Age and Ballistics

I am lucky enough to have four surviving grandparents, three of whom I visited this week. Two drove 12 hours round trip to spend Father’s Day weekend at my parent’s house, and the other was in the hospital having emergency surgery. Their age-range is 10 years but their “physical age range” might as well be 30 years. For the purposes of illustration, let’s take my Mom’s Dad and my Dad’s Mom. He is a healthy weight, has excellent markers for heart health (other than a congenital murmur),  above-average strength and muscle mass, excellent recall, and can walk anyone other than Denis Nizhegorodov into the ground. She has been dramatically overweight and underweight, had a heart attack last year, and even before the heart attack woudn't pick up a Sunday paper let alone walk all the way to the end of her driveway to get it. These two people could not be further apart in terms of health, yet are only 18 months apart in terms of age. So what gives?

Well, genetics. They matter. A lot. But you can't do anyting about them, so let's move on.

Gravitational Acceleration

When we are young, we grow a lot. We grow muscles, bone, red blood cells, fascia, and everything else we need to do what we want to with our bodies. Starting at puberty, we usually see improvements with every application of consistent and progressively intense stress (and ample recovery time), but things eventually start to slow down. It’s a hell of a tool, but time has a hell of a way of dulling its edge. And if you ask anyone who’s past that point of diminishing marginal return, they’ll tell you that the day you start dying is your 30th birthday.

It starts with recovery time. You won’t be able to get back on the horse as fast from hard workouts or injuries. It’ll take you longer to lose fat or gain muscle. Things will hurt that didn’t and range-of-motion will start to evaporate. You will be able to get stronger, faster, and hotter, but the gains will come more and more slowly. Like a ball thrown into the air, gravity has a way of slowing everything down until it comes crashing down to earth.

Velocity

All is not lost on the next 2/3 of our lives, however. There is a handful of simple things that we can do to insure we age gracefully and as my Grandfather put it, “take out the trash on the day we die.” Key among them is to never stop training. Always have a goal; always be trying to improve; always train smartly to get there. By obeying CPR, and trying to get better at something every damn day, you will generate a lot of momentum. But don’t just think in terms of strength or cardio. Gravity’s effects are universal so you’ll need to look at every aspect of your movement health, chiefly power and mobility.

Age saps all our muscle fibers, but none as acutely as the fast-twitch muscle fibers. Loss of these fibers is the major reason older people lose balance and coordination. Their brains know they are falling, they just can’t recruit the fibers necessary to right themselves. Training for power early and continuing to do so while we age is an excellent way to postpone those life-changing falls that happen later in life.  

When I’ve coached clients in their 80s, one of the hardest activities we do is just getting up off the ground. Not Turkish Get-ups, I’m talking about just getting up. Strength is a factor there, but the main culprit is simple mobility. The connective tissue of the body, as well as the skin, loses elasticity as we age. The solution to this is the same as with fast-twitch fiber: get all the mobility you can, when you can. Stretch, activate, stabilize and always lift with a full range-of-motion. Your body wants to seize up to protect itself, but those shortened ROMs are a one-way ticket to LifeAlert if you don’t take mobility work seriously when you are young.

Other things like lean-mass, bone-density, and CNS coordination will all benefit from consistent, intense strength training and intelligent recovery. And the benefit of age is always experience. By the time you have 30-40 training years under your weight belt, you’ll know how to listen to your body and maintain the velocity that you created in your youth. 

Time of Flight

Of course, if you ask me to, I can recommend a single exercise that trains all the weaknesses of aging: the kettlebell swing.  It's ballistic so it trains power; it's intense enough resistance to maintain strength, muscle mass, and bone-density; it really trains the muscles that gravity hits hardest (the hinging and pulling muscles); it uses the full mobility of the hip; and it gets the heart going like nothing else. In short, keep swings in your diet if you wanna live until you die.

You shouldn’t get freaked out about getting older. As Maurice Chevalier said, “it’s not so bad when you consider the alternative.” In fact, you don’t even really need to change your training philosophy. Whether your goal is to get faster, stronger, hotter, healthier, or if you just want to improve you flight time, training smart doesn’t change. Just stay in touch with your body and keep trying to improve your weaknesses. If you never stop training and focus on mastering the basics, you will launch yourself into your golden years with solid base of health and a lot of velocity.

