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Strong Medicine Questions and Answers

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Chris Hardy Strong Medicine Questions and Answers

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

HRV and Stress diagram

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

trainingprescription

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

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

 

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

 

The Stress Cup and Allostatic Load

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The Stress Cup Metaphor

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

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

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

Allostatic Load and Daily Training

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

Training Stimulus Continuum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stress Cup Size Chart

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

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

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

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

Hormesis

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

Hormesis Quote

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

Hormetic Window Chart

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

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

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

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Folding Inner Space part three Mark Chaillet

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

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

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

The Inner Astronaut
“An exercise-induced acid trip”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OctoberOutdoors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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Folding Inner Space Part II Lead Photo

Hormonal Nitrous Oxide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

The Stress Cup and Training

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Paul Britt, RKC Team Leader with Dynamometer

How full is your stress cup? For those that have not read the incredible book, Strong Medicine, the stress cup is a great way to view your overall stress levels. The cup can only hold so much before it overfills and starts to spill. If your cup is running over then you are not able to train effectively and other areas of your life will suffer also.

As Dr. Hardy writes, there are a lot of ways to check on your stress and oxidative inflammation levels. You need to know what your cholesterol is, the levels of associated lipid profiles, and markers of inflammation. If you do not know your levels, you do not know where to go and what your end goal should be. But, you cannot check these numbers on a daily basis. I personally chose to have lab work done about every 4 months or so. That time frame corresponds with the 120 day life cycle of the typical red blood cell. I have found that any changes I have made will be detected and quantifiable in that time frame.

But, you also need to use something that will allow a daily check of your stress cup. A little background before I go any further. My stress cup is pretty full most days. I have three kids, run my gym and training business and I am a full time student in Parker University’s Doctor of Chiropractic program. I leave my house at 5:15am and often return home at 7pm. My days are long, and at 47, tend to be pretty stressful. My school goal is to maintain a 3.2GPA and my current training goal has me training for the Beast Tamer, 48kg kettlebell pistol, press and pullup. I had to find something that would allow me to check my stress level on a daily basis to maximize my training and not add any extra stress or lengthy procedures.

Dr. Hardy spoke about Heart Rate Variability at the Dragon Door Health and Strength Conference as an indicator of the health of our autonomic nervous system. To live the Strong Medicine way we want the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) to be the main operating system in our daily life. It is the “rest and digest” system. However, in today’s society, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is often running at a low volume in the background. The everyday stresses that we allow to affect us keep the SNS pump primed and stress hormones continually trickling into the body. The SNS keeps the stress cup filling all day long and that affects training.

I looked into Heart Rate Variability (HRV) as a method to measure my stress levels for training. A quick, easy explanation of Heart Rate Variability looks at the spacing between heart beats. The more regular the space is between beats, the more the sympathetic nervous system is piloting the ship. You want there to be some variability between beats as that means the parasympathetic nervous system is in charge of everything. The drawback for me was the need to wear a chest strap to measure pulse rate during sleep as HRV is measured upon waking and prior to getting out of bed. It added a little to my stress cup as I did not sleep well with the monitor strap around my chest at night. Sleep is one of my cup fillers that I am working on as it is, but that is for another article.

Dr. Hardy mentioned grip strength as a possible tool to measure the stress cup on a daily basis. There are studies that have shown that a decrease in grip strength is correlated with strokes, heart attacks and overall longevity—it made sense that it would also be an indicator of Central Nervous System health. I also liked the fact that it was a quick and easy check that I could do daily before I trained.

I did some research on the subject and found some others had used grip strength for the same purpose with pretty good results. What I did not find was a consensus on numbers. Everything I read indicated that you need your baseline number, but everything else was across the board in regards to what constituted having a full stress cup. Dynamometers are pretty cheap online, so I bought one and began to play with it.

My initial baseline was an average of three different readings after two days of rest. I measured, waited five minutes, measured and repeated one more time to develop my numbers. The first training session using the dynamometer was the next day. My grip strength was dead-on my baseline and it was a great session, my press and pistol were really strong that day. I monitored my grip strength on a daily basis while using a program based on Easy Strength to train. My testing procedure is the same every time, I perform it in the same position and close to the same time that I initially tested. I try to keep the outside variables at a minimum. I feel that this is the best way to get an accurate reading.

