Cardio for athletic performance

When I was younger I always thought that being able to run five miles non-stop would get me in shape for a season of varsity soccer.

Boy was I wrong. Running at the same pace for 20 minutes didn't do jack for my in season conditioning.

The running I did in soccer was completely different then what I was doing on my own in the preseason.

In one minute of the game I could slowly be jogging to receive a pass and the next minute sprinting at full speed towards the net trying to shake defenders.

There was no carry over from the preseason to the season however from preseason to post I found that this was the opposite.

The constant pace change of the sport had conditioned my heart beyond what any sort of cross country work out had done.

I was running faster and doing more miles in less time then I was doing prior.

So what happened?

I’ll let the scientists and people much smarter then myself to figure this out but for my two centsI can only say that cross-country style running is a complete waste for sports conditioning.

Unless, I compete in an endurance sport rarely do I run super long distances.

Instead I find simply practicing the sport will give you the best conditioning you can get for it.

The more you the play a sport the longer you will be able to play it.

Now, that does not mean you can’t supplement your practice with conditioning.

However, instead of doing the typical knee crushing and ankle breaking long distance running people are obsessed with doing I suggest doing fast paced sprint style conditioning.

Do wind sprints, hill runs and suicides.

My favorite is lifting weights and swinging kettlebells.

If you raised your eye brow in confusion to the lifting weights part of the last sentence then let me explain.

When we lift weights for endurance we are working on speed and variety.

Something, I do not recommend in a strength building phase.

However, take a work out and do circuits from the floor to the ground and then let me know if you aren’t getting a cardio workout.

Here is a suggestion instead of focusing on the poundage on the bar focus on the time it takes you to complete a workout.


Work to minimize rest time.

Another classic is supersetting with reverse body parts like doing bench immediately followed by pull ups for reps.

Also, kettlebells nothing can compare to the affect of swinging a kettlebell for five minutes straight,

Not only is it taxing on your muscles but also your heart and your mind.

It takes will power to grind out five minutes of swings with a heavy weight and then it takes guts to try and best your reps by 10 next week.

Drink coffee, lift big then take a nap

If there is one supplement that does exactly what its suppose to do it is caffeine.

I’m not writing an article saying that drinking one cup of coffee before a work out is going to make you strong like Bill Kazimaier and ripped like Arnold Schwarzenegger but caffeine does have it’s advantages.

Personally, I don’t drink much of the stuff and when I do I usually stick to the basics coffee and tea (usually green tea).

Personally, I don’t like all the sugar that comes with drinking pop and energy drinks.

That being said caffeine is a wonderful supplement and something I recommend using on occasion.

Typically, when I use caffeine I use it when I am feeling tired, a little worn out and not very motivated to walk the two-feet from my house to the garage to work out.

First thing is first usually when I feel crummy like this it is from a lack of energy which boils down to two possible problems. Those problems typically are poor nutrition or a lack of sleep.

Like I said earlier in this article I don’t really care to drink caffeine but I hate even more to miss a work out. So, my solution is slug down a few cups of coffee or tea and whatever issues I am having.

Usually for me this would be going to bed earlier that night to make sure I am feeling ready to train tomorrow.

If your lack of energy continues after correcting your diet and sleeping more you may be getting dangerously close to over training.

If that’s the case it is time to consider a few days off from exercise completely to let your body recuperate.

As much as I hate taking extra days off I know that being over trained can lead to me getting sick. Something, I like to avoid and understand will cause more missed training sessions.

Remember caffeine is not a long term solution to correcting fatigue its simply a short term.

Use the stuff sparingly and try to use it as seldom as possible.

Caffeine is a stimulant and over time you can develop a tolerance (or so I’ve been told) so eventually the effectiveness is going to wear off.

For me one cup of coffee is enough. I use to drink no-Xplode before a work out and found that my body could hardly handle one scope full of the stuff.

I would experience caffeine overdose my speech would slur, I would have an extreme head ache, feel sick to my stomach and have the jitters.