Inertia and Momentum

When I was a Marine Corps officer candidate*, I went to a little 3-day taste of Officer Candidate School that was staffed by actual Sergeant Instructors from Quantico. After pick-up and a group run carrying all of our trash, my makeshift platoon was introduced to Gunnery Sergeant Mata. If you speak Spanish you'll get the joke. He called our names one-at-a-time and identified something unique to each of us that rendered us unfit for his Marine Corps. (I was guilty of having ridiculous side-burns which he later ordered me to shave off. Dry). To demonstrate how we weak we were, Gunnery Sgt. Mata issued the following so-simple-they-were-brilliant orders:

"Get on your face right now."
"Aye, Gunnery Sgt.!"
"Get up right now."
"Aye, Gunnery Sgt.!"

He repeated these orders until we either 1) could no longer respond, 2) cried out in pain, or 3) both. This took about 90 seconds. Getting up was the hardest thing I have ever done and it was only 90 seconds, performing a single task, with nothing more than bodyweight. Why? Inertia. Literally and metaphorically.

"Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed."- Newton's First Law of Motion

The deadlift, the Turkish Get Up, and the burpee would be on any decent trainer's Top Ten List of Awesome Exercises. One of the things they have in common is that they all involve getting something off the ground (a barbell, a kettlebell, you); the other thing they have in common is that they are all freaking hard. This is because the force you must impress on an object at rest comes entirely from within you. You can't rely on the stretch reflex to give you a little 'umph' in the deadlift or the TGU. And when you're face down in the dirt on your twelfth burpee, ain't no one gonna get you up but you.

Get on your face right now

The average American adult spends less than 30 minutes a day bearing their own weight. Think about what that means for a second. That means we are standing, walking, and moving on our feet less than 1/48th of our day. We are sitting or lying down 98% of our adult lives. Gunnery Sgt. Mata wouldn't have to tell most of us to get on our faces; we already are. And it takes a lot of force to get over that much inertia. I spent 25 years there. But one day I was compelled to change that state. Shame, fear, and the very real possibility that I might lose my wife was finally enough to get me to put on a six-year-old pair of running shoes and try to make it to the end of the block. Before that, I was flat on my face. The inertia was real and getting up was the hardest thing I've ever done.

Get up right now

One day, you just have to get up. You have to change the state you're in and move in a direction that is worth moving in. But it takes a lot of force to change the course of your life. For the next 2-3 weeks, everything you do will be hard. If you were in shape before it will be harder than every before. You are going to be weaker than you remember, slower than you thought, and more sore than you can imagine. Every time you work out for the next 14-21 days, it's going to feel like getting off the ground wearing a backpack full of sand. But you have to do it. You have to get up, put on the shoes, and train. Every. Damn. Day. Because in 2-3 weeks you'll learn something else about the laws of physics.

Aye, Gunnery Sergeant!

Inertia is a bitch, but she has a sister that is the best thing that will ever happen to you: momentum. The more times you get up, put in the work, and deal with the pain, the easier it will be. The more you do, the more you do. Habits have a way of begetting more habits because in 3 weeks you are going to notice your first results. The training will become part of your daily life and you start to look around and wonder what else you can be doing to get stronger, faster, or hotter. After 3 weeks you will want to do more reps, run more miles, eat more protein and none of it will be a fight. You'll have momentum. And getting up won't be nearly as hard.

It's not about you

When the my fellow officer candidates and I were face down in the gravel, Gunnery Sergeant Mata would yell something else at us. After what felt like an eternity of "up-downs" or diamond push ups, one of us would grunt in pain or half-ass an "Aye, Gunnery Sgt!" And when any of us experienced these lapses in bearing, Gunnery Sgt. Mata would tell us, "It's not about you." When you're tired and hurting and you don't think you're going to be able to get up again, it's easy to feel selfish. But sometimes, it's not about you. Gunnery Sgt. Mata was trying to tell us that even at their most exhausted, officers must lead enlisted Marines. They can't afford to be selfish and lose their bearing. And this applies to everyone looking to change their life. In February of 2008, I was pounding pavement because my wife deserved a better me (it was actually a surprise Valentine's Day present). Only you are going to be able to get your own ass off the couch, but sometimes the reason you get up is for other people. So look around at the people in your life and remember, it's not about you. And like Rif says, "that kettlebell won't swing itself."