I found on days that grip strength was at baseline or higher, I had incredible training sessions. In fact on days that it was higher, I was using a 44kg kettlebell for my lifts. But what about those days below the baseline? I tried to push through a few of those days to see what the result would be. The days that I tried to push hard, even though my grip strength was not at baseline, were rough. I did not make my numbers and I would lose a few days of training.

I looked at my daily numbers and came up with a guide that works pretty well.

  • Baseline: Green light to train heavy
  • 3-5% decrease: Yellow light, medium day
  • 6-8% decrease: Light or recovery day
  • 10% or more decrease: Take a break and rest

Remember, this is a quick test to determine how full your stress cup is—it is just a piece of the puzzle. You need to know your numbers on blood work, body composition, and determine as many other numbers as possible (such as amount of sleep) to help you maximize your health and avoid overfilling your stress cup.

***

RKC Team Leader Paul Britt has been an RKC kettlebell instructor since 2006. He is currently earning his Doctor of Chiropractic, while still training clients at Britt’s Training Systems, his award-winning Hardstyle Kettlebell Training Facility in Rockwall, Texas. Paul is a Certified Kettlebell Functional Movement Specialist (CK-FMS) and PCC Instructor and has worked with  the top Chiropractors in North Texas. Please visit his website brittstrainingsystems.com or Britt’s Training Systems on Facebook for more information.

East Meets West

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East Meets West

I’ve been waiting a very long time to write this blog post. Something near and dear to me, the state of the medical situation not only in the United States but everywhere in the world should create concern for all of this planet’s inhabitants. The answers are out there. We have them all. Unfortunately, money and egos have kept all of our citizens under the thumb of their illnesses and the medicine conversation feels more like an intentional tap-dance.

The good news is, this will not become some sort of political rant. It won’t become a push to convince people that all western doctors are corrupt and are only out to make a buck. I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but this is not going to be one of those either. Very much on the contrary. We live in an age where our doctors are developing technology, perfecting techniques and blazing trails like we have never seen before. And I can say with confidence that 99% of our doctors are true healers whose intentions are to eradicate disease and cure their patients.

I spent the weekend of August 15/16 at Dragon Door’s inaugural Health and Strength Conference. A gathering of some of the most forward thinking health, strength and fitness experts in the country, our intention for the weekend was to inform and celebrate the ideas of these exemplary people. I traveled alone, and looked forward to meeting the presenters and make some connections to continue my own growth as a coach and doctor. First up on Saturday morning, Dr. Chris Hardy. Within 20 minutes of his 90 minute presentation, I couldn’t sit still. The information he was sharing was so on point, his approach to health was so progressive and his delivery of the information was presented in a digestible way where even a high school sophomore could understand the value. By the end my head was spinning and my level of anxiousness and excitement to speak with Dr. Hardy was tangible. My good friend Mike Krivka introduced us, we saw the value of partnering, and now we are here.

My name is Chris Holder and I am the head of strength and conditioning at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA. I am a Senior RKC for Dragon Door but what makes me more useful for the Strong Medicine family is, I’m also a Doctor of Medical Qigong. One of the four major pillars in Traditional Chinese Medicine, my expertise lies in the study and manipulation of the bioenergetics of the patient to create healing. My training specialized in oncology and energetic psychology but my doctoral thesis was directed at athletic performance and how exposure to Qigong will give a competitive athlete an unfair advantage come game time.

Cal Poly Qigong

Since graduating in 2012, I have been on a self-imposed island testing some of my theories on my athletes with stunning success. We’ve been testing Qigong’s impact on flow state induction, concentration and focus during competition, accelerated healing in athletic injury and increased recovery as it relates to training. In the winter of 2015, I embarked on a formal study with my assistant and RKC Team Leader, Chris White, to investigate the potential benefits of a daily Qigong practice and its effects on strength gains. After 8 weeks of training, we found significance in nearly every single factor studied- and we had over 10,000 pieces of individual data at the conclusion. Years from now, I’m hoping, that this one specific study will be one of the propelling factors of moving mindful practices like Qigong into every locker room in America.

Enough about athletics and let’s talk about health. If you are reading this, you are likely an American or European born person whose health care system is firmly planted in western ideas. Great. You are the people who will benefit the most from reading this. Besides perhaps acupuncture, I will assume your familiarity with Eastern Medicine of any kind, but particularly Chinese Medicine, is limited at best. Awesome, you will extract the most from this article.

