SB Nation User Blog: Andrew Heffernan

"Best Time to Exercise" Revealed!

Andrew Heffernan — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:52:54 -0000

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/health/nutrition/10best.html?_r=1&ref=nutrition

Just about every fitness book has a little blurb in it saying, "When's the best time to train?" which winds up concluding, "Whenever you can get to the gym on a regular basis." They weigh the pros and cons of early-bird and night-owl-dom and conclude that there's no difference--there are advantages and disadvantages to both.

I've always been a morning exercise guy, but that's just me. Some people are useless in the morning, both in the gym and elsewhere...believe me, I've trained some of these people, and I know.

The New York Times, however, suggests that there actually is a correlation between time of day and neuromuscular efficiency, strength and power, which suggests, counterintuitively, that to perform your best, exercise later in the day is preferable. This has to do with being more warm and springy, having less fluid in your spine, even with greater cardiovascular efficiency: your heart rate can actually go higher in the evening. On first glance, this would seem to suggest less efficiency--ie, that the c.v. system is working harder to produce the same work output--but according to the article, the opposite is true. The system is just more responsive:

...a small group of researchers has studied the question of exercise performance and time of day, even doing studies of heart rates. And not only are performances better in the late afternoon and early evening, but, contrary to what exercise physiologists would predict, heart rates are also higher for the same effort.

One recent study...found that people’s maximum heart rates and sub-maximal heart rates were lower in the morning but that their perception of how hard they were working was the same in the morning as it was later in the day.

[Researchers]... also noted that athletes’ best performances, including world records, were typically set in the late afternoon or early evening.

Greg Atkinson, also at Liverpool John Moores University, said that some researchers, noticing that heart rates during exercise were lower in the morning, reasoned the way I did — that people must be more efficient in the morning. It would mean that exercise was easier in the morning. Of course, it seemed harder to me, but I could have been deluding myself. Not really, Dr. Atkinson said. It actually is harder to exercise in the morning.

"Most components (strength, power, speed) of athletic performance are worst in the early hours of the morning," he wrote in an e-mail message. "Ratings of perceived exertion during exercise have generally been found to be highest in the early morning."

I can't remember a time when I wasn't a morning exerciser by preference. And triathlon, in which I've participated since 2005, is a seriously morning sport: start times can be in the 6 AM hour, god help us. But my max heart rate is also way, way lower than the typical calculations suggest it should be: 140 beats per minute for me is tough, and if I do uphill resisted sprints, or some other similarly max-effort work,160 is about the highest I can get to, even though my max heart rate should be closer to 180.

I'd like to think that this was an indication of my Lance-Armstrong-esque fitness level, but I think it's just a physiological quirk. My resting heart-rate--a pretty reliable indication of fitness--is just under 60 beats a minute, meaning 'healthy' but not a superman.

As to the question of the best time to train: sounds like these studies are pointing towards afternoon or evening for best performance, though personally I'm still going to work out in the morning, even if it means I fall a few percentage points shy of my personal best on those days. I like that anyway: it means I can justify that extra 10% I always tag on to my numbers when people ask me my personal best on various lifts.

How to Touch Your Toes II

Andrew Heffernan — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:37:43 -0000

Just submitted a piece on Resistance Stretching--a flexibility modality which I wrote about, somewhat disparagingly, here, but discovered through my research is actually quite valuable. You can find a practitioner of Resistance Stretching--technically called Resistance Flexibility and Strength Training, or RFST--here, and I think they're worth a look. Seems like RFST not only loosens up your muscles and tendons, but also pulls fascia, scar tissue, and muscle adhesions out of muscle tissues, which results in greater strength and flexibility gains than regular stretching. Moreover, RFST helps you gain strength in your extreme ranges of motion--so that you're less likely to get injured when you find yourself overstretched for some reason--like if you slip on ice or dive for a pass in flag-football.

Anyway, it's good stuff.

Stingy as I am, I haven't yet looked up an RFST person in my neck of the woods, but I have started taking advantage of one of their key ideas in my own post-workout flexibility work, which typically takes me about five minutes. Essentially all you do--and just to clarify, this isn't RFST, it's just one of their principles applied to everyday flexibility work--is contract the muscle opposite the one you're stretching.

