It’s Getting Serious Again………………..

So what’s that next giant step towards a better me? I’m not really sure. Although I’ve made progress in the last 3 years, it has been slow and it is getting quite tedious. I think it’s time to step into a larger world. Wouldn’t want to go stale working toward that Last 10 Pounds, you gotta’ move forward, you gotta’ change your environment.

Lately I have been reading about cycling workout routines between three discrete areas of specificity over the course of a year. The first area is Power, followed by Endurance and then Sculpting. Each area of specificity would transition from the previous and allow for better overall performance and maybe, just maybe, better overall progress. Each area of specificity would be a macro-cycle. Within each of the four month macro’s, each month would be broken down into weekly loading progressions with higher ‘work loads’ each week. The last week of the month would be a low load week; built in recovery periodization. And over the four month macro, one would progress from the previous month and max out, e.g. meet your specificity goal the third week of the fourth month. WOW!!! This is complicated!!! But it sounds like fun.

The first area of specificity, Power, would  focus on the basic 5 exercises; Squats, Deads, Rows, Bench and Overhead Press, all greater than 75% of calculated ORM. One would establish the goal of lifting at greater than 90% of calculated ORM by the end of the cycle. These would consist of whole body workouts that alternate focus between above the waist and below the waist every other workout. These would be pretty intense as far as work load. The use of drop sets or ‘down the rack’ techniques should be implemented. There would be lots of rest between sets, up to 4 minutes. To ensure recovery you would be on a three day per week schedule, alternating upper and lower every other week. On the days you do upper and off days (back to back), limited slow cardio (30 minute Slow Jog’s; SLOG’s). You would also hit the minor body parts; e.g. biceps, calves, delts, etc…. during the upper and lower splits, you just need to treat these as secondary exercises. Diet wise; a ‘See Food’ diet is in order, you see food, you eat it. The only 2 rules; pick a calorie limit and stay away from sugar and refined carbs, cookies and cakes; blueberry and girlfriend pies are exceptions. As far as a calorie limit, figure 15 X your goal weight, e.g. if you want to weigh in at 180 then 2700 calories per day would be your limit. Just keep in mind that you have to eat to see progress here. And if you overeat, you will gain fat.

For the Endurance macro, workouts would consist of higher rep ranges at medium weight, maybe between 60 and 80% of your calculated ORM. The big difference would be moving from a 3 day per week lifting schedule to 4 days, using upper and lower splits and reducing rest between sets. All exercises would also be performed as supersets; push pulls or complementing. The weight training goal for this cycle would be to move from one exercise to the next without a rest period, or something less than one minute. One would also up the cardio to something like; Split 20’s four days a week and maybe twice a week throw in a Widow Maker, or other HIIT hybrid. The point is you build yourself up to six days a week cardio. Whatever we do, the mileage is up, the duration is up and the intensity is up. This is also where you would start to moderate the diet, take out a couple calories here and there, shooting for 300 or 500 hundred less per day than the ‘see food’ diet. Maybe 12 X your goal weight. At180 this would be 2200 calories. And toward the end of this cycle, the last month or so, one would start carbohydrate cycling, the same cycle that we tried so long ago, the Lyle McDonald UD2 sequence, carb depletion Sunday through Thursday, carb reload Thursday evening and Friday.

And for the last macro, Sculpting, this is where we should be looking at girth dimensions and based on what we learned from Dr. Casey Butt (Your Muscular Potential), figuring what areas need work; chest, back, legs, bicep’s, etc… and focusing on those areas. You would complete high rep medium weight (70%) upper and lower body split routines four times a week concentrating a majority of sets on those weak areas. At 70%, there is minimal recovery and you should be able to work those trouble spots a minimum of two times per week or as much as you need. You would also slow your cardio down over this four month period, not immediately but gradually. Start out cutting one or two days of running and progressing toward something like the www.fitnessblender.com HIIT routines two or three times a week. I would also keep up with the carb cycling diet, adjusting total calories based on where you want to land as far as final weight (your final lean, fat ratio). The overall goal here is to be at your chosen body fat level with enough muscularity (or illusion of muscularity) to pull of the classic V. Oh My!!!!!

	January - April		May - August		September - December
	Power		Endurance		Sculpt
	AM	PM	AM	PM	AM	PM
Monday	Slog	Upper	Split 20	Upper	Slog	Upper
Tuesday	Slog		Slog	Lower	HIIT	Lower
Wednesday		Lower
Thursday			Split 20	Upper	Slog	Upper
Friday	Slog	Upper	Slog	Lower	HIIT
Saturday	Slog		Tempo		Lower
Sunday

Hell, with a schedule like this by the end of the year, you should be downright cut. Ready for the beach or whatever…………..

When You’re  Noticed, You’re Headed in the Right Direction…………….

I’ve said this in several previous blogs and in fact I make a point of it in this entire blog series. If you’re on track, if you work hard, people will take notice and compliment your efforts. For me in Korea this has included……

• In the locker room of ye old gym at the Grand Hotel in Asan Korea, from behind, a young man in broken English asked how old I was. When I replied 60 he smiled and said nice muscles. WOW!

