At the Top of Their Game

In the past day, TV covered the two extreme ends of the exercise and fitness spectrum. First, the World Strongest Man Contest from South Africa, in which humongous guys (bigger than NFL lineman, with lats so developed their arms lifted away from their sides) dead lifted cars and carried 250 lb. kegs over twenty yards of 6 inch sand. Brutal! And, second, the U.S. Marathon Trials in Houston, in which skinny ectomorphs ran and ran and ran. The announcer spoke of a 5:50/mile pace for the runner in third toward the end of the race. Damn fast after already running twenty miles!

The winners in these events are at the top of their games. They had proof: who lifted the most weight, who had the fastest time on the clock. Genetics, training, diet, and coaching paid off for them.

Of course, they are only good at their game. The strongest men could not even run a 10K at a 10 min/mile pace because they are so heavy and muscle bound, and the marathoners would be lucky to dead-lift 250 lbs because they are almost muscle-less. At the very level top of any sport, the winners train for mastery of specific motor skills.

My son emailed me the link to an article in Men's Journal in which the writer, a recreational surfer and rock climber, lashed out at the fitness industry - expensive machines, long term contracts, mediocre trainers, faddishness, wall-mounted televisions, and one-size-fits-all exercise regimens. He was lost and bitter in the fitness maze, doing lots of different exercises and, unlike the strongest men and marathoners, not getting better at anything in particular. He realized the problems were not just with the fitness industry, but also himself because "vague goals beget vague methods."

Then he had a personal exercise enlightenment at a minimalist, no-nonsense training facility in Jackson, Wyoming, operated by a what sounds like a re-incarnated Spartan warrior. No wimpy exercise machines at 25 reps. No dweeby trainers in golf shirts. This place trains people in special ops. Here's the demanding, ultimate weight lifting goal for exercisers there:

To Front Squat 1.5x your body weight
To Dead Lift 2.0x your body weight
To Bench Press 1.5x your body weight

Up in Wyoming, Daniel Duane discovered the enormous physical rewards for getting down to weight training basics: "True sport-specific training, for literally everybody except elite athletes, isn’t sport-specific at all. It’s about getting strong, durable, and relentless in simple, old-school ways that a man can train, test, and measure." For him, they were squats, dead lifts, and bench presses.

He discovered how important it is to have measurable goals. They provide him direction and purpose. He found his fitness game.

In Praise of Exercised Muscles

There's more to exercised muscle than meets the eye. What I mean by that is in our body-image obsessed culture, some tend to focus on the superficial aspects of it, like looking  buff and strong. But there are many more compelling health reasons to build muscle with strength training than how it looks under our skin.

Consider the obvious, and not so obvious, benefits:

Mobility - No muscle, no movement. That we can walk, dance, run, lift, pump, jump, kick is a miracle. The most advanced robot can only crudely mimic the incredible array of movements made possible by the interplay of our muscles and bones.

Protection - Muscles are our shock abosorber system. Whether your're an NFL football player or snow boarder or an old TOJ, the muscles buffer your bones and internal organs by dissipating the shock of a fall or blow. Muscles keep you from falling. The stronger and more resilient your muscles, the more protection you have.

Stability and Balance - We know where we are, and whether we're right side up, by a combination of the brain, nerves and muscles called proprioception. The muscles do the heavy lifting to keep us erect and in line with the forces of gravity, as well as the subtle adjustments to enable us to navigate uneven terrain, like rocky trails.

Bone and joint health - Muscle contractions move, and place force on the bones, which in turn strengthens them as they respond to the stress. The movement of the muscle also spreads the synovial fluid, a lubricant between bones in a joint, to help the bone surfaces work smoothly and painlessly.

Metabolism - The most over-looked function of muscle is its role in reducing inflammation, which has been associated with the killers like cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. A major cause of inflammation is insulin resistance, a condition in which the glucose in our blood (there from eating or drinking carbohydrates) has no place to go. Excess glucose causes the liver to convert it to fatty acids, which in turn increase artery-clogging LDL cholesterol.