In practice: do a standing toe-touching movement. Try it just hanging there, like you are typically instructed to do: a relaxed stretch, letting gravity pull you forward and down. Note how far you can reach. Stand for a moment, then try it a second time, this time contracting the quads as forcefully as possible as you reach for your toes. Hold the contraction for 20 seconds or so. You may or may not get closer to your toes by contracting the quads, but try the toe-touch a third time--this time relaxing again--and you will almost certainly get closer to your toes.

The RFST principle here is that the limiter in stretches is often the muscle OPPOSITE the muscle being stretched. Meaning, in the toe-touch stretch, the quads aren't able to sufficiently shorten to allow the hips to flex maximally forward. "Teach" the quads to contract and the problem is alleviated.

Experiment with this idea in all stretches. It makes a huge difference. Stretches become isometric exercises: more painful but also way more effective. You feel wrung out afterward--in a good way. You also tend to sweat like a hog. Don't know why exactly. Just don't leave your towel at home.

I've seen this technique in some yoga classes and always wondered why it worked. I always assumed it was "reciprocal inhibition"--meaning that the muscle opposite a contracting muscle tends to relax more fully. I imagine this is also happening but this 'enabling' of the shortening function also seems to be part of the equation.

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Read "How to Touch Your Toes I" here.

Can We WALK?

Andrew Heffernan — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:58:16 -0000

My time of late has been sucked away by "real" writing assignments that help feed and clothe my children, so I've been negligent of this space--my apologies. Good news, though, is that my time spent away from MPF has given me all kinds of new insights into the fitness world...I've spoken with chaps like Pavel Tsatsouline, a "stretching genius" named Bob Cooley, bio-mechanics expert Tom Longo, Professor of Kinesiology Stacy Ingraham, and world-class Ironman Triathlete Gina Kehr. All super-smart folks. My head is spinning from the influx of great information from these folks...one of the wonderful side benefits of writing about fitness for a living.

One great concept that I've been ruminating on lately is something called "concommitance." This is Bob Cooley's word. In the acting world, you learn early on that you can often 'summon up' some kind of emotional state simply by doing something physical: get mad by slamming your fist on the table, for example. Or find tears by allowing your body to 'melt' completely...sounds ridiculous, but it works. I remember being asked once, 'How do you fake-cry onstage?' And the answer is that if it's happening, it's happening. I'm not sure I fully believe the notion that the body can't distinguish between a real and imagined event, but the line is paper-thin.

To the point: the body and the emotions aren't as isolated as we typically think. In fact, they're one thing. A physical change occasions an psycho-emotional one, if I may be so psycho-babbly.

My mood can get way out of whack if I don't work out for a few days, and when I finally do return to exercise, I'm practically euphoric. This is, in part, a demonstration of my extreme weirdness in relation to exercise (although I start to wonder whether people who profess to 'hate' exercise--like Oprah!--just don't get this influx of positive hormones), and I've often thought, Well, this isn't how I really feel. But Cooley--and other researchers, I might add--have suggested that they ARE the same thing. Anti-depressants work on the same principle, albeit in a somewhat more artificial way: change the body and the mind changes.

I guess I point this out (and I don't think this is the first time I've mentioned this) because people--myself included--get down, fall into depression, allow whatever difficult circumstance that is currently plaguing them to grind them into a fine powder, at various times in their lives. I remember hearing someone say, "Sometimes the distance between despair and tranquility can be bridged by a walk around the lake." Or words to that effect, probably better and more succinctly stated. But the point holds: external movement begets internal, subtle movement.

Again, this is sounding psychobabbly, but I actually think that it's the opposite: the danger of psychology is that it can start to seem way too complicated: you need to address this or that problem relationship in your life. You need to completely re-wire how you feel about your family in order to change it one iota. And then how do you start? It can become a way of avoiding REALLY confronting a problem. Whereas simply moving the body is immediate and profound and completely doable.

When a problem arises perhaps the immediate solution shouldn't be "Can We Talk?" but "Can We Walk?"

