CPR: The fastest way to get better

I watch people train all day. They lift, they jog, they stretch, and sometimes they come back again. Most do not, but those that do usually see results. But then there are those that I see every day and seem to be treading water. They bang away at the equipment in desperation and frustration, hoping to see any benefit from their pain. Experience has taught us many ways to improve the human body that science has backed up. And while there are many roads to Rome, some just get you there faster. The fastest way to results is also the easiest to remember: Consistency, Progression, and Recovery.

Be Consistent

If you want to improve a movement, you should do it often. If you want to run faster, run more. If you want to do more pull-ups, do more pull-ups. Most of the time it really is that simple. If your goals are more general than that ("I just wanna look good naked!"), then a good place to start is 5 hours a week of sweaty-time fun. 2-3 sessions of resistance training and 2-3 sessions of cardio. If your goals are more specific ("I wanna squat 5000lbs!") then you should program with that goal in mind, but do something that gets you closer to it every day.

Progress the Load

One of the biggest mistakes that I see consistent people make is being too damn consistent. I have clients that tell me, "I've run 5 miles a day since high school, and I'm still gaining weight!" Well unfortunately, your body adjusts to whatever load you give it. If you want to improve your performance, or even maintain them, you are going to have to up the ante. If you run every day, try and run faster. If you do 100 push-ups a day, try working up to 1-arm push-ups. You should not think that you have to go as hard as you can every day, but you need to be progressively overloading your body on a fairly consistent basis.

Recover and Repeat

Recovery means stretching and refeeding your muscles and sleeping. Your muscles need to be worked and stretched to maintain your mobility. They need to be fed (with protein and carbs) in order to work at full capacity again. And you need to sleep to get all this biochemistry done. Sleep is vital for muscle turnover and hormone repletion (which you need to lose fat). And worse of all, if you get less than 6 hours a sleep a night, you are likely not improving your body at all. You are probably increasing the levels of cortisol in your system to levels that will do it long term harm. So stretch right after you run or lift, eat well in the 3 hours after you work out, and go to frickin' bed already!

Load Vectors are Your Friends

I tell people all the time that, "this stuff ain't rocket science." By "stuff," I mean taking care of your body, and by "ain't rocket science," I am totally lying. Quite frankly, working out and being in the best shape you can be to move through this world shares a lot in common with rocket science. Namely, the physics of load vectors. Which can be really overwhelming, but not if you took 4 years of latin in high school. Oh you didn't? I guess that was just me...

When you look at a human body, there are six ways you can direct or resist force:

• Axial (Up and down)
• Anteroposterior (front to back)
• Lateromedial (toward and away from the middle along the side)
• Posteroanterior (back to front)
• Torsional (twisting)
• Axial/Anteroposterior Blend (up and out, or down and in)

Up until very recently, fitness nerds just referred to the planes of the human body. But that was very limiting because it is static and does not really capture how the body moves. But luckily, there is a CSCS even nerdier than I named Bret Contreras who decided that this was no way to live and started brandishing about these new fitness-physics terms. I am lifting liberally from his blog, but it's out of love. Because I am now going to make this make sense for you by completely butchering all his efforts to describe these movements in a precise way. So here are Coach Stevo's Load Vectors for People Who Did Not Take Four Years of Latin in High School:

• Presses and Squats
• Pushes and Thrusts
• Raises and Hello Dollies
• Pulls and Crunches
• Twists
• Swings and Sprints

I know what you're thinking: "Hey! I do all those!" And you're right, if you work out with me. I am a big fan of using the body as a tool, and this is the way the body moves. If you are programming your own workouts, I really recommend making sure that you are not neglecting resistance in any of these vectors, because there will be a time when your body will be resisted that way in real life by gravity or weight. Here are just a few examples of movements that you can incorporate into your routines that will train your body in all the ways it was designed to move.

Presses (Upper Body Axial)
Kettlebell Presses, Military Presses, Handstand Presses, Prisoner Presses and Pull ups (I know this doesn't seem to fit, but trust me. I speak latin)

Squats (Lower Body Axial)
Goblet Squats, Dead Lifts, Box Jumps, and Pistols

Pushes (Upper Body Anteroposterior)
Push Ups, Bench Presses, Pull Overs, Planks

Thrusts (Lower Body Anteroposterior)
Hip Thrusts, Glute Bridges, Back Extensions, Reverse Hypers

Raises (Upper Body Lateral)
Side Raises, Side Planks, Iron Crosses, Grocery Carries, 

