Strong Medicine

Exploring the Science, Art and Practice of Sustainable Health and Strength

Strong Medicine Questions and Answers

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Chris Hardy Strong Medicine Questions and Answers

This is the fifth and final post in a series of articles developed from Dr. Chris Hardy’s live presentation at Dragon Door’s Inaugural Health and Strength Conference. Click here to read the first article of the series. These questions were from the coaches, trainers, and fitness instructors in attendance.

 

Q: How do I measure HRV (heart rate variability) if I have eight people coming in for a group fitness class?

A: You would set this up with your clients beforehand. They would measure it first thing in the morning. In the back of Strong Medicine, I discuss how the optimum time to measure HRV is at first waking, before anything has an opportunity to fill the stress cup. This measurement will give them a baseline. Most HRV apps require two and a half minutes to measure and will use data from a chest strap like a Polar Bluetooth heart rate monitor. The app will determine the HRV as a number. It’s important to measure it first thing in the morning, because if you measure it throughout the day, even someone angering you in traffic will change it.

Measuring HRV is not perfect, but if you measure it the same time every day before anything else has effected your stress cup then it will be a good reference. It will also reflect if you’ve been up all night tossing and turning.

 

Q: I have a client who has a lap-band, so she’s only eating 200 calories a day. If she eats more she vomits yet she wants intense exercise. She’s stressed and thin but with a huge belly. How would we work with her if we can’t get her to eat more? Do we just take down the intensity?

A: First, it sounds like she’s protein deficient. And you won’t be able to workout with her—you can’t—it will hurt her. It’s like when people come to me and want antibiotics for a viral infection. Then, when I don’t prescribe the antibiotics, they just go to someone else who will. But you should not be training that person, because she could go off the rails in a second.

She’s protein deficient and malnourished. That large belly is basically a bunch of fluid because there’s so little protein in her bloodstream that an osmosis effect happens and draws water from the bloodstream, then it goes into the tissues. It’s called ascites, and patients will sometimes develop huge protuberant bellies. We see it happen in sub-Saharan Africa, and other places where people are malnourished. You need to say no, and she needs medical attention.

 

Q: We lead boot camps and have workouts on the board, what do you think about having our clients do their self reported health scale on the 1-5 range (will link to article) then adjust the workout accordingly?

A: Or they can monitor their own heart rates. This is also where you can use your creativity and find your own opportunities. You can stratify the workouts. Educate them to let them know that if they’re lower on their rating scale to be smart and that “this isn’t a punishment”. They need to know to be smart because they won’t do themselves any good by crushing themselves on that day—they’re just end up with a lot of cortisol. You’ve seen the ultra-skinny marathon runners that still have a little bit of a belly? It’s because of a cortisol response.

 

Q: You said that you have your clients measure their heart rates in the morning. My training classes usually take place at 8PM after they come from work and have done finished their day. How will the HRV measurement from the morning reflect how they are when they walk into my gym at 8PM?

A: It’s true that it isn’t perfect, and that’s the problem. But, as long as they’re not doing intense physical training before they get to you, if they measure their HRV in the morning, the biggest thing they will be affected by is sleep. Since HRV is the variability of the heart rate as measured on an app, it gives you an idea of where you were that morning. If your HRV is already low that morning, it will just get worse throughout the day. So, if they come in with a low HRV recorded in the morning, by the time they see you—especially if they have had other stresses during the day—then their HRV will be even lower.

HRV and Stress diagram

The morning measurement will give you a baseline, but that’s why you’ll also want to use the self-reporting scale. There’s too much that can happen during the day, and you’re trying to work with a consistent baseline. So, let’s say I usually run an “80” I’m picking an arbitrary number for my HRV, but that’s pretty high. But, this morning I measured my HRV and it was 62. When I come to train with you later that night I’ll tell you that my HRV was 62 this morning. Since I usually run in the 80s you would drop my workout down some. So in other words we are discounting what happened through the day unless a client did some other kind of training. It’s not a perfect system.

 

Q: What your favorite strategies for sleep? How do you feel about the different amounts of melatonin in supplements?

A: Sleep might be the same thing as attacking the circadian rhythm first. I hate to keep referring back to the book, but I do have a whole chapter on how to give your brain the right signals. So 2-3 hours before bedtime, no blue light from broad-spectrum sources. You can either use the goggles or my wife and I put yellow lights in the rooms where we spend our evening hours. We also follow basic sleep hygiene ideas—no electronics in the room. In the mornings we make sure to get bright, broad-spectrum light exposure, since most of us go to an office with poor lighting.

As for supplements, I am not a huge fan of melatonin, though I think it is very valuable for getting yourself back into another rhythm in the case of jet lag. The problem is most of the doses are supra-physiological. The pineal gland in the brain actually secretes melatonin on a pulse, about every 40 minutes since it has a very short half-life. Your body metabolizes melatonin supplements quickly, so it may help you fall asleep, but then you’re going to be back up again if you haven’t fixed your circadian rhythm. And it may also suppress your endogenous (internal) melatonin secretion.

 

Q: On Saturday and Sunday, 25-30 people come in to our gym for group classes. Either myself or the other trainer will greet the people as they are coming in and ask them how they are doing and how they are feeling. If they come in and say that they slept badly, just came home from an intense two-day conference, or they are still sore from working out, then we will then tell them that we will scale the workout of the day. We put up the workout and a scaled version in terms of volume or intensity and say that if we spoke to you and said you should do the scaled version, we can now train 20-30 people together.

A: I love it, but would say from a psychological point of view I would have them self-label.

Q: That was my follow up question. This is a physical/psychological assessment based on how they feel about today themselves that day, etc.

A: If a client comes in and says that they are feeling kind of cruddy, and then you say, “well we are going to do this to you” that takes some of the control from them. Instead you could have them self-label and say “I’m a 3 right now”. Since they put themselves in that category, it will be easier for them to understand that it’s not a punishment. They will just be doing the #3 workout today. It’s part of the psychology of getting them to buy in more because they have self-labeled.

 

Q: My question is goes back to using heart rate. How would you use the heart rate protocol with someone on beta-blockers?

A: That can be very inconvenient! Beta-blockers basically stick a wrench in the system, and prevent the heart rate from going up. It depends on why the client is on a beta-blocker—and if it is for arrhythmia then you don’t want to mess with it. But if someone is on a beta-blocker because their doctor is trying to use it as an inappropriate way to control high blood pressure, then you might suggest that they ask their doctor about alternatives. When someone is on beta-blockers, they will not be able to get their heart rate up, so rate of perceived exertion may be a better indicator for them.

 

Q: Melatonin was already discussed as a supplement for sleep, but how would you say performance supplements like pre-workout or protein supplements would affect allostatic load?

A: That’s a great question and, they do affect the allostatic load. It goes back to the idea of feeding your activity. We need the proper amount of protein so that amino acids hit our anabolic pathways—mTOR, the anabolic pathway where certain branched chain amino acids will hit. It can give the body fuel for activity. You need to fuel your body and give it the precursors of what it needs—whole regular food is always the best, but that is not always possible. So, supplementing something like whey protein, or a post-workout combination of protein and some glucose sources can work well, but be sure to tailor it to your activity. Do you really need to load up with a huge serving of starch or glucose for strength training? Probably not. You’ll want to use amino acids instead.

Q: But in regards to pre-workout energy supplements, I’ve tried some that just made me feel extremely crazy and full of false energy…

A: Honestly, if you are going to do one, the supplement I think is best for pre-workout is creatine. It hits the phosphogen energy pathway. But I am not a fan of the supplements that “jack up the nervous system” they can work for younger people, but in the older population it can affect the stress cup.

 

Q: What are your recommendations for determining optimal heart rates for training and interval training? Do you have any recommendations for estimating or determining maximum heart rate? What if someone is on a beta-blocker? Is a VO2Max test, a stress test, or a simple calculation the best?

A: It depends on your client. If you are working with an elite athlete, then you should probably do one of the more clinical assessments. This is because we all know that the samples for calculating max heart rate are estimates and they’re for a general population. They aren’t necessarily appropriate for everyone because they can be underestimated. If you used the formula on an athletic 50-year-old, it may underestimate their max heart rate. Some of the formulas are better than others—certainly better than 220 minus age.

trainingprescription

Q: When working with individuals who are nurses, police officers, fire fighters, and other shift workers, how do you help them make improve the sleep they are getting?

A: Shift work is actually classified as a carcinogen by large governing agencies. But they have done studies with shift workers and found that their environmental clues are the most important. Your circadian system is free running—they’ve done studies in caves in isolation—and will advance itself without external cues. Another study with police officers and nurses exposed them to maximum bright lights during their shifts at night—which was their mornings. Even though they are coming to their shift at night, they should get maximum bright light exposure. When they are coming home, they should use amber glasses or something to block out blue spectrum light. When they sleep, blackout curtains can make their environment as dark as possible. Are they getting perfect sleep? No, but these environmental cues can make a big improvement.

 

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Chris Hardy, D.O., M.P.H., CSCS, is the author of Strong Medicine: How to Conquer Chronic Disease and Achieve Your Full Genetic Potential. He is a public-health physician, personal trainer, mountain biker, rock climber and guitarist. His passion is communicating science-based lifestyle information and recommendations in an easy-to-understand manner to empower the public in the fight against preventable chronic disease.

 

HRV and the Self-Rated Health Scale

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HRV and Self-Rated Health

This is the fourth in a series of articles developed from Dr. Chris Hardy’s live presentation at Dragon Door’s Inaugural Health and Strength Conference. Click here to read the first article of the series.

In the previous posts of this series we were estimating the size of the stress cup. But, there’s a more reliable way to measure it. We’ll use the interrelationship of the brain, the cardiovascular system, and the musculo-skeletal system for another window into the stress cup. The first window is heart rate variability, the beat to beat variation of the heart rate.

We will use HRV as a window into the autonomic nervous system and how it relates to the heart. This will show us the stress load on a given day. On a high stress day, the sympathetic nervous system is dominant—the fight or flight system will drive the heart with a machine-like precision (low variability). This indicates a state of allostatic overload, poor health, and an overflowing stress cup.

Caption: In this chart, the beats are the same distance apart. That machine-like precision is not good. It's a sign of bad health and stress to the system.
In this chart, the beats are the same distance apart. That machine-like precision is not good. It’s a sign of bad health and stress to the system.

Now, in the normal state—when you have good readiness and a manageable stress cup—you’re in parasympathetic dominance and will have that good, high variability.