*So we're clear, I was never a Marine. I was not selected for, did not attend, nor complete OCS. I was an officer candidate from November of 2008 to February of 2010 and that alone was enough to be a formative experience in my life. The picture is actually Gunnery Sergeant Mata yelling and my friend Gram. I'm 3rd in line to get fucked with.

Everything Works (until it doesn't)

Have you ever gone to a bookstore and looked at how many diet books there are? Have you every wondered why there are so many different exercise programs on the internet? Or why every trainer is an expert in [latest fad workout, body part, etc.]? Well at great risk to my physical well being, I am about the let you know the secret to training, and improving your body for the rest of your life. If I don't post next week, you'll know why.

The Most Closely Guarded Secret in the Fitness Industry

When I first started training, it all seemed very complicated. Sets, reps, one leg, two legs, bodyweight, cardio... ahhh! There was a sea of choices that I needed to navigate. How would I know what to do?! Well, as I got more immersed in the science (thanks to people like Alan Aragon, Bret Contreras, Nick Tumminello, Brad Pilon, Dr. John Berardi, Eric Cressey, Leigh Peele, Jonathan Fass, and even Kevin Larrabee) and the art of training (Dan John, Mike Boyle, Mark Reifkind, and Pavel), I began to slowly realize something that Dan John had of course learned decades ago: Everything works (until it doesn't).

Every diet, as long as it is eating less calories than you use, works. You will lose weight; the number on the scale will go down. Until it doesn't anymore.

Every strength training program, as long as it involves CPR, works. You will lift heavier weights; the number will go up. Until it doesn't anymore.

You Are Not the Marble. You Are the Chisel.

One of the things you have to understand for this to make sense is that you are not a block of marble waiting for some brilliant trainer to come along and sculpt into a perfect hottie. Only you can make you. Your body simply responds to the stresses you place on it. Whether it's lifting heavy weights or running really fast, your body reacts to the stress of consistent training with neurological and physiological changes. You need consistency so the body knows it's not temporary, intensity so it knows you mean business, and recovery so it has time to change. But this process is not passive and you are not a block of marble; you are the chisel and the stress is the hammer.

Surely, no stress is a stressful as new stress. New diets, new exercises, new programs, all seem to have an immediate impact on the body because they place our body on high alert. After 2-3 weeks of consistent exposure, we see big improvements on new programs and tell the world about our awesome new diet, program, trainer, etc. But in time, our bodies adjust. In 6-8 weeks we just get used to things. We burn less calories doing movements we are more efficient at. We recruit less muscle fiber into lifts that we are more proficient in. Our brain lowers our NEAT to match the new caloric input. The rate of improvement begins to drop. After 12 weeks or so, no matter how well designed the program is, our bodies usually stop changing. And banging away at things harder won't change much because by now the chisel is dull and needs resharpening.

Know What is Working

The key to understanding how to sharpen the chisel again is knowing what was working in the first place. Before you go off and try every workout program and fad diet under the sun, it's important to have a baseline from which to work.  You have to be aware of what you are eating and what you are doing. You have to know that you are burning about 2000kcal a day to intelligently play around with numbers in your diet. You have to know what set and rep schemes worked best for you at certain times in your life. You have to know how much sleep you are getting. You have to know your tool well before you go about changing it. So here are some tips for understanding what is working and why before you go off and change everything willy-nilly:

• Keep a training journal. I have a blog so I can monitor all my activity. No you can't see it.
• Keep a food journal. This doesn't have to be complicated. I use the same blog and just post a little :) or :( if I was compliant to the particular plan I am on at the time. Some of my clients take pictures of all the food they eat with their phone.
• Pick a few skill measurements and do them a few times a year. I like the front squat, the deadlift, the one-arm overhead press, pull-ups, and the RKC snatch test. Every movement is represented, as well as my conditioning and I don't need a spotter or a lot of equipment.
• Weigh in, but not too often. Dust your scale off every 2-4 weeks. That's about how long it takes to really lose fat or put on muscle. Any more than that will just freak you out.
• Take pictures. Every 2-3 weeks take craigslist-style mirror shots of yourself from a few different angles. The scale is not the only thing that matters. In fact, for most people half-naked pictures matter a lot more.
• Recognise that it's all related. Training, diet, sleep, and life all interact. So keep tabs on how these things affect each other in your journals. Were you traveling a lot during that time? Just had a baby? Drinking more alcohol? Write it down and remember to make a not of it when you are assessing a program.

Now Change Something

Now that you kind of know what works for you, change something. Honestly, it doesn't have to be drastic. Subtle changes to a nutrition plan or a workout program can keep the results coming. If you were doing sets of 20 swings, try 25. If you were back squatting, try front squatting. If you were eating 150g of protein, try 175g. Or 125g. But whatever you change, keep at it for 2-3 weeks. Now look at your body shots. Are they hotter? Did the number on the scale change? Are you moving bigger weights? These little changes can add up to having a major impact on your body, but only if you give it time. If you have tried monkeying around with something a few times and it's still not working, try making a more drastic change. Switch from kettlebells to barbells. Stop drinking for a month. Hell, go vegan, just don't tell me about it. But whatever you change, make sure to keep as much as possible the same. Just like you learned in 8th grade science class, sticking to one variable is the only way to know whether or not something worked.

The Best Exercise in the World

People like to cut corners. Everyone is looking for a shortcut to wealth, happiness and hotness. And so it's not surprising that people look to take shortcuts at the gym. Everyone wants to be hotter, stronger, leaner, and faster yesterday. And I get it. Doing things is hard, especially things that are hard to do in the first place. Not doing things is way easier. But what I can't jive is that the reason most people say they don't exercise is that they "don't have the time" for 2-3 resistance training sessions and 2-3 cardio training sessions a week. Now, if you do the math, that's only 5 hours a week in the gym. And as I've said before, any more time that you have to dedicate to training should be dedicated to sleeping. But let's say for the sake of argument that you don't have 5 hours a week to go to the gym (how much time do you spend on Facebook again?). So you ask me, "Coach Stevo, what's the single best exercise I can do?" Oh, I'll tell you, but I guarantee you that you are not gonna like the answer.

"The Best Exercise in the World" is the one that you suck at the most. You wanna get hotter, stronger, leaner, doing only one exercise? Then go to the gym and do the one exercise you suck at the most.

Everybody Got Their Goat

 Let's look at an MMA fighter. George St.-Pierre is a gifted athlete and a brilliant tactician, but his greatest strength lies in honest personal assessment. At the beginning of camp, he sizes himself up and asks, "what's my weakness? How can this guy beat me?" Then he spends the next 8-12 weeks training with people better than him at that weak spot (boxing, jiujitsu, whatever). No matter how good he gets, he will always be great at some things and weaker in others and in the cage, those weaknesses can become liabilities. The same is true with you. The entire spectrum of human movement comes down to some simple moves. We push, pull, squat, hinge, carry, and we do things faster than we metabolize oxygen or slower (anaerobic or aerobic cardio). That's about it. And if you look at what you do most in the gym, I bet there is at least a 90% correlation to doing the stuff you're already pretty good at. The joke in the industry is that for men, Monday is International Bench Press Day. Well, when I look around so is Wednesday, Friday, and every other day ending in "Y." And for women, every day is "aerobic cardio" day. Oh, I'm sorry, and "core strength" day. But humans aren't made that way. Our bodies are a single piece; a tool that either works well or doesn't. And every body has a weak link, usually highlighted by a exercise that we hate doing. In the biz, that's called your "Goat." Now you just gotta find it and train it.

Finding Your Goat

Take the list of movements above and write them in order of your favorite to your least favorite. That movement you wrote down last? That's your Goat. And for you, it's The Best Exercise in the World.

