Weekly Learning: Number One

 I might try a new weekly or semi regular installment of a concept called weekly (even if it isn't) learning. Mostly thoughts on what I've read or experienced in clinic.  I'll see how it evolves.  I've been thinking that it would be good practice to sit and think about the week.  

A win:  Had a patient that was getting repeated knee pain for months after exactly half mile of running.  Swelling on the outside lateral knee.  I had treated the foot and hip and knee in all various combos.  Big rocks were checked and rechecked.  One evening I sat and throught through the anatomy and reviewed some old French Anatomy notes I have.  Taken from the 1800's before Fascia wasn't eliminated.  I reviewed an old Guy Voyer video and throught through some joint jumping techniques that I have learned from a Guy seminar taught by the amazing Brian Murer.  Some individuals will have a lateral sesamoid bone and can have various IT band attachments (up to 5).  I worked the tissue and joint pumped the joint in various ways.  Two days later I got a text he had run 5 miles with no pain or swelling!  Pretty cool.  

A Loss:  A profesional runner I have worked with retired from foot pain.  It was a frustrating experience for him, to state it mildly.  I'd get to check it every 5-6 weeks.  I have probably read more about the foot in the last year than any other anatomy to try to figure this out.  Worked on trying to create exercises to emphasis better control in the foot and in the body.  Just nothing ever clicked.  Very bummed for him.  The goal for any athlete is to retire because they aren't good enough or they have accomplished what they wanted to.  Not to let injury decide for you.  Very humbling to know you couldn't help.  

But it also puts into clarity the importance of keeping learning, keep thinking, keep tinkering.  I'll cross paths again with injured athletes from various things.  I owe it to that future athlete to get better.  When an athlete trust their career and dreams to help keep them healthy,  it's not a thing to take lightly.  Keep learning, get better.

The Adductor Magnus really has 4 parts if you take the blood vessel areas as zones.  Zone one acts as a hip stabilizer, 2 and 3 are middle zone and are conductors of movement.  Zone 4 is basically acting like another hamstring.  Interesting stuff.  

Why Do We Train

Why do we train?

To answer this question becomes the foundation for the rest of the story.  Get this wrong and your trajectory is off and you will miss the mark.

Better to go slowly in the right direction than quickly in the wrong.  

Filter One:  Why do we train?

Here are some common answers.  To be better at my sport.  Let's break this down a bit further.  To be a better football player, would be completely different than being a better runner.  Does a better runner mean I run faster or run further? 

To be healthier.  What does health mean to you?  Less body fat, more muscle, better cardiovascular capacity, better bone density? 

To look different.  Growing up as a kid in the 80's I wanted muscles like Rocky.  Some people want to get bigger, some people want to get smaller.  

To Feel better.  Training has a calming, almost euphoric result.  Brain producing BDNF produces less anxiety.  Some train to deal with depression or sadness.  Mental health from training can be just as great as the physical. 

Filter Two:  What is the most precise description to the answer of filter one.  Example.  To better at sport.  Football.  I'm a little small.  I need to get bigger.  Fat don't fly, so I need to put body armor on.  AKA...muscles.  My goal is hypertrophy.  

Example.  I want to be better runner.  I want to run faster.  How do I run faster.  This can be a bit more complicated.  Lets go through a few scenarios.  I get niggles here and there that disrupts my training blocks.  Training for this scenario is figuring out why you can't handle load.  My goal is capacity of my tissues.

Am I to big?  Again, fat don't fly, so perhaps better body composition is in order.  My goal is better body comp.  

I am generally weaker than the accepted norm for my level of compotition.  But as a runner/biker/climber/ weight gain may not be desirable.  My goal is strength without the additional hypertrophy.  

Filter Three:  What are the best exercises to choose to reach the desired outcomes.  Best becomes individual.  Individual aspects will vary widely.  Mobility, technique, training history, injury history, limb size will all provide unique data points to consider.  Most importantly, does it get a yes from the first two filters.  

Example.  Is the lying leg curl a good exercise.  Strength.  Probably better choices.  Hypertrophy, I might keep this.  Running faster, def better options.  Rehabbing a hamstring strain, I might keep this one in.  

Common pitfalls to better training.

As Dan John says "keep the goal the goal."  Losing focus on why you are in the gym is easy to do.  We get enamored with toys, exercises we saw on social media, or what are friends are doing. 

We get caught up in a certain exercise.  A barbell is only a tool.  A back squat with a straight bar, deadlift or bench has come to be the holy trinity.  Please remember, those are a sport in and of itself.  Even powerlifters have now devised bars that are more ergonomically designed to support the gain of strength without risking joint health.  Being dogmatic with a straight bar is foolish.

