Strong Medicine

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

Motivation

Strong Medicine Questions and Answers

By 2 Comments

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.

 

***

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

By 3 Comments

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.

 

***

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

By 9 Comments

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

***

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.

Folding Inner Space: Part I – Iron Zen: Exercise-Induced Altered States

By 12 Comments

Iron Zen

Tibetan Lama Dungse Jampol is the son of a Tibetan meditation master. At a young age he asked his father to explain to him, “What is the nature of the mind?” and “What is ‘pure existence” and what is the meaning of “enlightenment?” His father sat down and said to the boy, “Come closer.” The boy came within arms length of the father who gestured him even closer by wagging his finger. When the boy’s forehead was within six inches of the father, the elder lama unleashed a blood-curdling scream that literally sent the youngster reeling. Dungse recalled, “That scream was so loud and so intense and so unexpected that I was paralyzed; shocked, my mind was completely cleared of everything – instantly. My father excitedly said, “See! There it is! There it is!”

It is my contention that intense physical effort, the kind of effort generated during limit-exceeding weight training sessions, offers an entranceway into higher realms of consciousness. My Zen master friend, Ken O’Neil, and I have talked frequently about this phenomenon at length and in depth. I have long sought out others that have experienced this Iron Satori in my ongoing effort to bring attention to this rarified and refined quality of consciousness attained during “Iron Zazen.”

Exercise-induced altered consciousness, or, alternatively and more poetically, The Zen of Pure Physical Effort, is a higher awareness induced by intense physical exercise. Superhuman effort opens the “heavy door with rusted hinges.”

I have been a hardcore weight trainer for 54 years and a meditator for 43 years. Nietzsche once noted “true greatness requires long obedience in the same direction.” To which I would add, over time and with continual repetition the ability to enter into exercise-induced altered states of consciousness becomes easier. The longer and more often the athlete enters these zones of heightened sensory awareness, the deeper the experience becomes and the easier it is accessed: vividness and clarity magnify with repeated visitations.

The exercise-induced altered mindset offers a “shortcut” method, a meditational way in which to fold inner space.

We can jump the beginning meditator ahead; throw them into the deep end of the pool, metaphorically speaking, through the precise application of Iron Zen. Intense physical effort shortens the meditation learning curve, depositing the Iron Zen adherent into an advanced state-of-being. Entry is dependent on the quality of the individual workout: if the effort is deep enough, sincere enough, intense enough, Huxley’s Doors of Perception swing open and the exerciser is predictably enveloped in blissful state of exercise-induced nirvana.

Conscious thought is the enemy, the destroyer of optimal human performance. The elite athlete understands this fact: they embrace and inhabit a wordless state that characterizes optimal human performance. Intense physical effort attacks the human body on a variety of fronts in a variety of ways: we self-inflict body trauma in order to induce beneficial stresses. The optimal workout creates stress. The poison is in the dose.

Our subtle task is to create sufficient stress to invoke the adaptive response–this in order to reap all the considerable benefit associated with expertly applied progressive resistance training. Too little self-induced stress and nothing of any physical or psychological consequence occur. What are the stress categories?

  • Mental stress
  • Hormonal stress
  • Central nervous system stress
  • Muscular stress
  • Internal organ stress

How do we create beneficial stresses and not overdo or under-do the dose?

The requisite stress dose appears when we approach, equal or exceed some measure, some current performance benchmark. Hypertrophy, strength, power and exercise-induced satori do not and cannot appear or occur in response to sub-maximal effort. Pushing up to or past capacity–in some way, shape or form–is what triggers all the good stuff.

The elite athlete is able to will his body to perform past its realistic capacity. This ability is one of the contributing factors to why the elite are the elite. At the highest levels of athletics, regardless the sport, everyone has the genetics and everyone has the work ethic, everyone is fast, everyone is strong and agile–so what separates 1st form 5th place?

In most cases superior or inferior placing correlates to the mental attributes (or lack there of) of the athlete. Some athletes are natural competitors and rise to the competitive occasion while others shrink and fall apart at the actual competition.

Human Nervous System

The elite athlete is willfully able to invoke the primordial fight-or-flight response, the necessary precursor to extraordinary effort. Successfully triggering the flight-or-flight response sets in motion everything of benefit that follows. How does one “artificially” invoke fight-or-flight? They create a system of psych.

Successful superhuman effort requires a singularity of mind. A person does not casually exert superhuman effort.

Elite athletes develop individualized mental methods by which they psych themselves up in order to achieve superhuman levels of performance.  Athletes do not care one wit about attaining higher levels of consciousness; elite athletes only care about improved performance.  An experienced, mature, seasoned athlete uses a highly developed psych designed to elevate the quality of the individual workout and elevate performance in actual competitions.

Recalibrating the mind is the necessary precursor to elevating performance. The “Psych” is a conscious, willful act. The athlete executes a mental checklist that they have developed over time. They recalibrate their mindset to prepare for the training session. Once the actual training session is underway, a highly individualized psych-up routine is used repeatedly in each exercise, drill or protocol.

By consciously focusing, concentrating and using tunnel-vision focus, the seasoned athlete optimizes their capacities and abilities. This singularity of purpose improves the quality of, and results derived from, the workout. The key to continual improvement is being able to string together long series of quality workouts, like pearls strung together on a necklace strand.

***

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.

Rekindling the Fire: The Dragon Door Health and Strength Conference

By 20 Comments

RekindledFire

I must admit to feeling burned out of late. Strong Medicine was released several months ago and I have just completed the final requirements of a two year fellowship in Integrative Medicine. Both of these have been monumental personal achievements for me following my passion and mission to improve the dismal state of public health, specifically the seemingly unstoppable spread of preventable chronic disease. Despite these recent achievements, I have felt very alone and isolated within the conventional medical system. My Integrative Medicine classmates are like-minded, but many are struggling to find a way to earn a living putting a holistic model of medicine that emphasizes prevention into practice within the mainstream. I have been disheartened to say the least, but this last weekend was a game changer for me.

Dragon Door’s first Health and Strength Conference was an incredible experience as both a speaker and participant. I have never seen so many incredibly talented people under one roof who were all freely sharing their experiences and diverse approaches to the betterment of our collective health and wellness. I am posting this on the Strong Medicine blog, because the conference presenters and participants exemplified the Strong Medicine mission statement found on the home page of this blog in their own unique way.

Health and Strength Conference Group Photo

Rolando Garcia gave an insightful presentation on the business of fitness, but made a key point that left a lasting impression on me. He rightly pointed out that a trainer will potentially see a client 100-200 times per year (as opposed to a handful of 15 minute doctors visits) placing the trainer in a unique position with an opportunity to have a tremendous impact on a person’s health, potentially far more than their health care provider.

Danny and Al Kavadlo gave informative and entertaining talks, reminding us again that your clients don’t need gym memberships or fancy equipment to effectively rebuild bodies ravaged by the inactivity rampant in modern society. Their amazing bodyweight progressions make strength training truly accessible to all.

Max Shank knocked it out of the park sharing his stripped down approach to training. While I gave a theoretical talk about using the concepts of allostatic load in training, Max showed us how he is already doing it with his clients and getting fantastic results and keeping them injury free.

Zach Even-Esh is truly a warrior for public health. He is training our kids, a group many are predicting to be the first generation not to outlive their parents. Zach’s life story, work ethic, and commitment to improving the sorry state of fitness in our adolescents and teenagers was inspirational for me.