Eventually, I got to the point where I could drink three scoops of the stuff but that was also when I could no longer discern whether the stuff was helping to boost my performance or not

Remember, moderation try to not be dependent. More is less with caffeine when I started using it constantly I found out that I wasn’t getting the energy or the performance enhancing qualities promised.

However, once I weened myself from using it again I found that on occasion a little bit would go a long way.

Goal Setting part 2

In my last post I talked about training consistency which is something that I believe is very important when weight lifting or doing any sort physical training.

However, that is only the stepping stone because the focus of these articles is success.

Any person doing any sort of exercise will be more successful if they set goals for themselves.

If there is one lesson that should be taken out of the last post it’s that you need to keep a journal, diary or whatever you call it to log your progress.

This journal or whatever will be instrumental for tracking your success and achieving your goals.

Here is an exercise that I think almost any person can benefit from in any endeavor whether physical, mental or financial.

On a piece of paper right out your long term goals-- things that you want to accomplish. From there take your goal and break it down it to several mini goals.

An example would be bench pressing 300-pounds. First what your would do is break that goal down to benching 145 for 3, 200 for 3, 225 for 3 and so on.

You want to set bench marks find mini-goals that are achievable that will eventually work to that final result.

Breaking something down smaller and smaller will help you gain the confidence you need to succeed.

Endlessly repping 195 for months even years at a time will not put you any closer towards that 300 bench.

Nothing is impossible it just might need more steps to complete.

If you continue to achieve these mini goals you will become more motivated to work hard and succeed.

Remember the naysayers that tell you, you can’t do something are people who are either jealous or have tried and failed.

Why did they fail because they didn’t set those mini goals they just went for it and failed.

Goal Setting part 1

For me consistently doing the same routine week after week is difficult. Week after week doing the same old thing over and over again just seems so boring.

So what have I done for most of my weight lifting career?

Well in all honesty I have constantly changed and reinvented my routine to a point where I had no clue how strong I was. The routine would be different from week to week taking in and accounting for every new breakthrough and fad that was popular at the moment.

I guess the pop term for this would be “muscle confusion” (imaginary finger quotes not needed) and is basically what is being sold by every mail-order exercise routine at the moment.

So what does muscle confusion do for a person who wants to be strong like a powerlifter? The answer is nothing.

I went from having a thin body (I’m talking Kate Moss) to having a lean over sized cross country runner body. I ended college at 185-pounds and did not look or feel like the weight lifting machine I had always hoped to be.

People still mistook me for being in high school and instead of looking 185 I looked like an big 155.

Huh? Yeah my thoughts exactly.

So, lesson learned muscle confusion was not the answer. What I am now finding out

and really have known all along is that keeping a training diary, log, journal or whatever is important to become successful.

Stick to a core routine and write down everything you do and accomplish. Exhaust a routine until you stop making gains and then change things or start over.

Simple enough yet for me it was and still can be the hardest thing to do.

I want to bench and press massive weights, be able to deadlift a car and tear decks of cards like they were paper. Unfortunately, muscle confusion and even those bodybuilding routines published in magazines were not getting me the results I wanted.

So after reading Pavel Tsatsouline books, reading John Brookfields grip books and looking through Brooks Kubiks “Dinosaur Training” I have finally found what I believe works for me.

My first step was losing weight-- why keep it if it doesn’t help. I’m between 165 and 170 depending on the day. I checked my ego at the door and have yet to see if affect my lifting.

Why carry the weight if I’m not strong enough to use it?

Next I decided to put together a core routine consisting of two sets of bench and two sets of dead lifts with five minute rest intervals. Keep the sets in the two to three rep range.

I add weight at either the end of a week or the beginning of the next.

For me doing only two exercises for two sets is hard. I’m someone who actually likes to exercise so when I cut my work out down to about twenty minutes I actually get sad.

My solution here was to alternate days between grip and ab work and biceps and stretching.

Keep a log and be consistent and make sure every week you try to go heavier.

Finally, Friday is a fun day you do your regular routine and then you throw in whatever the hell you want to do.