In this chart, the time between each beat is slightly different. That's how a healthy heart and nervous system actually works. It's imperceptible, but if you measure it accurately you'll see the variability between beats.
In this chart, the time between each beat is slightly different. That’s how a healthy heart and nervous system actually works. It’s imperceptible, but if you measure it accurately you’ll see the variability between beats.

There are several apps that calculate HRV and will give you a score. There’s also a section in Strong Medicine that shows you how to do that in training. It’s a very simplistic approach, but its good for our purposes.

Joel Jamieson, a Seattle area MMA trainer uses HRV in training in a very sophisticated way so definitely look him up if you want to learn even more. But, I prefer a more simplistic and intuitive approach. But, before I show you my approach I want to quickly review another simple way to assess the state of the nervous system.

MiniHomuncDiagA homunculus is a representation of what we would look like if we were physically configured according to the proportion of brain required to operate our body parts. Do you see how big the hands are? A huge portion of the brain is involved with the sensation and motor control of the hands. For example, grip training has a huge impact on the nervous system. Grip strength is also a good way to tell the status of the nervous system. This idea has been used in the former Eastern bloc countries for a long time, and Charles Poliquin wrote about it pretty recently.

Charles Poliquin’s protocol starts with recording a baseline using a Dynamometer. You can get them pretty cheaply on Amazon. Be sure to measure grip strength in kilos when you (or your client, if you are training others) are feeling good. Then on the morning of training, measure it again, and if you drop 2kg, then you may want to reconsider training. If you drop 4kg from the baseline, then you might even consider taking a rest day. it’s a simple way to do it. Do you have to continually measure grip strength or HRV with all your clients? No, that would be ridiculous, fortunately there’s another method.

 

The Self-Rated Health Scale

In terms of predictors of who will develop chronic diseases, and who is at risk of dying, what is the best marker to use? We’ve used all kinds of blood tests, and every other imaginable test, but the best predictor we’ve found is to ask this one question:

“In general, would you say your health is on a one to five scale? With one being the best and five being the worst?”

Believe it or not, that self-rated health question was more accurate than any medical test in predicting if someone would develop a chronic disease in the next 5-10 years. There’s a new area of neuroscience intensely studying interoception, the brain’s subconscious awareness of our organ systems. Many of you who read Strong Medicine know that our gut and intestinal tract has just as many neurons and nerve cells as the spinal cord. Some even call it the “second brain”. When you have a gut feeling about something or butterflies in your stomach, that’s the brain actually monitoring the state of our organ systems on a subconscious level. It can also induce stress responses, which is why diabetics have an on-going low-level “fight or flight response” due to this interceptive process monitoring the state of the internal organs and immune system. The brain knows something bad is happening and that we need to be on alert. This system also gives you an intuitive sense of how you are doing.

A new study came out about HRV and focused on measuring what correlated best to Self-Rated Health. We already know the question predicts disease very well—they measured every blood test, cholesterol, inflammatory monitors, and many other tests, but what correlated best with Self-Graded Health was heart rate variability. People with high HRV (good) usually said that their health was about 4-5 on the scale (the highest health scores). So, how you intuitively feel physically and mentally is very predictive of your stress cup. This is why an intuitive approach to a given day’s training could be very valid. Even though there are some really sophisticated tools such as the Recovery Stress Questionnaire For Athletes—which is a validated tool—I guarantee that none of your clients will want to sit down and answer 76 questions.

If you’re training elite athletes, it’s great, but it is not practical for those of us in the trenches. My next suggestion is not validated, and I haven’t tried it out—so you can be the test group—what if we replaced the Self-Rated Health question with the following:

“In general, would you say your readiness to train is… excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor?”

I would also suggest verifying it by testing grip strength and heart rate variability first before asking the question to see how they correlate. Over time it will help them get an intuitive sense of how they are and fine tune their conscious awareness of interoception. So, when they give you a rating, you can also look at the data (grip strength and HRV), and over time this will be a pretty good window into how they’re doing.

 

Getting Your Clients Onboard with Smart Programming and Recovery

How do you convince your client that this stuff really matters? It’s essential. If you want to train hard, you’ve got to recover harder. You need to tell your clients that they need to reduce their stress cup and earn the ability to train hard. The results they want will only happen with a proper balance of training and recovery.

The first thing they have to fix is their sleep, and there’s a whole chapter in Strong Medicine about doing that. Stress management, meditation, yoga, whatever you want to do is fantastic. Massage and acupuncture are unbelievable for helping to reduce stress and enhance the parasympathetic nervous system. If you like qigong, tai chi, all that stuff is fantastic as well to achieve the same goal.

Obviously, cleaning up the nutrition is a whole lecture into itself. As is feeding your activity levels. If you are going to crush yourself with high intensity training, you need to replace that muscle glycogen. If you’re only doing a walking and strength-based program, you can go very low carb and be fine. But if you want to push that anaerobic threshold, then you will need to feed that activity or you will overtrain.

 

Summary:

First, estimate their stress cup size. Then, estimate what is filling it today, since it will be different that what fills it tomorrow. Then, we will prescribe an appropriate exercise volume and intensity—and that’s what you guys as trainers know how to do well already. Now, you have the extra information to help you adjust the sets and reps, intervals and modalities. And while you don’t have to assess the stress cup every time you train your clients, I think you should always ask the self-report scale question and then prescribe the appropriate amount of training.

I don’t think you need to use HRV on the average client. But, if you are working with elite athletes, you will need to cover all those bases. The most important thing for everyone is to always emphasize the importance of recovery.

Now, using this approach is very simple, and I provided the scientific foundation for how we came up with this very easy system. If you train someone this way, they will meet their goals. It will be sustainable, unlike those three or four weeks crash diets and radical exercise routines. With this method, every New Year, instead of starting over with a resolution, they can just continue building on the success of the previous year. This is just a framework, so use your expertise as a trainer to customize your programs.

The final post in this series will be the best of the question and answer portion of Dr. Chris Hardy’s presentation.

 

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Chris Hardy, D.O., M.P.H., CSCS, is the author of Strong Medicine: How to Conquer Chronic Disease and Achieve Your Full Genetic Potential. He is a public-health physician, personal trainer, mountain biker, rock climber and guitarist. His passion is communicating science-based lifestyle information and recommendations in an easy-to-understand manner to empower the public in the fight against preventable chronic disease.

How to use the Burst Cardio Protocol for Accurate Exercise Dose

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Strong Medicine: Burst Cardio Protocol

This is the third in a series of articles developed from Dr. Chris Hardy’s live presentation at Dragon Door’s Inaugural Health and Strength Conference. Click here to read the first article of the series.

The Stress Cup dictates the beneficial, hormetic exercise dose. To apply this concept to our training, we need a scientific foundation—but it’s also an art. Elite coaches like Marty Gallagher—who has coached for over fifty years—have intuitively figured it out. In this article I will try to give you a foundation so that you won’t need all those years of trial and error to figure it out. Applying this science to your clients is the art of training. Since you already know how to adjust sets, reps, intensity, and volume, you’re already ahead of the game. We will try to hone your art with these concepts.

First, there are no hard and fast rules, this is more a conceptual thing. Remember that all of your clients are individuals and can’t all train the same way. Plus, their environments and stresses change from day to day. Our approach will allow for this day to day individualization.

Case Studies:

Our first example is someone with a “tall” stress cup. What’s filling his stress cup? On new client intakes, do you ask about their health problems? How about their stress levels and how they sleep? It’s really important that they tell you about these issues. This client has a small stress cup and a large amount of lifestyle stress will put him in allostatic overload. We will know that he’s been in this state for a long time if he has a disease resulting from a failure to adapt. Diabetes can be thought of as a failure to adapt to a lack of exercise, poor sleep, and/or terrible nutrition. The body will try to adapt to those stresses, and even though it does bad things for the body, diabetes is actually an adaptive condition.

Stress Cup Size Chart

So, how would we train this client? What would we do for strength training and for cardio? Like many other people, our client also doesn’t have a lot of spare time. One approach to consider for a guy like this is a stripped-down linear progression with a bit of a hypertrophy bias, in the 5-10 rep range. Diabetics and people with metabolic diseases work very well in that range and it helps clear out some muscle glycogen too. It’s beneficial, but it’s not the only way.

Let’s assume for example that he has diabetes and high blood pressure. Of course he could be walking but we could also try high intensity interval training—even low amounts of it can have incredible results for diabetics. Basically, it bypasses the normal insulin signaling mechanisms and gets some of the glucose from the blood stream back into the muscles. Emptying those glycogen tanks is really beneficial too, because lower glucose in the muscles will pull a lot more glucose from the blood. This process will increase insulin sensitivity for at least 24-36 hours.

Burst Cardio Protocol Chart

But, while high intensity interval training is a really good approach for the diabetics, our example client also has a small, and nearly full stress cup. We need to figure out how much exercise is too much. With our example client it would be very easy to overdo it, so we need to remove the guesswork. We will use the Burst Cardio Protocol we describe in Strong Medicine. You don’t have to use it with all of your clients, but it is a fail-safe. When working with a client who is at risk of exercise overdose, but who could really benefit from high intensity training, the Burst Cardio Protocol is a very good choice.

This protocol uses heart rate to set both the interval duration and recovery times. Depending on the state of the client’s stress cup, they will respond to the same exercise differently from one day to the next. Heart rate response will be our window to the state of their stress cup. We will start with heart rate max, which is not the most scientifically accurate, but will be a close enough estimate for most of you clients. So, we’ll start by leading them to warm up, then we will start their interval exercises as hard as possible. The goal is for them to reach 95% of max heart rate, though 90% is the requirement. Once the client reaches the heart rate goal, they stop and recover until their heart rate is back down to 70%, then they begin another interval. This works well for a 20 minute session and can be done with kettlebell swings or snatches, or other modalities like the hand bike, elliptical machine, medicine ball slams or even burpees. You can choose anything anaerobic that will rapidly increate the client’s heart rate.

The key point of this whole protocol is that on the day when the stress cup’s load is low, there’s room for a higher exercise dose. Since a low stress cup equals parasympathetic dominance, this means the client will recover faster because the parasympathetic system will lower the elevated heart rate from the exercise. Faster recovery times will also allow the client to do more intervals during the set period of 20 minutes. If they are recovering more quickly, they’ll be able to start the next interval more quickly, too. When the stress cup is nearly full, there’s less room for exercise, and the sympathetic system is dominant. Recovery will be slower. If the client gets up to 95% and they have slept poorly, they will recovery more slowly since the parasympathetic system won’t be able to bring the heart rate down as quickly. The client will not be able to do as many intervals in the allotted time.