Andrea Du Cane put the spotlight brightly on the importance of training our aging population. She gave a fantastic talk that emphasized not only why we should be actively seeking this demographic as clients, but safe and effective ways to implement real strength training and reverse the scourges of sarcopenia and osteoporosis.

Steve Holiner filled in brilliantly for Josh Henkin. His presentation of the DVRT system was outstanding, filling in the gaps many of us have with our movement. The potential applications to rehabilitation and “prehabilitation” are very exciting for me. I was also blown away be his brief offline discussion with me on his biopsychosocial approach to training.

Phil Ross gave a barnstorming presentation on training and combatives that peaked my interest as a fledgling BJJ practitioner. Jon Bruney and Logan Christopher gave fascinating lectures on harnessing the brain and nervous system to improve performance.   Mike Gillette showed us how to save our joints while building incredible strength and resilience with his masterful presentation on ring training. Mike Krivka showed his passion and expertise anchoring our introduction to CrossCore HardCore.

And finally my co-author Marty Gallagher gave one of the most poignant and inspiration talks that I have ever seen. I am truly honored to call that man a friend.

The participants were out of this world as well. My discussions throughout the two days with so many of them were just as educational for me as the formal presentations. There were so many trainers and even some other health care professionals sharing their knowledge freely. This was the most collegial environment that I have ever experienced.

I have come away from the Dragon Door Health and Strength Conference with my fire burning again. The epiphany for me was that I need to spend my energy bringing groups like this together to better our collective craft, rather than wringing my hands over my frustrations with our current health care system.   If we can keep building our collective and synergize our efforts, we can truly have an impact on public health. My sincere thanks to everyone involved for making this experience one of the best in my professional career, and especially to John Du Cane for having the vision to make it happen.

***

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.

Back in the Coaching Saddle… After a Twenty Year Hiatus

By 6 Comments

Marty Gallagher and Cristi Bartlett

I stopped coaching at the national and international level when my superstar powerlifter, Kirk Karwoski, retired in 1996. After a ten-year rocket ride with the Kirk, the undisputed King of powerlifting, anything subsequent would have been anticlimactic. Kirk crushed the best with yawning nonchalance: he won seven straight national titles in three different weight divisions. He steamrolled to six straight world titles and set 20 + world records, including an all-time squat record of 1,003 pounds that remains unsurpassed to this day, 18 years after being set. He was widely considered to have had the strongest legs in the history of powerlifting and he built his unprecedented leg power using a strength system I introduced him to. He and I, coach and athlete, refined and fine-tuned this simplistic approach over the next decade. With each succeeding year he got substantially better.

We called our power approach “The Modified Cassidy” because this unique strength strategy was based on an approach first devised by world champion Hugh Cassidy. Hugh’s template was brutal yet effective, a minimalistic approach towards strength training (and eating) that we customized for Kirk. We were heavily influenced by innovative modifications made to the same system we used by power immortals Ed Coan and Doug Furnas. I talked to Coan weekly for years; we were like two lab scientists discussing a mutual science project—which happened to be Kirk. He was the baby gorilla we were raising in captivity: each week I would tell Coan what Karwoski had done in training and listen to Ed’s feedback. We had this ongoing three-way conversation and eventually settled on a system that caused Kirk to skyrocket. It took five years of dues paying before Kirk won his first national title. That same year he took second place at the world championships when Kristo Vilmi of Finland, edged him by 5-pounds. After that, Karwoski went on a rampage: Vilmi was the last man to beat Kirk, ever.

Kirk and I were a coach/athlete partnership: we thought long and hard each successive competitive year about what new wrinkles we would add, what modifications we would apply, how would we hone and refine our core strength system to make it better. We had a viewpoint, a philosophic strength strategy and our report card was how we did at the national and world championships. For seven years he was the best in the world—by a country mile. He didn’t defeat the competition; he annihilated the competition. He was our champion and we campaigned a specific method, a defined strength philosophy. Kirk was the best in the world for a long, long time and he could have won five more world titles had he not become bored with it all.

I did a lot of coaching at nosebleed levels, including coaching the United States to the IPF world team title at the 1991 world championships in Orebro, Sweden. Like Kirk, I too got burnt out. Truth be known, I didn’t miss coaching. I did so much of it for so long and with such a high caliber of athlete that the idea of coaching again held zero appeal. That all changed when I got a load of Cristi Bartlett. Naturally I heard about her before I met her. She was a protégé of Jim Steel, the no-nonsense, Old School, hardcore strength coach at University of Pennsylvania. Jimmy has been at Penn going on 15 years and oversees a 20-million dollar facility with responsibilities for twenty + collegiate sport teams. He needs help and Cristi worked for Jim as an assistant coach. He began telling me about her years ago and a few years back I met her.

I was really impressed with how she looked and how she moved. She was a muscled-up 190-pounds, which sounds huge, but on her it looked quite normal. She moved like a panther and had “elite athlete” stamped all over her. I was hardly surprised when told she’d been a collegiate basketball player and held a Masters degree in exercise science. Cream rises to the top and genetics, brains and youth are always a good combination in an athlete. While I was not surprised at her athletic pedigree or academic degree, I was quite surprised (shocked, actually) at how “spot-on” her deadlift technique was: she deadlifted as if she’d come straight out of the same Hugh Cassidy technical deadlift boot camp that world champions Mark Dimiduk, Mark Chaillet, Marty Gallagher, Kirk Karwoski and Don Mills were schooled in.

She had intuitively taught herself how to pull using the same technique we were taught: narrow stance, upright torso, bust it from the floor using leg power, finish off the pull with a steel-coil hip hinge held in reserve until that special instant. “Where’d you learn to pull like that?” It was the first question I ever asked her. “Oh, I sort of figured it out on my own. It seemed logical.” Now that was the right answer. She had excellent body proportions; a positive indicator for future balanced lifting. Most good female powerlifters are short and squat; they usually have good squats and good bench presses and are piss-poor deadlifters. Cristi is the rare breed: world level bench presser and deadlifter. She is also a 100% lifetime drug-free athlete.

I asked around a bit about the national and world records in the newly minted USAPL and IPF “raw” divisions. Raw powerlifting is done without any supportive gear, other than a weightlifting belt. The explosion of CrossFit has been a shot in the arm for raw powerlifting competitions. Nowadays the raw national championships might attract 400 + lifters. The USAPL and IPF are strictly judged; squats have to be below parallel; and they practice out-of-competition drug testing. Strict judging and strict drug testing work in Ms. Bartlett’s favor. Her training lifts were at or above world record level. For the first time in decades I sensed that here was an athlete capable of going all the way: become the best in the world. Few knew those “all the way” ropes better than me.

She was receptive to the idea of going to the USAPL national powerlifting championships. That competition would be held close by, in Scranton, and would occur in October, a long time off. We agreed in principle to “go for it.” She needed to compete in a qualifying meet in order to be eligible to compete at the nationals. We found a USAPL competition in suburban Baltimore on July 12th and worked together for eight weeks leading up to the Baltimore competition. The web is a wonderful training tool: each week she would video tape her “top set” in the squat or deadlift and e-mail it to me. I would review it, critique it and then, based on all the combined factors, we would make the poundage/rep call for the subsequent workout. It was agreed that the key to her ultimate powerlifting success would be lie in increasing her leg strength.