Go nuts this day is for you and feel free to experiment.

I like to do keg presses, ring work and mace swinging so these are the days I usually mess around with these kind of lifts.

Diet versus "Diet"

To many the word diet is a short term change to ones eating patterns to get thin. The thing is that a diet should be so much more.
People should think of their diet as rules to eat by for their entire life.
You will often times here so and so say I feel so great now that I began eating healthy and lost all this weight. Next month that person returns to their regular eating habits and undoes months of hard work spent eating healthy and going to the gym.
The word diet should carry a little more weight in peoples vocabulary. When I tell my friends a McDonald's Big Mac is not part of my diet they know that I don’t eat it. I don’t eat McDonald’s and I haven’t since I was a junior in high school.
People that know me know that my diet is how I always eat. I have never had to lose weight never had to “diet” in the usual Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig sense of the word.
So do I diet?
Yes I diet I constantly diet. I change it to fit whatever I am trying to accomplish.
Sometimes I diet to gain weight. For some that is a concept that might be confusing which may be understandable because the average desk jockey with a bad back doesn’t understand the value of weight gain.
People, my family and friends included don’t always understand that their is such a thing as positive weight gain.
What I mean by positive weight gain is that you gain weight to gain muscle not gain weight to get fat.
Regardless of all that there is too much emphasis on the “diet” and not a diet. People allow themselves to much leniency when it comes to eating. The simple matter of it is there is to much positive re-enforcement and to much incentive to eat poorly in most diet plans.
Most diets work on calorie counting.
“Oh if I just eat 15 calories for lunch then I can eat this 100 calorie piece of cake.”
Wrong, complete crap maybe I am someone who was gifted with a fast metabolism but from my stand point it is about the quality of food you eat not the calories.
What is cake?
Cake is sugar and carbohydrates plain and simple. Obviously sugar and carbs is no-no in any diet. How can simply counting calories prevent the negative affects that sugar and carbs have on your insulin?
I don’t have the answer because I’m not a dietitian but I know that insulin plays a big role in body fat percentage. In my personal opinion it is probably a lot better to eat 100 calories of almonds then of cake.
Why? Almonds=Protein.
Not only do almonds have protein but they are rich in unsaturated fats which by the way is an appetite suppressant.
There is to much fat-free and reduced-fat this and that. Diet food is crap for the most part. They replace one ingredient with another just to reduce the calorie count of the food and in turn might be replacing it with something that does you more harm then good.
The biggest joke is diet tea.
How can there be such a thing as diet tea?
Tea if it is brewed actually helps you lose weight especially the green tea variety. So something labeled diet tea is obviously not real tea.
Look it is simple if you feel better about yourself and have more energy from eating healthy why sabotage that?
If you know you should be eating a chicken breast instead of eating pizza why reach for the pizza?
It’s simple you lack motivation and you need to get it.
We all know that eating healthy you feel better, you look better, and if your an athlete probably perform better. But looking at it from a financial standpoint if you eat healthy you are going to have less doctors visits and less medications to buy for things like high blood pressure and type-2 diabetes.
So with less doctors visits and less medicine to buy you are going to have more money.
Isn’t more money enough of an incentive to try and be healthy?
So what are the blueprints for a good diet?
Simple fresh fruits and vegetables, raw meat that you have to cook yourself, nuts, milk and minimal to no carbs
The more you have to prepare your food the healthier it is going to be for you to eat.

Some favorites for odd object training

For me lifting the same old weight over and over again can get a bit boring and a bit tiresome.
Maybe I am a hipster when it comes to weight lifting and fitness because I am always looking to try something new, be different and do the opposite of whatever everyone else is doing.
Sure I do traditional weight lifting stuff-- you know the bench, dead lift and squats. One thing I also do though is lift weird awkward objects as well as do grip work that may appear slightly unusual the average gym rat.
Most of my unique training I do might be done with equipment that isn’t in the norm of your local gym or even is homemade.

The thing is that this weird awkward object training builds different levels of strength for an individuals that carry over to other lifts, they are great for conditioning and is just fun to do.