The differences between the western medical paradigm and the eastern medical set of ideas couldn’t be more different. When I was in medical school, I quickly realized I had to forfeit any notion of understanding what I was learning if passed through a western lens. They don’t match up in any way. Perhaps my greatest asset going into this study was an agreement I made with myself sitting out in front of the school building on night one. I made the deal that I was going to accept whatever I was being taught with no resistance whatsoever. A true “child’s mind” approach. This became enormously valuable from the onset because many of the ideas eastern medicine has challenge and even conflict with how a western trained doctor conducts business. I put up no fight whatsoever which helped expedite my understanding and quickly enhanced my abilities. I encourage you to do the same as you read.

Eastern medicine has been around for approximately 5,000 years. Compared to our western medical practices, which in contrast is a toddler in total years (around 150-200 years old), eastern philosophy is claimed to have been dated back before the written word. Medicine men, shamans and priests were credited for some of the fundamental practices that are still used in modern times.

Susan MeditatingTraditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is broken into four primary practices: Qigong (where my expertise resides); herbal medicine; acupuncture; and massage. Due to some feathers I have ruffled, I will qualify all of my medical knowledge to be isolated to the Qigong perspective only. I have done the herbs and the medical massage, and since I am not licensed to needle anyone, I have no experience with acupuncture from the provider’s vantage point. Lucky for you, the Qigong is not only the most interesting of the four, but also considered to be the mother of the other three, philosophically.

Please place your Eastern cap on now. All things in the universe are comprised of energy. The sun, your coffee cup, your dog, the water in your tub, the rocks in your backyard, your cell phone and your physical body are all-energy. Quantum physics supports this. At its fundamental roots, TCM is trying to restore the human body into perfect balance of Yin and Yang. Everyone is born with a special recipe of both (for the purposes of this blog we will say an even 50/50). When your balance has been established and all that is YOU is in harmony, the human machine thrives. Digestion, sleep, cellular regeneration, respiration, circulation, hormone balance, cognitive function, sexual performance, immune function… the list goes on and on. Imagine your body is a car that is not running well. You take it to the mechanic and he returns it to you tuned up and ready to go another 5,000 miles. When the Yin and Yang of your being is in balance, you are ready for another 5,000 miles.

Where the great divide between east and west begins (in my mind) is the way we approach health care and healing. Please let me explain. Here in the west we like to use the term “holistic”. It’s that all-encompassing word that implies there is an attempt to heal the body, the mind and in some cases, the spirit. Unfortunately, we have compartmentalized each component to the point where a true healing, under the above definition of holistic, would take around 8 different doctors, nutritionists, psychologists and ministers to achieve the desired effect.

In an eastern framework, the three (body/mind/spirit) are one. We’ve never separated the three. They are one system that work in rhythm to complete the human experience, to live a long, healthy abundant life. When a patient comes to me for my services, they are usually in fairly deep trouble. Because of the inherent obscurity of my practice, many of my patients are at the end of the road and at a stage where considering getting their affairs in order is recommended. Their team of doctors have performed the appropriate surgeries, prescribed all of the best drugs known and given this patient the most cutting edge care fathomable and yet, they are still declining. What gives?

What if I told you that in the current system of practice here in America, in many cases, is looking in the wrong place when it comes to healing? Let’s put together a hypothetical. Susan has just been diagnosed with breast cancer for a second time. She endured a lumpectomy, radiation and chemotherapy four years ago but is facing the same problem again. On paper, Susan has lived a very healthy charmed life. She’s happily married with three fantastic children. She has her dream job and is very successful within her thriving company. She’s not a smoker, her stress levels are as low as they can be, she eats a very healthy diet and exercises four times a week. Her support system is strong, she has a tight nucleus of loyal friends and has an incredible relationship with her family who all live nearby. She was surrounded by amazing doctors who followed protocol and now she and her medical team are considering a full mastectomy. Everyone is very hopeful for a full recovery this time but the entire team is mystified by the reoccurrence due to Susan’s lifestyle, demeanor and overall positive approach to life.

Five years ago Susan lost a pregnancy. It was hard on everyone, especially Susan. Her husband John was a rock and that amazing support system we mentioned above came to her side and helped her pick up the pieces. Susan is the posterchild of poise and perseverance and after a very short time away after losing the baby, she jumped back into life feet first. I mean let’s face it, she’s got three other children to take care of, a husband who couldn’t live without her and a company that needs her presence as much as possible. In doing so, she never gave herself a chance to fully grieve, if that is at all possible in this type of tragedy.