She was already world level in both bench pressing and deadlifting but she was 100 pounds off the pace in the squat. Champions don’t continually play to their strengths; instead they attack their weakness. That is where the dramatic improvement lies. Ergo, it only stood to reason that she would concentrate on bringing up her squat: to do so would make her invincible. Rome would not be built in a day and we would treat the Baltimore meet as a mere workout, she would lift conservatively: no close misses.

Cristi Bartlett Deadlift

The actual competition turned out to be a madhouse as 100 lifters were lifting. The 28-year old exhibited coolness in her competitive demeanor; she was aggressive yet upbeat, engaged but unfazed, she was alternately in one of two states: totally relaxed sitting in the audience with her dad and Tracey, her training partner, or prior to a lift, concentrated and focused. In her squats, her first attempt was with 295-pounds and she buried the lift a full three inches below parallel. It was a “three-white-light” success. Her 315-pound second attempt squat was easier than the first. She roared out and methodically dispatched a perfect 3rd attempt with 330. Each squat was a cookie-cutter replication of the previous perfect squat.

In the bench press she was nursing a shoulder injury, a serious injury that caused her to train light. She was not at her benching best. The competitive bench press has to be paused on the chest and then pressed evenly and perfectly: she perfectly pressed 205, 231 and finally a very easy 248. We were unaware that the national record was 252-pounds, or we would have taken 256 on her 3rd attempt. Six lifts, three squats, three bench presses, eighteen white lights; she was perfection in motion.

In the deadlift, she hit her first (and only) snag of the day when on her 1st attempt deadlift with 440-pounds she drew a lone red light; the side judge said she did not have her shoulders all the way back at lockout. Two judges passed the lift. She asked for 485 pounds on her second attempt deadlift. The current national record was 473 pounds. After seeing the slump-shouldered 440 opening deadlift, I secretly thought 45 pounds might be a bridge to far. Plus the competition was dragging on and on and cumulative fatigue was a real factor; Cristi had taken her first squat warm-up at 9:30 am and now it was 2:30 pm. That is a long time to maintain an edge.

To my surprise and delight, she strode out and after a long, hard pull locked out 485 pounds to set the new national record. What a GRIP! Mark Chaillet had the strongest set of hands I’ve ever seen and he could just tug and tug and tug on an 850 + pound deadlift all day long—Cristi has that same powerhouse type of “kung fu grip.”

After she locked the weight out and accepted the thunderous applause, she came off stage and I congratulated her. “That’s it—right? You don’t want a 3rd do you?” After seeing how tough the 485 was, after seeing the adrenaline dump and the excitation of that national record, I was convinced she was done. “Whoa!” she said, “How about a 3rd attempt?” I was puzzled, “Really?” I looked deep in her eyes; she was smiling but serious. I didn’t say it but thought; if you worked that hard with 485, what are we going for on the 3rd, 486??? “Sure!” I said, “What’s the number?” She didn’t hesitate. “500!”

She would need to find a deeper well somewhere. To make a long story short, it was as if everything in the competition leading up to this point was the preliminary stuff. By now it was apparent to everyone in the oversized, stuffed to capacity gym, that this woman, pound for pound, was the best lifter in the entire competition, female or male. This deadlift would be more than the male class winner in the 184-pound class and it would exceed her just-set national record. It would also exceed the current 496-pound IPF world record in the deadlift.

https://youtu.be/V3eGtpDQaW4

She crushed 500. 485 was light years better than 440 and 500 was light years easier than 485. She had racked up nine perfect lifts and made 26 out of a possible 27 white lights. She ended with a world record-exceeding lift in her second-ever powerlifting competition. It was exciting as hell. It triggered a feeling in me I hadn’t felt since Kirk hung it up. As my old boss at the Washington Post, Vic Sussman used to say, “Let the facts speak for themselves.” Here is a fact: Cristi Bartlett got me back into coaching…and I am excited to see how far she can go. If she caught fire she could become the female Ed Coan, she’s that talented.

 

***

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.

Breaking Down the Barriers to Exercise

By 6 Comments

Carrie Hardy Breaking Barriers for Exercise

Another day and another pep talk. I know that exercise is good for me but some days I find myself making excuses and rationalizing why I can’t exercise today. As a former scientist and current physician-in-training, I am well aware of the research that shows the benefits of exercise for health and wellness. I know that in addition to the physical benefits, daily exercise can facilitate protective, adaptive and regenerative responses in the brain. I am even married to the guy who co-wrote Strong Medicine, arguably the most important health and wellness book out there (I am in no way biased!), with pages filled with the reasons I need to exercise. So why do I have such a hard time sustaining a schedule that includes regular exercise?

From looking at the poor state of fitness in the majority of us, I know that I am not an anomaly. Most of us have similar struggles prioritizing exercise. Starting and maintaining a regular exercise routine obviously has many barriers in modern society. There are entire industries built around finding the latest “revolutionary” gadget or program to inspire us to exercise. The marketing gurus of the sporting goods and technology companies have tried to assist us (and take our money) by selling handy gadgets such as the Fitbit, heart rate monitors, and activity trackers all created to help motivate us to just move. Despite of all the latest technology at hand we still struggle.

SolidBrickWall2

Those who study this subject have looked closely at barriers to exercise (and lifestyle change in general). These barriers can be broken down into three general categories:

  1. Intrapersonal: time, knowledge, motivation, personal appearance, and overall health to initiate an exercise program.
  2. Interpersonal: commitment to self versus others, lack of support, and lack of workout partner
  3. Environmental: lack of equipment and lack of realistic role models.

Personal appearance! Who doesn’t want to look better naked? Some days it is really tough to face the mirror and many feel this way (whether they admit it or not). What can even be more taxing on self esteem is how we perceive we look both in our workout attire and while we are performing the exercises.   Before you launch into a rant about exercise not being a beauty contest, let’s take a closer look at these very real barriers (especially for women) to getting someone to start and maintain an exercise program. I came across a very interesting research article published by Bourn and colleagues that evaluated the effects of viewing “reality” weight loss television shows on body satisfaction, mood and snack food consumption. We assume that these reality TV shows are motivating for those watching, however Bourn’s published results show that “larger women experienced less body satisfaction and less positive mood in response to weight loss program” than a control group that watched a program on home renovations (the control group). Additionally, it was reported that a “greater percentage of women with higher dietary restraint ate food whilst watching the weight loss program.” In this study, not only was watching overweight people exercise not helpful for the viewers own body image, people whom normally have more restraint with snacking ate food while watching the reality weight loss show!

I know you are saying to yourself that this is a research group and perhaps they were almost expected to feel this way. But, let’s look at a snapshot in reality. Negative thoughts about your appearance can create a rabbit hole into which we chase our self-esteem. I want to share a story about appearance during exercise. A friend of mine and I were talking about exercise and clothing. The weather is getting warmer, but not quite warm enough for just shorts and t-shirts. I freely admit that I have moments where I am concerned about appearance while in workout attire. I expressed this to my friend, who has been an athlete since she was a teenager and has the lean body composition that one would expect with a life long athlete. I was shocked to hear her express similar insecurities with her own appearance in workout clothing. Logical or not, perceived self image and appearance is a river that runs deep!

Lack of time and conflicting responsibilities seem to be partners in crime for creating barriers to exercise. There never seems to be enough time and it seems that we have to make a choice to do something good for ourselves or take care of our family first. I know I think about this often!   I am a full time medical student and I feel that I need to carve out time for everything from studying, spending quality time with my family, and personal time for myself (mostly to workout).