I’ve tested the protocol myself for a few years. One workout I tried a couple of years ago used the twenty minute time period. I did a hideous alternating combination of kettlebell snatches and medicine ball slams. It was rough. You can see on the chart below that I spiked up to 95% pretty quickly. I recovered and managed to get six intervals in 20 minutes—and that was on a day when I was feeling great.

BurstCardioExampleChart1

I waited a week later and tried the same workout when I had had a night of poor sleep. When I did the exact same workout with the same time period, look what happened on the chart below! I spiked up to 95% again, but then it kept taking me longer and longer to recover. After the 4th interval, it took me so long to recover that I never dropped below 70% before the 20 minute session was over.

BurstCardioExampleChart2

So, even though I had fewer intervals, the protocol allowed me to exercise but not overdo it. My heart rate was a window into the state of my stress cup and adjusted the number of intervals for me.

The Burst Cardio Protocol automatically adjusts to the correct dose on a given day. As another example, let’s say that I’ve done a strength training session before my burst cardio. The strength training will affect the nervous system, along with my recovery time and the interval itself.

You can also use the Burst Cardio Protocol to train multiple clients with different stress cups. One client may end up doing more intervals during the time period, but since they will be regulating their own intensity you can concentrate more on watching and coaching their exercise techniques. When one client wants to know why they are not able to do as many intervals as someone else you can also explain how recovery itself is a trainable event. Between the intervals we can also coach our clients with breathing exercises and techniques to help them recover. A simple breathing technique such as breathing in, filling up the diaphragm, then slowly exhaling while watching their heart rate on a biofeedback device will allow a client to feel like they’re still training while they are resting. This technique will help them recover faster, too.

The protocol also works for mixed modalities—clients can do kettlebell swings for one round, the elliptical machine for the next, etc. I’ve tested it and found that when someone gets to 95% with kettlebell swings, it takes a lot longer to get back down to 70% as opposed to getting to 95% on the elliptical. The Burst Protocol also adjusts for the given modality. While it’s not necessary to use the Burst Protocol all the time, it is very useful if you are worried about overflowing someone’s stress cup.

The next post in this series will cover another common training scenario and how to use HRV and the Self-Rated Health Scale.

 

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Chris Hardy, D.O., M.P.H., CSCS, is the author of Strong Medicine: How to Conquer Chronic Disease and Achieve Your Full Genetic Potential. He is a public-health physician, personal trainer, mountain biker, rock climber and guitarist. His passion is communicating science-based lifestyle information and recommendations in an easy-to-understand manner to empower the public in the fight against preventable chronic disease.

The Stress Cup and Allostatic Load

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The Stress Cup Metaphor

This is the second in a series of articles developed from Dr. Chris Hardy’s live presentation at Dragon Door’s Inaugural Health and Strength Conference. Click here to read the first article of the series.

The Stress Cup is a visual representation of allostatic load, the total amount of stress. In the example above, the cup is pretty full—can you relate to it? We have a little space left at the top, and if you can stay within your stress cup without overflowing it, you can achieve a positive adaptation to your training.

Let’s assume my trainer says he has a great workout for me today: limit squats for four or five sets then full sprints afterwards. That might sound awesome, but the stress from the workout he planned for me might overflow my already full stress cup. Can my body successfully adapt to a training challenge that also over-filled my stress cup? No, I will experience allostatic overload. And, this failure to adapt will cause a huge stress response as the body and brain attempt to adapt. If this happens over and over, it will cause serious, deleterious health consequences far beyond an overtraining situation.

Allostatic Load and Daily Training

Undertraining is not enough stimulus for adaptation. The green area on the chart below indicates acute overload—a good workout session with good adaptation. Not much recovery will be needed. But, many times we will overreach with a session that pushes past our limits. While we can still experience good performance enhancement and positive adaptation, we must be cognizant of our recovery, which will take longer. Last, there’s overtraining, and since we can’t adapt to it we will have decreased performance and sometimes a very lengthy recovery period.

Training Stimulus Continuum

Too much overreaching without adequate recovery becomes overtraining syndrome, a medical condition. Overtraining syndrome is a prolonged imbalance of training load and recovery. For example, we might have a great session then rest for a day, then we hit it again and realize we need to rest more—but instead we do max deadlifts with no recovery. Basically, this will cause the stress cup to continually overflow since we have not allowed for recovery and have accumulated training load over time.

Overtraining syndrome is a big deal. If you truly have it, it can take months for a full recovery. While it happens more in elite athletes, it can happen with your clients, because they have other sources of stress beyond their training. Think about allostatic load and overtraining as the same thing. Your client might constantly have a high cortisol level because their stress response is over reactive. High cortisol for a long period of time is bad for body composition and general health.

A good coach should be able to spot the following problems early: fatigue, decreased performance, increased resting hart rate, insomnia, irritability. The stressed out brain starts overreacting. For example, if someone makes you mad at work instead of a calm conversation you snap at them—that’s the overstressed brain being more animal-like and it happens with overtraining too.

Remember, the brain is trying to protect you. So, if you feel like you shouldn’t be training, then listen and learn to spot this with your clients. Overtraining begins at this stage with a very animal-like dominant sympathetic system. Over time, if you don’t listen, your body can even become resistant to the fight or flight response. Parasympathetic overtraining means that you’ve dug such a deep hole for yourself that you can’t even raise your heart rate. I’ve heard of cases when people have needed one to two years to fully recover—and that’s not an exaggeration. It’s more than just your athletic performance, long-term failure to successfully adapt is the same as the long-term allostatic overload seen in all these conditions. In medicine, this is a new concept and new way of looking at chronic diseases.

Now, the mechanism—and this is in Strong Medicine as well—is that if your stress cup is overflowing for long periods of time, you are also generating inflammation or oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is an excess of free radicals or reactive oxygen species—and they drive chronic diseases. But if you’ve maintained your stress cup, even though you still get inflammation and oxidative stress from exercise, it will be short term and you will adapt to it. You need inflammation and oxidative stress to heal injuries, and for your immune system to respond to infections. Correctly dosed exercise can really be the fountain of youth.

Overtraining is catabolic. If your clients want to lose body fat and gain muscle, overtraining does the opposite. Excess cortisol wastes muscle and puts body fat in unfavorable places. The term “skinny fat” describes someone with low muscle mass, and low weight, but they look soft around the middle. Your clients don’t want that and you’ll need to educate a client who wants to try losing weight by eating an under 500 calorie a day diet while getting mashed under a high intensity exercise program. While they will lose weight with that plan, much of that weight will be muscle mass.

It’s important to keep in mind that we are all individuals with different issues filling the stress cup. Who are you training? It might sound intrusive, and your clients might wonder why you want to know about your stress, but it is important. You must know who are you training and what’s filling their stress cup. There are variations in what’s filling it, and there are many different sized stress cups.

Stress Cup Size Chart

This chart is inspired by Starbucks. You can categorize your clients into a stress cup size. If they’re on the small side of the chart, they’re vulnerable, and you won’t be able to do a whole lot with them right now. Then on the other side, there’s a 20 year old who can go drinking all night ,and train hard the next day with no problems because their stress cup is huge. …But it will shrink if they keep doing that!

For example, let’s compare the 20 year old and a 40 year old stressed out executive. If I am a trainer who wants to do a cookie cutter (one size fits all) bootcamp workout, the 20 year old will have no problem with room to spare. But it will be too much for the 40 year old. Is your client vulnerable or resilient? It’s really important to figure out who you are training. Even if you have a smaller stress cup or are older, it doesn’t mean you can’t still perform at high levels. There are the Mike Gillettes, and Marty Gallaghers out there and many others in the room who perform at high levels—but they often need more recovery than when they were 20. But there’s some good news, through exercise you can slow that progression down significantly. Greater resilience is the picture of healthy aging. We can also reverse the process. Over time with smart training at the correct dosing, we can slowly build the size of the stress cup to an extent.

But the largest cup on the chart is not the norm. The small crumpled stress cup on the other side of the chart is the sad truth I face very often in public health. Many people of the general public are dying in their 60s and even earlier. These are the people we need to help. Sure it’s great to train an athlete who wants to enhance their performance, but you can really make a drastic impact on public health by training everyday people. Unfortunately, the medical profession is not doing it—they’re managing diseases, not preventing or reversing them.

Estimating the size of someone’s stress cup is not an exact science. If someone has high stress, a chronic disease, poor sleep, and very little exercise, we can assume he has a small stress cup (or “Tall” on the Starbucks chart). Another example might be a 45 year old female and the only reason she’s a medium (“Venti” on our chart) is that she’s 45. But otherwise she has minimal work stress, good sleep, no diseases, mediates regularly, and has a high fitness level. We intuitively know that we can’t train both of these clients the same way.

Hormesis

Before we discuss exercise and recovery doses, we take a little step back and talk about the concept of hormesis. I learned about hormesis from my toxicology training—a small dose of something might be beneficial, but the same thing at a higher dose could be harmful or cause death. Radiation is a perfect example. Lose dose radiation accelerates DNA repair—it helps our cells regenerate and repair themselves. But, high doses of radiation can kill us.

Hormesis Quote

The famous quote is from Paracelsus in the 16th century. The chart below simply shows that when we go from left to right, the challenge increases. For our example, exercise, it isn’t really classic hormesis because doses that are too low are also bad. But there’s also a nice middle dose that’s “just right”, but as we continue to the right, the dose increases and begins to cause problems. In the example of exercise, point A represents a sedentary person who has very little physical activity. As we go right there’s an optimum dose that’s giving good effects, but if we keep going, overtraining occurs and can cause problems. The example can be made with food—under nutrition at point A, perfect the right amount of calories and the right kind of food at point B, and point C is over nutrition which we see all the time.

Hormetic Window Chart

The hormetic dose is the ideal dose leading to beneficial change/positive adaptation. Much like pharmaceuticals, prescribing the correct exercise dose is crucial. Consistent under dosing leads to no progress—you need enough exercise to promote positive adaptations. And overdosing leads to overtraining. Exercise is more powerful than any pharmaceutical across the board. Pharmaceuticals just manage diseases, while you can reverse chronic disease and improve health with exercise. As a trainer, you should place as much importance on prescribing exercise, and think about it as seriously as a physician does with pharmaceuticals.

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Chris Hardy, D.O., M.P.H., CSCS, is the author of Strong Medicine: How to Conquer Chronic Disease and Achieve Your Full Genetic Potential. He is a public-health physician, personal trainer, mountain biker, rock climber and guitarist. His passion is communicating science-based lifestyle information and recommendations in an easy-to-understand manner to empower the public in the fight against preventable chronic disease.