When it comes to weight lifting I try to not make it a chore. I generally enjoy working out and part of that is doing things that are unusual.

There is some great awkward object training that you can do right at home with a relatively low investment.

Keg Lifting

Probably my all time favorite thing to lift that is heavy is a water filled beer keg that I have in my garage. Beer kegs I feel like are one of the most versatile and challenging pieces of equipment anyone can work with.

One thing that is great about keg lifting is that just about any college kid who has an apartment probably has one laying around in a corner of some room from a party the night before.

Buying a beer keg just for the sake of working out may be a little costly. The cost itself is probably close to $100. The keg itself is really just a $50 deposit plus the beer. Luckily, if you have a few friends who can chip in you can empty the keg of beer and make your money back.

Now that you have an empty keg what do you do with it?

Well the most obvious thing is to shoulder press it overhead. Depending on the type of keg you have it can be relatively simple to fill it with water (I suggest that you look up a tutorial on how to do this).

With water inside the keg pressing even with it partially full can be difficult. The water moves back in forth inside of the keg making it hard to get the weight overhead.

There are also some other great lifts you can do with a keg besides just shoulder presses. You can do all of the Olympic lifts which can be very difficult as well as work on some strong man style exercises.

In the summer I like to take my heavy beer keg and bear hug it. I then walk the length of my back yard back and forth to see how many laps I can do.

Other uses can be partial dead lifts, kettlebells swings and shouldering exercises.

Great thing about the keg is that it works your stabiliser muscles and abs with the constant weight shift from the water inside.

Slosh Pipe
Another great awkward object to work with is a slosh pipe. A slosh pipe is just a long and thick PVC pipe filled half-way with water and sealed at both ends with caps.
The pipe was an excellent and fun piece of training equipment my college roommates and I had fun messing around with.
Our pipe was practically impossible to grip so lifting it over head was a real challenge especially with the moving water on the inside.
It is almost impossible to keep the water perfectly level within the pipe but that is also the challenge.
Try walking with the pipe in the crook of your arms, front squatting or pressing a slosh pipe and you may find yourself working muscles you didn’t even know you had.
It was always a challenge to work out with this piece of equipment and was something fun for my roommates and I to use.
We would keep the pipe in our living room and would challenge so-called college strong men to try lifting the pipe to level. If they were real masters we would challenge them to press it over head.
Have fun with it and give it a try but remember you need a lot of space to use this piece of equipment.

Maces

Another great piece of equipment that you may be able to make ( I didn’t though) are maces.
I have a macebell I bought from Torque athletic which I love and also paid a lot of money for.
Maces are basically large round weight on the end of a stick. I have seen some homemade versions online using dowel rods and bowling balls. Go nuts and be creative.
Maces are a challenge most because it requires some sort of leveraging strength.
The most common exercise is the swing which involves whipping the weight around your neck and back to your front. It is not as easy at seem this particular movement requires you to use your forearms, grip, shoulders and obliques just to complete it.
There are lots of great exercises like shovel lifts, uneven bicep curls and walking ab bridges.

The five myths of weight lifting or why some people can't do a PR

I originally submitted to this article to EliteFTS.com about two weeks ago unfortunately they never got back with me on whether or not they would publish this article so instead I am putting it up on this blog instead.

I have weight lifter’s ADD-- sad to say but it is true-- I am one of those people that spends a great deal of their time trolling the Internet for the newest, latest and most unconventional ways on how to get strong.
Of course with all my vast fitness knowledge, countless hours spent lifting iron and overall craziness I am relatively weak. I wish I could tell you that I looked like the incredible hulk, or weighed 145-pounds and could bench a half ton of weight.
The sad truth is I’m not a freak in any sense of the word, I’m fit, but not freaky.
However, with my constant self-experimentation I would say I have some good insight and advice in the world of strength training and fitness. I can honestly say that I am probably stronger then the average guy with a gym membership and have managed to accomplish a few personal fitness goals as well.
Some of those goals is a constant weight gain (from 145-185-pounds) since I started college in late-2006 and graduation in 2011. Took up steel bending for one year and managed to bend a few small nails before stopping and losing the skill all together and being able to successfully do a free standing hand stand pushup.
So here for your pleasure I present 5-weight lifting myths that I have discovered through my self-experimentation.