Being stuck with prescribed ROM.  I never was able to figure out why a 45lb weight plate is 17.72 inches in diameter.  Why the barbell is 8.5" off the ground.  Manipulate the ROM for your best health and for the desires of your goal.  Perhaps raising up the plates by 6" allowing the bar to be 14.5" off the ground is the best for your hypertrophy goals?

Going from one thing to another.  Not sticking with a thing long enough to see it through the end.  

Sticking with something to long is the other end of that quandary.  How you became a 400lb deadlifter, will not be how you become a 500lb deadlifter.  Training and special exercises will most likely need to change. 

Mistaking getting good at an exercise for thinking that it has proper carry over.  This probably gets filed under picking better exercises.  Thinking that you put 40lb on your bench and thinking that you will be a better football player is very rarely true.  

Seeking fatigue.  I think this is one of the biggest pitfalls.  People think that getting tired is a good thing.  Just because you get tired, doesn't mean you had a good workout or that something positive happened.  Just like busy doesn't equal productive.    

Training like you have always trained.  For a few years after I was done with bobsledding, I found myself still training like I was going to push a bobsled.  Except I wasn't.  My mobility was deteriorating, my aerobic base didn't exist, and I was starting to feel beat up.  But it was what felt comfortable.  I still felt "strong" because I could lift a lot of weight, but it was not improving my quality of life, in fact it was hurting it.  My filter was still in "to be better at a sport, when I needed it to be healthier, 

How we train should change when lifestyle, goals and circumstances change.  How we did something should not be the reason for how we do something now.  Use these three filters to devise a better plan.  Be wary of the pitfalls, and above all have fun in the process.  Training should never end, so if it's not fun, it will.

Track, Travel, Thoughts

 A few weeks ago I got the chance to travel to Serbia and work with the New Zealand National Track and Field athletes that had qualified for the Indoor World Championships.  The event was held in Belgrade, Serbia. 

Getting off the plane into Belgrade and was immediately hit with the smell of cigarette smoke.  It has been over a decade since I have been around the smell, so it was a bit startling.  All the countries seemed to arrive at once, so there was a bit of chaos into getting to your hotel.  Luckily they had a Serbian volunteer that helped with all the logistics.  

We stayed at a hotel that allowed you to walk to the Arena.  The fresh air was appreciated.  It was hard to not be stuck by the giant concrete apartments buildings.  They were all around.  I've read research where the building style was purposefully built to drain your emotional well being.  To create a type of depression.  It works.  Graffiti and trash peppered the landscape.  Full disclosure:  I never had the time to go into old town.  I'm sure that was much cooler and full of history.  

We took a bus trip to the practice track and witnessed a mass of riot police in full battle regalia lining the streets.  We are talking hundreds and hundreds.  Apparently they were preparing for a soccer game to start and finish.  I was told Serbian Soccer games have a reputation for violence.  Such a strange thing to witness.  

The event and arena was great.  Held in their national basketball arena.  It held a lot of fans.  The track had a fast middle straight for the sprinters and a comfortable, but not fast track for endurance events.  The warm up area was excellent.  

Hours spent in the warm up area working on the athletes I was with and watching various events warm up, I had some thoughts.  Americans love warm up drills.  Foreign athletes like games and easy going style of general preparation.  The medal contenders are just physically different.  No matter the coaching/training, to win medals, you have to be blessed with that extra.  Listening to Marcel Jacobs do block starts had a different sound than all the others.  The power was audible.  The finalist had a different sound than the athletes that didn't make it out of the prelims.  Grant Holloway, the same.  I don't think you can achieve a medal without hard work, but I don't think you can get a medal with average talent and incredible work.  They are special.  It is easy to recognize the unicorns.  Also, why I think travel sports are a bit on the silly side when it comes to kids under 14.  Play lots of sports, lots of experiences.  Cream rises no matter what. You can see special in a few minutes.  If you have to ask if your kid is special, they are not. (harsh, but true).  

You didn't see the open support of Ukraine in any of the places we were.  This could be that it is very real there, or life is hard enough and you just don't have time to worry when life has enough problems in the current day.  It raises the question if things like sport matter when things like war is going on.  I think they do.  Sport lets you see what humans are capable of.  It lets the young dream and the old reminisce.  There is a joyful escape in seeing effort.  A respect for the work and sacrifice.  There is something about wondering how far you can run, how fast you can do it, how high you can jump, how far can you throw that will always bring a sense of wonderment and curiosity. 