The Mechanics of Stress Response

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Chris Hardy Navy Diving School

This is the first in a series of articles developed from Dr. Chris Hardy’s live presentation at Dragon Door’s Inaugural Health and Strength Conference.

I was 23 years old and had graduated from one of the toughest schools in the military. It was designed to mentally and physically beat you down. After 5-6 months, I came out thinking I was super human—of course at 23 we think that anyway. We were crushed with physical training twice a day with academics in between. But, when I graduated, I really didn’t know anything about training others. I thought training and getting better was all about getting beat down as hard as possible. But, I didn’t know that I would soon be facing a different challenge.

When I arrived at my new unit as the new guy, and they put me in charge of their training. They were all seasoned deep sea divers—a very physically demanding job, probably one of the hardest on the planet. Training military divers is like training athletes. They’re a very resilient, self-selected group. My dive school class started with 35, and 13 graduated. So the people who graduate are pretty hard to break. They put me in charge of their training, and over the next two years I developed my own routine of mashing them as hard as I could, because that’s what they wanted.

Overweight General Population ClientDuring that same time, I got interested in medicine. I didn’t always want to be a doctor, but at 25, I decided I needed a change of pace. I went to college and thought that since I was already a trainer, I would train people while I went to college.

I was used to dealing with military deep sea divers, and all I was working with people who have diseases and were out of shape. I didn’t know how to deal with any of these conditions and it blew my mind. I decided to learn more and started getting certifications. Over the next 20 years, I tried to hone my training craft and I even became a doctor along the way!

I wanted to know how to get results for these people without breaking them in the process. I couldn’t train them like Navy divers, because they wouldn’t come back and I would certainly break them. In 22 years as a trainer, and 12 years as a physician I don’t have all the answers, but I have developed a framework.

Your clients want results from you, but what’s your responsibility to them? Safety, or as in medical terminology, “do no harm”. We want them to achieve their goals, but we want them to do it safely. Sometimes you have to save your clients from themselves, because they think they know what they want but you really need to educate them. We also have a popular culture that creates more challenges for us in the perception of what exercise and weight loss should be like.

Quote Primum Non NocereTV shows like The Biggest Loser and other transformation programs are what our clients are seeing. They’re getting the message that every workout needs to be a beat-down, and if you’ve watched that show or others like it, there’s a calorically restricted diet. And that’s what our clients think will get them results. How many of you have new clients come to you expecting that kind of workout—and who aren’t happy when they don’t get it? Or maybe you aren’t getting clients because they are too scared to even come to your gym.

We have a huge opportunity. As a good coach, we need to educate our clients on why the beat down workouts are not a good approach.

What is Coaching?

Coaching is an art with a scientific foundation. If you’re a professional, you have the art down, so now we will look at our foundation to answer some key questions:

  • How can I optimally dose the training on any given day for my client?
  • How can I prevent overdosing but still training the client hard enough so that they achieve their goals?

We aren’t letting our clients off the hook, this is the holy grail of training.

When I look at any problem, I want to go back to underlying foundations—that’s how I wrote Strong Medicine, and it’s how I approach medicine. I look at the foundations of the problem in the first place—it’s what I call first principles. Next, we can build a conceptual framework to answer the questions from the bottom up.

Before we could build a space shuttle, we first had to figure out how to make fire. In building up our conceptual framework, let’s begin by defining exercise. Exercise is a form of stress. What is stress? , Hans Selye defined stress as an engineering term as the amount of force per unit area. Now we say, “I’m under a lot of stress” or, “I am stressed out”.

Stress Examples

Anything that triggers the stress response is a stressor—including exercise. Getting attacked by a bear, traffic, or doing dumbbell presses are all sources of stress. External stress examples include food, water, activity, your work environment, traffic. Internal stress can come from diseases—it all activates in the brain.

Is Stress Good or Bad?

Both, it depends. Short term stress is necessary for survival and if you want to make any gains in the gym. Marty Gallagher will tell you that, you can’t have sub-optimal stress if you want to make gains in the gym. But the chronic stress in an over-trained endurance runner or someone who is just completely burned out at their job is not good.

These chronic stresses actually lead to physical changes in the brain and nervous system, and over-activates our stress response. You could argue that the modern environment has toxic levels of stress and that our physiology is at odds with our modern environment. We are probably not wired to handle what we’re dealing with on a daily basis. We can easily recover from short term acute stress, and most of the time we’re not under it. But, many people are now under constant chronic stress, including your clients. And, you can’t train your clients as if they live in a vacuum.

BrainThe brain is command central for the stress response. It receives, evaluates, and responds to stress in our environment from all sources. It is very important to understand that stress is everything the brain perceives as stress—whether or not the issue is a threat to life or limb. If your brain perceives something as stress, then you will trigger the stress response.

It is especially true in modern society. If your boss is a real jerk and you’re under stress at work, that same fight or flight response will be active as if you were running from a bear—maybe not to the same degree, but it will still be active.

We have fast and slow pathways. Simply put, the hypothalamus is a very small part of the brain but it’s actually central to the stress response. When the brain perceives something threatening—if someone scares you—then you get that fluttering heart, “all-jacked-up” feeling. That’s the fast pathway, and it’s direct to the adrenal glands. It dumps adrenaline, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. Afterwards, about twenty minutes later, the slow pathway through the pituitary gland and down to the adrenals is active. It’s a hormonal system that secretes cortisol which helps you recover from the stress. For the purposes of this post, that’s all you need to know about neuro-anatomy.

Those of you who have also trained in Chinese Medicine or follow Taoist philosophy know that the Yin/Yang concept works very well to describe the autonomic nervous system. (Autonomic just means that I don’t have to think about it for it to happen—I don’t have to think to raise my heart rate or to breathe at night.) The autonomic nervous system has two branches, sympathetic (fight or flight), and parasympathetic (rest and recovery). The “fight or flight” system is actually the most inflammatory response in the body. The parasympathetic system is the opposite. Typically, the parasympathetic system should be dominant most of the time, and the sympathetic should only be active when we need to use it for a “flight or fight” response or during exercise. The sympathetic system is used in response to stress—but it should be used minimally.

Autonomic Nervous System Diagram

The parasympathetic system is dominant for the recovery to all of the exercise you’re doing (and that your clients are doing). It’s also when that anabolic response to exercise occurs. But, if the sympathetic system is on all the time—as it is for many of our clients and ourselves—in the long term it will lead to muscle-wasting and chronic diseases.

How the Brain Controls Stress Response

Three main parts of the brain control the stress response to perceived threats. The prefrontal cortex (we also use it to maintain attention) right behind the forehead determines if something is truly a threat using higher reasoning. Our memory center, the hippocampus also helps us determine if something is threatening or not. The prefrontal cortex and hippocampus can override the threat response together if they have determined something has been seen or experienced before and is probably not threatening. The amygdala is the brain structure which drives the threat response, it responds to learned fear and the emotional reaction of stress. If I got an electric shock every time someone rang a bell or hit a gong, then pretty soon every time I would hear a sound like that, I would have a severe stress response. That’s what the amygdala does.

Normally, the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex inhibit the stress response, and the amygdala will activate it. It’s a three prong connection, and the brain will perform normally if the parasympathetic system is dominant most of the time. For example, if you see long cylindrical object across your path while walking in the woods, the prefrontal cortex will pay attention to it, the hippocampus will respond that it recognizes that it’s probably a stick, and will generally keep the brain from triggering the stress response.

Brain Diagram Stress StructuresBut over time, a brain will change in response to chronic stress. The word neuroplasticity means that the brain can functionally and structurally change. We used to think that psychological stress was “all in your head”, but in fact the brain can change its structure and how it functions—and you can actually be lose neurons. A person who is stressed out or depressed over a long term will have a physically different brain—the hippocampus will shrink under chronic stress.

Epigenetics is how the genes in our DNA are expressed. In Strong Medicine, I used this example: genes are a recipe that says I need four eggs to make a cake. So, if I do a mutation and use five eggs, then that’s a mutation to the genes. Epigenetics doesn’t change the genes, it just tells me how many “cakes” (if any) will be made from the recipe. When someone is under constant stress, everything is involved including hormone pathways. Everything involved with the stress response will be amped up and producing more products for the stress response.

So, someone under chronic stress will respond differently to exercise. If their stress response is overactive, it won’t take much to activate it, and they will have a harder time recovering from exercise because the sympathetic nervous system will be more dominant. If they are already in such a fight or flight state, it will take longer for the parasympathetic nervous system to allow for recovery. Normally the brain would use these mechanisms for survival, not a chronic perceived stress.

Stress Examples 2

Going back to our example with the stick across a path in the woods, if the brain is under chronic stress it will become more animal-like. The structure has changed and when someone with a chronically stressed brain sees something lying across the path, and the hippocampus memory has shrunk, you might jump straight to the conclusion that the object is a snake and trigger the stress response. The chronically stressed brain responds and reacts as opposed to focusing, maintaining attention, and drawing on previous memories.

How does all of this relate to fitness and training? As trainers—and I’ve done this myself—we often focus only on physical stresses. But, we aren’t training in a vacuum, so we must consider our environments. Our clients are faced with many sources of stress outside exercise stress, and we want to train them effectively. Allostasis is a broad concept that basically means “achieving stability through change”. While homeostasis means that a specific equilibrium is maintained, allostasis changes the point we come back to maintain that equilibrium. The stress response is part of this process. If you are trying to achieve stability with the environment, then we are also trying to achieve stability with anything perceived as threatening, challenging, or dangerous, right?

Allostasis is the mechanism responsible for adaptation to any challenge, exercise, or social, psychological activity. We need some psychological stress to become resilient, but too much of it and we can become depressed and anxious. Nutrition is similar, we need to be adequately nourished but not overly so, since the body will adapt to over-nutrition, and we see that all the time. The same is also true for sleep—too little sleep and the body adapts with a stress response, and new science is showing that too much sleep is also bad.

As far as the brain is concerned, recovering from a training challenge with endorphins, and growth hormone building bigger muscles and more mitochondria is allostasis—the brain will think that you need to get stronger to survive that type of challenge/stress again. Allostasis brings you to a new set point as opposed to homeostasis taking you back to the same equilibrium. This is a relatively new concept. Total stress is also called the allostatic load—allostasis is the change, and allostatic load is everything that the brain perceives from the environment as stress.

 

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The next post in this series will outline a visual representation of the Stress Cup and how to use it to optimize your training and client training programs.

Chris Hardy, D.O., M.P.H., CSCS, is the author of Strong Medicine: How to Conquer Chronic Disease and Achieve Your Full Genetic Potential. He is a public-health physician, personal trainer, mountain biker, rock climber and guitarist. His passion is communicating science-based lifestyle information and recommendations in an easy-to-understand manner to empower the public in the fight against preventable chronic disease.