However, here muscle comes to the rescue. Through a process called glycogenolysis, an exercised muscle will move the glycogen out of your blood and store it as a useful source of energy in the muscle itself.  And depending on how intensely the muscle was exercised, this continues for hours, and even days, after exercising. Pretty cool.

We have over 600 of them, and they are mostly made of water. Tend them like a garden. Exercise them at least three times a week. Hydrate well and feed them with good food (mainly protein with some carbs). In exchange, they will take care of you, in more ways than you know.

Kettlebells: From Russia With Love and Macho

A few weeks ago I got a 35 lb. kettlebell. Not one to go to gyms often in the past twenty years, I had never heard of kettlebells until about at year ago, although they've been used in Russia for several hundred years. It's been a happy discovery for this TOJ.

A kettlebell workout is challenging, but very effective and simple. It takes some getting used to because the exercises are ballistic, required you to swing a heavy weight, and involve your total body. But I do think they are superior in many ways to barbells and dumbbells that focus on isolated muscle groups. When I finish a workout, I feel a relaxed fatigue from my shoulders to my feet. And I think they are making me stronger.

When my children were little kids, we had book of Russian fairy tales, all based on animal stories. What was different than those tales and, say, "The Three Bears," was that they all had unhappy endings. They were cautionary tales of animals with human foibles, which would eventually end with the hero of the story being eaten by another animal or freezing to death. I remember thinking that being raised in a culture like this would make for a tough adult.

In the days of the Soviet Union, the Russian athletic establishment was the embodiment of this Spartan view of life. They were notorious for grueling workouts, harsh training conditions, and applying science to "manufacturing" great athletes. And they did. The Soviets were always top medal winners in the winter and summer Olympics.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire back in the 1980's, the Russian Army and US Special Forces started training under the guidance of Pavel Tsatouline, a Russian solider and conditioning coach. To our embarrassment, the Russian soldiers exhibited better strength and endurance than our soldiers. The former trained almost exclusively with kettlebells.

In Russia, kettlebells, used for centuries as counter-weights in farm commerce, were already widely used by soldiers, athletes, farmers and workers to develop and display their strength. Most Russians have always been relatively poor, certainly not able to pay a monthly fee to workout on the Nautilus. So kettlebells kept them strong.

A born entrepreneur, Tsatouline, now Pavel, Inc., found a tremendous opportunity in obese, exercise-starved America, and has created a whole kettlebell franchise with the weights, books, DVDs and trainer certification. There are hundreds of imitators, but he is a credible source regarding how to train with a kettlebell.

His books, though full of solid exercise physiology, can be sort of funny because they are riddled with military macho. Weightlifters are referred to as warriors. He describes the fat-burning aspects of the kettleball as superior to the "dishonor of diet and aerobic exercise." (He reminds me of the testosterone-hyped writers in Men's Health magazine; don't know why the weight-lifter types have such a visceral reaction to skinny marathoners!)

However, Pavel is a master of the kettlebell, which requires a lot of technique to get the benefits and avoid injury. Working out with a kettleball is demanding and different to what I was used to with conventional weights. You use your core muscles to lift and balance a large, unstable (because of the handle) weight overhead with your arm locked. It's important to keep the wrist relatively straight, which can be hard if you do not control the kettlebell well enough to avoid slamming it against your wrist (it hurts!).

You will find tons of video about the kettleball on YouTube, including some that show incredibly strong Russians flipping them around like jugglers. However, be careful because some of the demonstrator in the videos display poor technique.

I plan to incorporate a kettlebell workout at least twice a week. There's no doubt it maximizes overall functional strength, stability, flexibility, and balance. It's perfect if you only have 30 minutes to exercise because in that time you can reach complete muscle exhaustion if you keep rests short between sets.

Now when I think of Russia, I don't think vodka, caviar, Baryshnikov, Tolstoy or Siberia. I think kettlebells.