BusyMind2

I scrutinize my schedule to see where I can fit in time for a 20-minute burst protocol (see Strong Medicine) or a 4-minute Tabata routine. It doesn’t seem like a lot of time but when you factor everything in, but even this amount of time can seem prohibitive. I have become creative and workout. When there is a short break in between classes or before I get dinner started (if I am home before Chris), I will pop into the garage to get some sort of workout in. Having a space set aside in your home to work out can really make a difference. Strong Medicine provided us with a look at some efficient exercises that can be done using either the burst or HIIT protocols, helping to eliminate the concerns of time being barrier while still getting in an effective workout. Using these two methods can certainly help overcome the barrier of time.

While engaging in regular exercise can help increase energy, improve mood and improve your physical appearance, make sure you start at your ability level. You may have to start with just walking. That is OK, just make sure you do it. You may not feel that is enough but it is a starting place to build your foundation. Strong Medicine has a walking program for the absolute beginner that starts out very slowly and builds gradually.

Lack of social support from family or friends and lack of partner for exercise are less discussed barriers. We touched upon conflicting responsibilities as it overlaps with time in the intrapersonal barriers but how do we overcome lack of support? Let’s look to our family first. Getting a family member to join us in exercise can increase the time we spend with loved ones as well as provide support and a workout partner for us. Here are a few ideas to start:

  • Find a family member or friend willing to go for a walk with you regularly. Once a routine is formed you can try out alternate exercises and intensities together. Building the exercise relationship first this the is key.
  • Instead of a ladies or guys night out at some bar, how about 30 minutes of exercise with your friends before dinner? Make exercise a part of the social bonding of a night out.

So now that we have made a time commitment to ourselves and found a workout partner, let’s look at our final group of barriers. These can include:

  • Lack of facilities/equipment,
  • Lack of role models for physical activity

Gym memberships and equipment can be expensive, and choices of where to join and what to buy can be overwhelming. If you are a beginner to exercise, you are born with all the equipment you need to get a good workout, your own body! Learning simple bodyweight exercises can be a great beginning. If this is where you are starting you are probably pretty safe working out on your own. The safety concerns should be minimal but if you are ready to attack advanced moves, you will want to consult a professional (Dragon Door’s PCC is an excellent place to start).

Finding motivating exercise role models can be extremely difficult. All of the images on TV or the Internet are of extremely buff individuals with bodies that appear unattainable. However, it is this image that sells products with the promise that you also can look like this. Uh oh! We are back to body image.

Perhaps we should stop looking for role models and just find motivation first. Personally, I find this quote by physician and athlete George A Sheehan helpful for motivation (maybe not so inspirational): “Exercise is done against one’s wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.” The fear of poor health can kick you in the butt to get you moving, but once you start making exercise a habit in daily life, you will find that the good feeling you get after a workout is its own reward and will keep you coming back for more (endorphins are wonderful!) Become your own inspiration instead of looking for it in others.

This article was originally written to discuss both barriers and motivations for exercise. Motivation, like exercise, is not one size fits all. The quote from Dr. Sheehan above should be enough to set your body in motion but you will need to find what motivates or inspires you to take control of your health and your life. Obtaining a better body and health is achievable if you prioritize exercise and make it a habit. The barriers you perceive are not insurmountable. Besides, who doesn’t want to be really, really, ridiculously good looking…

****

Carrie Hardy, M.S. is a former biochemist, 4th year medical student at Bastyr University, mountain biker, amateur photographer and a neophyte in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Her passion is combining science with individualized medicine to empower individuals to lead a healthier life.

Roots and Mentors: Mac McCallum’s Profound Insights Are Still Relevant

By 8 Comments

John McCallum: our mentors had to walk the walk before we listened when they talked the talk. He wrote 100 + articles; he gave us our marching orders every month.
John McCallum: our mentors had to walk the walk before we listened when they talked the talk. He wrote 100 + articles; he gave us our marching orders every month.

There is no school like Old School!
“Train, eat, sleep, grow – repeat!”

John “Mac” McCallum was a hugely influential figure that burst onto the muscle and strength scene in the 1960s. He built a cult following with his superb column in Strength & Health magazine. The “Keys to Progress” series ran for years and presented a viewpoint and tone that struck a resonant chord with alpha males worldwide. Mac was a man’s man, he offered up a vision of the idealized man—then provided a blueprint for morphing yourself into that ideal. In Mac’s way of thinking, the ideal man was large, muscular, athletic and smart. He loved the rugged, functional physiques of the Olympic weightlifter. Mac was generally dismissive of bodybuilders: they were too effete, preening, egotistical and un-athletic. But, having said that, he worshiped the “power bodybuilders” as exemplified by Reg Park and Bill Pearl.

First and foremost, Mac’s goal was to become strong. The key to transforming into the idealized alpha male was to grow dramatically stronger. Everything flowed from strength; in order to grow stronger, Mac championed the strategy of getting bigger. How did a man grow bigger and stronger? He first and foremost lifted weights in a very specific and disciplined fashion. Secondly, the acolyte purposefully ate a massive amount of food. The goal was to lift weights hard, heavy, often and with incredible training intensity, or “effort,” as he called it. To “support” the intense lifting Mac wanted athletes to eat big and eat often. The emphasis was on protein but his nutritional approach was the “seafood diet,” i.e. see food, eat it. When it came to packing on muscle size, intense lifting and intense eating will grow a body.

He was also a huge proponent of rest, and deep sleep. He rightly believed that if a man shatters himself to the required degree in weight training—lifting long and often—food and rest are needed to recover and grow. The entire growth equation was simple: lift, eat, sleep, grow. Genius.

Mac’s strategy was lift hardcore and eat like a ravenous animal—purposefully and repeatedly, unapologetically… What a profoundly fun, easy and delightful philosophy for a young man to follow! Eat as many calories as possible from the time you get up until the time you go to bed. Protein was favored over all nutrients; McCallum had one article entitled, “Protein is King! But other calories were welcome too”. One particularly awesome Strength & Health article circa 1966, but not a Mac column, described the successful “bulk up” strategy of an air force sergeant stationed in a hut by himself at the North Pole monitoring the missile-detecting DEW line. He had a 500-pound set of weights, unlimited amounts of food, and nothing to do for six straight months in 1965. His inspired tale told of how he spent his time: he lifted weights daily in marathon sessions, and why not? There was nothing else to do! He actually had some metabolism-spiking cardio activity as each day he had to slog around outside in sub-zero temperatures and 60 mph winds for hours each and every day. Then he would come inside, eat like a starving wolf, and sleep for as long and a soundly as he liked. The radio was his only company. Six months later he came back to civilization having gained 100 pounds. That man was a hero to me—I longed to be sent to Greenland, exiled with my books, LP records, weights and unlimited amounts of delicious food.

As a stud high school athlete, I ate two lunches and drank four pints of milk for less than a dollar. Being an alpha male leader of boys, I routinely had food offerings from other students dropped off in front of me. Whatever class followed lunch I predictably went narcoleptic. I was forcefully morphing my body. I engaged in lots of aerobic sports activities which kept my metabolism kicking. The lifting built muscle and the copious calories supported recovery and growth. Shot full of teen testosterone and training hard enough to trigger hypertrophy, I grew muscle—lots of muscle. I was burning thousands of calories in sports activities and eating thousands of calories of all types. I had hit upon a metabolic nirvana. I inadvertently combined my immersion into hardcore weight training with a hormonal growth spurt manifested by dramatically elevated levels of testosterone. The results were immediate and sensational. By age 14, I was a regional weightlifting champion. By age 17, I weighed 200-pounds at 8% body fat. I set my first national records and won my first national championships. Only awful grades prevented me from attending a Division I school on a football scholarship. All of my progress was rooted in the profound teachings of Mac.