Hello Dollies (Lower Body Lateral)
Jane Fondas, Side Lunges, Lying Abduction

Pulls (Upper Body Posteroanterior)
Horizontal Pulls, Seated Rows

 Crunches (Lower Body Posteroanterior)
Crunches, Leg Lifts, Backward Sprinting

Twists (Core Torsional)
Roman Twists, Cable Chops, Wood Chops

Swings and Sprints
Swings... and Sprints

Food: An Education

Things have been kinda quiet on coachstevo.com, but that's not because I've gotten lazy. For the past few weeks, I have been attacking the next stage in my fitness education: nutrition. When I lost all this weight in 2008, I learned a lot about how to avoid sugar and eat proper portion sizes, and all that stuff you can learn on Oprah. But as my body began to move from a thing to be fixed, to a tool to be used, I began to notice a serious gap in my education. Namely, "How the hell do I fuel this thing?"

Back when I was a marathoner, I just ate all I freaking could. I convinced myself that "if you burn the furnace hot enough, the fuel source doesn't matter!" And at 25 miles a week plus weight training 3 times a week, that was kind of OK. But as I have noted, most people gain weight during marathon training because it has such an impact on your body that it freaks out and screams "FOOD!" If you look at pictures of me, I don't look great, even though I weighed very little. And I sure as hell wasn't healthy or strong. I was getting sick all the damn time towards race day.

Fast-forward to USMC training. I was learning more about nutrition because some of the candidates would ask me nutrition questions that I felt obligated to answer intelligently. The main thing I worried about was getting enough protein, which I had reasonably deduced to be about 1g/lb of body weight. I needed the muscle to do the pull-ups (I thought) and that would help. I was also very concerned with fat intake because I had learned about "calories in/calories out." This all seemed OK, and I definitely improved enough to get my double-300, but I wasn't "putting on muscle" and I wasn't getting any leaner either. I would later find out that most of my improvements were cardiovascular and neuromuscular efficiency based.

When I trained for my next marathon, I had a much more lofty goal: sub-3 hours. That's really freaking fast (6:51/mile for 26.2 miles). In order to meet that goal, I threw myself all in to training and packed on 50+ miles every week, eating kind of whatever I wanted but still avoiding sugar and fat. But after 8 weeks, my body was completely destroyed. I was getting really sick, had started to get slower, and had completely forfeited my libido (always a big sign of trouble). Why couldn't I fuel this damn thing!

In January, I got my answer. Kind of. Part of the formal education I put together to pass the NSCA CSCS exam included a review of all the scientific literature I could get access to on sports and exercise nutrition. I'm not gonna lie, it was confusing and there is a lot that science just hasn't figured out. But I focused on the food before, during, and after my workouts (peri-workout nutrition is the most studied and settled) and saw significant improvements to my recovery times and lean mass before the RKC. I actually put on about 15 lbs, almost all of it muscle. Problem solved, right? No. 

After I got addicted to the literature on exercise science, I started to see a name pop up an awful lot. "Dr. John Berardi" was on a lot of the papers and "Precision Nutrition" kept showing up, too. Then I heard that my favorite Mixed Martial Artist had put on 9lbs of lean muscle with the help of a nutrition expert. He said in multiple interviews that he had "fixed his nutrition and everything about his game was better." I just had to know who the best in the world call when they need science to improve their diet. Low and behold, it was Dr. Berardi and Precision Nutrition.

A few weeks ago I bit the bullet and bought all the books that Precision Nutrition has put out. I signed up for their 2-year waiting list for Precision Nutrition Certification, and got on the forums. The past month has been a complete re-education for me about diet, peri-workout nutrition, fat loss and muscle turnover. Not that this is a revolutionary diet or that Berardi knows things that reading the scientific literature wouldn't already tell you. The people at Precision Nutrition have just taken what we know and given it a structure so that you can integrate sports and exercise nutrition into your everyday life with relative ease. The result is a way of eating that has completely changed my energy levels, recovery time, and it's common-sense enough that my great-grandmother would probably recognize it as the best way of eating healthy. There are thousands of pages of suggestions and tips, but the habits Precision Nutrition taught me are simple and nothing that will surprise you. Here they are:

1. Eat every 2-4 hours. Consistent fueling requires consistent fueling. So eat often. Duh.
2. Eat complete, lean protein with every meal. Active people need a lot of protein to stimulate and supply muscle turnover. In practice this means 20-30g for the ladies and 40-60g for the men. When you do the math between habit #1 and habit #2, you suddenly realize this is going to be a LOT of complete, lean protein every day.
3. Eat vegetables with every meal. Vegetables are nutritionally dense and calorically light. They are also crazy-frikkin' good for you (Yes, "crazy-frikkin'" is a scientific quantity). Eat 1-2 cups per meal, so again, this adds up fast.
4. If you wanna lose fat, only eat starchy carbs after you've earned them. Whole grains, bread, pasta, rice, potatoes. All these foods are extremely important to exercise recovery, so don't skimp on them, but only eat them in the three hour, post-workout window. If you don't want to lose weight, then you can relax on this habit.
5. Eat healthy fat. Focus on adding monounsaturated and polyunsaturated  fat to your diet with sources like avocado, olive oil, oily fish, and nuts to your diet. Fat is necessary for most micronutrients to be absorbed into the body and for the creation of testosterone, HGH, and cortisol as well as all the other hormones necessary for active people to perform well.
6. Rarely drink beverages with more than 0 calories. Soda, fruit juice, and alcohol have little nutritional value but are very calorically dense. 
7. Eat whole foods whenever possible. Avoid powders, bars, shakes an pills unless you've just worked out.
8. Plan ahead. You are going to be eating every 2-4 hours so think ahead, cook ahead, and invest in tupperware. 
9. Eat as wide a variety of good foods as possible. Mix it up and eat seasonal fruits and veggies, lots of different kinds of meat and beans, and even different kinds of protein supplements. This will insure you are getting a healthy mix of nutrients and amino acids. Plus it keeps things from getting boring.
10. Plan to screw up 10% of the time. The difference between 90% and 100% adherence to these habits is negligible. But plan your mistakes. I plan to screw up my nutrition plan every Sunday for brunch. But the funny thing is, once you start eating this way and feel what it does for your body and mind... you kinda lose the urge to cheat. But hey, it happens. Don't fret.

I was eating with these habits in mind for a week and dropped 5 pounds. Granted, it would be impossible for all of that to be fat (a pound of fat is 3500 calories so most of it had to be water that was being held onto by starchy carbs and glycogen). But I have better definition, energy, and workout recovery. Plus, I don't feel like I'm denying myself anything. Eating every 2-4 hours means I'm never hungry and if I really want something bad, I can eat it knowing that I just have to be extra careful the other 90% of the time. This isn't a diet. It isn't even a fat-loss plan. It's strategy for living a better life with a better functioning body and mind. And bonus: I have a new hobby! The ladies love when you cook them breakfast...

Core Strength

One of the main problems that people complain about (and that trainers project onto clients as a problem) is "core strength." I have seen these buzz words in magazines and on gym membership ads for years and it has begun to bother me. Not that publishers and gyms are using it as a hook, but the misinformation that still exists in the culture that is being purposefully left out there in order to sell those magazines and memberships. So let me get some of those myths out of the way with a few statements of scientific fact so we can talk about what core strength actually means.

• "Core strength" doesn't mean "a ripped six-pack." 
• Strengthening your core will not give you a ripped six-pack (alone).
• A six-pack is the result of fat loss.
• There is no such thing as targeted fat loss.

"Core strength" how Coach Stevo uses it, is simply the relative strength of the muscles in your trunk. The strength of these muscles is very important to your overall mobility, strength, and health and I am gong to try to address what these muscles are, what they do, and how you can train them without doing 1000 crunches.

The Muscles of Many Metaphors.

"The core." Also known as "the powerhouse," " the box," "the armor," "the tummy," "the six-pack," or as some of my clients call it, "the no-fun-zone." There are many names for this area of the body, most of them colorful reflections on the muscles' many functions. What "the core" really is, are the combined function of the Major muscles included are the pelvic floor muscles on bottom, transversus abdominis, multifidus, internal and external obliques, rectus abdominis, erector spinae (sacrospinalis) especially the longissimus thoracis, and the diaphragm on top. These muscles act in concert with the latissimus dorsi, gluteus maximus, trapezius and hip flexors to either support your spine or move you about the middle of your body. "The core" is the vocabulary I use, but I think "the box" is more apt because it reminds me that the core is not a girdle of muscles around my spine, but also has a top (diaphragm) and a bottom (the pelvic floor muscles).

What They Do

We often think of the core muscles as responsible for contracting and moving your torso independently of your hips, or vice versa. But they also support your upper body on your hips. Your spine has a lot of compressive resistance, but is really like a wet noodle against every other force vector. The core muscles spend most of their time resisting force from the front, back and sides. In short, they keep you upright.