Have a great weekend--

"I really think you should just...get on the Stairmaster for awhile."

More On Circuits

Andrew Heffernan — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:22:51 -0000

I'm sensing a groundswell in the fitness world...sort of like one of those "great disturbances in the force" that Jedis get from time to time. Mike Boyle sent out a piece he wrote on circuit training today; this afternoon I got a review request for a book called "Hardcore Circuit Training For Men" (I'm somewhat wary of the term "hardcore" and "for men" in the same title, but I'll reserve judgment).

Anyway: circuit training isn't new, of course. As Boyle notes, it was making the rounds fifty or sixty years ago. But ever since I took up strength training, I've wondered about these huge pauses we're supposed to take between sets. Some protocols call for 3-5 minutes between sets--meaning you squeeze in just fifteen sets in an hour of lifiting!

It isn't that I doubt the concepts behind these lifting systems--it's that they seem...boring. I know they're not boring if you like to load up the Olympic bar with enough weight to bend it and slam out three nose-bleeding reps at a time, but, due respect, that's not my speed, and it's not the speed of most people I train.

Now--Eric Cressey posed an pointed question in a recent TMuscle piece on squatting: "Is any exercise truly functional?" he asked. Meaning, life is life, sport is sport, and exercises are exercises. If it's an exercise, by definition, it's not really sport: it's a variation on a theme, but it's not the sport itself.

The same could be said of exercise in general. Everyone can argue for the "functionality" of his or her training program; it just depends on which particular function you are trying to refine. Big LIfter Man could say he wants to be able to move refrigerators by himself. Long Distance Runner Man could say he wants to be able to get from point A in Indiana to point B in Idaho without the aid of a motor vehicle. And both of them could make an aesthetic argument for the merits of the particular type of physique their activity builds.

Personally I want to get better at working intensely over an extended period of time. I want to be a guy who can move furniture for a few hours and not crap out after 20 minutes. Or play an afternoon rough-and-tumble game with my kids and not worry about them outlasting me. Or--in my latest passion--get through an aikido class without fatigue interfering with the workout.

For these purposes, a kind of circuit training serves me well, and that's what I'm practicing at the moment.

My feeling is that when sprints were "discovered" a few years ago, people realized that there was a whole new level of fatigue and exhaustion one could generate by working the whole body at maximum intensity for brief intervals, and that that kind of full-body blitz was missing, for all intents and purposes, from the average person's steady diet of isolation exercises and low-intensity cardio training. Nowadays, whether they settle on sprints, circuit training, or another form of intense training, 'hardcore' types are seeking that same kind of thorough workout--something that makes them feel wrung-out in the short term, but very quickly, alert and energized.

I admit that I have a bias in this--it works for me and it's worked for clients--but given what most people are seeking in the gym--not "I want to be huge" or "I want to lift Volkswagens" or "I want to run to Miami" but "I want to be lean, strong, and athletic, and have boundless energy"--I'd say circuits are a pretty darn good fit.

A Better, Stronger Faster Foam Roller

Andrew Heffernan — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:00:06 -0000

Okay, maybe it's not stronger or faster, but the SmartRoller--an oblong-shaped version of the regular ol' Garden Variety model--is a cool variation on the old chestnut theme of rolling on heavy, industrial-strength foam to bust up muscle adhesions and to improve alignment.

I got hold of one of these bad-boys early this year while attending a Feldenkrais workshop taught by my friend Stacy Barrows. In addition to being a physical therapist and Feldenkrais practitioner, Barrows is something of an entrepreneur, and was selling prototypes of this new-fangled foam roller she designed.

I've been using it ever since, and lemmie tellya, you can do some things with this foam roller that just aren't possible with the regular kind.

I've touted the value of foam rolling in this space a number of times, but, as with virtually everything, over time, your body gets used to foam rolling. The roller contacts the same amount of surface area on your body no matter where you place it, and if you've got a big knot or a ball of tension that's laughing at the roller--well, you're out of luck.

Enter the SmartRoller: it's got a flatter side, which is great for the initial softening up of your tissues, as well as a more pointy side, which really allows you to dig into those areas that need it the most. Plus, it allows you to do all kinds of cool balancing drills and alignment-enhancing exercises (try lying on the thing longitudinally...it feels wonderful, in an 'extremely painful' kind of way).