Forced Evolution

The goal was forced evolution; we would morph ourselves by exerting our iron will. We would faithfully combine copious and indiscriminant consumption of calories with hardcore weight training. We sought to morph from human to inhuman, from normal into abnormal, from forgettable into gargantuan. We would not become another cog in societal machinery; we sought distinction from our fellow man. We were of the warrior caste. This martial mentality dug its talons deep into me, and by the time I was 14 years old I had been into the hardcore progressive resistance scene for nearly four years. I took my training cues from heavyweights like Bill Pearl, Norbert Schemansky, Reg Park, Paul Anderson, John Grimek, Bill Starr, Terry Todd, Tommy Suggs, Pat Casey and Morris Weisbrott—not in person, but through the pithy, informative, no-bullshit, all-man training articles untainted by any whiff of commercialism.

The Mac Daddy communicator was Mac: a folksy writer who made his bones by engineering his own radical physical transformation. Mac was both the curator and repository of the cutting-edge philosophic protocols of the day. Yet he was no dry academic; he taught his lessons using a storyteller’s approach. Like an Iron Aesop, he beguiled us while relating profundities.

“Nobody knew much about squats twenty odd years ago. {Written in 1965} Nobody bothered with them and bodybuilding standards were way down. If you had a fifteen-inch arm you looked like the village blacksmith and a 40-inch chest would bring out the beast in your old lady…you can solve all of your muscle and size problems with squats alone. You can make gains you never dreamed of before. You can build unbelievable size and power.”

Prose like that put me on the squat bandwagon right then and there. Fifty years later, I can tell you that everything Mac said about squats was and is true: mastery of squats opens the door to everything of value in resistance training. McCallum pointed his acolytes down the right pathway on a dozen interrelated topics. In his “Keys to Progress” article, “The Time Factor”, he inadvertently outlined the generalized workout schematic I would use for the next half century…

“There aren’t many exercises in this {resistance} training program. Work hard on every one. Work out three times a week—no more! Don’t touch the weights at all on your in-between days. When you finish your workout, take a shower and forget all about weight training until your next training day. Get plenty of sleep and rest and eat lots of good food.”

Mac had Boy Scout earnestness, a lack of irony and a great, Mark Twain-like sense of humor. His lessons were all about building power and how power begets muscle. The idea of morphing from whatever you are into a muscle monster has motivated men for eons. McCallum’s modus operandi was purposeful primitivism: Mac was the first one to get us to stress the 5-rep set in all our exercises. I am not quite sure how or why he came to the conclusion that 5-reps strikes the perfect balance between low rep power and torque acquisition, but per usual he was prophetic. I think it no accident that “the five” became universally practiced in powerlifting. Mac’s was the first to say, “Men, seriously, concentrate on 5-rep sets in all the big movements.”

He was a big fan (deservedly) of Reg Park and the preference for the 5-rep set might have originated with the Englishman. Other possibilities include Maurice Jones or Bill Pearl. Bill loved 6-rep sets, a miniscule yet significant differentiation. The mystery of Mac and the 5-rep set was buried with him—all I can attest to is that based on his advice (which we slavishly adhered to) we began subsisting on 5-rep sets in squats, overhead presses, bench press, deadlift and power cleans. Our Olympic lifts used lower reps and our arm work used higher reps. He wrote in an era before there were warning labels on cigarette packs, seat belts in cars, computers or access to information we now take for granted in this day and age. This makes the rightness (to this day) of his prognostications all the more impressive. If you’d like to read the collected works of Mac, Randy Strossen at Iron Mind has collected all the Keys to Progress columns and placed them sequentially between two covers of a book. Genius.

***

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.

Norbert Schemansky: World & Olympic Champion, Transitional Strength Figure, Mentor to My Mentor…

By 10 Comments

How it was done: Norb lays back, stands partially erect in photo three, before laying back a second time as shown in photo four. He eventually pressed 420 using this style.
How it was done: Norb lays back, stands partially erect in photo three, before laying back a second time as shown in photo four. He eventually pressed 420 using this style.

The press photo sequence above is of Ski pressing 396 at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games where he went on to take the bronze medal. He stood 5’11” and in this photo weighed a rock hard 260 pounds. At his awesome peak he was capable of a 420 press, a 370 snatch and a 460-pound clean and jerk. He could squat 650 for reps. Norb was the prototypical modern power athlete, both physiologically and psychologically. We want to relate (and embellish) a strength parable that was first told in Strength & Health magazine in 1966 by Bill Starr. The tale bears retelling because the lessons it aimed to teach are still valid in 2015.

The year is 1966 and a young trainee approached Norbert Schemansky—world and Olympic champion—with great trepidation. The Polish-American lifter from Detroit was infamous for brusqueness; he did not suffer fools lightly, particularly if he was interrupted when training. And at the moment Ski was training and not in a particularly jovial mood. The setting was the venerable and ancient York gym on a typical Saturday. Most every Saturday in the 50s and 60s, a mini-Olympic weightlifting competition was conducted in the York gym. The public was welcome and you could see a veritable cavalcade of national and world champion weightlifters in action. Lifting acolytes from around the country made their way to this American lifting equivalent of the Haj in Mecca. The vast majority of the onlookers were lifters seeking tips and tactics that would improve their own weightlifting efforts.

On this particular day, Norb was midway through the overhead press portion of his extended workout. An 18-year-old regional weightlifting champion had driven to York with two training partners. The young men were positively enthralled and agog, absorbing new data about lifting that they would use in their own herculean efforts; they could barely wait to return home and put into practice all the new training protocols and lifting techniques they had gleaned and observed. Our earnest protagonist knew that he and his pals would have to leave for home in the next hour in order to return in time to meet their parental curfews.

The youngster was bursting at the seams to ask Schemansky some pointed questions about tactics and training. The problem was Ski had been training for a long time and looked as if he might continue for quite a while longer. Under normal circumstances, the clean-cut young man would never bother Ski, or any other elite lifter while they trained. A training session was sacred, and amongst the Iron Elite interrupting the sacrosanct training atmosphere with mindless blather was considered sacrilege.

The youngster was impaled on the horns of an irresolvable dilemma: interrupt the fearsome Schemansky’s workout and risk incurring the legendary wrath—he’d been known to get physical with those who irritated him—or miss the opportunity to ask Ski questions. If his burning questions were left unanswered, it would haunt him forever. Summoning up his courage, the young lifter took in a sharp breath and strode to where the champ sat between sets on a steel folding chair.

Ski caught the youngster approaching him out of the corner of his eye and thought, “Oh Hell no!” He mumbled and muttered under his breath; he knew what was about to happen. Schemansky was a month out from competing at the American National Championships; his last major competition had been the 1964 Olympic games, where he’d taken the 3rd place bronze medal behind the legendary Soviet world and Olympic champions Yuri Vlasov and newcomer Leonid Zhabotinsky. An uncontrollable scowl spread across his already dour face as the well-built boy pulled up to a halt four feet in front of Ski and stood wordlessly at attention. After a long silent pause, the youngster said in a single breath…

“Mr. Schemansky, Sir! I am sorry to interrupt you, my press has been stuck at 205 for the past six months. Could you be so kind as to give me some advice about how I might increase my press?”