Unfortunately, her doctors will go more aggressive this time with both the surgeries and the drugs and Susan will be in a bigger fight than she ever imagined. In this case, her medical protocols are like taking a fishing pole and trying to catch the evenings dinner in a swimming pool. Yes, fish live in water… just not that water.

Chris Holder QigongFrom my perspective (the Qigong approach), we begin with the timeline in which the original diagnosis was made. We understand that the doctors have determined we are stage two. The mass has returned. But we are not interested in the mass itself… we are more concerned with its fuel source and origin or root cause. Where the disconnect resides with her current care is in the lack of understanding by her medical team of the emotional/spiritual versions that make up Susan (the entire person). When I’m treating a patient, I’m not just looking at their physical body or managing their physical symptoms. We are looking at the emotional and spiritual bodies as well (think of a holographic copy of that person that represents one of the three aspects of their being). In many cases (more than you might understand) the illness is in the emotional or spiritual body and simply manifesting in the physical body. The emotion of grief/sadness is assigned to the lungs from this perspective. Each of what we call the five Yin organs (Liver, Lungs, Kidneys, Spleen and Heart) are responsible for setting the energetic stage for the entire body. The motion and fluidity of the energy moving in the body keeps everything functioning normally. But, when Susan lost the baby, the overwhelming grief that accompanies an event like that created a thunderstorm of sorts of dank, stagnant energy within the lungs. Since Susan didn’t get to take the time to care for herself emotionally and chose to dive back into life, her grief was never resolved. Over time, or in this case, the following year, that storm sat into the lungs until on a nuclear level, gave birth to a flower. That flower manifested into her breast and this is where our original story began.

Even though her doctors jumped on things in time and were able to remove the tumor, the root system (that grief which energetically becomes prime soil for regrowth) is intact and will bear fruit once again… unless she sorts out her grief. With the help of a savvy psychotherapist and some high end energy work, her chances at beating this disease once and for all goes up exponentially. It’s the grief, the emotion that is the fuel for the illness. Think of Qigong and other mindful practices as the grand gardener of all chronic illnesses.

See, the primary problem with our healthcare system isn’t that one side is right and one side is wrong. I’ve said for years now that if the greatest minds of both sides could meet somewhere and sort out philosophy, fill gaps in one another’s approach, we would have a complete system of care. Even the side I am most aligned with, the eastern side, is saturated with ego, stubbornness and an unrelenting need to be right… so much so that they regularly stifle the information to contain the power of the medicine. I was fortunate to study with a person (Dr. Jerry Alan Johnson) who was willing to put everything on the table for us. He was retiring at the conclusion of my doctoral work and closing the school, so we ended up getting the gold. Because my work is so heavily entrenched in the esoteric and what most would consider supernatural, many of the religious fundamentalists would rather suffer, and some willing to die, because of misled fear tactics their leaders have imposed on them. I’ve seen it over and over.

Listen, I understand that some of this information can be overwhelming. And I know that health care can be expensive, especially when most of the “alternative” services are not covered by conventional insurances. The purpose of this blog post is to open your mind. I want to expose you to a new way of looking at health and wellness. Along with the rest of the Strong Medicine team, I want to educate and create dialogue about healing and vitality.

In the months to come, I will be contributing extensively to the Strong Medicine blog about all things Qigong related. I look forward to answering questions and encourage all of you to keep an open mind and do a little research of your own. I’m excited about partnering with Dr. Hardy and Marty Gallagher and hope to become a valuable ally in helping you achieve lifelong wellness and longevity.

Editor’s Comment:

I have been trying to find a person with the requisite expertise for applying Eastern concepts to Western Medicine, and was fortunate to have crossed paths with Dr. Chris Holder. This article may raise some eyebrows for some of you, but I encourage you to open your minds to some of the concepts Chris has introduced above. “Mind-Body” techniques such as Medical Qigong are the missing link in contemporary medical care. They have been developed empirically for thousands of years with modern science recently starting to uncover the molecular mechanisms behind the observed benefits. Mechanistically, most of the mind-body practices work by reducing the stress response and inflammation, the primary driver behind many chronic diseases, including cancer.