The SmartRoller. It's a foam roller 2.0. A foam roller on 'roids. The Cadillac of foam rollers.

(This is hard. Get a SmartRoller and see.)

And, okay, here's the link in case you want to pick one up for the fitness nerd on your shopping list (Someone besides me, as I already have one, but thanks for thinking of me): I'd say they'd just baaarely fit inside an oversized stocking, and therefore would qualify as a stuffer.

Cheers

The Holy Grail of Fitness

Andrew Heffernan — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:44:43 -0000

You can't do everything, where would you put it?

I read quite often -- in one form or another -- that you can't build muscle and burn fat at the same time. I'm not completely sure that's true: there have been some studies which have found those two things happening simultaneously, even if most of them are done on novice lifters. And now and then you get a person -- often someone endorsing a product -- who claims to have discovered the magic muscle-gaining, fat-losing grail at last.

One hundred-percent impossible or not, I think the basic idea remains sound: it's hard to burn fat quickly and build muscle quickly at the same time. It's best to focus on one of those goals at once.

Just don't do one thing for four years--getting enormous and fat--and the other for two, eating nothing but bean curd and whittling yourself away to a stick. As I've written here before, the lion's share of fitness information comes to us via bodybuilding, but unless your idea of a good time is basting yourself like a turkey and flexing in front of a crowd in a thong-th-thong-thong-thong (and there's nothing wrong with that...I know a few people who have done it and it takes serious guts, literally), well, you don't want to follow that advice.

Besides, most people want to look good and feel good as much of the time as they can. They don't WANT to look bloated for half the year, feeling like they couldn't slam another chicken breast down their gullets if their lives depended on it, and gaunt and starving for the other half.

So to my mind the Holy Grail of Fitness IS a system that effects a good amount of fat loss--or perhaps, more accurately, control of fat--and, simultaneously, good gains in strength and muscle mass. Compromise. True, you're not going to get HUGE and, depending on how you eat, you're probably not going to get SHREDDED, but you're going to look and feel good.

Then, come the time when you want to look bigger--if you're a guy; few women ever want to look bigger--or leaner, or get your tennis game really on point for the big tourney, or do a sprint-triathlon, or whatever your shorter-term fitness goal is--you can do it, and you're never too far out of shape to get there.

One can extrapolate this concept

Evolution Before Your Eyes

Andrew Heffernan — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:58:10 -0000

My son turned one a few days ago.

As if on cue, the kid decided it was time to work on standing up on his own, so over the break, while we were sitting in a mall--middle Americans that we are--waiting for something to open, Dylan started working on his standing skill.

I had a still camera--and hopefully will post a pic or two here--but no video, and what was most amazing about the process was watching him realize that he was on to something BIG. He would hoist himself up to standing (doing a kind of modified deadlift and validating Gray Cook's theory that the deadlift--not the squat--is really the most natural way of getting up from the ground), and then totter there for a moment, eyes shining, beaming, sometimes applauding himself as he suddenly realized...his hands were free, and he could suddenly see WAY further than usual.

It was a bit of compressed evolution at work. He was evolving from four-footed to bipedal right before our eyes.

Probably the most amazing thing--and of course I'm fully aware that I'm a simpering father and biased about my own son's accomplishments--was that he repeated his efforts, over and over and over again. And though he got himself upright most of the time, he always fell over after a few seconds. Always.

So--and this is where this stops being a simpering Dad story and more of a fitness tale--all his efforts were finally...hate to say it...futile. He failed. They finished with a crash to the floor.

But the notable part--the part that houses the lesson for me, and maybe for you too--was that there was no evidence of frustration in him. He didn't care that he fell over every time--it was just part of the game. He was just enjoying the hell out of his singular accomplishment. It was all a marvelous game to him.

Inevitably, my wife and I started trying to coax him into walking, but it was my six-year-old who called us off: just let him stand, she said. Don't try to make him do more than that right now.