Ski exhaled a cooling breath and proceeded to talk himself out of the trees; he was NOT going to go off, explode, or go ape-shit on this earnest young man. Ski was trying to turn over a new leaf and would not resort to cussing this kid out—as he would have in the not-too-distant-past. Truth be known, as Ski looked the kid up and down like an expensive side-dish he hadn’t ordered—despite wanting to hate all interlopers—he got a good vibe from the boy.

Norbert takes 3rd place at the 1960 Olympic games: A fantastic-looking Yuri Vlasov wins for Russia with America’s Jim Bradford in second place. Bradford lived and lifted in Washington, DC. He and my mentor Hugh “Huge” Cassidy would periodically train together. Bradford could clean and strict press 400 pounds. What a great trio.
Norbert takes 3rd place at the 1960 Olympic games: A fantastic-looking Yuri Vlasov wins for Russia with America’s Jim Bradford in second place. Bradford lived and lifted in Washington, DC. He and my mentor Hugh “Huge” Cassidy would periodically train together. Bradford could clean and strict press 400 pounds. What a great trio.

Ski had a secondary motive: despite the pure joy he derived from going off on a civilian, any emotional outbursts—while terrifically satisfying (a guilty pleasure)—would derail and destroy the workout. He had eleven training sessions before leaving for the national championships and every single session needed to count; each week he had to show tangible improvement.

He decided to be tolerant and understanding with this clean-cut polite boy—no yelling, profanity, or rebuffs; he would avoid ‘leaking’ any of his precious emotional psych. Plus there was something oddly endearing about the bearing, manner, and presence of the youngster who stood in front of him. The boy was deferential and reverential, akin to a young soldier addressing a general. Ski always and forever had a place in his heart for the military man so he grunted a reply…

“FIRST OFF it is RUDE to interrupt a man prepping for a national championship—WHAT is so GODDAMNED IMPORTANT!”

Schemansky was pleased with himself. He considered that a measured response and quite restrained, compared to previous “alleged” incidents. The boy literally quaked, shook, and was on the verge of peeing himself; his training partners slunk backwards four steps. Norbert then switched gears and said,

“Son, if you want to improve your press—PRESS!”

Ski deliberately made eye contact with the youngster. A look of confusion and consternation spread across the boy’s face. Puzzled, but elated by the fact that he had not been physically assaulted, the youngster decided to press his luck and posed a second question.

“Mr. Schemansky, sir! Any suggestions on how to improve my snatch would be greatly appreciated. I have been stalled…”

Ski decided to reinforce a point. “Do I look like a give a Tinker’s damn if your snatch is stalled?” It was a rhetorical question. “If you want to improve your snatch THEN SNATCH!”

The rugged champion leaned back in his chair and drilled his eyes into the youngster until the boy winced and wilted. Yet, instead of skittering away, the youngster gathered himself admirably; he knew he was pressing his luck, but plunged onward anyway. “How about my clean and jerk, sir? Please sir, my jerk stinks and yours is great—no, incredible—what can I do to improve my clean and jerk, sir?

“More Clean and Jerks, son!” Norb was warming to the kid.

“Squat?”

This actually made Norbert laugh. The boy had big balls. He looked at the boy and with a quick jerk of the head wordlessly indicated that the audience was over. The boy, being smart and perceptive got that he was being dismissed. He wanted to express his gratitude for the great man’s time.

“Thank you sir.” He extended a limp, damp hand that hung there suspended in space for the longest time before Ski sighed and engulfed the boy’s hand with his own callused hand and gave the youngster a real man’s handshake, a small jolt, just a taste of his raw power, transmitted through a crushing handshake. The boy winced in pain. He would remember those 15 minutes for the rest of his life.

50 years later the strength elite would still talk about and marvel at the Zen wisdom and sparse economy of Norb’s precise answers. There was (and remains) so much truth in his advice.

Ski spikes 440. He came back from back surgery to snatch a world record
Ski spikes 440. He came back from back surgery to snatch a world record

There is a famous Zen Koan: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The answer is a hard slap across the face. The student poses the question and the Roshi slaps the taste out of the acolyte’s mouth. Often that unexpected slap would jolt the Zen student out of his conscious mind, allowing him to attain the level of consciousness that cannot be reasoned out. Ski’s irreducible answers were akin to the Zen face slap.

Truly, as Ski succinctly noted, if a man is serious about improving his press, snatch, clean and jerk, squat, deadlift or any other major resistance training exercise—the best possible way to improve is to do that specific lift—repeatedly. Remember Aristotle’s truism: “We are what we do repeatedly.” Sport specificity applies to strength training movements. As my old lifting coach Hugh Cassidy would say, “The best way to improve in any lift is to do that lift and do it a whole lot.”

Further, the best assistance exercises (adjunct lifts) for any of the three powerlifts most closely resemble the core lift. Hence, the best assistance exercise for bench press is the bench press with a wide grip or a narrow grip; in keeping with Cassidy’s timeless axiom, variations on flat benching are superior assistance exercises to say, incline bench press or decline bench press.

There is tremendous wisdom hidden deep within Schemansky and Cassidy’s pithy pronouncements. Schemansky classic power strategy for improving strength could be described as “doing fewer things better.” This old school philosophy could be summarized as, “Perform the major lifts and do them often—and do very little else.” Old pros knew that a universe of variety and variation exists within the core four lifts and their assistance-lift brethren.

In this day and age, it is very chic and fashionable to avoid doing the lifts. The prevailing wisdom in our information age is that you can improve the squat, bench or deadlift without doing the actual lifts. You can get just as strong, stronger in fact, by using bands, boards, chains, board presses, box squats—anything to avoid the harsh starkness of that most primal and ancient of strategies… “Just do the lifts.” Ski and Cassidy (and John Kuc, Jon Vole, Kaz, Pacifico, and all the other all-time greats of the 1960s and 1970s) would do the three Olympic lifts or the three powerlifts—and little if anything else. It would never occur to these powerhouse men NOT to do the core lifts.

How did we arrive at this upside-down bizarro world? It think it is no coincidence that the physiques of Doug Young, Kaz, Gamble, Cash, Roger Estep, and all the other muscled-to-the-max men of yesteryear blow away the physiques of today’s “smarter” athletes. The ancients bore the weight, embraced the sticking points, and did full and deep lifts. They performed the ultra-basics over and over and over and over, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. How do you get really good at doing the core lifts? By doing them repeatedly, world without end, amen.

Perfect pull technique: Man mountain Roger Estep at the exact instant he launches a 744-pound conventional deadlift. He uses leg power to break the bar from the floor and will fire his hip-hinge (purposefully held in reserve) as the bar approaches his knees. Estep stood 5’6” and lifted in the 198-pound class. A nuclear engineer from West Virginia, he died early from cancer. He had the prototypical power physique; the kind that can only be built by a man who has mastered all three power lifts.
Perfect pull technique: Man mountain Roger Estep at the exact instant he launches a 744-pound conventional deadlift. He uses leg power to break the bar from the floor and will fire his hip-hinge (purposefully held in reserve) as the bar approaches his knees. Estep stood 5’6” and lifted in the 198-pound class. A nuclear engineer from West Virginia, he died early from cancer. He had the prototypical power physique; the kind that can only be built by a man who has mastered all three power lifts.