 

 

 

Building Your Health Fortress, One Brick at a Time

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Health Fortress

The New Year is almost upon us and millions of people will be making resolutions to improve their health. Gym memberships are purchased, new diets are tried, and home exercise equipment is ordered. Unfortunately most of these resolutions are doomed to fail, often by the time March rolls around. The gym memberships go unused, the diets are not sustainable, and the exercise equipment becomes an expensive clothes hanger. The cycle will repeat the following New Year, with many of us starting over again, sometimes in worse health than the previous year. No long-term progress is ever made. Why do we set ourselves up for failure year after year?

The modern environment lays perpetual siege to the health of our body and mind. Fast food, nasty bosses, long work hours, financial worries, domestic conflicts, poor sleep, and pollutants/toxicants are part of the world in which we live. With these health-destroying enemies at our gates, we have to put in more effort than ever before to achieve and maintain optimum health. We have to build a health fortress to protect us from the modern environment.

The primary reason most resolutions go unrealized soon after they are made has less to do with the actual resolutions themselves and more to do with how they are implemented-the plan. Attempting to radically change your current lifestyle overnight is akin to building a huge wall with brick and stone and not using mortar. You can build an impressive wall quickly but it will soon crumble under the slightest outside pressure, certainly not siege-worthy.

An instant gratification mindset leads to this sad excuse for a wall.
An instant gratification mindset leads to this sad excuse for a wall.

To build an impregnable Health Fortress, each brick and stone has to be placed and then sealed with mortar for strength and resilience. This process takes time and effort, but the result is a structure that you can build on year after year, not a flimsy construct that has to be rebuilt from scratch every year.

Each brick/stone for your fortress is a small positive lifestyle change. Each change must be sealed in place with time as the mortar. When you can incorporate a small lifestyle change into your daily routine for at least 90 days, the chances of it sticking for life increases dramatically. This is the way you can slowly build each wall of your fortress, and the building process is sustainable.

There are hundreds of potential bricks (lifestyle changes) outlined in Strong Medicine. In the book, we call them defensive tactics. On New Years day, pick a couple of these that you think you need the most and incorporate them into your life for 3 months. By the time March rolls around, the new bricks are no longer changes but have become part of your wall, set in place and resilient. Then pick a couple more bricks and continue the process. Even if you just picked 2 changes every 3 months, by next New Year you will be well on your way to having an impressive wall. Instead of starting over again, you now have a structure on which to keep building. This is how a Health Fortress is made, and sustainable wellness is achieved.

Don’t fall into the New Year’s resolution trap. Start 2016 with a New Life Resolution and build your Health Fortress.

Strong Medicine Scroll

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Chris Hardy, D.O., M.P.H., CSCS, is the author of Strong Medicine: How to Conquer Chronic Disease and Achieve Your Full Genetic Potential. He is a public-health physician, personal trainer, mountain biker, rock climber and guitarist. His passion is communicating science-based lifestyle information and recommendations in an easy-to-understand manner to empower the public in the fight against preventable chronic disease.

Journey to the Center of the Physiological Universe

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Journey to the Center of the Physiological Universe

“We here in the Western world are top-heavy. ‘Shoulders back! Chest out! Stomach in!’ Thus the center of gravity becomes elevated. In zazen, Zen training, the tanden (or hara) is the source and foundation of deep meditation. When moving, the tanden is the source of bodily strength. Abdominal breathing generates strength: we live  from this centremost point of gravity. This is Zen breathing. Sekai tanden means spiritual field. The tanden is located below the navel. Here, in the Western world, we don’t think in terms of having a singular point of gravity, a vital center; in Zen this vital center is our wellspring source.”

Tanden: Source of Spiritual Strength, Kongo Langlois, Roshi

Since 1970 I have been pondering this odd oriental concept of “the body’s singular point of gravity.” Why was this concept so important in meditation and certain martial arts? This exact center of balance even has a name; it is called the hara, or tanden in Japan, in Chinese medicine and Taoist martial arts the exact same thing is called the dantian. Conceptually, the idea was to initiate the breath from that epicenter of balance. This center of gravity exists within every human body at all times. Whether we are aware of (or attuned to) this bodily gyroscope is another matter entirely.

I got some high level schooling from an elite martial master very early on. I was first trained in dantian breathing when as a 20 year old, I began five years of study under America’s foremost expert on the Chinese “internal” martial arts, Robert Smith. Bob was, at the time, 50ish, a famed author, a hardcore judo man, a former CIA station chief, a sophisticated yet earthy man fluent in several Chinese dialects, brilliant, funny as hell, ingratiating and never off-putting. He was an amazing dude that just happened to live in my neighborhood.

I trained with him twice a week for many years. After each session I took home what he taught me to work on in lone solo sessions. On Thursday night and Saturday morning he taught me the three interrelated internal martial arts of Pa kua, Hsing I and Tai Chi. Bob Smith was singlehandedly bringing attention and western scholarship to these obscure fighting styles.

Bob Smith (right) in action
Bob Smith (right) in action

During our training sessions he would talk endlessly and incessantly about the concepts of “rooting” and “sinking,” and “breathing deep and low from the dantian.” He preferred the Taoist phrase and would place his hands on his own lower ab area and make it throb to demonstrate that his “chi” breathing originated at his “exact center of balance.”

Even during the execution of lightning fast, highly exertive Hsing I katas, he expected the athletes to attain, maintain and retain deep abdominal breathing; nose breathing went out the window with the fast and intense stuff as we couldn’t pull in enough oxygen (using nose-breathing) to forestall oxygen debt and the resultant lactic acid build-up. Though we had to breathe through our mouths, we were still expected to use diaphragm breathing, though no one called it that back then. Linking the concentrated breathing with form and movement was far easier to successfully attain when engaging in slow-motion tai chi.

While I preferred the dynamic and circular Pa Kua and the slashing and linear Hsing I, I found it far easier to get “into the zone” and successfully sync deep and concentrated breathing with precision glide-path tai chi. I would practice alone in my basement and would repeat the first third of the 36-posture sequence endlessly; I would really get lost in the whole thing and eventually I “got it.” I knew I had gotten it when one day (a year in) he looked at me and did a double-take. He laughed, “Hey, you got it!”

Tai Chi Chart

Smith was a famed writer, a great writer in fact and a huge influence on my emerging writing style. He was a fabulous alpha male role model: smart, a genuine bad ass, simultaneously erudite and streetwise, he was formidable but approachable. He put me in mind of a soldier of fortune character out of a John LeCarre novel set in Hong Kong. He was getting a kick out of teaching earnest locals right in his own backyard and he had the writer’s ability to communicate verbal concepts with crystal clarity. Vladimir Nabokov once marveled, “To me, spontaneous eloquence is miraculous.” When Bob Smith instructed you, it seemed miraculous.

I learned all about rooting my feet, sinking and relaxing. I learned to breath in such a way as to expand my “orb of chi.” Regardless if we were “walking the circle” in Pa Kua, throwing the “five fists” in Hsing I or floating across the landscape using his sublime tai chi style, we were always expected to be breathing from the “expanding and contracting” dantian.

Before each training session, as a group we would stand at relaxed attention, performing “quiet standing” with our heels together, sinking down into the soles of the feet. We focused on the mechanics of breath. He would speak to us as we stood in mute, relaxed, erect, alert attention…

“When Cheng Man-Cheng accepted Ben Lo as a student he made the youngster do quiet standing—and nothing else—for one hour each day seven days a week for one year. Why? This is a rhetorical question so please allow me to answer: the Master was teaching the neophyte about root and about how to truly relax and really sink and how to access dantian breathing. At the end of the year Cheng taught Ben the actual forms and Lo mastered all of them effortlessly and quickly. When asked how this was possible Cheng said, ‘Because all the hard and important work was done that first year.’”

Smith was an expert explainer of the concepts that prefigured technique…

“Imagine a steel rod running through your body at hip level. One end of the rod starts at the absolute center of your right hip joint. A thin chrome rod runs through your abdomen and ends in the exact center of your left hip-joint. Now imagine that at the absolute epicenter of this thin steel rod that runs right through the middle of your body, that there is a round chrome orb, a ball the size of a golf ball. As you inhale this orb swells to the size of a tennis ball. As you slowly exhale, the tennis ball-sized orb shrinks back down to the size of a golf ball. This is your dantian powering the breath process.”

I loved that image. It enabled me to conceptualize was being asked of me: I could attain low breathing via the dantian because I now understood it and could mimic the image using his imaging. Smith would pace between our rows, talking to us as he inspected our quiet standing posture. He would stop to make minute adjustments to our shoulder or arm position. I remember him always adjusting my elbows. His voice sounded like Charleston Heston playing God…

“Expand the waistline outward in a level and even fashion…push the bottom of the belly downward…actually you create a vacuum effect, similar to the downstroke of a piston drawing fuel into the cylinder of an internal combustion engine…pull the breath into the body with mouth closed…pull air in through the nostrils. Listen to the sound, the noise the air makes around the nostrils. This requires close attention.”

You could hear a pin drop as he talked us into breathing just right. Unbeknownst to us, he was also maneuvering us into a placid headspace.

“Contemplate the breath with the care and attention it deserves…observe it with complete focus on both inhalation and exhalation. No need for thinking or thoughts…breath deep and low from the dantian…relax…sink…stay focused please. No passengers, everyone is a participant.”

He was the personification of Nabokov’s spontaneous eloquence; he said things that I have never heard said before or since…

“Pay particularly close attention to the breath at the ‘turnarounds,’ the little dead space that appears in short gap at the end of each breath, that transitory instant when inhalation becomes exhalation and again when exhalation becomes inhalation. Stray thoughts love to slip into these crevices and attach and germinate and take root inside these tiny gaps of inattention…every breath has four parts: inhalation, turnaround, exhalation, turnaround; draw the breath from down deep, using an expanding and contracting dantian to power everything.”

He could tell when a person had lost focus just by looking at their posture.

“If you engage in internal conversation, you ruin the quiet standing effort. If a stray thought arises, note it and let it pass by. Just because a thought drops by doesn’t mean you have to invite it in for a cup of coffee.”

When he was satisfied that we as a group had the requisite focus, he would set us in motion; guiding us through the circles and “palm changes” of Pa Kua, the straight-line power slams of Hsing I or his unique and stylized brand of tai chi, with its combination of grace, power, flow and relaxation. He had specific techniques for each posture and every transition. He was a superstar in that world.