When the kid's right, she's right. Dylan was having a great time standing and falling, standing and falling. As proud as we were of him. my wife and I just wanted him to hurry up and walk.

Okay so here's the life lesson, compressed:

1) Revel in your accomplishments.

2) Enjoy the process of learning.

3) Understand that imperfection is part of the package.

4) Don't judge yourself.

I heard some neurologist once say that in the first year of life you learn more than you'll learn for the whole rest of your life combined. Virtually anything we can do in life is actually less complex than the process of learning to walk. We all did that, so why can't we learn a foreign language, take up a new sport, learn to ballroom dance, get an advanced degree?

Watching a kid learn to walk does tend to make one think anything is possible.

To Revere or Reject Our Fitness Forebears?

Andrew Heffernan — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:15:32 -0000

I've spent my share of time in the martial-arts world, and there's a funny-sad phenomenon I've noticed.

There are a zillion 'styles' of each martial art.

I've often wondered why that was until a few years ago I figured it out. I was visiting an old dojo where I used to work out and asked why the head sensei, a great guy named Vernon Owens who I can't seem to track down any more, had changed the name of his studio from "Enshin Karate" to something else..."Ko Ken" Karate or some such. The answer, it would seem, was that he was tired of paying a kind of fealty to his old teacher, Kancho Joko Ninomiya. He didn't want to be a branch of a different style, he wanted to be doing his own thing.

Funny thing was that Ninomiya, maybe ten years before, had made a similar break from his old teacher, a guy named Ashihara. Ninomiya rechristened what he was teaching from "Ashihara" Karate to "Enshin" Karate. He, too, had become tired of being a wing on the Ashihara mansion, and decided that he wanted to be a master himself.

It's all completely understandable...a version of adolescent rebellion manifesting later in adulthood. "I've worked hard, too, I've made a contribution, why should I continue to pay homage to this old, almost dead guy?"

I don't know. I've never been a master of a martial art, so I can't really fully understand the kind of commitment and sacrifice that it takes to really master a style. It's a lifetime, truth be told, and I suspect after a lifetime one does want some recognition. You're certainly not likely to get much financial remuneration for being a 'master,' so I understand why someone would at least want a wee bit o' respect. I also have never fully been a part of the Eastern system of near-despotic rule of the elder, which permeates most martial arts systems.

On the other hand, I also think, in a way, that there's nothing cooler when someone with the credentials of an Eric Cressey makes a nod to his teacher in print: "I learned this from this or that coach." It's just--good manners, especially in the world of fitness, which as we can see, is an ever-shifting universe. It's not like most traditional martial arts at all: if anything, there's a tendency in the fitness world to reject past ideas and to jump on the latest bandwagon of the latest technique or idea.

There's a balance to be struck here, I think, between reverence for what's come before and the impulse to make your own contribution and have your own voice. You can't really patent or copyright a movement; for that reason it's polite to say, "Hey, I got this from so-and-so." On the other hand, you don't want to wind up like David Brent in the original "Office" series, saying "I made up the term 'Exsqueeze Me?' (you know, for 'excuse me'?) and I think it's time I was acknowledged for that."

Extending Myself on Matters of Stretching

Andrew Heffernan — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 01:22:49 -0000

Okay, that was a long break. Very indulgent of me to take all that time off from my blogging duties, but the fact is that Internet access was spotty where I was and I was swamped with writing projects and family obligations, and also figured that the last thing people wanted to hear about over Thanksgiving was about Spartan exercise and diet habits.

I'm back on the blog-beat in earnest tomorrow, but I wanted to float this concept with everyone before this Tuesday got entirely away from me.

Last week I interviewed a guy named Bob Cooley, who invented something he calls Resistance Flexibility and Strength Training. He runs a studio in Boston. The interview was for an article I'm writing on this fitness modality, so as usual I'm not going to spill all the bean here, but here's one particularly interesting gem that ties in with some of the Feldenkrais work I've been doing lately.

Like a lot of people reading this, I have a mild case of "deskitis": the usual tightness in my chest, a forward-head tendency, a thoracic spine that wants to round forward. I stretch the bejesus out of my hammies and hip flexors, but if I didn't, they'd surely be tight too. Essentially, as much time as I spend on my feet with clients and doing my own workouts, my body has adapted to the seated posture, darn it all.