Lift performance, the classical report card, has been inflated through the use of supportive gear, the mono-lift and corrupted judging. It appeared that lifts were skyrocketing and all as a result of this get-better-at-the-lift-without-doing-the-lift philosophy. Actually, if you strip the modern lifter of his lifting apparel, make him do below parallel squats and bench presses without wearing the bench shirt, then guess what? The modern “athlete” is weaker than the ancients. Talk about an inconvenient truth…

Ski and Cassidy, Rigert and Pacifico, Mel Hennessey and Roger Estep knew that in order to get really good at a thing, you needed to do that thing, endlessly. By doing the lifts to near exclusion, they built physiques and levels of raw power and strength which are unrivaled and unmatched to this day. Those lessons have been lost to history: in our age, everyone is looking for the next new thing. However in the universe of radical physical transformation—more muscle, more strength, more power, radically reduced body fat percentile—the answers lie in the deep and primal past.

The smart trainee needs to look backwards for breakthrough strength strategies; back to the ancients and their “plain vanilla” training strategies that relied more on effort and degree of difficulty than in sophisticated user-friendliness. These stark, barebones training strategies discovered by the ancients need to be resurrected. Those who tell you that modern strength and power strategies trump what came before are false prophets speaking with forked tongues. It is time we destroyed the golden calf of delusion and get back on the Old School good foot: to get super-strong become super-simplistic.

Ski was “the sophisticated brute,” fast as lighting on his split cleans and split snatches. Here he pulls 330—look at the balletic athletic poetry of this bottom position. He would whip the snatch bar to sternum height, then dive under the barbell in an eye-blink, attaining this precarious position at the low point. From here he would “recover” and stand erect. Ski snatched a 363-pound world record at age 38.
Ski was “the sophisticated brute,” fast as lighting on his split cleans and split snatches. Here he pulls 330—look at the balletic athletic poetry of this bottom position. He would whip the snatch bar to sternum height, then dive under the barbell in an eye-blink, attaining this precarious position at the low point. From here he would “recover” and stand erect. Ski snatched a 363-pound world record at age 38.

Norb Schemansky was born in 1924. The Detroit native learned his fundamentals early. He came into his own during the post-war period. Norbert stayed at the top of the strength world from the 1940s all the way into the late 1960s. He cut his teeth on simplistic pre-war training templates and over time modified them; he grew larger and stronger as he got older. Norb set the world record in the snatch, 363lbs at age 38, some twenty years into his competitive career. Norb adapted and adopted, yet he always retained the simplistic sophistication that earmarked his training strategies. Even as he matured, he never lost his pre-war, depression-era work ethic.

Norb become the first weightlifter in history to earn four Olympic medals, despite missing the 1956 Olympic games due to back problems. Norbert won an Olympic gold medal; a silver medal and two bronze medals spread over four games. He won the world championship three times and won the Pan American Games. He was the Olympic champion in 1952. He set an all-time world record in the snatch in 1962 when he split-snatched a seemingly miraculous 363-pounds. Norb set 75 national, world, and Olympic records.

According to his biographer Richard Back, Schemansky related that the most impressive feat of strength he ever witnessed took place at the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games during a rare joint training session when the American and the Russian lifters were both in the same training hall at the same time. Trench-coated KGB secret police lined the walls of the training hall just in case a desperate communist athlete dared try and dash for sanctuary and freedom. This stuff was real and Ski saw the Big Red sport machine up close and personal for decades.

Ski’s number one competitor in 1952 was the 180-pound Soviet champion Gregory Novak. Novak held the press record at 309 pounds and during the joint training session the stumpy, thick Russian effortlessly pressed 281 pounds, and then—no doubt for Norbert’s benefit (Novak was well aware that Schemansky was watching)—pulled a psych maneuver that blew Ski’s mind.

“First he presses 281 and I am impressed with the strictness and lack of backbend. I mean back then (1952) a press was still a press.” Norb then related, “Then, just for the hell of it, Novak lowers the 281 pound weight down behind his neck and presses it three times! I’m thinking, I better have a damn good snatch and jerk because I surer than hell was not going to beat this beast in a pressing contest.”

Rare photo of Russian powerhouse Gregory Novak; this photo was taken with his two sons 20 years after his retirement. Reportedly, even at age 50, he was still capable of a strict 130 kilo (286 pound) clean and press.
Rare photo of Russian powerhouse Gregory Novak; this photo was taken with his two sons 20 years after his retirement. Reportedly, even at age 50, he was still capable of a strict 130 kilo (286 pound) clean and press.

Schemansky struggled with life outside of weightlifting. He stayed in Detroit and was reduced to working minimum wage jobs to make ends meet between national and world championships. While Big Daddy Hoffman would cover the expense of sending Norb to the national and world championships, between those trips and excursions Ski had to pump gas and scrub toilets. It became so bad that Sports Illustrated magazine ran a feature article called, “Looking for a Lift,” an expose’ on the hard times that had befallen one of America’s premier Olympic athletes.

This wasn’t some retrospective on how some former great was now laid low—Norbert was on the national, world and Olympic teams at the time, winning and placing at the highest levels of the sport. In the SI magazine photo, Norb stood desolate, wire scrub brush in hand in front of a commode he was about to scrub. This was a MAN, a man with a wife and kids who in his spare time was kicking ass internationally for his country. At home he was a pathetic nobody, always two paychecks away from disaster, destitution and homelessness.

Despite the feature in SI describing his plight, no sugar daddy, organization or corporation stepped forward to offer Ski any relief. In nearly every retrospective written on him, the phrase “bitter” enters into the article. Ski was once asked what he was most bitter about and he wryly commented he was “bitterest about always being portrayed as bitter.” It was yet another one of his barbed comments about an athletic career that was nothing less than astounding contrasted with compensation nothing short of pathetic.

Indirectly, Norbert heavily influenced the fledgling sport of powerlifting. Norbert trained in Detroit with a young engineer named Glen Middleton. When Bechtel transferred Middleton to Washington, DC, Glenn sought out and began training with Hugh Cassidy. Hugh was taken with Middleton’s urbane sophistication and his intellectual approach towards strength training. Hugh, another intellectual with a first-rate brain, appropriated the essence of the Schemansky approach—a simplified exercise menu, ferocity in training, singularity of purpose, preplanning (a revolutionary concept at the time) and the idea that over time a lifter needed to grow more muscle.

Ski rose to national prominence as a 180-pound lifter and finished out his career weighing a massive yet lean 260 pounds. Hugh took the lessons learned from Ski, via Glenn, added his own empirical-based technical and tactical modifications and won national and world championships. In turn, he mentored national and world champions. Cassidy’s teachings were passed to me and I passed them along to others. In turn, I created world champion athletes who set all-time world records using these primal Ski/Cassidy techniques and tactics.

We need go back to the future and revisit the methods of Iron Immortals; their simplistic, primal approach towards transformational strength training is so much more effective and applicable for today’s time-pressed individual than the “revolutionary” power and strength methods pedaled by modern day fitness hucksters seeking to turn a profit. As my own cliché goes: There is no school like Old School.

***

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.

Kaizen and Strong Medicine

By 8 Comments

Kaizen Strong Medicine Lead Photo

Strong Medicine has over six hundred pages of text and illustrations that will dramatically change how you perceive nutrition, training, and how you can effectively manage the stressors in your lifestyle. The concepts and how they can be applied are laid out in such a manner that, with the some simple planning, discipline and implementation, you will have no choice but to be successful.  This blog post is going to provide you with some tools and strategies that you can use in order to implement the concepts presented in Strong Medicine in such a way that you will not only succeed, but will be able to do so with the least amount of stress possible.