Medical Qigong and other mind-body practices reduce the stress response (see Strong Medicine for more). Chronic stress response can dramatically influence the progression and growth of cancers (no convincing data for initiation of cancer at this point). Thus it is no surprise that these practices have shown to have a significant favorable impact of quality of life and even long term outcomes in cancer patients. I have put some links below to some recent research with Medical Qigong and cancer treatment for those interested in more information. Chris will be a regular contributor to the Strong Medicine blog.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18543381

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21715370

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19880433

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Coach Chris HolderChris Holder comes to the Strong Medicine Blog with over thirty years as an athlete and coach. A football player first and then spending his entire professional coaching career at the college level, Holder has been in love with everything weight lifting since he was a little boy.

Holder, a Senior RKC with Dragon Door, has an incredibly diversified training background that brings a unique product to his athletes. Known in many circles as a pioneer of kettlebell training at the college level, Chris opened the door in the early 2000s to break the mold and monotony of the traditional methods of training college student-athletes. Additionally, his preparation of football players for the NFL Combine has gained recognition from the NFL for years.

In his “other” life, Chris is a Doctor of Medical Qigong with an emphasis in oncology. Under the tutelage of legendary Kung Fu and Qigong Grand Master Dr. Jerry Alan Johnson, Dr. Holder has developed protocols to enhance every aspect of an athlete’s competitive life. Blending disciplines of both East and West, Holder has created a holistic training environment for his athletes and is at the forefront of Qigong research at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California.

Back in the Coaching Saddle… After a Twenty Year Hiatus

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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.

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

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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…

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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.

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

Strength After Sixty – Resilience Against Frailty: Part II

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If we look at the physical aspects of frailty as discussed in Part 1 of this article, it is evident that the strength, mobility and stability of the musculoskeletal system declines as we age. Exercise is the only remedy for this. There is no pill you can take to move better or become stronger. With the proper training, movement and physical strength can be restored, and maintained, at any age. If you are young, consider strength training as part of your retirement planning. If you are old, better get started now.

This article will discuss some of the basic activities of daily living (ADLs) and exercises that best support them. The exercises can be scaled to be appropriate for anyone, regardless of their current physical condition.

Rising from a seated position to standing (and vice-versa) and walking are foundational ADLs. We will assume that our hypothetical trainee can stand and walk, but not much more (injured or wheelchair bound individuals will be discussed in another article). From a strength coach’s perspective, we want to strengthen and improve the ADLs of the sitting to standing transition as well as walking. Squats are the most high-yield exercise to achieve this goal. “Bad knees” and “bad backs” are the most common reasons trainees give to avoid squatting. Properly instructed squats with thoughtful progressions can often surmount these obstacles and get an aging trainee squatting safely and pain free.

Many older trainees may have been told by their physicians (who most often have no strength training background) that they should never squat. It is probably a safe bet that their doctor has not told them that they should never get out of a chair or rise from the toilet seat. Squatting is a fundamental movement for these crucial daily activities. The best starting exercise to train standing from a seated position in senior fitness circles is called “chair stands” (“box squats” in powerlifting).

Box squats allow for this important movement to be performed at varying ranges of motion. Typically, the greater the depth of a squat, the more strength, mobility and stability are tested. A lack of any one of those things could compromise how deep a person could and should squat. For the lowest functioning individuals, we will use double stacked chairs and do bodyweight squats; for the high functioning individuals, we will do full squats with added weight.

Case Studies:

Mrs. Ethel was a 92 year old woman with severe kyphosis (aka hunch back). She walked using a walker with her head looking straight down. Her posture was so bad that when you passed her in the hallway she had to turn to the side to look up at you. Mrs. Ethel could barely stand even from a double-stacked chair, so that’s where we started. She was challenged to not use her arms to assist, to stand a little taller at the top of each rep and descend under control (no “plopping”). A sticky note was placed on the wall in front of her to look up at, and it was gradually raised higher over the course of her program. She would probably never stand completely upright again but we countered the effect gravity was having on her with simple cues like “stand tall” and “look up”. As her leg strength increased we moved to a single chair (lower starting position); first allowing use of the arms for assistance and then without. With 20 repetitions being her “max” she never needed an additional load.

Compare this to Mr. Frank, a 85 year old man who exercised regularly since he left the military 50 years ago. He could squat to below parallel and his range of motion was limited only by arthritic knees and his preference for biceps curls instead. He could also maintain proper form under a load. Although shoulder mobility might prevent him from holding a barbell behind his back as in a true powerlifting squat, dumbbells and kettlebells could be held as a front or goblet squat. Mr. Frank has more options available to him for progression as he could safely increase weight, repetitions and on good days even try to go lower (albeit with less weight).