Myth 5: The biggest guy is the strongest guy or why bodybuilders are not the strongest

Look I have been there I have been that self-obsessed, image absorbed guy who wanted to be huge. I always told myself that wasn’t the case but truthfully I started out weight lifting for sport specific training and became more interested in the glamour of it all.
Bodybuilders are all about the pump and while there are some very strong bodybuilders who can bench press about 600-pounds there also guys who are about 90-pounds lighter who can do the exact same thing. 600-pound benchers in bodybuilding is not the norm it is the exception.
Of course strength is a hard thing to measure because there are many types of strength but in the pure sense of the traditional lifts: Dead lifting, benching and squat the biggest guys are not putting up the top numbers in these categories.
Remember, bodybuilding is about the pump not the poundage strength is just a by product that comes along with training hard.

Myth 4: You can’t get stronger at your current weight or why bulking up is only slightly crap

Look I can honestly say that I have tried bulking up and despite a constant positive looking muscular weight gain I have made relatively small gains in certain critical lifts.
I will first like to say that weight lifting starts first as a skill, second as overall personal psychology, third as good nutrition and lastly your genetic limitations at a given weight.
I have never been stronger then I have been right now and am currently 15-pounds lighter then my heaviest weight of 185-pounds. I was fit at 185 but I am superman at 170 in my most difficult lift--the bench.
Everyone is so obsessed with the bench despite it not being nearly as critically or developmentally as important as the dead lift and squat-- this of course is a topic for another article.
I have essentially become a better bencher out of the necessity to become a better lifter.
I taught myself how to bench as a technical skill that requires correct positioning of the shoulders, back and legs. You engage more muscles then just your chest in the bench and it is important to learn how to properly , lower the weight as well as pushing it up.
There are about a hundred itsy-bitsy things that can help to improve a bench press but the most key and critical thing I have learned is body positioning you need to know how to engage your legs, lats and triceps and protect your shoulders so you don’t hurt them.
A smart lifter is a healthy lifter and just about every lift has a few correct ways of doing it and about 100 wrong ways.
Another thing is finding psychological weakness-- a lot of people are going to sell themselves short on a lift just because they can’t believe they are trying to lift that much.
The truth is most people have it in them to accomplish great feats of strength but the psychology isn’t there. Each lifting routine should include some sort of meditation-- not the Buddhist kind but some sort of routine to put you in a winning state of mind.
Possibilities include: listening to certain types of music, visualization technique or like arm wrestler Travis Bagent screaming and self-hype.
Finally, if you are purely concerned about strength and have made all the adjustments and can’t seem to get stronger gain weight. Hypertrophy isn’t the be all or end all in strength gains but sometimes it is necessary.

Myth 3: Getting stronger and hypertrophy requires almost constant working out

Once again this another one of those myths that are not true-- these work out splits that they sell in bodybuilding magazines where a person trains five maybe six days a week is crap.
If you train that much you might get some good definition but you are also not going to make significant weight gains and will just make yourself sick from over training.
Do you think these bodybuilders are training six days a week for most of the year-- doubt it. I can’t actually say since I have never once been close to winning a Mr. Olympia but I can tell you that I made the biggest weight gains when I switched to a high intensity three-days a week workout.
I did everything I could do to reach that epic muscular failure that is so glamorized by meat heads in the work out magazines. Exercising like this allowed me to gain nearly 15lbs in one month.
Lets look at a not to scientific explanation: Muscle fibers break down, then they get plenty of rest to grow back bigger and stronger.
It doesn’t make sense that training to constant failure six out of seven days a week would make you get big and strong. When does your body have time to recuperate?
Hypertrophy is due to micro-tears in your muscle fibers if you are always tearing and splitting those fibers they aren’t going to have a chance to adapt.
In fact you will just make yourself sick from over training and then you won’t be able to work out-- so you are doing yourself a favor when you give yourself an extra day of rest.
The same goes with power lifting if you don’t hit that weight you were gunning for then you probably need to take a rest so that your body can heal back stronger.

