“Fitness training for a given sport is not simply a matter of selecting a few popular exercises from a bodybuilding magazine or prescribing heavy squats, power cleans, leg curls, bench press, circuit training, isokinetic leg extensions or ‘cross training’. This approach may produce aesthetic results for the average non-competitive client of a health centre, but it is of very limited value to the serious athlete.”
- Dr. Mel Siff, Supertraining
With all this recent hoopla surrounding ‘functional’ or ‘cross training’, ranging from all the hype over ‘300‘ a few years ago (and the resulting attention that Mark Twight of GymJones fame received) right on up to the, shall we say ‘interesting’, antics of CrossFit, it’s something that’s really stayed off my radar.
The piece I wrote yesterday – Bodybuilding has lied to you, and that’s why you’re skinny – was a big hit. In particular, it was posted over on BB.com’s teen forum, which is the digital equivalent of dropping a roach bomb in a the middle of New York City. The hilarity that was generated has been off the charts.
A quick view of the thread reveals that a few guys thought it was solid info; they actually read it and saw the points I was making. A much larger segment of the respondents thought it was bunk, of course. It’s interesting that these guys all had their stats posted as being between 130 and 180 lbs, if they were average height, or around 190-210 if they were taller.
In other words, they went out of their way to prove me right – still skinny, still weak, and still telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about. You don’t pay money for better comedy, folks. I flat out said, in the article that they read, that it would happen – and they did it anyway.
Over the last say five, six years, I’ve pretty well managed to wall myself off from gym culture. I do lift in a commercial gym, though I have very little contact with the people there – unless you count staring in slack-jawed amazement at some of the antics and stupidity as contact. I don’t, personally.
Most of the people I talk to in person are real lifters of some sort or another, guys that like powerlifting and strongman and Highland games. The manly kind of sports that you can drink beer with. We don’t always agree 100% on the details, but we also know that the details don’t matter and that in every way that matters, we’re on the same page.
“When a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger.”
Sometimes there’s deep truth in simple statements.
In Buddhism, particularly the famous Zen school, they’re fond of using koans like this to deliver powerful meaning. Koans are short stories, usually no more than a few short sentences, that always confuse Westerners because we’re brought up to be very literal-minded. You can’t look at a koan and try to interpret it literally. At least not if you expect to take any meaning from it.
There’s nothing exceptional here, besides the usual T-Men being T-Men, and the T-Moderators locking the T-Thread because somebody said something that might lead to real discussion.
Here we have a prime example of someone that doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. And yet, due to the magic of Internet media, he’s given a voice.
The only good news here is that even the YouTubers largely realize this is bad gumbo, given the one-star rating and judging by the comments.
The other week a blog was linked on a board I read, and it was a discussion loosely titled as “explosive movements don’t make you explosive”. This is a recurring theme amongst some elements of the strength & conditioning field, most notably the more rapid later-comers of the HIT and SuperSlow schools of thought.
I added a few comments to the discussion, because I felt the gentleman in question was mistaken on a few assumptions. Firstly, I linked to several studies that showed the addition of elastic bands to regular strength-training to be more effective at developing both strength and power when compared to regular weights (PMID: 16686552, PMID: 18550975).
This sparked a tangential discussion – namely, what does variable resistance training (the fancy name for adding bands or chains or anything that changes the normal resistance curve) have to do with training explosively?
So T-Mag finally released their Ultimate Super Mega Peri-Workout Protocol based on the ANACONDA!!!!! supplement they’ve been hyping since about 2006.
When you’re talking about ANACONDA!!! you have to preserve a few rules. Firstly, YOU HAVE TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS AND USE THE BIGGEST BOLD-FACE FONT YOU HAVE AVAILABLE!!!! EVERY SENTENCE MUST END WITH EXCESSIVE PUNCTUATION!!!!
To be a bit more serious, if you actually sit down and read the labels on all the overpriced crap they’re hocking, you find (or at least deduce) a few interesting things.
It’s started already. Every year, The Holiday Season seems to creep back earlier and earlier. When I left the US, you could see Christmas ads starting in October. Halloween be damned! Thanksgiving gets some kind of individual respect, though you can tell that it too is being assimilated into this vague “holiday season” that seems to last about four months.
I don’t mind the holiday spirit. I do hate how it’s become so commercialized that the entirety of Q4 is given over to a continuous spree of BUY! messages. Halloween seems to kick it off, and it doesn’t really quit until New Year’s Day. Then everybody wakes up on January 1st with a hangover and a new stack of credit card bills.
I’ve always hated the Good Morning. It gets a lot of attention from a lot of really strong guys, and because of that advice I’ve tried to give it a fair shake over the years. No matter how much I tried, I was never able to find a way to make this an enjoyable exercise.
Usually I consider not liking an exercise to be a good thing, since that pretty much means you suck at it and will benefit from getting it stronger. That’s not what I mean here. Yeah, it’s awkward if you don’t do them regularly, but it’s not just that. The mechanics of the lift are just weird.
I think that part of the problem was trying to follow what Westside was doing a few years back when they were really pushing them as Max Effort exercises. They seem to have backed off that somewhat lately, although it’s still pretty common to see maxed-out GMs floating around.