Art is important.  It strikes you when it isn't present.  Even graffiti could be described as a impulsive call to break up the grey monotony of the concrete.  Concrete, a feeling of being stuck.  A lack of motion, we are, I am, not going anywhere.  Sport and Art have a way to inspire and transport.  The ability to create motion, to spark imagination.  It's a shame that it is being cut from schools.  

"The arts are not a way to make a living.  They are a very human way of making a life more bearable.  practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your should grow, for heaven's sake.  Sing in the shower.  Dance to the radio.   Tell stories.  Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem.  Do it as well as you possibly can.  You will get an enormous reward.  You will have created something."  -Kurt Vonnegut

Attaining Health Quickly: What To Do

 There is not time to get healthy.  I heard this a lot a few years ago.  Health is not something that can be attained in a few weeks or even months.  You can't rush your fitness or health, but are there things that can actually make you healthier instantly?  More specifically, are there things that can be done today, that will make you healthier today or tomorrow?

"The best time to plant was 20 years ago.  The second best time is today."

If you walk for 30 min at a comfortable pace outside your Natural Killer cells and your T-Cells go up.  Simply put, your immune system is raised up and has shown to have less overall sick days and respiratory illness over a winter.  Several studies support this.  This is immediate.  Can you imagine if this was a pill, how many people would be clamoring to take it!

Staying with walking, as little as a 10 min walk after eating, has been shown to keep your glucose levels down.  Regulating blood glucose levels is how we can go from pre-diabetic state to a healthy range.  This is regardless of what you eat.  It's not even saying, change what you are eating, just walk a bit afterwards!  (Side note:  The words comorbidity has been thrown a lot around recently, pre-diabetic blood sugar levels, is a comorbidity, you may look and feel great, but your body is essentially rusting.) 

Speaking of dietary changes.  You can change your gut biome in as little as 4 days.  A fast food diet of burger and fries were compared to a Mediterranean diet for 4 days.  There was 4 days in between each diet.  Fast food diet showed an increase in the bad bacteria in the gut and Med. Diet showed an increase in the good bacteria.  This was after 4 days!  Imagine what a month could do.  A few more fruits, vegetables, olive oil and quality protein.  Dump the fried foods. 

Vitamin D levels is a very important parameter for overall human health.  Immune system, muscular recovery and mood are just a few but important areas it impacts.  10 min in the sunlight on your skin is about the equivalent of 10,000 IU of vitamin D.  Supplementing with Vit D can serve as a great adjunct on days there is no sun or you are stuck inside.  

Sleep is a big deal.  A good nights sleep drives a healthier innate immune system.  It enhances recovery.  Your biomarkers that fight infection are improved.  Your inflammation goes down (or up if you sleep poor).  The response to vaccines is improved after good nights sleep! (what do you think this means if you sleep pretty poor consistently?).  A lot of what we know on how to attain a good nights sleep drives from understanding the circadian rhythm of our bodies.  Here is the easiest guidelines.  Let your eyes see the sun in the morning.  It basically is the physiological wake up signal.  Light on the retina.  Eat something.  Have some movement in your day.  Stop caffeine before noon (for most people).  Cut out your phone and blue light 2 hours before bed.  Blue light stops the melatonin hormone.  Yea, you say you can fall asleep but your sleep is disrupted, which means you wake up!  Your sleep was disturbed.  Take Magnesium an hour before bed.   This has been a game changer for so many patients of mine.  Go to bed at the same time, yes even on the weekends.  

Breath deep for a few minutes.  Inhale through the nose, hold for a few second.  Exhale for a few seconds. Hold for a few seconds.  This is called box breathing.  Repeat for a few minutes.  This will literally drive you into a parasympathetic state.  Less cortisol, which means less inflammatory response to stress.  Breathing is like the remote control to your nervous system.  It works that quickly.  

Drink water with some electrolytes.  We are water.  We are electrical beings.  Better hydration is better function.  

Socialize with people you like.  This I found quite ironic.  Social isolation or a perceived social threat produced more inflammation and decreased anti viral qualities.  While the opposite was also true.  Positive social interactions showed decrease inflammation, and bolstered anti viral responses.  

There is time, there was time.  Today can be that day.  Acute can become chronic.  Your body will change, wether you do something or not.  You can decide how.  Health can be improved today.  Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.  

Breaking Down the Formula...F=MA

 This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend the Functional Range Seminar Internal Strength.  If you have never attended one of their seminars (functional range release, conditioning, assessment)  I would highly recommend it.  