Why You Should Care

They keep you upright! There is pretty much nothing you do in your everyday life that doesn't use your core muscles. Getting up, picking stuff up, sex, even so called "isolated movements" like bicep curls utilize your core muscles to keep your body upright and in a desired position. A strong core is important in preventing injury (back pulls, blown discs, hernia, etc.) and is vital in coordinating just about any complex movement. Beyond resistance, the core is key in kinetic linking which delivers any power your limbs generate and direct outward. Punching, throwing, lifting, and kicking all deliver power generated from big muscles (glutes, lats, quads, etc.) through the middle of your body and out to wherever you want it to go (your hands, fists, feet, or even your head). The other function of the core is protecting your organs. The core is a suit of armor that you can engage to prevent injury to your most vital organs.

How To Train Them

Despite all the amazing things these muscles do, they are just muscles. You can train them for power, strength, or endurance just like any other muscle. So before you start doing thousands of crunches, think about what you do that uses the core and needs training. When I train for contraction, I think about power which means big, explosive movements. Hanging windshield wipers, lower back hypers, and around the world circles. You should work up to these exercises with weighted versions of normal core work such as crunches, hypers and roman twists holding weights. The key is to think about the way your shoulders can move independently of your hips (crunch forward and back, crunching to the sides, and twisting) and try to utilize all those functions with weight. But with most clients, I tend to emphasize endurance and resistant exercises that focus on support and maintaining posture rather than simple contraction. These exercises include the plank (front and sides) and having my clients hold a ball in place while I attempt to push and pull it in varying directions with different amounts of force. But the best way to train your core is without doing any specific "core workouts" or "ab days." The best way to train your core is to use it all the damn time.

Complex Motion, Specialized Function

Most of my clients think of me as a "form nazi." I am constantly tweaking their posture in every exercise and telling them things like, "get your hips underneath you." What I am trying to do is get them to engage their core so that they have more control over their body and the exercise movement. The more you feel yourself using your core in every movement, the more you will think about doing every movement correctly. I don't lift things with my back because I know what that feels like. I don't sway my hips in a bicep curl because I know that's cheating my biceps out of a workout (which is why I'm doing bicep curls in the first place). I also do very big, complex exercise movements that focus a lot of attention on proper form and the special purpose the core has in kinetic linking and support. Push-ups, dips, kettlebell swings, presses, and front squats. Even pull-ups depend on maintaining perfect posture and core tension in order to complete the motion and do the lift. The result of all my "form nazi" ways and my perfectionist attitude towards form is that at the end of the week, I end up doing very little "ab work." However, I have the core strength to front squat my wife without pulling my back and the endurance to plank for 6 full minutes.

Core strength is an important part of being a healthy, strong person. But being healthy and strong doesn't mean you are gonna have ripped abs. A "six-pack" is just the rectus abdominis without any fat on top. My wife likes to joke that based on my strength, I have a amazing set of abs lurking under a "small layer of fuel." If you want to get ripped abs, lose weight. But if you want to do anything well, and that includes living well, you should focus on your form and think about engaging those core muscles in everything you do.

Fatigue is an Emotion

    It's running season again, and while I don't recommend running for all (or even most) of my clients, I simply cannot live without it. The fascinating thing about running to me is testing the limits of my own fatigue. But this leads to a question: What is fatigue? What is the mechanism that allows you to only push yourself so far, and more importantly what is it about this mechanism that allows for the improvement of performance?

   Quite simply, fatigue is an emotion. It's an emotion that tells you increasingly and inevitably  to slow down or stop moving outright. Emotions are incredibly deep, powerful, and ancient sensations of brain chemistry that arise from the oldest parts of the brain, the limbic system and midbrain. The limbic system is responsible for the way our bodies responds initially to stimuli. It predates our pre-frontal cortex ("PFC," where all the real "thinking" occurs) and is responsible for the creation of emotions, which have great impact on the way our body responds to those stimuli. The emotion "fear" is really our brain telling preparing our body for "fight or flight." The emotion of "bliss" is a release of brain chemicals that remind us we did something rewarding to our bodies or brain and to keep it up. These emotions are tied into the sense organs pretty directly and respond much faster than the PFC can even deduce what's going on. If your friend sneaks up on you, you get startled and your heart races (a release of adrenaline coordinated by your amygdala and sympathetic nervous system) before you can even perceive cognitively whether there is a threat. And after your friend reveals himself, it takes a while to calm down.

    The role of the pre-frontal cortex is cognition, your higher reasoning skills. It's what you would consider, "you." But interestingly, the main role of the PFC is to inhibit your emotional responses. In fact, your PFC produces most of your brain's GABA, the neurochemical responsible for inhibiting synaptic firing. Without intervention from the PFC, your limbic system is a positive feedback loop. Your emotions just get more and more intense, like a dog gets more and more excited about going outside for his walk. Stopping this loop usually manifests itself as you telling yourself to "calm down" or "cheer up!" as you try and counteract stimuli coming in from the outside world.  Fatigue is one of these deep-brain emotions, but the stimuli is internal.

