion shoulder-rotator exercises out there that might make my oft-dislocated right shoulder marginally more stable, but I just don't have the time or energy to do more than one or two of them in my warm-up before I need to get on with my real workout. And some, of course, are of extremely questionable value indeed.

So again, you need to pick and choose. This is part of why the "Squat or Don't" argument rages so furiously. A few years ago I would have contended, like many people, that squats seem like a top-tier movement that everyone should do. Now I'm not so sure. If someone of Mike Boyle's caliber had said he didn't believe in the forearm roller, no one would have cared much.

Whatever cool new movement you choose--and, again, I credit Cosgrove with this point--it's got to knock some other exercise out of the lineup. And the top half-dozen or so movements and their immediate descendants are pretty convincingly entrenched.

(Don't think it hasn't occurred to me.)

So the next time you think about putting some new exercise into the lineup, particularly one that's named after someone (I'm still taking suggestions for the Heffernan Press, Row, Leg Raise, or more obscure exercise name like the "sidewinder" or some such), consider what you'll be replacing in your lineup. If it legitimately takes the place of one of the big movements, and trains that pattern effectively--go for it. But if it doesn't--take a pass.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Fun is Essential

Andrew Heffernan — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:52:55 -0000

I was on the phone with Alwyn Cosgrove this morning (shameless name-drop among fitness cognoscenti) picking his brain on a couple of exercises that I'm putting in my forthcoming piece on 'neglected exercises' for Experience Life magazine (incidentally, if you missed my last one on Feldenkrais--yes, a new obsession of mine--click on the link under "Andrew's Article Archives" at left, or, hey, just click here!)

Much to my delight and edification, Alwyn is a digressive speaker--meaning that, in addition to whatever information I need for the article, Alwyn drops dozens of off-topic pearls that make great blog fodder, not to mention ample food for thought on all fitness-related matters.

Alwyn brought up Mike Boyle's recent assertion that conventional squats are pretty much off his roster of useful and effective exercises (I blogged about this last week), and made the point that Bulgarian Split Squats--which Boyle offers as a functional alternative to the back squat--are tough to get excited about. Yes, they're effective. They make your legs sore, they're dead-on tough as hell.

But they aren't...fun.

Now--are squats 'fun'? For a gym rat--yes. When I was a young squirt, it was a kick to be able to load almost 300 pounds on the bar and "squat" it (I use quotes because I imagine that my version of a squat at the time more closely resembled a very red-faced Good Morning exercise). It is fun to test your limits in that way, fun to see your strength growing by leaps and bounds, fun to challenge yourself.

But even if your Bulgarian Split Squat numbers are impressive--like, say, approaching your body weight--no one really cares. No one's going to ask you "How much do you BFF, bro?" It's just not going to happen. And your numbers are never going to get as impressive as your squat numbers.

Now, this might seem like a minor point, but as I've written in this space before--fun is everything. Any bozo can write a weight-loss program, but it takes real skill and finesse to write a fat-loss program that people find enjoyable. Where they don't dread going to the gym. Where they're not so sore they just don't feel like going back, like, ever.

Why don't more people exercise? They don't enjoy it. It's not fun. A fitness professional's job is to make exercise fun. Sometimes by sheer force of personality (Todd Durkin is a master of this. So is Sean Burch.), but equally by dint of skillful programming. A good program is enjoyable. It's hard and effective, but it's doable.

No matter how much science backs a given program, a fitness regimen only works if you do it.

Science is important; fun is essential.

RIP Aerobic Base Training: Boyle Slaughters Another Sacred Cow

Andrew Heffernan — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:22:15 -0000

Well okay. Mike Boyle's making another crazy--but very well-argued--point this week about skipping aerobic base-training.

I remember back at Hanover High School the lacrosse coach had his charges run and run and run for nearly half of practice. It was all aerobic base training. Sometimes, even more perplexingly, he would have them bike and bike and bike (apparently some of the bigger guys' knees couldn't take the pounding.) The football team did as much running as the track guys. I think I lost weight that the season I played football, which was the last thing I needed.

Boyle's argument is that all this long, slow training--wait for it--slows athletes down: adolescents interested in power sports particularly (i.e., pretty much any sport besides cross-country or marathon running), should emphasize the development of speed and power rather than aerobic training to force the body to favor the development of fast-twitch muscle fibers throughout life.

In the video linked above, Boyle doesn't even go into the greater fat-loss benefits conferred by interval training, which have been covered ad nauseum by Alwyn Cosgrove and others (and probably no one's more nauseumed than Cosgrove himself, who's been arguing this for about a decade now). Boyle suggests that the only reasons to do aerobic training are:

1) If you like it or

2) If you're a long-distance athlete.

As Boyle indicates, the case for aerobic base training is pretty much closed. There's really no reason to do it unless you fall into the relatively limited categories above.

Yet if you go into the local pumpatorium...everyone's doing it.

I'd argue that this is kind of a gender issue: women like to do steady-state cardio; they think it makes them 'smaller.' Guys don't like doing cardio for the same reason--they want to get bigger, so they don't do it.

It just ain't that simple.

As a matter of performance enhancement, long, slow running falls under the category of non-specific training. If you're trying to get faster--don't run slowly.

***************************************

The ever-creative Nick Tumminello has a nice piece on muscle imbalances here.