Diaphragm breathing is a relatively popular topic (deservedly) in the world of high-level fitness. This strategy has deep roots in meditation and martial arts. In formal Taoist, Zen or Hindu meditation, deep breathing, low breathing, is always a foundational technique and a core principle. Breath and mind always seem to walk hand in hand. Where there is meditative breathing invariably and quite naturally (and not coincidentally) “mindfulness” invariably appears.

There is tremendous interest in the subject of mindfulness. Almost without exception, mindfulness books, articles, strategies and tactics emphasis some type of focused attention on the mechanics of breathing. To be able to concentrate fully and completely on breath for an extended period is the surest way to attain true mindfulness. But there are pitfalls: as someone noted, “Mindfulness has become the new folk religion of the secular elite.” It seems everyone everywhere has leapt on the mindfulness bandwagon.

For those of us that have been on the mindfulness bandwagon for decades, our initial amusement at its newfound popularity has been replaced with successive emotional phases of puzzlement, befuddlement and repulsion. The repulsion comes from the ultimate awareness that money and financial gain have successfully corrupted and diluted the effectiveness of true mindfulness. Mindfulness-lite is watered down, user-friendly, anemic and ineffectual. But the ease of the method and the wildly exaggerated promised results makes faux mindfulness eternally popular.

We were mindful before mindful was hip. We achieved our mindfulness without striving for it; it was a by-product of what we were after: improved performance in the martial arts. Our mindfulness was attained by focusing 100% of our attention on the mechanics of breath. In our meditational sitting, during our quiet standing, or while performing martial katas, we focused on breath with every fiber of our being. In doing so we become mindfulness personified.

A smart trainee expropriates Smith’s concept of the physiological epicentre, the expanding and shrinking dantian orb. Use this image to find your physiological center of balance. Sync breath with posture and simultaneously acquire the mindfulness mindset. How appropriate that Smith’s ancient martial strategy of “breath before everything” turns out to be the perfect gateway into modern mindfulness. The fact that his forgotten lessons are still relevant and important seems weirdly appropriate. I am happy to pass along even a sliver of his iconic wisdom.

Mr. Smith joined the U.S. Marines in 1944 at age 17, served overseas in the Pacific theater with the Fifth Division as a combat rifleman at Peleliu and Guam. He was among the first troops into defeated Japan. Mr. Smith received his undergraduate degree in History from the University of Illinois and his master’s degree in Far Eastern and Russian Studies from the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1955, he joined the CIA as an intelligence officer, going to Taiwan four years later in 1959. There he continued his pursuit of martial arts practice and research. During this time he went to Tokyo and won his third degree black belt in Judo at the Kodokan, the international Judo headquarters.

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Marty Gallagher is the author of Strong Medicine, The Purposeful Primitive and Coan: The Man, The Myth, The Method.  Gallagher coached the United States team that won the IPF powerlifting world team title in 1991. He is a 6-time national masters champion and national record holder.  He was the IFF world master powerlifting champion in 1992.  He currently works with elite athletes, spec ops military and governmental agencies.

Don’t Fear the Sleeper!

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Don't Fear the Sleeper by Mike Krivka

Want to lose fat and gain muscle? Want to improve your cognitive ability and decrease reaction time? Want to increase your ability to heal from illness and injury? Want to do it without taking expensive supplements or complicated diets? Sure, everyone does! Then let me tell you a little secret: Sleep is one of the key factors in losing fat, gaining muscle, staying sharper, and living longer.

We live in an environment where sleep is the enemy and something that is actively avoided and delayed. Is there a cost to this habit? There sure is, and it’s a high one at that! From the increase in chronic illnesses (heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) to deaths due to sleep deprivation, we are paying a high price.

SM_DTFS_002“Red Bull Nation”

Man is the only mammal that willingly delays sleep and goes to extremes to avoid it. The increase in the consumption of coffee and energy drinks (the fastest growing market segment for soft drinks) should be some indication that people are either avoiding sleep or are trying to cope with the aftermath of not getting enough of it.

If you are an athlete you may have your nutrition and exercise dialed in, but if you don’t get the commensurate recovery (i.e. sleep) it is all for naught. In no uncertain terms, sleep is just as important as diet and exercise. Consider this: your body does not make changes or adaptations during a workout; your body only makes organic changes during sleep. Repair of damaged cells, the regeneration of DNA, the release and regulation of critical hormones are all reliant upon one thing–sleep.

Too Little Too Late

In general, most healthy adults need between seven to nine hours of sleep a night; but if you are regularly training hard, your requirements might be higher. Professional athletes like Roger Federer, Lebron James, Lindsey Vohn and Michelle Wie, regularly get between nine and twelve (yes, twelve!) hours of sleep! There are many factors that contribute to the amount of sleep you will need: environment, diet, medications, stress, etc. The trick is finding the right amount of sleep you need and getting it on a consistent basis. Regardless if it is seven or ten hours, you need every minute of it to meet your potential!

The Benefits of Sleep

Testosterone and growth hormone levels, as well as other key hormones, elevate during sleep. This is part of the body’s physical and mental repair system. These hormones assist in recovery as well as strength and fitness gains. These hormones start to release after being asleep for about 30 minutes. These hormone levels elevate every time you go thru a certain phase of your sleep cycle. The longer you sleep, the more cycles you go thru, and the more of these recovery promoting hormones will be pumping through your body.

Setting the Stage for a Perfect Night’s Sleep

Hopefully it won’t take a lot of convincing to get you to devote a little more effort to getting more and better quality, sleep. So, what do you need to do to get a good night’s sleep? You really need to make the effort to “set the stage” to stack the odds in your favor. The following are some things you can do to give you the best chance at getting a restful and productive (yes productive) night’s sleep:

  • Go to bed and get up at the same time every day – …Even if you are on the road or in a different time zone. You should try to follow this, within reason, so that you don’t disrupt your set sleep cycle. My instructor, Guro Dan Inosanto, travels somewhere every weekend teaching workshops. He gets up at the same time every day, around 4:00AM PST, so that even when he is on the East Coast he will be getting up in time to be at a workshop that usually starts at 10:00AM. While he should be suffering from horrible sleep deprivation because of his teaching, training, and traveling schedule, he is still going strong at 78 years old.
  • Use “sleep aids” sparingly if at all – Some studies show promise for the use of melatonin in shortening the time it takes to fall asleep and reducing the number of awakenings, but not necessarily total sleep time. Other studies show no benefit at all with melatonin supplementation. If you are traveling or trying to recover your natural sleep cycle, then a dose of a melatonin supplement might be just what you need to get you back on track… but it might not be beneficial to take it every night. How important is melatonin? Extremely! Melatonin holds the key to not only sleep but also cellular and DNA regeneration, the release of growth hormones, and is a natural anti-inflammatory. Do you really think that missing sleep isn’t important now?
  • Sleep in a dark room – Block out all of the light sources in the room… and that includes ambient light from clocks, night lights, phone chargers, etc. “Black out” curtains are another option if you live in an urban environment and have a lot of “light pollution” from the outside invading your sleep space. Can’t block out all of the light in the room? Then get yourself a high quality sleep mask that will block out all light.SM_DFTS_005
  • Eliminate sources of noise – One of the best investments I’ve made in the past few years was replacing the windows in my bedroom. The old ones allowed as much noise into the bedroom when they were closed as when they were open! Try to make your sleep space as quiet as possible, but a little noise might be a good thing. White noise from a fan or even a white noise machine (or an app on your phone) can help you drop into sleep faster. Another alternative is getting ear plugs. There are a number of different configurations on the market, from wax to foam, and you’ll need to find ones that are the most comfortable for your ear configuration and which block an acceptable amount of noise.
  • Cool is better than warm – Keep your bedroom as cool as possible (somewhere between 65-72 degrees is optimal). Even if you are sleeping under several blankets, you need to have the ambient air as cool as possible. This will help you fall into a deeper sleep and fall to sleep much faster.
  • Ice, ice baby – If you are up to something a little more extreme, try taking a ten minute ice bath one hour before bedtime. After your body has returned to normal temperature from an ice bath, the aftereffects of the cold will help you drop into a deep slumber. Another use for ice is to go bed with an ice pack, “ice cape”, or blanket. I was told by several people that an ice pack, ice blanket, or cape across your shoulders will reduce the time it takes to fall to sleep. Tim Ferris mentions this in The Four Hour Body and I’ve heard it from athletes as well.
  • SM_DFTS_003Establish a sleep ritual – Create a routine that allows you to relax and transition into sleep mode. Turn off the television, phone and iPad–get away from all electronics. Read a book, listen to relaxing music, or do something that is not too stimulating. Remove any blue light generating items from your environment prior to sleep. Dr. Chris Hardy, author of Strong Medicine, recommends wearing “blue blocker” sunglasses in the evening as well as switching the lights in the bedroom over to “bug lights” or any type of light bulb that doesn’t generate blue light.
  • Just say no to drugs – Regular use of prescription sleep medications can lead to long term problems. I have talked to a number of doctors about if and when they prescribe sleep medications, and they all do so with great hesitation. Instead of prescription medication, you can always try natural sleep aids–at least they don’t come with several pages of warning and possibly fatal side effects. NOTE: Tim Ferris recommends Yogi Soothing Caramel Bedtime Tea and there are other brands that seem to work as well. I have had several people recommend aromatic oils as well.
  • Don’t go to the (blue) light! – Light is the most powerful stimulator of the circadian system and can have positive or negative effects. Broad spectrum light stops the production of melatonin and pushes us into a waking state. This spectrum of light, in particular blue light, has the most impact on our circadian clock. So how much blue light do you get? If you have incandescent lights going, are watching television or using your computer or phone, you are bathing in the stuff.
  • Sunglasses at night? – How can you minimize blue light in the evening so that you can make a smoother transition into sleep? There are two easy ways that are not only inexpensive but effective. First, eliminate your exposure to blue light 2-3 hours before your bedtime by turning off the television, phone, and computer, and by installing lights in your evening living space that have a low blue light emission. Low blue light bulbs are those that have a yellow or orange color to them and are have a low CCT (Correlated Color Temperature). Inexpensive “bug lights” work well but there are other low cost alternatives on the market that you can find with a little research. The second way is to wear “blue blocker” glasses. Yeah, I know the old “sunglasses at night-thing” sounds a little weird but they work.

SM_DFTS_006

Sleep Like a Baby

There you go! Ten tips that will have you sleeping like a baby in no time at all. Try one or several to see if they work for you. I would recommend first setting up your sleeping space to be optimal, and working from there. If you have any tips or thoughts on how to get to sleep faster and easier I’d love to hear about them in the comments section below.

Until we meet again, Sleep Well!