    Think about when you perceive a threat. You see it with your eyes, hear it with your ears, etc. These outside stimuli are translated into nerve signals by the sense organs and move into the limbic system, usually via the hypothalamus. But your body has a lot of senses, ones that you aren't consciously aware of which face inward. Science has identified many of these senses as factors in what we experience as fatigue, or that urge to slow down. Here are the main ones that we know about.

1.  Lack of oxygen. After just a few minutes of anaerobic activity, your muscles need oxygen to keep moving. This is measured as total volume of oxygen your body can pump to your muscles in a given time and referred to as "VO2 MAX." If you exceed your VO2 MAX for too long, your brain senses the lack of oxygen and fearing for your heart muscles (which cannot run anaerobicly) tells you to slow down.
2. Depletion of fuel. Your body needs fuel to move the muscles and keep your brain thinking (your brain actually uses a lot of fuel) and it places a high priority on sugar. So as you burn up available ATP (2-6 seconds), then creatine tri-phosphate (6-30 seconds), then muscle glycogen (20 minutes), then the glycogen in your liver (45 minutes) your brain starts to get worried that it won't have enough sugar. So it tells you to slow down.
3. Acidity. The byproduct of a lot of the chemical reactions that produce muscular motion are H+ ions. If these ions accumulate faster than they can be shuttled into other area of the muscle fiber cells, the chemical reactions necessary for motion get less and less efficient. Scientists call this the "Lactic Threshold" followed by the "Onset of Blood Lactate" or OBLA, which is the actual point of diminishing marginal return in trained athletes. This is when the pH in your muscles and blood is high enough that your brain notices and tells you to slow down.
4. Overheating. Moving your body produces heat and your body copes with that heat through cooling mechanisms like sweating. If you are producing more heat than your body can handle or if you have run out of water to sweat with, your brian will sense this and tell you to slow down.
5. Muscle damage. When you are going all out, especially during ballistic activity like running where the muscle fibers are being stretched and shortened with many times the force of gravity, damage to the muscle fibers occur. These are repaired during recovery, but as the tears and tetanus accumulate faster than your body can deal with their waste products, and as you start to run out of other fibers to recruit (especially type 1 fibers) then your brain gets worried you are going to chew up all your muscle fibers and it tells you to slow down.
6. Central nervous system neurochemical depletion. Your body needs nerves to signal the muscles to contract and relax in order to control movement. Synapses are gaps between nerve cells and muscle cells where chemicals are passed back and forth to create those signals. But there is a finite amount of those chemicals in your body, especially sodium. As you use them up, your brain gets worried you will use them all up and it won't be able to function without sodium. So it tells you to slow down.

    I've put these senses in order of how soon they appear in the feeling of fatigue to give you an idea of how long you have to work before you begin to feel that signal as a desire to stop. This model is called the "Central Governor Theory of Fatigue" and was posited by Tim Noakes. He outlines this theory in the must-read, The Lore of Running. The theory is really that the brain senses all these (and many other) stimuli and is constantly metering the body's output, acting as a governor to your total performance. This means that fatigue is more lie an emotion (a subconscious response to stimuli through the limbic system) than a simple biological response. In short, fatigue is a complex system of inputs controlled by a very old part of our midbrain, not a simple negative feedback loop that looks at one thing and says, "not enough oxygen... stop!" Believe it or not, this is rather controversial and goes against 70+ years of assumptions about exercise science which to this day is obsessed with VO2 MAX.

    So why is it that we can train our bodies and better our performance? How do we resist fatigue? In essence, we train our central governor to chill out. Our brains are very paranoid and there is a large envelope of performance that we are leaving untapped before we start to train. Training teaches our brains that we can still function at speed without catastrophic failure. there are biological responses too (like higher muscle glucose levels, later LT and OBLA, higher VO2 MAX and heart stroke volume, more type IIb muscle fibers, etc) but the major governor to our performance is our subconscious. Its that overwhelming desire to stop that our pre-frontal cortex must regulate as it would any other emotion that we determine to be unwanted or unreliable. We can do this by keeping our PFC engaged, which is fancy talk for keeping from getting bored. I do this with music and by concentrating on my form and breathing. If you are running splits, stay focused on your time. If you focus on emotion, you start to give in to it. And if you focus on fatigue, you will eventually just stop. So if you can keep thinking, you can keep moving.