What We're Missing in the Weight Room

Andrew Heffernan — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:51:35 -0000

Squats, deadlifts, bench presses, rows, overhead presses, chins, planks, maybe a lunge or two. Maybe a weighted pushup. Most gym-goers look at themselves quite happily if they're strong on all those movements. And, I suppose--rightly so. Arguably (and there's been argument about those things in this space, and indeed, all over the place) they're the big kahunas of the weight room.

The limitation to standard strength training--and I speak as a guy who's lifted weights for my entire adult life and much of my adolescence, and have every intention of continuing to do so--involves a little thing called gravity.

Gravity works--wait for it--by pulling down.

Dropping my usual jejune approach for a moment, it occurred to me recently--perhaps because I'm currently steeped in training in aikido and Feldenkrais, two disciplines that require coordinated, simultaneous movement in all three planes of motion, that the big six or eight or ten strength-training movements don't do much to teach you how to move.

Sure, strength training makes you strong. No question. Depending on how you do it, it can also make you big and lean, improve your endurance and your athletic power, and generally make you a better athlete. And if you do it well for long enough, it will teach you about moving safely under load (italics mine. Italics are always mine! So is Calligraphy! So is Times New Roman, and Geneva, and Baskerville Semibold! All mine, I say!).

But moving well under load isn't the same as moving well or efficiently. In fact, in some ways, it might instill bad movement habits.

Take squatting. If you squat with a barbell on your shoulders, every Jay, Ronnie, and Arnie will tell you that you've got to keep your lumbar spine in its natural curve.

But just sitting around squatting? No need for the curve. In fact, a curve limits your range of motion. Go to a third-world country and check out everyone squatting around talking. The lumbar is rounded. If I were a person who liked the term, I'd postulate that our lumbar spines were 'designed' to round in that position--or at the very least, come out of the arched position that all of us so zealously guard when we're squatting with big weights on our backs.

(indeed, maybe that's another reason squatting correctly is so tough--that the lumbar desperately wants to round, but we've got to resist the urge).

That's just one example. There are lots of other cases where a movement we do to stay safe under load is completely fine when we're unloaded.

The reason I say that gravity is a limiter in the effectiveness of strength training is that the big five movements all require you to position yourself so that the targeted muscles are working directly against gravity. The bench press only exists because, in order to pound the chest muscles with an Olympic bar, you've got to scoot yourself under a bar push up against gravity. And the body doesn't always move like that. I'd venture to say that it rarely moves like that. The body is usually moving at an oblique angle to gravity: up and over; sideways, diagonally, twisting and turning. When I think of the weird movement I have to do just to hoist my son out of his crib when he's screaming at 3 am, it has nothing to do with good strength-training form. It's way, way off the beam. Weight training takes all those other movements out and makes movement very linear and angular.

I'm only saying this--and on a fitness site with a strength-training focus, no less!--to emphasize what I think is missing from the exercise programs of most strength-training individuals. It's a start to eliminate machine-style training which has limited carry-over in everyday life; the next step is to find ways to include movement that's more exploratory, more creative and spontaneous, perhaps, than what one sees in even a well-designed strength training program.

I don't think one needs to go too far off the beaten path to find exercises and sports which require and train this kind of movement; here are a lot of standard sports and activities that fit the bill: basketball, for instance, requires spins and jumps and turns and shifts of focus that would be impossible to replicate in the weight room. Other team sports, like soccer, require quick directional shifts, along with upper-body jukes and turns. Many combat sports and martial arts do the same, as do t'ai chi and some forms of yoga.

Looking big-picture at activities and programs which improve long-term health, I'd wager that pretty soon health pros will be talking about including some kind of activity which requires multi-directional movement to round things out.

All Work and No Play

Andrew Heffernan — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:18:22 -0000

I'm an exercise neurotic and I have to own up to that.

As I've mentioned, I'm trying to squeeze three days a week of aikido classes into my schedule, and I can't bring myself to also hit the gym on those days. I'm neurotic but I'm not that extreme. I also don't have that much time on my hands.

Back in the late 90's when my wife and I were first living together she would occasionally find tiny scraps of paper with weirdly coded calendars on them: they'd say things like M: A Tu: B W: Aer Th: A F: B Sa: Aer Su: REST and so on. Page after page of such things. I imagine it was was rather like in The Shining, when Shelley Duvall finds Jack Nicholson's manuscript, which he's been working on for weeks, and sees that all he's produced has been reams and reams of pages reading "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," over and over and over.

Jesus, Kubrick could do scary.

Anyway, I'm frantically trying to figure out how to keep progressing with my strength and conditioning goals while pursuing aikido, which at the moment--as I struggle through these first months of slow and meticulous learning, before I start to get faster and more adept (I hope)--offers little in the way of a fitness challenge. Should I lift heavy three days a week and ditch my aerobic / anaerobic workouts? Should I do hybrid-style, outdoor workouts that challenge my c.v. system and muscular endurance, and forget about holding onto much muscle mass?

This question literally has been keeping me up at night. I realize that over the years I've actually abandoned a number of very worthwhile pursuits because they interfered with my fitness goal of the moment.

Is this the definition of an addict?

Post comments about extreme behavior motivated by a desire not to miss workouts or fall off the fitness wagon below. Have you invented an ailing grandparent to get out of parties where fattening food will be served? Have you been so obsessed with the gym that your spouse suspects an affair? We want to hear about it.