***

Michael Krivka is a Senior RKC with Dragon Door and has been training with, teaching, and sharing the gospel of the kettlebell for over a decade. As a life-long martial artist, he is a Full Instructor under Guro Dan Inosanto in Jeet Kune Do (JKD); the Filipino Martial Arts of Kali, Escrima and Arnis; and Maphilindo Silat. He lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland with his wife and two sons. He owns CrossFit Koncepts where he runs strength and conditioning classes with an emphasis on kettlebell training, mobility and longevity. Follow him on Facebook.com/CrossFitKoncepts or Instagram.com/Michael_Krivka

Folding Inner Space, Part III – Pure Awareness and Deep Athletics in Action

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Folding Inner Space part three Mark Chaillet

Mark Chaillet, world record holder, world champion: Mark is shown in 1980 deadlifting 800-pounds. He weighs 219 in the picture and is badly out of position, struggling to finish the lift. His shoulders have gotten in front of the bar during the upward pull and now, with legs already straightened; he must finish locking out this ponderous poundage with pure reverse hip-hinge power.

He has shot off all his muscular guns and the only tricks left in his trick bag are his python-like spinal erectors and a grip like eagle talons. He pulled this lift to completion, but a controversial decision, the three judges turn the lift down, 2 to 1, thereby costing him the national title.

Mark was my training partner for six years. He fine-tuned my deadlift technique. We were both narrow-stance conventional deadlifters and both were taught by world champion Hugh Cassidy. We both used Hugh’s technique. Mark’s face and physique shows the degree of pure physical effort needed to experience exercise-induced altered states of consciousness. Nothing less than superhuman effort will fold inner space.

The Inner Astronaut
“An exercise-induced acid trip”

I walked towards my garage gym with a head full of minor troubles. I was distracted and out of sorts. I was really considering punting the workout to another day; my head was really not into it. I was really not feeling up to butting heads with a heavy barbell. As jazz tenor saxophonist John Coltrane once noted in an interview, “I feel the closest to hell when I am dealing with money.” I second that emotion. I was tired and drained, not from any physical toil, rather from mental stress related to life and making a living.

I had myself half convinced to lie back down (it was 6AM) and read some Evelyn Waugh or Kinsley Amis and fall back asleep. I’d wake back up in an hour or so with a whole new fresh and vibrant perspective and start all over.  I wrestled with my thoughts. “When a man’s head is not into the game, distraction prefigures injury,” I thought to myself. This was an excellent argument for blowing off the workout.

My conscientious right-thinking mind knew it was losing the internal argument so it decided to try a new approach. “Why not compromise? How about if you just squat light–nothing heavy, nothing ambitious, just some pristine, precise, technical bon mots–we won’t even pay any attention to the poundage. What say you, other self?” I had played the guilt card on myself and it had carried the day. I would ‘do the right thing’ (the right thing is always something I don’t want to do) and train, but train minimally and lightly and precisely in what I envisioned as a crispy technique day. Who cared if I was weak? Who cared if “light” training was about as exciting as kissing your sister?

Some training is better than no training, “an inch of meditation is an inch of the Buddha” and all of those other exhortations for mediocrity. I walked into the garage and took a look at the big clock. It was 6:18. I didn’t intend to be here long. I turned on my iPod and pulled up something mellow; I save the intense music for my strongest days, when I am fired up and ready to rip into it. Not today. Today I wanted something to keep me calm.

I selected a breezy mystical piece of music, a rare Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar album called, West meets East, recorded in 1970. I clicked on “Raga Inanda Biaravra” and the sitar and Stradivarius began riffing atop an Indian drone tuned to B♭. It was a good musical choice: I had forgotten how strange and passionate and technically superb this odd, old, and for me, recently rediscovered music was.

I loaded a 45-pound plate on each side of the Olympic barbell, already set at shoulder height in the power rack. I checked the gym clock yet again; I wanted to see how long the actual workout would take, not rushing or hurrying. It was 6:21. I ducked under the 135-pound bar, affixed it behind my neck; stood erect and stepped back. I “set up” (took adjustment steps) the squat and unlocked my knees to commence my first rep.

My body felt creaky and stiff and awkward as I lowered down. The weight felt heavy. I felt like the tin woodsman before being oiled. By the fourth out of eight reps, I had broken through my stiffness and awoken my central nervous system. My muscles were being forcibly stretched and warmed, flushed with blood, like it or not, ready or not.

The 135-pound squat set shocked my body awake on every level. It was as if I had jumped into a freezing river. My body, brain and central nervous system were bitch-slapped. I racked the weight. As was my recent habit, immediately after every set of light squats I would perform a slow and precise set of lying leg curls. After eight slo-mo leg curl reps, I immediately performed a set of calf raises. These were done one leg at a time on a stair-step while holding a 40-pound dumbbell in one hand while using the other hand as a support for balance.

On every rep of every calf raise I would stretch as far down as possible then rise up onto the ball of the foot, ending in a ballet-dancer toe extension flexion. I would go to failure with each leg and then immediately “rep out” with both legs. I would do three “tri-sets” (squat, leg curl, calf raise) and rest two to three minutes between each tri-set. I would add a little bit of poundage on the leg curls and use a slightly heavier dumbbell on each successive calf raise set.

The sequence would go: squat, leg curl, calf raises, rest. I would take the 135-pounds one more time for a second 8-rep warm-up set. This one was a delight compared to the first. Loose and warm, I got looser and warmer the deeper into the second set I got. The music was sounding good, appropriate for the early morning dawn. The door was wide open and the October backyard was lush and green with dew on the grass. It was truly picturesque and suddenly I felt good.

OctoberOutdoors

I was really listening to the music, trying hard to follow the lightning fast arpeggio riffs. During Swara, the dappled sunlight was pouring into the gym; the 65-degree temperature was perfect for iron slinging, the music was pulsing and I was starting to get swept away.

For my third squat set, I would handle 185 for six reps. I felt the telltale tinkle of an adrenaline dump as I ducked under the squat bar for the 185-pound set. I snapped it out of the supports, stepped back, set it up and performed six perfect reps. The weight felt incredibly light. This further amplified my burgeoning psych. I did my final tri-set. I had performed 9 total sets in five minutes. My body and legs were vibrant and awake. From this point forward, I would squat and squat only. I had gotten in my three “to failure sets” of the leg curl and calf raise, now 100% of my energy and effort would be directed at the remaining four squat sets.

In quick succession I hit 225, 255 and 285-pounds, all for a single repetition. The idea was to not waste any strength performing a lot of reps on warm-up sets. The single rep sets, spaced a few minutes apart, allowed me to “feel” increasingly heavier weight on my back, yet without frittering away any precious strength or energy best saved for the final, all out set. Each rep felt “snappy” i.e. I was able to accelerate upward and to a dramatic degree on each single.

The last set, the final set, was the only set that mattered: all the good stuff, all the strength increases, all the muscle hypertrophy, occurred during the final squat set. As Cassidy, my Zen lifting mentor used to say, “Everything before the top set is just throat-clearing and windup. Don’t blow your wad on the warm-up sets and preliminary sets.”

Warm, centered and ready, I loaded the barbell to 315-pounds. I felt my “wordless” psych coming on strong. I could “feel” my focus sharpen as I became increasingly focused and aggressive in immediate anticipation of the final all-out squat effort. Five days ago I had done 305 for 6 reps and the final two reps had been hell and barely made–but made nonetheless. Now, on a supposed “off day” (remember, I almost blew off the workout on account of distraction and stress) I felt good enough to attempt ten more pounds.

I knew myself and I knew the difference between real preparedness and feigned or superficial preparedness. I could not afford to tackle this poundage with fake, pretend or faux readiness. The nagging problems that had been bothering me before, the money and people woes, had long since evaporated.

It was Go Time. I switched to some hard, hard music, violent, visceral and aggressive. I began my psych ritual by pacing. I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my body. I could feel the fight-or-flight switch being thrown. The hairs on the back of my neck and on my arms stood up as a cocktail of hormones were fuel-injected into my bloodstream. It was time to storm the barricades.

I wheeled and strode to the bar; I got under the bar ASAP, set up and snapped the barbell out of the racks. In my state of excitation, the 315 felt lighter than the previous 285-pound effort; a great sign. I stepped back and set up. I broke my knees to begin the first rep. I eased downward, feeling the weight every inch of the descent. It felt as if it took forever to bottom out. I made sure I was perfectly positioned on the descent. Now it was time to come erect. Above all else, I would NOT fudge on the depth–every rep had to be ‘bottomed out,’ taken as deep as humanly possible, 6-10 inches below parallel.

I threw my knees out hard as I bottomed out and powered upward. I stood with real acceleration, the first few reps felt powerful and relatively easy. I became instantly elated; electricity was shooting through my central nervous system. On every inch of every squat rep I focused my eyes on a spot on the wall at eye level directly in front of me: it was as if I was trying to use X-ray vision to burn a hole through a quarter-sized hole on the wall. This intense visual focus kept me balanced by providing a stable reference point as I dipped and arose with a body-crushing weight on my back.

If my eyes wandered I would become unstable and instantly lose my balance. Psychologically, the intense visual focus provided my consciousness with a simplistic fundamental task that was critically important: if my eyes wandered for a split second I would lose the rep. This critical task kept a portion of my brain engaged at a high level and continual level, one lapse and I would collapse. I could not let my excitation and psych create slop and chaos. The 2th rep was effortless. Mind and body had successfully unified in order to cope with the severity of the effort

For the first three reps, a single aggressive breath between reps was all that was needed. Rep # 4 slowed a bit as I experienced a definite power stall at the top. No problem, I stood erect and fully locked out. I now forced three huge breathes. I held the third breath, broke my knees and descended for rep five. Rep #5 felt heavy going down and felt heavier still standing erect. High-end acceleration was suddenly replaced by grind; high-end horsepower was replaced with low-end torque. I shifted into four-wheel low and ground number 5 to lockout.

I pushed through the sticking point and stood erect. One more to go; I stood and inhaled “as if trying to suck all of the air out of the room.” I unlocked my knees and began the final rep. While rep six was more difficult than rep five, the final result was never in doubt: the barbell never stalled on its upward trajectory and I never lost my laser eye focus. I locked out rep six and re-racked the barbell with great care. I had given 105%.

I peeled myself off the barbell carefully. I was huffing and puffing and held onto the squat bar with two hands in case I fainted or fell down. I glanced at the clock: it was 6:42. The entire torture-fest squat session, a total of seven sets, (plus six sets of calfs and hams) had taken a grand total of 21-minutes. My legs felt shaky as I wobbled to the nearby flat bench and sat down.

I immediately turned off the music. The violent battle music soundtrack was suddenly inappropriate. I took stock: I was physically shattered; my body was shaking; yet I was elated. As I sat, I noticed all five sense-gates (smell, hear, feel, touch, see, conscious awareness) were wide open and hyper-receptive. I felt like a nuclear isotope, generating heat, glowing. I felt perfect. No thoughts were needed; no commentary could do justice to what I was feeling. I purposefully sunk further into this exercise-induced acid trip. Suddenly an old nonsensical Zen koan made perfect sense to me, “Iron Mountains, Silver Cliffs–Soaring!”

Once again I had entered into this exercise-induced state of altered consciousness: It was Iron Zen, a satori-state, the Zen of pure physical effort. I sat on the exercise bench facing the open doorway in perfect stillness and deeply satisfied equanimity. I sat like a mountain as I gazed out from within my skull with divine mental silence and a relaxed “soft eye” I was taking in everything at once. Another Zen koan came to mind, “Stoned…Immaculate…” that one from Zen Grand Maestro, Jimi Hendrix.

The beautiful orange-leafed Japanese maple, statuesque and perfectly framed in the doorway was contrasted with the most luscious green grass, grass that glistened with diamond dew. I put back the mystical Indian music back on and placed my hands in the cosmic mudra in my lap. I would sit in this wordless bliss for another perfect 30 minutes.

I felt myself start to slump and fuzz out, so I stood, stretched, yawned and headed back into the house. Still enveloped in quietude, I mindfully made myself a nutrient-dense post-workout regenerative shake. My concoction consisted of protein powder, raw peanut butter and raw milk and was unbelievably delicious, particularly while still in the throes of a heightened sense of taste. This “meal in a glass” was ideal for healing a shattered body. I laid down on my futon in the living room and immediately fell into a narcoleptic power nap. For 40 minutes I was in a deep sleep coma. I swear I could feel my body growing as I bathed in deep, dreamless REM.

I awoke refreshed, drank some potent coffee and admonished myself: and to think, I came within a whisker of blowing off the transcendental workout. What did I learn? The hard lesson might be, “How you feel is a lie.”

***

Marty Gallagher is the author of Strong Medicine, The Purposeful Primitive and Coan: The Man, The Myth, The Method.  Gallagher coached the United States team that won the IPF powerlifting world team title in 1991. He is a 6-time national masters champion and national record holder.  He was the IFF world master powerlifting champion in 1992.  He currently works with elite athletes, spec ops military and governmental agencies.

Folding Inner Space, Part II – Cessation of Thought and Super-Human Effort

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Folding Inner Space Part II Lead Photo

Hormonal Nitrous Oxide

Body-shocking physical effort, maximum effort of a very specific type and kind births an exercised-induced altered state of pure awareness that elite athletes routinely experience, yet fail to identify.  Access to this exercise-induced zone of pure awareness can only be attained when the degree of difficulty is sufficient to cross a hormonal threshold.

How difficult is difficult? In progressive resistance training difficult means exerting to a degree equal to or surpassing whatever you are currently capable of.  To enter exercise-induced Nirvana, you must equal or exceed your current physical limit in some way, shape or form, in some manner or fashion.

I have been self-inducing this physiological phenomena for fifty years and can say with the certainty that comes with half a century of concentrated practice that 100% maximal physical effort, and preferably 102% or 105% effort, is necessary to gain entry into the post-workout bliss-zone.

I am an athlete in a sport of complete mathematical certainty: I have been a national champion in both Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting.  My sports are all about pounds lifted.  It is a universe of numbers: sets, reps, frequency, duration, time under tension–everything in the elite strength world can and is assigned a numerical value.  The iron elite create complex training matrices using cold logic and empirical data; this approach is the apogee of sophisticated rational thought applied to progressive resistance training.

How metaphysically ironic that we utilize the Yang rational left-brain, with its Spock-like coldness, its numerical and mathematical certainties, its science and logic to create the savage training regimens that unlocks the ethereal, intuitive artistic consciousness that lies dormant in the Yin right brain.

The rational goal of powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting is to increase the sheer amount of poundage lifted in the three powerlifts or two Olympic lifts.  This can be accomplished by honing technique and/or by becoming stronger.  The way in which we become stronger is to stress the body to such a degree that we invoke an adaptive response.  We traumatize the body in a deliberate and systematic fashion in order to elicit a specific and desired physiological reaction.

When the body is purposefully stressed–and stressed to a dramatic degree, new muscle tissue is constructed: cells split and divide and strength increases; all as protective response to the self-inflicted trauma of an expertly applied progressive resistance training session.  If the degree of difficulty is sufficiently intense, a hormonal threshold is crossed and a tsunami of hormones are released into the bloodstream: endorphins, adrenaline, cortisol, growth hormone are shot into the bloodstream like hormonal nitrous oxide.

A productive training session is a body-shocking event. The sheer physicality of the effort is so muscularly exhaustive that it completely depletes and drains the human body. There is a concurrent hormonal floodtide. Somewhere in the immediate aftermath, the mind grows silent and the shattered body becomes enveloped in a relaxed and blissful state of pure awareness and contentment.

In this post-workout state, clarity, vividness and cognition are amplified. Effortlessly, without suppression, the conscious observer ceases its endless babbling inside the athlete’s skull.  As my mental mentor, Krishnamurti noted, “The cessation of thought is the awakening of intelligence.”  When the never-ending unceasing internal dialogue ceases, the athlete is able to experience the electric crackle that imbues the very atmosphere of the instantaneous present.

As the exhausted yet elated athlete basks in his endorphin afterglow, he looks out at the gym from inside his head without the inky film of thought blurring his vision; every thing, every object, every person, every object and color is vibrant and enhanced, visually amplified. The athlete glows and basks in his centered, peaceful post-workout state of intense quietude: he is content, he is exhausted, he is at peace and centered.  This post-workout glow, the beatific state-of-being bears many overt and subtle similarities to the amplified states of consciousness achieved in sitting meditation.

Like base jumping, big wave surfing, skydiving or cliff jumping, big poundage teaches with a big stick.  Any man that attempts more than he is capable of, via psych and preparation and sheer effort, must learn how to create a totality of effort–nothing less will accomplish a muscular task that exceeds current capabilities and capacities.

On the other hand, dare to struggle, dare to win. No one ever improved by doing the same thing, over and over in the same way.  To approach, equal or (optimally) exceed current physical capacity, the athlete must successfully achieve a synergistic melding of mind and body.  We seek something profound: we seek to perform past all rational and realistic expectations.  To do so will require more than human effort, it will require superhuman effort. Superhuman effort can only occur if a mind/body melding has already occurred.

Psych and Artificially-Inducing “Fight-or-Flight”

Elite athletes access modified consciousness by self-inflicting a cataclysmic event in the form of a body-shocking training session. They train so hard, so intensely and so fiercely that the body is “tricked” into invoking the primal “fight-or-flight” syndrome. We force a mind/body synergistic melding by subjecting our own body to a task that is so physically demanding, so difficult, so outrageous, that it can only be accomplished by exerting a 100% effort.

Any physical effort at or above 100% of realistic capacity demands that mind and body enter into a unified partnership in order to successfully cope.  Only through a successful mind-body melding can we make the body do that which it is currently incapable of. If successful, we set a new performance benchmark and simultaneously acquire all the physiological benefits associated with progressive resistance training.

Humans are no longer chased by bears, attacked by invaders, forced to hunt and kill to eat.  Only on rare occasions does modern man invoke the fight-or-flight response.  Athletes rekindle and reawaken the dormant fight-or-flight impulse, they hotwire it, like stealing a car.  Any athlete performs better, light-years better, when aroused, centered, focused, fierce, alert, highly combative and possessing an overall heightened sense of awareness.

The athlete convinces the mind that it is fighting for its life. How? By subjecting the body to a 100% all-out physical effort.  The degree of struggle and effort are the tripwire mechanism. The body realizes it is about to be pulverized and the fight-or-flight response awakens in order to cope.

The nervous system’s response should be the same…
The nervous system’s response should be the same…

So instead of having a saber tooth tiger leap out of the woods, the athlete voluntarily attempts to exceed a previous best in an exercise, set and rep benchmark.  Once the brain becomes convinced that, yes, we have a genuine fight-or-flight situation, the brain declares Defcon 5 and triggers an adrenaline dump–which is felt immediately. When the adrenaline begins coursing through the bloodstream, we throw hormonal gasoline on the mental fire.

Excitation combines with emotion and if channeled properly enables the lifter to lift 5% to 10% more than if they performed the identical lift without a proper psych. The best athletic psychers are getting a full 10% over their non-psyched self.  Think of elite athlete “super psych” as the bottled, formalized, artificial version of the 140-pound lady who lifts the back end of the car off her child that is pinned underneath the vehicle.  The elite strength athlete is a psych master. If he wasn’t he wouldn’t be elite.

Normal fitness trainees are oblivious to the degree of effort needed to forcibly morph the human body: only in response to self-inflicted trauma does the adaptive response trigger; only in response to superhuman effort does the body build new muscle. Elite athletes have performance benchmarks that they continually seek to improve upon.  By continually expanding our limits, the body is forced to transform.  The human body will not and does not grow new muscle (hypertrophy) or acquire more strength by exerting sub-maximally.

  • Sub-maximal exertion, can, at best, serve to retain the physical status quo.  The body will not radically transform in response to sub-maximal exertion.
  • Exceeding capacity requires the mind and body unify and assist one another–otherwise the total effort is insufficient to accomplish the task.

Please be aware that you are not expected to perform one-rep maximum single reps in all your progressive resistance sessions.  The man with the 400×1 back squat will have a 5-rep personal best of say, 350-pounds, a triple max of 370, a 10-rep PR of 315-pounds, and so on.  In any session the trainee can select from an infinite variety of capacity benchmarks. Capacity can have a myriad of expressions.

A trainee that seeks extraordinary results must exert extraordinary effort, superhuman effort; mere human effort can only maintain what has been achieved already.  Continually assault the limits.  This implies that you have limits to assault.  Establish benchmarks; embrace struggle and embrace difficulty.  Do so and reap the optimal physiological and psychological benefit: a transformed body and a transformed mind.

***

Marty Gallagher is the author of Strong Medicine, The Purposeful Primitive and Coan: The Man, The Myth, The Method.  Gallagher coached the United States team that won the IPF powerlifting world team title in 1991. He is a 6-time national masters champion and national record holder.  He was the IFF world master powerlifting champion in 1992.  He currently works with elite athletes, spec ops military and governmental agencies.