MYTH 2: Flexibility makes you weaker or why I choose to give up my ability to tie my own shoes

There is this idea that stretching will make you weaker, while there may be some truth to this it is still only a half-truth.

The number one purpose of stretching is to prevent injury and to remove tightness from muscles.
Yet for some strange reason people view stretching as sissy and totally avoid the practice-- those people often times are the people who complain of bad backs from years of dead lifting heavy poundage.
To a degree if you stretch before a work out you are in a way overworking your muscles before lifting and could be making them weaker. Of course that is only a temporary result of stretching.
Stretching is something that should be done usually in between sets or after a workout.
Stretching is going to help remove blood from your muscles and help to relieve some of that next day soreness. There of course are some other benefits of stretching that weight lifters may not be aware off.
Stretching can be effectively used to increase muscle fullness in hypertrophy--if you don’t believe me then its time to seriously look into Dogg Crap Training.
In DC training weighted stretches are used to help pack on that extra density in a targeted muscle area.

MYTH 1: You need fancy protective equipment when you are lifting.

If you can’t dead lift 300-pounds without a belt or no straps then you aren’t strong enough to dead lift 300-pounds.
There is this mindset that to be a lifter you have to wear straps, expensive tennis shoes and use a weight belt. FALSE!
None of that stuff is necessary and in fact almost all of that hinders your strength gains. I am sure that there comes a time when maybe some of those things are necessary but when you consider that Louis Cyr quite possibly the strongest man to ever lived dead lifted over 500-pounds with no belt, straps or expensive shoes with only a finger then those things sort of seem pointless.
Once again I can’t stress technique enough which a lack off is primarily why people wear belts. Most people in a YMCA or college recreation centers are not a world powerlifting champion like current world strongest man Zydrunas Savickas.
I have yet to see in person someone dead lift 800-pounds at an everyday run of the mill gym. Until you are an elite power lifter there isn’t much of a need for a belt.
Read about muscle tension and irradiation written about in Pavel Tsatsouline’s “Power to the People” book and it becomes clear that bracing your muscles tight before a lift acts as a natural weight belt to protect your spine.
Next are straps another one of those things where unless your are an elite power lifter have no business using.
You’ll notice at most gyms these amateur bodybuilders will be shrugging with the 100-pound dumb bells but are using straps. These guys are weak, I’m sorry and are severely limiting their bodies development.
Don’t shrug or dead lift more then you can grip. If you can’t grip it then you need to go back to the drawing board and work on getting your hands stronger.
Stronger hands equals a stronger lifter the harder you can grip something the tenser your body becomes and allows you to lift more.
It’s irradiation again and even in exercises like the bench press a strong grip can make the difference in setting that new personal record.
Finally shoes.
A lot of lower back, knee and ankle problems come from modern shoes. Scientists are discovering that injuries shoes are designed to prevent actually cause them. Forget about lifting weights in Air Jordans your best bet is going barefoot.
If you can’t go barefoot then wear something flat like some Converse Chuck Taylors, Vibram Five Fingers or some of those water shoes you buy at the beach.
Why do this?
Well for lifters it is because you are lower to the ground and have less distance to move a weight off the floor from. Also, since your not as high up and your standing flat instead of a pronated position your less likely to roll your ankles and knees.
You get more muscle activation as well when your wearing a minimal amount of shoe your forcing those underused muscles on the bottoms of your feet to actually work.

Conclusion

Finally, I can’t stress technique enough I know there are going to be these first time lifters who read this that will think they can just pull weight of the ground without a weight belt. Technique is always the most important thing to learn in weight lifting and anyone considering doing it should research and train technique before attempting to lift heavy weights.
Be smart before you lift heavy and makes sure to talk to your doctor before starting any kind of exercise program.