Change… Sucks!

Making drastic changes in your life does not lead to dramatic results–it usually leads to dismal failure and a lot of brow beating! Anyone who has made a New Year’s resolution only to have it crumble within a matter of weeks (or in some cases, a matter of hours) knows that making changes (big or small) in your life is hard to do. Everyone starts out with good intentions and a wealth of willpower only to see the good intentions crumble and the willpower dissolve like a puff of smoke at the first impasse. With all of these bad past experiences surrounding change, I’m sure you’re convinced that you can’t make any changes in your life and might as well just quit now. Wrong! Just because you failed in the past doesn’t mean you’ll fail this time–especially if you are honest with yourself about the plans and tools you need to succeed. So… how do you begin making changes? The same way you’d eat an elephant–one bite at a time!

Kaizen = Continual Improvement   Kaizen Diagram

Kaizen is a Japanese term that has been borrowed by the business world. Roughly translated, it means “change for the better” or “continual improvement”. As a business major in college (many, many, many years ago) I learned about the concept of “Kaizen” and how it was successfully implemented in the Japanese automotive industry. Kaizen gave everyone–from the guy sweeping the floor to the VP in charge of making million dollar decisions–the power to change how things were done on a daily basis. In other words, the power was placed in the hands of those who could make the most difference. Since then, the concept of Kaizen has been applied to banking, healthcare, government and other areas where complicated processes need to be considered and improved to increase efficiency and consistent outcomes.

How does this apply to you and how will it impact the implementation of what you’ve learned from Strong Medicine? You need to develop a simple but effective plan for implementing the nutritional and training guidelines presented in Strong Medicine. Your plan should be created and executed in a way so that changes can be small, easily managed, and built upon. Remember that the best plans are the simplest effective ones that also have the latitude for change and modification on the fly.

NOTE: Understand that these plans are best implemented one at a time. Trying to make too many changes too soon and with too much accompanying stress will make this process a lot harder than necessary. With this in mind, I feel that the concepts behind Kaizen are the best common-sense approaches to implementing any nutrition, training or lifestyle modifications.

“Eat like an Adult”

Strong Medicine goes into great detail about what and how you should eat–and how those choices are will effect you over the short and long term. There are many scientific theories and big words involved–which can be daunting to some people–but you will need to absorb it to understand what Dr. Chris and Marty are trying to do. They successfully make many complex ideas and concepts simple to grasp, and that’s vitally important for the subjects of nutrition and training. I admire people who can take complex problems and explain solutions in simple terms everyone can understand.  For example, when Dan John said, “Eat like an Adult” during a lecture a couple years ago, it really stuck with me. His comment was simple, direct and to the point. Those four words make choosing, preparing, and eating the right foods a lot easier! I know those four words help me get in the right mindset when I’m preparing, ordering, and even shopping for food.

Start with the Beginning     Small Daily Improvements

“Eating like an Adult” will help you succeed with the Strong Medicine guidelines. But first you need to know where you stand. The easiest (and the most eye-opening) method I know is to keep a food log for ten days. (Before you start grumbling and groaning, hear me out–the food log will give you some great intel into what’s going on and how to fix it!) Keeping a food log is as simple as folding a piece of paper into sections, then writing down everything that goes in your mouth. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, drinks, etc.–it all goes in the food log. Once you have all this information you’ll be able to create a baseline for what kind of food you are eating, how much you are eating, and what is missing from your diet. Remember, keep this as simple as possible and don’t stress out about what you are writing down. It’s just information you’ll use to create a plan!

Once you have ten days of information, what do you do with it? First, find the gaps in your nutrition. For example you might notice that during those 10 days the only time you ate any vegetables (not counting the lettuce and tomato on your hamburger) was with dinner. Over ten dinners you had a handful of salads, a couple baked potatoes (not to mention French fries), and several servings of broccoli. If that was the case, then introducing more vegetables into your evening meals AND including them as part of breakfast and lunch would be in order.

Getting Started

Does this sound like a big step and a major hassle? Not really! It just takes a little forethought and preparation and you’ll have it nailed. Prepare by having the food you need on hand, and by creating and using shopping lists. Your shopping list will guide you through the grocery store. For the most part you’ll stay in the periphery, where the vegetables, meat and dairy products are found. (Stay away from the middle of the store where the Mountain Dew and Fritos are located!) Grab your list and shop either once a week or several times a week, whichever is more comfortable or convenient for you. Remember, you’re only shopping for the things on your list! NOTE: if you don’t have a shopping list, you can Google “shopping list” for plenty to choose from and modify as needed.

Now that you have all this food in the kitchen, what do you do with it? Well, you will need to start making your own meals based on the nutrition gaps in your food log. It will be easy for the most part–in the above example, we simply need to increase the amount of veggies throughout the day. We need to make this change as simple as possible. Think about this: it only takes a minute or two to cut up some peppers or cucumbers and throw them into a plastic bag or Tupperware for later in the day. Grab some veggies and prep them for the day while you’re standing around waiting for your coffee to brew in the morning!

I can hear the whining and moaning already! “Veggies for breakfast and lunch? How am I going to do that?” Easily! Just add vegetables you like to meals you are already eating. Still confused? Here’s some ideas to help you jump start the process!

How to add vegetables to breakfast:

  • Add avocado and salsa to your scrambled eggs
  • While frying your eggs, sauté some spinach in bacon grease and serve it on the side or as a bed for the eggs
  • Warm up some sauerkraut for a tangy side (or kimchi for something spicy) with your eggs
  • Brown onions, tomatoes and mushrooms and make an omelet
  • Slice up some hard boiled eggs with ripe tomatoes
  • Slice red or yellow peppers, clean out any seeds and whatnot. Put the slices in a frying pan and add an egg inside the gap for peppers and eggs over easy
  • Grab a container full of sliced veggies (that you prepared the night before) and a container of yogurt for a quick and easy breakfast on the go
  • Chop bacon into bite-size pieces and toss them in a frying pan. Add onions and peppers then simmer everything together. Drain the excess oil, then toss the bacon and vegetables on top of scrambled or poached eggs

Small Steps Lead to Big Results

I guarantee that if you take a little time and mental energy and apply it to filling in the gaps of your nutrition, it will pay huge benefits in the short and long term. I’m not proposing massive changes. On the contrary, I think the best and most effective way to ensure your success is by making small changes that you can easily adjust to before moving onto the next step. Remember what you learned in Strong Medicine about how stress (in all its forms) adversely affects the body. Adding stress by making big changes in your nutrition will be counter-productive. Keep the concepts of Kaizen in the forefront of your mind–small changes leading to big results–and you will not stress out at all!

NOTE: The training for life guidelines will be in part two of this blog post. In the meantime, I want you to start improving your nutrition. Small increases in nutrients will have a major impact on how you feel and move. By getting your nutrition plan in place now, you will establish the foundation for a successful training program.

 ***

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

 

Editor’s Note:

Where the Strong Medicine book is the template for lifestyle change and taking charge of your health, Mike has the beginnings of a Strong Medicine Operational Manual with this first post. The philosophy of Kaizen melds so well with our philosophy of lifestyle change that I am kicking myself for not including it the book, but this is why I try to surround myself with talented people like Mike Krivka.

In keeping with the mission of the blog for a two-way exchange of information, please share your perspective on lifestyle change in keeping with the Kaizen philosophy. Fantastic job, Mike!