Last Feldenkrais session I did, we performed a whole bunch of movements that involved forward flexion. They're sort of hard to describe, but in essence, I felt like the stretches--if I can even call them that--were rounding me more and more forward. We probably spent 45 minutes on this one series of drills, and I remember thinking, "Wow, I'm going to have to undo all this with a lot of extension work, because this is just reinforcing my bad habits."

The funny thing was, when we finished, I was way more relaxed. It was actually easier to stand straight. The forward movement had exactly the opposite effect from what I was expecting. Instead of making me worse, it made me better--more able to extend.

Cooley made a similar point when we spoke: that the flexion-dominant posture associated with sitting doesn't necessarily derive maximal benefit from extension: lots of chest-opening and the like. Rather, intense stretching of the posterior chain, according to Cooley, helps break up fascial tissue that grows in and around muscles that are chronically overstretched. So the answer to excessive flexion is sometimes--a form of more and exaggerated flexion.

Cooley's method--which involves a very deep and intense stretch, often requiring one or more partners trained in the RFST system--consists in part of an extremely intense, full-range eccentric contraction of the muscle. The force generated by the muscle (at least twice what the person could lift concentrically) is often sufficient to break up scar and fascial tissue which inhibits the full expression of strength in the muscle.

Weird, huh? But again, my experience with Feldenkrais--though coming at it from a much softer angle--bears this out.

Bottom line: solving or balancing the relationship between flexion and extension in a joint is not always simply a matter of "stretch what's short, stregthen what's weak', as a traditional, physical-therapy based model would suggest. If you do it right, sometimes judicious stretching in the direction that the joint seems to "want" to go has surprising benefits.

More on this to come. Welcome back to MPF...

Fun with Training Montages

Andrew Heffernan — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:10:28 -0000

I was checking out a fitness site recently and they had embedded the training montage from "Rocky IV." Now, I'm not a great judge of these things, but I've probably seen "Rocky IV" 17 times in its entirety, though now, with the advent of YouTube, I've watched the training montage a good 50 times or so: a few more times through than the sappy-but-still-moving "Rocky Qua Pied Piper" montage from "Rocky II," but not as many as "Rocky-becomes-Ali" montage from "Rocky III," which climaxes with Stallone and Carl Weathers frolicking in the surf, filmed in an era before the term "homoerotic" had entered common parlance. In that one, the Rock doesn't just get in the shape of his life, but he becomes smooth, quick, almost cool--like like Ali--and gains the respect of the real Ali-foil of the series, Apollo "What's-the-MATTER-wit-you??" Creed.

The "Rocky IV" presages the current rage--of which I fully approve--of dropping all the machines and tech and going with bare-bones equipment and functional movements. In the Rocky IV sequence, Rocko chops down trees, hoists carts containing his training partners and coaches, even harnesses himself to a sled, gets down on all fours, and pulls his brother-in-law across the plains of frozen Siberia. Meanwhile, his adversary, the seemingly-genetically-engineered Drago, works out in air-conditioned comfort as teams of scientists monitor his vital signs and nod at one another approvingly at their creation.

At the end, though, Rocky falls in love with the Russian people watching his fight, who, improbably, start cheering for him rather than their hometown hero, whilst Drago essentially renounces his whole country, screaming "I FIGHT FOR ME! FOR ME!!" much to everyone's horror. Rocky has learned to love and trust the commies, and is the better man for it, while Drago has learned a thing or two about Western individuality. But it's not his fault--at heart, he's just a genetically-engineered pug.

The ROCKY movies are really just a framework for those training montage sequences, which, it must be said, work like a charm. They're inspiring, they're gritty, they show you what's possible through effort. I remember I used to run with a tape-deck Walkman (those are what we used to have before IPods, youngster) with a cassette tape (those are what we used to have before MP3's, junior) on which I had recorded, from a VCR tape (those are...ah, never mind. Just keep my wheelchair well-oiled), the theme songs played underneath those training montages.

Having been a fan of training montages for a few decades, though, this one still cracks me up: