“40 million kids play sports, and most of them
are between 7 and 12. By the time they are 13 more than 70 percent of them have
stopped playing because it’s not fun anymore. All of a sudden when kids get
into junior high, we feel this need to have them become professionals, and the
coaches become professionals… The message I’d like to get out to them is to
honor the game. The goal, or the victory is important, but team sportsmanship,
the athletic endeavor itself is just as important” (LA Lakers Coach Phil
Jackson).
I came across this article on Anthony Colpo’s excellent site. It was featured on newsweek.com. Please check it out. I think you will find it quite fascinating.
If you follow the news about health research, you risk whiplash. First garlic
lowers bad cholesterol, then—after more study—it doesn’t. Hormone replacement
reduces the risk of heart disease in postmenopausal women, until a huge study
finds that it doesn’t (and that it raises the risk of breast cancer to boot).
Eating a big breakfast cuts your total daily calories, or not—as a study
released last week finds. Yet even if biomedical research can be a fickle guide,
we rely on it.
But what if wrong answers aren’t the exception but the rule? More and more
scholars who scrutinize health research are now making that claim. It isn’t just
an individual study here and there that’s flawed, they charge. Instead, the very
framework of medical investigation may be off-kilter, leading time and again to
findings that are at best unproved and at worst dangerously wrong. The result is
a system that leads patients and physicians astray—spurring often costly
regimens that won’t help and may even harm you.
It’s a disturbing view, with huge implications for doctors, policymakers,
and health-conscious consumers. And one of its foremost advocates, Dr. John P.A.
Ioannidis, has just ascended to a new, prominent platform after years of
crusading against the baseless health and medical claims. As the new chief of
Stanford University’s Prevention Research Center, Ioannidis is cementing his
role as one of medicine’s top mythbusters. “People are being hurt and even
dying” because of false medical claims, he says: not quackery, but errors in
medical research.
This is Ioannidis’s moment. As medical costs hamper the economy and impede
deficit-reduction efforts, policymakers and businesses are desperate to cut them
without sacrificing sick people. One no-brainer solution is to use and pay for
only treatments that work. But if Ioannidis is right, most biomedical studies
are wrong.
In just the last two months, two pillars of preventive medicine fell. A major
study concluded there’s no good evidence that statins (drugs like Lipitor and
Crestor) help people with no history of heart disease. The study, by the
Cochrane Collaboration, a global consortium of biomedical experts, was based on
an evaluation of 14 individual trials with 34,272 patients. Cost of statins:
more than $20 billion per year, of which half may be unnecessary. (Pfizer, which
makes Lipitor, responds in part that “managing cardiovascular disease risk
factors is complicated”). In November a panel of the Institute of Medicine
concluded that having a blood test for vitamin D is pointless: almost everyone
has enough D for bone health (20 nanograms per milliliter) without taking
supplements or calcium pills. Cost of vitamin D: $425 million per
year.
Ioannidis, 45, didn’t set out to slay medical myths. A child prodigy (he was
calculating decimals at age 3 and wrote a book of poetry at 8), he graduated
first in his class from the University of Athens Medical School, did a residency
at Harvard, oversaw AIDS clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health in
the mid-1990s, and chaired the department of epidemiology at Greece’s University
of Ioannina School of Medicine. But at NIH Ioannidis had an epiphany. “Positive”
drug trials, which find that a treatment is effective, and “negative” trials, in
which a drug fails, take the same amount of time to conduct. “But negative
trials took an extra two to four years to be published,” he noticed. “Negative
results sit in a file drawer, or the trial keeps going in hopes the results turn
positive.” With billions of dollars on the line, companies are loath to declare
a new drug ineffective. As a result of the lag in publishing negative studies,
patients receive a treatment that is actually ineffective. That made Ioannidis
wonder, how many biomedical studies are wrong?
His answer, in a 2005 paper: “the majority.” From clinical trials of new
drugs to cutting-edge genetics, biomedical research is riddled with incorrect
findings, he argued. Ioannidis deployed an abstruse mathematical argument to
prove this, which some critics have questioned. “I do agree that many claims are
far more tenuous than is generally appreciated, but to ‘prove’ that most are
false, in all areas of medicine, one needs a different statistical model and
more empirical evidence than Ioannidis uses,” says biostatistician Steven
Goodman of Johns Hopkins, who worries that the most-research-is-wrong claim
“could promote an unhealthy skepticism about medical research, which is being
used to fuel anti-science fervor.”
Even a cursory glance at medical journals shows that once heralded studies
keep falling by the wayside. Two 1993 studies concluded that vitamin E prevents
cardiovascular disease; that claim was overturned by more rigorous experiments,
in 1996 and 2000. A 1996 study concluding that estrogen therapy reduces older
women’s risk of Alzheimer’s was overturned in 2004. Numerous studies concluding
that popular antidepressants work by altering brain chemistry have now been
contradicted (the drugs help with mild and moderate depression, when they work
at all, through a placebo effect), as has research claiming that early cancer
detection (through, say, PSA tests) invariably saves lives. The list goes
on.
Despite the explosive nature of his charges, Ioannidis has collaborated with
some 1,500 other scientists, and Stanford, epitome of the establishment, hired
him in August to run the preventive-medicine center. “The core of medicine is
getting evidence that guides decision making for patients and doctors,” says
Ralph Horwitz, chairman of the department of medicine at Stanford. “John has
been the foremost innovative thinker about biomedical evidence, so he was a
natural for us.”
Ioannidis’s first targets were shoddy statistics used in early genome
studies. Scientists would test one or a few genes at a time for links to
virtually every disease they could think of. That just about ensured they would
get “hits” by chance alone. When he began marching through the genetics
literature, it was like Sherman laying waste to Georgia: most of these candidate
genes could not be verified. The claim that variants of the vitamin D–receptor
gene explain three quarters of the risk of osteoporosis? Wrong, he and
colleagues proved in 2006: the variants have no effect on osteoporosis. That
scores of genes identified by the National Human Genome Research Institute can
be used to predict cardiovascular disease? No (2009). That six gene variants
raise the risk of Parkinson’s disease? No (2010). Yet claims that gene X raises
the risk of disease Y contaminate the scientific literature, affecting personal
health decisions and sustaining the personal genome-testing industry.
Statistical flukes also plague epidemiology, in which researchers look for
links between health and the environment, including how people behave and what
they eat. A study might ask whether coffee raises the risk of joint pain, or
headaches, or gallbladder disease, or hundreds of other ills. “When you do
thousands of tests, statistics says you’ll have some false winners,” says
Ioannidis. Drug companies make a mint on such dicey statistics. By testing an
approved drug for other uses, they get hits by chance, “and doctors use that as
the basis to prescribe the drug for this new use. I think that’s wrong.” Even
when a claim is disproved, it hangs around like a deadbeat renter you can’t
evict. Years after the claim that vitamin E prevents heart disease had been
overturned, half the scientific papers mentioning it cast it as true, Ioannidis
found in 2007.
The situation isn’t hopeless. Geneticists have mostly mended their ways,
tightening statistical criteria, but other fields still need to clean house,
Ioannidis says. Surgical practices, for instance, have not been tested to nearly
the extent that medications have. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a large proportion
of surgical practice is based on thin air, and [claims for effectiveness] would
evaporate if we studied them closely,” Ioannidis says. That would also save
billions of dollars. George Lundberg, former editor of The Journal of the
American Medical Association, estimates that strictly applying criteria like
Ioannidis pushes would save $700 billion to $1 trillion a year in U.S.
health-care spending.
Of course, not all conventional health wisdom is wrong. Smoking kills, being
morbidly obese or severely underweight makes you more likely to die before your
time, processed meat raises the risk of some cancers, and controlling blood
pressure reduces the risk of stroke. The upshot for consumers: medical wisdom
that has stood the test of time—and large, randomized, controlled trials—is more
likely to be right than the latest news flash about a single food or
drug.
Robert Rausch is never short of topics for his Children in Competitive Sports class at Westfield State College.
“We never lack for material,” said Rausch, who has been teaching the class for 10 years. “There’s something in the newspaper literally every day.
“We get great discussions. Participation level is very high. Everyone has a story, both the good, the bad, and the ugly, which adds to the discussion and makes the class interesting.”
Interesting? Yes. Good news? Not necessarily.
Rausch, who played sports growing up and has coached and officiated multiple sports in his adulthood, said he has his concerns about the road youth sports, in general, is traveling.
“One time you played soccer for three months of the year, played probably 10 games, and when that was over you moved on to another activity,” said Rausch, 50, who grew up in Green Bay, Wis. “Now, as part of your soccer experience, you’re also doing weight training in many circumstances, or endurance training. And when the season is over in 30 or 40 games, you have a non-traditional season, and you’re encouraged to do something in your offseason.
“From the students, all the time, I get this, ‘I was told I wouldn’t make the varsity soccer team if I didn’t participate on this summer traveling squad.’ We’ve become much more specialized to the point where it’s much less about enjoyment and fun, and really about winning and being the best, which goes against the surveys that suggest kids participate for fun.”
Rausch said a study regarding what youth athletes are hoping to accomplish by playing sports, conducted by Michigan State University, listed winning as No. 10, while having fun, playing with friends and doing an activity ranked much higher. Another study showed 75 percent of kids will stop playing sports by the age of 15.
Other than discussing hot topics, Rausch has the students conduct surveys on campus on athletes and non-athletes.
“We want to teach the students in terms of the dynamics of youth sports, and from my perspective, how it’s changed over time,” said Rausch, of West Springfield. “Initially, (youth sports) was an outlet for energy purposes, good recreational fun, and an enjoyable activity you can do with others, and to some degree compete. Largely today, many people really have an angle, whether it’s a college scholarship or a career in the pros as a means of getting an education; belonging to a team and a support group. I think it’s changed a little bit in that sense.”
Rausch also said there are, among others, two big problems in youth sports: parents’ perspectives regarding college scholarships, and coaches.
“Someone told me about a survey, which I’ve yet to track down, that says 75 percent of all parents think their (high school) child is good enough to get a college scholarship based on their athletic ability,” he said. “And in actuality, it’s a little less than one percent. That’s a big discrepancy.”
Regarding coaching, Rausch said there’s a Catch 22 situation. There are 3 million to 3.5 million youth coaches in American, with two-thirds of those coaches being volunteers.
“There in itself is a dilemma,” Rausch said. “We have a demand for these folks who are giving up their time in the name of their son or daughter, or for giving back to the community. Can we ask them to take a workshop or take some courses so they have a little bit of a background in terms of child development and youth sports in general?”
Rausch said his students enjoying going on Youtube to download videos regarding youth sports, for example, “You can find dozens of videos: the football father running out onto the field to tackle an opponent – an 8-year-old or a 10-year-old. It’s insane.”
For parents interested in becoming coaches and educating themselves, Rausch suggested going to http://www.nays.org and http://www.ncaa.org. For a good read, he also recommended a book released in March, written by Tom Farrey: “Game On – The All-American Race To Make Champions Of Our Children.”
Beavis and Butthead giggled their way onto T.V. sets all across America, everyone was dancing to the hip sounds of The Macarena, and droves of SUV’s started roaming the streets all across the country.
It was the 1990s.
In comes Benny.
His was a Ford Explorer or other. It was oversized, commanding, and ornate. All the qualities he desired but lacked.
He parked the alter ego in a handicapped spot and made his way to the gym.
The door swiftly came open and there stood Benny in the threshold. The entrance was somewhat dramatic. Frothy smoke bellying up all around him was the only effect missing for a complete scene.
Benny was dressed to the nines. He was sporting a new urban street track suit. Thoughts of him auditioning for a role in the hit series The Sopranos or just getting back from a hip hop convention crossed our minds.
He was styling.
“Wasup” was voiced by the nylon pimp. We could only exchange welcomes with grunts; squats were taking their toll on us.
Joking, sarcasm, and brotherly love was the atmosphere and the hot topic quickly turned to Benny’s new get-up. It was a boisterous sort of green color with purple stripes parading down the forepart of his jacket. He must have been professionally fitted, for it fit him like a glove.
We on the other hand were fashion wrecks. Our fashion statement was that of mismatched, torn, and chalk-sooted garb.
Versace would have turned over in his grave.
We weren’t there to look good. We were there to lift.
Presses were up next so we huddled around the sacramental bench and began our ritualistic strength ceremony. Numbers were blared out, plates were exchanged, and effort emitted.
Just then a ring filled the air.
Benny dipped a hand inside his jacket pocket and pulled out his new mobile phone. It was the beginning of the (perpetual) contact era and Benny bought into it.
An invitation to join us was almost exuded but…
we quickly realized that curling his jittery phone up to his ear with each call made or received was the only kind of lifting Benny would be performing that day.
Benny had it all wrong.
Like Benny, I believe most people have it all wrong too.
I believe that too many of us spend too much of our time and energy on the superficial aspects of self (having) rather than core substance (being).
In Karl Marx’s view, the problem with having is that
it produces a false path to happiness through “commodity fetishism”
(Marx 1867). In commodity fetishism goods are worshipped by consumers and
believed to have magical powers to bring happiness, provoking a pervasive
expectation that happiness lies in the next purchase, or, “I would be
happy if I could just have …” (Belk).
Here’s an example of the feeling of identity invested in material objects according to Ames. I believe many of us secretly hold these exact feelings-
They knew from experience that purchasing a major
object could be a significant and momentous occasion in itself, a time of
heightened positive emotions and feelings of well-being and importance a major
purchase would transform them in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. They
would become worth more . . . and acquire greater status. By so doing they
would receive more respect and deference from others which would, in turn, make
them feel better about themselves. [pp. 30 -31]
Yet another example of misdirected, better yet false, intentions can be seen in the footage and lyrics Billionaire by Travis McCoy featuring Bruno Mars.
This is the no talent garbage that the music industry is pumping out in order to convince society, especially its vulnerable youth, false aspirations to a happy life.
Money, power, and fame equals happiness right?
Bruno Mars
I wanna be a billionaire so frickin bad
Buy all of the things I never had
I wanna be on the cover of Forbes Magazine
Smiling next to Oprah and the Queen
Oh every time I close my eyes
I see my name in shining lights, yeaaah
A different city every night oh I swear
The world better prepare for when I’m a billionaire
Travie McCoy
Yeah I would have a show like Oprah
I would be the host of
Everyday Christmas give Travie a wish list
I’d probably pull an Angelina and Brad Pitt
and adopt a bunch of babies that ain’t never had sh!t
Give away a few Mercedes like here lady have this
And last but not least grant somebody their last wish
It’s been a couple months since I’ve single so
You can call me Travie Claus minus the ho-ho
Get it, I’d probably visit where Katrina hit
And damn sure do a lot more than FEMA did
Yeah can’t forget about me stupid
Everywhere I go Imma have my own theme music
Bruno Mars
Oh every time I close my eyes
I see my name in shining lights
A different city every night oh I swear
The world better prepare for when I’m a billionaire
(oooh ooh) when I’m a Billionaire
(oooh ooooh)
Travie McCoy
I’ll be playing basketball with the President
Dunking on his delegates
Senator … his political etiquette
Toss a couple milli in the air just for the heck of it
But keep the fives, twenty’s …completely separate
And yeah I’ll be in a whole new tax bracket
We in recession but let me take a crack at it
I’ll probably take whatever left and just split it up
So everybody that I love can have a couple bucks
And not a single tummy around me
Would know what hungry was
Eating good sleeping soundly
I know we all have a similar dream
Go in your pocket pull out your wallet
And put it in the air and sing
Bruno Mars
I wanna be a billionaire so frickin bad (so bad)
Buy all of the things I never had
I wanna be on the cover of Forbes Magazine
Smiling next to Oprah and the Queen
Oh every time I close my eyes
I see my name in shining lights
A different city every night oh I swear
The world better prepare for when I’m a billionaire
(oooh ooh sing it) when I’m a Billionaire
(oooh ooooh)
I wanna be a billionaire so frickin bad
End-
What is the message that “Travie” or more specifically the music industry is trying to convey?
That happiness is only attainable if you have a boatload of money.
Come on!
Substance, according to my beliefs, is the true makeup of who we are and is where applied effort should be focused.
Working on bettering our integrity, authenticity, civility, generosity, sensitivity, and a host of other personal traits should be what concerns us.
We should be doing the complete OPPOSITE of what is expected of us from western civilization.
An over excess of possessions, material, can foster greed, self-indulgence, selfishness, etc.
Remember-
The greater the tendency for the person to rely on material possessions to
constitute self, usually the greater the emptiness in sense of self is likely
felt (Belk).
References
Ames, K. L. (1984). Material culture as nonverbal communication: a historical case study. In American Material Culture: The Shape of Things Around Us, ed. Edith Mayo, pp. 25-47. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press.
On some of my first trips around Sao Paulo after moving here, I caught
glimpses of life under the city’s many highway viaducts, whether it was of
people storing recyclable waste or even living under the bridges. I refer to my
roaming excursions in this city as “trips,” because this massive city of nearly
20 million inhabitants is a world in itself.
One day, as I gradually widened my geographic range and knowledge of my new
city, I spotted people practicing sports under one bridge. It was a brief view
but long enough to register in my mind. So when I read soon after about a boxing
school under a viaduct and went to search it out, I realized immediately it was
the same one I had spotted that day.
Under the bridge I met former pro boxer Nilson Garrido, the founder and owner
of the school. Six years ago Garrido started a project in which he created
several boxing academies under the viaducts of Sao Paulo. His goal was to take
the sport to the poor and marginalized population. In the meantime the project
attracted other people who started to contribute a small monthly fee for the use
of the gym.
The Boxing Academies of Garrido adopt primitive training equipment that he
developed himself during his years as a coach; plastic containers turned into
punching bags, heavy rocks used for weightlifting and abdominal workouts,
vehicle motor shafts for exercise bars, truck tires as weights for resistance
training.
Today Garrido manages and lives in the academy under the Alcantara Machado
viaduct, part of which receives donations of more modern sports equipment, and
where they are developing other activities besides boxing, such as gymnastics,
skating and biking. The ring is located under a section of the overpass that
doubles as a parking lot.
One day, as I sat ringside waiting for the arrival of present and future
athletes, Gorilla and Talent appeared. Those are the nicknames of two normal,
simple people who practically live there with their enormous desire to grow into
boxers. As we got to talking they asked me if I knew of anyone who could treat
them to “vitaminas,” a word that means vitamins but that they use to refer to
the protein drinks commonly used by boxers and weight-lifters. I thought they
were talking about fruit and vegetable juices, so I took them out to a nearby
stand to drink one. That one juice quickly turned into a daily habit during
their breaks from training. That was the perfect time for them to tell me about
their personal lives, their children and the child support they were paying from
their meager incomes.
The effort these athletes put in with the primitive training methods is
fascinating. I could feel the fatigue resulting from their incredible effort,
their sweating bodies, and their jolts of adrenaline. As the days passed it
dawned on me that economically, these people were truly needy, and that they
were lucky to have this place to practice sports and to be able to dream of
becoming boxers.
Others whose situation touched me were a student named Laercio and his
trainer Mauricio. Laercio almost never spoke, but when Mauricio arrived they had
long conversations before and during the session.
One day I put my camera down ringside and spent the time listening to them
carefully. Laercio arrived to train and Mauricio fired a question at him. “What
is the greatest conquest?”
Laercio looked at him without responding, so Mauricio answered his own
question. “The control of your emotions,” he said.
Laercio never stopped looking at his mentor, who continued the questions.
“Who is your greatest adversary?”
More silence.
“We, ourselves,” responded Mauricio. “Training is our best medicine. This is
the present. The future is in our imagination.”
Silence again, and Mauricio said, “Start with the mirror and confront
yourself first.” That’s when I realized that Mauricio’s phrases weren’t only
about sport, but rather about training for life itself.
I looked at my camera lying on the side of the ring, and began to compare it
to Mauricio’s mirror. I asked myself, “Do I use my camera to present my
subjects, or to represent them?”
Benny seemed naively content in the obstetrician like chair doing the now you see it now you don’t with his lower limbs. I was profoundly perplexed.
I had my music muffs on pacing back and forth between the squat rack and the bench press with Zack de la Rocha from Rage Against the Machine screaming in my ears.
I was set on hitting a new PR that day so I was psyching myself up to bury some weight.
Benny however broke my concentration (the gall) because he wanted to know if the contraption he was in was of any use.
To answer Benny’s question I asked him if he wanted to hear the truth or niceties.
“The truth” Benny boasted.
So the truth it was.
“That machine would be better off melted down and converted into a power rack. There you could do wide stance squats where your adductors would get hit in a more “functional” manner,” I decreed.
“What is it that you’re trying to do anyways?” I continued.
Benny was speechless. He really didn’t know. Embarrassment entered his being and
showed its’ presence on his face.
Trimming my inner thighs? He would have been ridiculed for such a statement.
As you may have guessed, the exercise machine in question is the seated hip adduction machine.
Why?
Many female gym goers (as well as imprudent “males”) plop themselves down on said devices thinking that they can reduce the girth of their inner thighs.
Now hear this!
There is no such thing as spot reduction!
Doing endless sets and reps of sit-ups, crunches, kickbacks, hip abduction, and hip
adduction exercises will not reduce fat in the exercised area.
Fat is lost throughout the body in a pattern dependent on your genetics, hormones, and age.
Exercising a muscle doesn’t burn the fat covering it.
Contrarily, building muscle underneath fat will only increase the size of the area you wish reduced.
Counterproductive isn’t it?
Benny hopped off the lady lounge and made his way to the Smith machine. I shook my head, hit my PR, and packed away my weightlifting gear.
All I could do to make it stop was to either run out into open traffic or put my earphones on. I opted for the latter.
I made it to the gym early this morning and all I could hear was the aerobics instructor’s high whining voice. She sounded like a revved-up high school cheerleader and it was eating at my brain.
The mirrored sliding door was slightly open and I could see a handful of girls stomping and bopping and jumping and bumping. It looked like a crazy dance routine and the energy was flowing.
The class soon came to a finish when a round of applause filled the air as if Isaac Stern just got done playing a violin concerto at Carnegie Hall.
A stream of smiley and sweaty students tiredly evacuated the aerobics room leaving an air of accomplishment behind.
I just finished a set of partial deadlifts and watched the estrogen parade as I rested.
As I analyzed the diehard dance demons, I thought to myself why haven’t many of these girls lost any weight after such repeated effort.
I’m not going to lie to you, classes do work for weight loss after all it is a form of exercise.
However if your diet isn’t in check, you can bebop till the cows come home, but your weight loss goals might as well be put out to pasture.
Now the sciency part-
In 2003 researchers analyzed data from the 1998 National Health Interview Survey, which was conducted through face-to-face interviews of a nationally representative
sample of U.S. adults (n =32,440) [1].
The results were rather perplexing. Only one-third of all those trying to lose weight
reported eating fewer calories and exercising more. However the most common
strategies among those trying to lose weight were eating fewer calories, eating less fat, and exercising more.
I guess the old adage- saying and doing are two different things- stands to reason here.
The researchers concluded by stating, “increased efforts are needed to promote effective weight-loss strategies among those who are obese and to promote the use of
calorie reduction along with increased physical activity in those who attempt weight loss.”
You see folks, you can’t expect results by just attending a couple of exercise classes per week and then chowing down like a crazed wilder beast.
It just ain’t gonna happen.
Check out the video below for a (exercise vs. eating) comparison.
In this testosterone laden blog I have yet to post an article that is aimed specifically towards women. Even though the information contained within may seem intended just for men, women can benefit from the information as well.
You will come to see what I mean shortly.
Fitness professionals, exercise gurus, and even Joe Bench Press down at the local Gold’s Gym have recommended, for years, that women, in their quest for weight loss and body metamorphosis, follow a “starvation” diet, perform copious amounts of cardiovascular work, and train with ridiculously light weights.
As a result, we have gyms across the country packed with disillusioned members obtaining objectionable results.
How this popular but questionable exercise prescription came about, I can only guess at.
Maybe the recommendation came about from stereotypical reasons, that women are weak and fragile (please don’t shoot the messenger). Or maybe it’s the belief that high-repetition training with light weights increases muscle “tone.” Or maybe it’s because weightlifting is deemed such a “masculine” activity that it needed to be “feminized” in order to illicit increased female participation.
Whatever the reasons, we can certainly see that the results are dismal.
Therefore, if you’re going to want extraordinary results, then unordinary measures must be taken. Right?
Let’s get to the meat of the matter.
It doesn’t matter if your primary goal is to lose weight, build muscle, increase strength, or enhance appearance, the approach and method should be the same.
Women should train the same way as men and it should be done with high intensity, heavy weight, and with basic compound exercises. Exercises like the squat, deadlift, presses, rows, dips, chin/pull-ups, and glute focused exercises such as weighted glute bridges and hip thrusts should be performed.
Just like the men you should be striving to increase your performance constantly. This means adding weight to the bar and/or repetitions to a set. The name of the game is progressive overload which is the gradual increase of stress placed upon the body during exercise training.
You should strength train three times per week on a full-body or upper/lower-body split routine with conditioning work performed on your “off days.”
Fun activity (hiking, biking, pick-up basketball game, etc) or 30-45 min brisk walking
So why all this focus on strength training?
Oh my, look at all the hands going up.
“Yes Connie Concerned.”
“Um, I’m only interested in toning up. I don’t want to build muscle or anything like that.”
“Yes Penny Perturbed.”
“Yeah, won’t all that weightlifting make me look like Arnold?”
“Go ahead Wanda Worried.”
“OK I was thinking, isn’t it best to get this fat off first before it turns into muscle or something?”
Let me explain.
According to Structure & Function of the Human Body, Memmler & Wood, “muscle tone refers to a partially contracted state of the muscles which is normal even though the muscles may not be in use at the time. The maintenance of this tone or tonus is due to the action of the nervous system, and its effect is to keep the muscles in a constant state of readiness for action.”
The popular definition of muscle tone according to askthetrainer.com is, “the level of visibility of your muscles which is also commonly referred to as definition. Having muscle tone means you can see the outlines of the muscles under your skin. Everyone has the muscles but not everyone is toned or defined which allows the muscles to be visible.”
Obviously we can see significant discrepancies between the two definitions. The popular term has morphed into something completely different from its intended meaning. It’s a misnomer.
Basically getting “toned” means losing excess body fat and building muscle.
And the best way to do this? That’s right. Heavy, hard, and with the basics.
Moving ahead, you will never look like Arnold, thank goodness, or the beings on the glossy magazines. Physiologically you are at a disadvantage in building muscle compared to men and in order to look like a “female” professional bodybuilder, you would need to take a vat full of pharmaceutical drugs.
Arm wrestle ya for some Anavar
On average, testosterone (a muscle-building hormone) levels in women are typically 5 percent to 10 percent of those in men. Therefore, you need not worry about building too much of it.
As for turning fat into muscle, this is a misconception. Fat and muscle are two different tissues and you cannot convert one to the other.
Now let’s look at some benefits of strength training for women (this by no means is an all-encompassing list):
Increased strength
Increased muscle mass and decreased body fat
Increased bone density
Improved immune function
Reversed effects of aging
Improved mood and increased confidence
Improved quality of life
I will not elaborate on all of the benefits listed above, however I do want to touch upon the second bullet point a bit.
I understand that many women are deathly afraid of gaining some muscle mass, but please hear me out before you tune me out.
As your lean muscle increases, so does your resting metabolism. As a matter of fact, strength training can increase your metabolism by 15 percent. Coincidently, this equates to burning more calories throughout the day.
You see, a pound of muscle can burn about *20-30 calories a day (a pound of fat burns about 5 calories a day) therefore the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn. More calories are used to make and maintain muscle than fat.
Chris Scott, Ph.D., exercise physiologist at the University of Southern Maine Human Performance Laboratory says, “When exercise ends, it takes time and energy for muscle cells to return to resting levels. Recovery can also be expensive: Depleted glucose and fat stores need to be refilled, accumulated cell products need to be removed and protein levels need to be built back up. All this requires energy.”
And the more reconstructing to be done, the more calories will be burned after your workout.
Again, do not worry about bulking up. It will not happen. You do not have enough testosterone to build large muscles.
OK, to tell you the truth, initially you may see a slight size increase (due to an increase in lean muscle mass) however this is only temporary because as fat tissue diminishes so will the bulk.
What’s more strength training “shapes” your muscles. Without sufficient load, muscle will not “change” and “tone” cannot be achieved.
Conversely, if you are successful with the popular prescription purported (diet, cardio, light weights), most end up with what is known as the skinny-fat look.
Skinny-fat can be defined as someone being fairly thin or “average” weight but having a high fat to muscle ratio. What is called skinny-fat in the fitness circle, is called normal-weight obesity within the scientific community.
Skinny-fat Look
Paul Chek, internationally renowned expert in the fields of corrective and high-performance exercise kinesiology stated,
“Charles Poliquin and colleagues have identified The Chunky Aerobic Instructor Syndrome. Poliquin found that aerobics instructors quickly adapted to the workload of teaching classes, often performing three hours of exercise a day. Despite the fact that this is the equivalent training level of a professional athlete, the instructors still maintained disproportionately high body fat levels. You can verify Poliquin’s findings by simply observing the bodies of people who perform a lot of cyclical cardiovascular activity; there is no question many of them are pudgier than you would expect” (Chek).
He goes on to say that resistance/strength training is the key to breaking away from the Chunky Aerobics Instructor Syndrome.
Now I would like for you to check out how strength training should be done and the results that can be gained from it. I’ll let the videos speak for themselves and I’ll end it here for now.
*The precise number of calories burned per day by skeletal muscle is still being debated today. I have seen figures from as low as 6 to as high as 100. By no means do the discrepancies in numbers take away from the importance of strength training. I will cover this debate in a future blog entry so please stay tuned.
My training today was quick and brutal, I performed heavy box squats for openers, close grip bench presses afterwards, and packed it all in with some hammer curls and neck work.
I got to the gym feeling less than 100% so I had it in mind to perform some “light work” in order to facilitate “recovery.”
Well that went straight out the window as I started ramping up the weights during my squats.
Nevertheless, as I finished my routine and I was putting away my weightlifting gear, one of the gym members turned to me and said, “had yourself quite a short workout today huh.”
Mind you my short workout was 10 times more productive than his.
I just smiled and said, “yeah, I’m not feeling myself today so I better quit while I’m still ahead.”
He then fired back with, “why don’t you just drop all that heavy lifting and take it easy? You should lift lighter. You know you ain’t getting any younger and all that straining is just going to get you hurt.”
I smiled again and just said, “I’m going to lift as heavy as I can for as long as I can. The day that I have to lift light is the day I hang it all up.”
This little conversation with said fellow got me thinking. Why is it that some of us just can’t take it easy? Why do we have to keep pushing day in and day out? Are we a different breed from the rest or do we have some loose screws?
Call me different or even nuts, I just can’t see myself doing it any other way.
PRESSING to STRONGMAN 