By squatting deep and with a load, we can improve the strength, mobility and stability qualities required to stand up and walk. Appropriate squat depth and load will vary significantly with each individual. It is helpful to remember the concepts of hormesis and allostasis covered in the beginning of Strong Medicine when deciding on the proper “dose” for squatting. With these concepts in mind, proper dosing can be successfully prescribed by the fitness professional well-versed in squatting mechanics (see Marty Gallagher’s previous article on the squat for a master class). The squat is a basic human movement that you will need to do for the rest of your life if you plan to be independent into old age. Performing this exercise regularly will not only maintain strength, but also develop both the mobility and stability that is crucial for preventing frailty.

The other exercise that translates extremely well to ADLs for the senior is the deadlift. This deadlift is one of THE best cures for osteoporosis. The deadlift and the partial deadlift allow for heavier loads to be used to maximize bone density and prevent muscle wasting. Deadlifting is a pure strength movement that can be scaled to the senior population. This lift is based on the hip hinge movement and contrary to idea that deadlifts are “bad for the back”, a proper deadlift can rehabilitate a weak back. Neurosurgeon Patrick Roth, M.D. prescribes a kettlebell deadlift as part of his spine rehabilitation program in his excellent book The End of Back Pain.

There is a deadlift variation that is appropriate for anyone. For some a load is not appropriate at first, but everyone should be taught the hip-hinging movement central to the deadlift. Arguably, the hip hinge should even be taught before the squat, especially considering that squatting “starts” at the hips.

Another benefit to the deadlift is that it has a shorter range of motion, making it safer for more people. It is also a less technical movement, making it easier to learn. A good coach can teach the hip hinge and tell when individuals are ready to progress. Again, progressions can be made in the form of additional load or greater ROM. As a rule, I use where the wrist falls on the body during the exercise to determine where people can safely pull from. If technique can be maintained to a point where the crease of the wrist passes the knee for instance, then the trainee can pull from there. Setting up at this height will allow for a 2-3 inch “buffer” so the lifter is not pulling from his/her end-ROM.

Paula Hip Hinge
Paula is able to maintain a neutral spine to a point where her wrists touch her knees in a hip hinge movement, thus making a knee-height partial deadlift a safe range of motion for her.

A brief note on set up.

Any powerlifter reading this will know how to set up a power cage for rack pulls. To pretty much everyone else reading this those last few words are foreign, especially to your average 60+ year old exerciser. This is unknown territory that can be downright frightening to some people. Fortunately there are machines that allow set up for partial deadlifts with adjustments as simple as pressing a button. Many senior centers are equipped with pneumatic or computerized machines to allow user friendly solutions to older adults. Unfortunately you will see few “racks” in these centers. We can speculate on why that is the case (i.e. liability, funding, misuse, lack of qualified personnel, etc) or we can make a call to action for fitness centers to offer deadlifting options. The importance of real weight bearing exercise to combat sarcopenia, osteoporosis and frailty syndrome cannot be overstated. Partial range of motion deadlifts must be made available to the population who are at most at risk if we are to reinforce our position against frailty. If this means expensive equipment or powerlifting coaches posted by the powercages in every senior center, so be it. The cost of equipment is minimal and justified by the potential for improving the quality of life and avoiding catastrophic injuries such as hip fractures from falls.

Paula Power Rack Lift
Paula has moved out of osteopenia and into normal range bone density at 57 years of age. Here she is working on her retirement plan making strength deposits with 225lbs, pulling from the rack for a safe range of motion to maintain pristine technique for her current mobility.

Aging is a process that we all face. Strength training is a necessary component to aging successfully, but we need effective methods. So much of senior fitness boils down to the end goals of standing tall, and standing strong. We need the right balance between mobility and stability, and for most of us, strengthening the posterior and stretching the anterior. When properly programmed, the squat and the deadlift address the core activities of daily living for the senior. These two exercises alone give people a simple approach to not just exercising, but improving the quality of their lives. Humans are meant to lift weight and load their bodies. If we can get more intersection and synergy between the powerlifting community and the retirement community, geriatric health and senior fitness will flourish.

 

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Dan Cenidoza, BS, CSCS is a personal trainer, professional strongman and owner of Art & Strength in Baltimore, Maryland. He has a degree in exercise science and specializes in kettlebells and strength & conditioning. His mission is to instruct and inspire people to live stronger, healthier lives. artandstrength.com facebook.com/artandstrength