I won't summarize the whole weekend, but I did want to hash out a talk, that really made some of my thoughts much more clear in programming.  The talk was given by therapist John Quint.  John works with some of the strongest people on the planet at Westside Barbell.  

We have all heard the formula F=MA.  F is force.  M is mass.  A is acceleration.  There are a few ways to think of training but they all fall under these methods. 

1.  ME. max effort. 90-100%

2.  DE.  dynamic effort. 50-60 percent of ME

3.  RE.  repetition effort. 40-50 percent of ME

4.  REF.  repetition effort failure (hypertrophy)

Force will be ME.  Once we get an exercise to the ME we desire, lets say 405# on trap bar deadlift, we can then address other issues.  Most athletes are not looking to get bigger.  Runners, bikers, weight class athletes actually improve if they get stronger, but remain the same size.  Hypertrophy is usually not the goal.  REF is not used then in the purpose of bigger muscles.  So M in the F=MA will stay RE for maintenance of the ME or F.  A in the F=MA will the DE.  Moving the weight fast with intent and acceleration.  

This allows you to maintain what you have built in the 405# trap bar deadlift.  Over time, this may well bring negative adaptations in hip quality though.  Continually pushing weights in the same movement pattern is not the recipe for keeping a healthy human being.  

Enter the REF for the M in the F=MA equation.  Repetition effort to failure using CARS (controlled articular rotations) as your exercise (in this example doing the hip) to help the trap bar.  CARS at intense level is designed to get you access to new tissue.  This new tissue will need to be trained to keep it.  It will also be weaker.  So using a percentage in the ME or DE allows you to integrate that new tissue into the programming of the F=MA for the trap bar (any exercise).  

Running this equation this way over and over allows the athlete to not hit a plateau.  Even though the weight (405#) stays the same.  The athlete is continuously integrating new fibers, new recruitment around the hip to keep improving and also not allowing the exercise to ever create negative adaptations.  

Practically what would it look like.  Get the athlete as strong as you think is necessary.  I'm 195 pounds and have decided I want to keep a 2x bodyweight deadlift.  I have worked to get that number.  Now I'm going to work intensely on Hip CARS as part of my workout and my pair then with a percentage of the deadlift done with speed aka DE work.  I could also pair CARS with ME work, again supersetting hip CARS with a few reps at 95 percent of my 2x bodyweight deadlift.  

Quint did a great job of explaining this and made my thinking of this concept so much more clearer for me.  I hope my quick synopsis creates more direction for your training and also more curiosity for theirs.  

Stay strong, stay healthy.  

Coming Back Around to the Warm Up

 "We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing."

My last year of chiropractic school presented with an opportunity to compete to make the USA National Bobsled team.  One of the biggest aspects of training was running fast.  Training to run fast was the goal for the next few months.  One problem it was winter.  I found one indoor running track that allowed me to train on it from 5-6am.  

Me and the old folks.

I had a sprinting background from years in high school and college.  So a standard warm up was between 45-60 min for about 3-8 quality reps that lasted between 3-6 seconds.  Drills, drills, drills.  

"Don't ever stop doing that stuff and you won't ever have any problems like us!"

I remember those words from the same guy that would shuffle around the track every morning while I was there.  My life at the time was train, school, rugby, study.  Day in and day out.  My reference point was training.  My only thought when hearing those words, why would I?  Why would I stop warming up?

Fast forward a decade plus and I know have my own business and a kid.  The shift wasn't training, it was working out.  There is a huge difference. No plan, just get a work out in as time permitted.  The first thing to be lost was the warm up.  I no longer had to operate in the 95-99% of maximum efficiency.  

What was lost?

Warm ups are designed to expose the body to gradual increase in temperature.  10 min has been designated a minimum.  Think of it as gradual body perfusion of increased blood flow.  Blood flow is how things heal.  Cutting out the warm up is cutting out opportunity for helping little niggles to get better.

Warm up use multiple movements in multiple planes.  This is simply doing lots of different movements then what we have done on a routine basis.  Squatting, lunging, reaching, tumbling, gradual exposure into lengthening and loading tissues that haven't been active all day.  Joints have rotational capabilities that need to be expressed daily or they begin to stiffen.  Capsules need synovial fluid to stay healthy.  Synovial reaches the capsule through movement.  If you don't expose the joint to angles it doesn't drive synovial fluid into those spaces.  Cutting out the warm up cuts out the maintenance of joint range of motion.  

Warm ups allow gradual practice of the skill of the movement.  Rep after rep.  Regardless if it's a sprint, a squat, a deadlift or a push up, sprinting and lifting have a skill component that needs to be constantly kept fresh.  Skills that are practiced generally get better.  Cutting out the warm up cuts out the opportunity to practice skills.  

Warm ups allow us to take inventory of body parts and body movements that don't quite feel right.  Maybe, we spend a few extra minutes exploring those.  If something feels off after several days, perhaps we seek help, even if it's just a YouTube search of the area from a trusted source.  If you don't know your shoulder hurts when you do a table top stretch maybe it festers into something worse months later.  Cutting the warm up cuts out that screening process.  

For the general person adding or keeping a quality warm up for 10-15 min can bring many health and performance benefits.  Even if you only had 20 minutes, a 10 min warm up still allows ten minutes for high quality one or two movements.  Allow yourself the opportunity to keep giving your body a chance to move and improve.  Don't let that body get to old to play.  

What Can We Learn From the Potato Blight

 Reading through the fascinating book 1493 by Charles Mann has been a learning experience about how foods like the potato have been influenced by the Colombian Exchange.  Put simply, with the "discovery" of the New World by Columbus, a complicated and world altering exchange of goods, services and ideas from and into Europe, Asia, North and South America was created.

One of the more interesting exchanges was the amazing potato.  Most researchers agree that the potato was cultivated in the Andean area, most likely Peru.  In fact, hundreds of varieties of potatoes exist.  Over the next few hundred years the potato was brought to Europe.  The potato is credited for allowing Europe to grow and not to starve.  For the first time the common man had a surplus of calories.  In a way, you could make an argument that the potato saved Europe.  

Fast forward a few hundred years into the late 1700s and another Columbian Exchange product is becoming worth its weight in gold, guano.  Bird poop.  Guano has been discovered to be the ultimate fertilizer for the soil, for growing better crops.  It is now agreed that somewhere and sometime in the late 1700's a little parasite called P. infestans aka the deadly potato blight, was hitching a ride in the guano.  It was laid into the soil in Europe and slowly spread over the next 50 years to trigger what we now call the Great Famine. 

It is not the potato blight I found interesting though, it was what were the conditions for which allowed such spread.  Why Ireland and what can we learn from this?

First, Ireland was heavily reliant on the potato, more so than many of the other countries.  It had become a mono culture.  The climate of wet cool areas certainly played a part.  The third was the change in growing methods.  This holds the most interest for me.  

Ireland had developed a growing method over the years very similar to the Andean way of growing potatoes called Wacho.  It had become known as Lazy beds in Europe.  They took up the sod and stacked them on top of each other.  This created ridges with a small trench nearby.  Because the ridges were raised up, they heated up in the day earlier and retained heat.  They were dense roots so they held onto the nutrients in the soil and because of the grass resisted erosion.  The densely packed Wacho also resisted weeds.  Because the soil held more nutrients, they didn't need fertilizer (guano).  The fallows from where the sod had been dug up acted like natural drains when it rained.  

This method had been perfected and used from most likely Inca times in Peru and used successfully into Ireland hundreds of years later.  Until, they are told differently.

"Activist like Andrew Wight and Jethro Tull wanted farmers to release soil nutrients by deep thorough plowing, to plant every bit of terrain, to change the land with fertilizer, use ruthless weeding, and maximize yields by efficient harvesting.  Believers in technology, they viewed the newest factory made harrows, drillers and harvesters as God given tools to accomplish these goals."

They got rid of the Wacho growing methods, a decade later the potato blight all but destroyed the potato.  It is quite a harrowing story reading about the Great Famine. 

"During the next forty years, researches attributed the blight to ozone, air pollution, static electricity, volcanic action, smoke from steam locomotives, excessive humidity or heat, gases from the recently introduced sulfur match, and emanation from outer space, various insects..."

New technology and wanting efficiency replaced common sense and experience.  Even giving the name Lazy beds also makes it seem like they were subtly looking down on this growing method, instead of using the name Wacho.

It is interesting seeing the blame placed on various ideas because the real cause was unknown.  It is interesting to see how science was espoused over experience.  This can still be seen in coaching/therapy and almost every profession.  There must be a balance in, this is the way we have always done it and science says we should do it this way.

One quote that has stuck with me, " was simply the latest and worth pathogen to take advantage of the new scientific agriculture, ...on a terrain shaped for technology and not biology."

Makes me wonder how modern life is shaping the biology we call the human body.