Training your Goat

Tomorrow, I want you to go to the gym and do a thorough warm up with all the movements on that list. Then, do your goat exercise (aka, The Best Exercise in the World). Now do whatever the hell you want. 2 days later, repeat. Continue for 6 weeks, then re-write your list. Got a new goat? Repeat! Make sure you are training everything a little but hitting your goat first, hardest, and every single time. For extra credit on your days off, do your goat with just your bodyweight for a light sweat. Now you're training the Coach Stevo way: Every. Damn. Day.

Recruiting

What's the difference between you and someone who is really freaking strong? What's the difference between the average 5'8" 185lb American male, and the guy in this picture? The guy in this picture is Jim Leonhard. Jim is a free safety for the New York Jets. He's a full 4 inches shorter and 30 pounds lighter than the average free safety, and is tasked with stopping guys who might have 8 inches and 80 lbs on him. Think about that for a second. This "average-sized" guy gets paid $2 million dollars a year to run across a field and tackle other professional athletes who are carrying 70% more mass than him at the same speed in the opposite direction. You don't have to be Newton to realize that Jim Leonhard is a freaking strong dude. But how?

Lean Mass

Let's get this out of the way right now, you are fatter than Jim. Even if you weigh 185lbs, Jim conservatively has no more than 14% body fat where as the average American man has 25% body fat. So Jim has 159lbs of "lean mass" where as you might have only 139lbs. That extra 14% of muscle that Jim has put on with years of a Wisconsin farm-boy diet and exercise allows him to pack a hell of a lot more punch than you. But it doesn't tell the whole story. Jim's probably put in a decade of training to do something better than you, me, or anyone we know. Jim can recruit.

Strength is a Skill

Just for a little recap, your body is a sack of meat with some interior scaffolding. Your brain turns that sack of meat into a moving tool by getting muscles to fire in a coordinated effort to direct energy from the ground, through your skeleton, and into whatever you want to pick up, move, carry, or throw. When you train a movement, your brain gets better at coordinating that effort. And it does this in 3 important ways:

• More Stability: When you hold a weight over your head, you will feel your entire body fighting to stay underneath it and keep the whole sack of meat + weight upright. But as you do this more, your brain learns to coordinate all those muscles better so that you are more stable. This means force can be directed from the ground, through your bones, and into the weight more efficiently, which means you can lift more weight more easily. In a classic example, it's the difference between firing a canon from a fort or from a canoe.  

• More Gas: As you place more stress on your muscles and start trying to recruit more of them into movements, your brain learns that it's ok to put more 'umph' into those movements. Some of this is actual structural change as more neural connections between your brain and muscles are created ("somatic motor neurons") and more fibers are grown in the existing muscle ("myofibrillar hypertrophy"), but most of this new 'umph' (up to 80% in the first 6 weeks of training) is just your brain turning up the volume to the existing connections and firing different types of muscle fibers in a better order to produce more force.

• Less Brakes: Every muscle that pulls on a bone in your body has a muscle that pulls on the same bone in the opposite direction. This is what creates the stability you need to keep your meat sack moving around, but it also means that our movements have a built in braking system. The stronger you get, the more comfortable your brain is with letting the brakes off a little. Then a little more, etc. Some powerlifters and sprinters are so strong that they have trained their brains into letting off nearly all the brakes and risk getting injured by actually pulling their muscles off their bones.

So to sum up, Jim can recruit more muscle fibers, more quickly, more efficiently, with more 'umph,' less in the way, and all from a more stable base of support. In short, he's a strong little SOB with 236 tackles in 2010.

Why You Care

This is good news for everyone, including those people that just wanna drop some fat and look better by the pool. The stronger you get, the more muscle you can recruit into every movement. The more muscle you can recruit, the more calories you burn just doing stuff. Stronger people have more of a buffer to work with. They can indulge a little more in the calories department from time to time because it's easier for them to burn it off without really trying. Weaker people have to work with such razor-thin margins on their calories that it makes healthy habits seem impossibly strict. So the stronger you get, the more cupcakes you can "accidentally" eat, and the better your quality of life your will be. It all comes down to better recruiting what you got and training the skill of strength.