• And the nice Korean lady that works at the Korean Post Office (who we found out later was actually the mother of one of my daughters Korean friends) told me I looked extremely healthy. Yep, getting noticed in a crowd, you’re on course, you’re doing something right.

• And the nice older gal at the Grand hotel gym that always gives me the ‘thumbs up’ when she sees me in the smith or with a bar loaded for dead lifts.

Where Does the Fat Go……………

I read an article this month that is just plain fascinating. It is the chemical process of how fat is oxidized. Based on the chemistry; 22 pounds of triglycerides (fat) converts to 18.5 pounds of CO₂ and 3.5 pounds of water. WOW!!! The reaction looks something like this;

C₅₅H₁₀₄O₆ + 78O₂ → 55CO₂ + 52H₂O + Energy

Based on this equation, it takes 78 molecules of O₂ to oxidize 1 molecule of triglyceride. So the byproducts of fat loss are CO₂ and water _;  CO₂ is processed through the lungs and the water comes out as sweat, pee, tears, saliva, etc…. You can read the article through the following link. Like I said, it’s pretty cool.

www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7257

For fun let’s compare this CO₂ emission to my car; a 2002 Porsche 996. The Porsche gets 21 mpg combined mileage and based on data from www.fueleconomy.gov, the US governments official website on these matters, the Porsche also pumps out 467 grams of CO₂ per mile based on that fuel usage. 467 grams converts to 1.03 pounds, I would have to drive 17.96 miles to pump out 18.5 pounds of CO₂. That’s pretty close to 1 pound of CO₂ per mile.

On the other hand, to lose 22 pounds at a recommended max of 2 pounds per week, that would take pretty much a full year. Let’s say I added 12 miles per week to my existing run schedule over the next year to get that 2 pound per week fat loss. That would be 624 miles to pump out 18.5 pounds of CO₂ or 0.03 pounds of CO₂ per mile. WOW!!! Now if my legs could only generate 320 HP, I wonder……………………

A New Book……………..

And the book report this month is Body by Science: A Researched Base Program for Strength Training, Bodybuilding, and Complete Fitness in 12 Minutes a Week, by Doug McGuff, MD and John Little. This book includes some pretty cool concepts. Overall, I would consider the book a ‘very good’ read for anyone interested in sports science; especially those that are interested in coaching and training. The concepts that I found most interesting in this book were the author’s thoughts on training frequency, cross training and epigenetics.

Before we get too far into my thoughts on this book, there is one sour spot that I would like to share; the authors’ overwhelming focus on isolation machines. The authors are partial to the Nautilus product line. The reason; they work at a Nautilus training facility in the Seattle area. The authors do talk about the big 5 exercises; dead’s, rows, bench, overhead press and squats and use these examples as the basis of strength training, however in general, strength training is performed on the machines. For example, dead’s and squats are reduced to leg presses; and we know that leg presses are nowhere near as effective as a dead or a squat. Free weights are a last resort according to the authors. I think we know better.

The authors are pretty conclusive in their thoughts as to maximum strength Training Frequency of a target muscle group; not greater than once a week (read as 7 days) and maybe longer, depending on the recoverability of the individual. WOW!!! They are very specific in this area stating several times in the first several chapters that maxing out (working to failure) can only be accommodated once per week; maybe. Any sooner and recovery is incomplete. The author’s view of recovery is that the muscle must heal from both the micro trauma resulting from the previous workout plus any muscle cell glycogen is replenished. And the glycogen recovery to the fast twitch muscle fibers that absorbed the max overload, the last ones recruited, take a long time to refuel, maybe longer than the healing process.

If you have never experienced the feeling of a max effort whole body workout then try this when you’re feeling a bit frisky. On a Friday evening hit the gym and complete several drop sets of both bench presses and bent over rows. Keep these sets as heavy as you can, working to perceived failure. These would be your two main exercises for the evening. You can throw in some bicep and deltoid work, but if the benches and rows are heavy enough, anything else you do will seem pretty wimpy. Now Saturday morning, more or less 12 hours after the upper body sets, hit the gym and go for some heavy sets of dead lifts followed by lighter sets of squats. The dead’s should also be drop sets or at least followed immediately by a set of barbell hacks. Then the second set of back squats should be performed, keeping the weight light but getting an ass to grass stretch; using your hips and upper quads to get the bar up. Again, these would be your two main exercises. You could throw in some calf and hamstring work but you may not have the energy to accommodate.

At the end of these to back to back max or close to max working sessions you should feel totally drained. You will be useless for the remainder of the weekend and anything you do at the gym over the next week will be pretty dismal. I guarantee, if you do this back to back workout with maximum effort, your lifts for the next week will be 10 to 30 pounds below par. In fact you may not be able to recover any progress for several weeks.

In other words, the authors are ‘on the money’ with the recovery recommendations for maximum effort. However, I think, and I would recommend hitting the same muscle groups twice per week, getting in a light set then and a heavier set; not max, and work on workout density (the amount of work I can do in a given time period). I’d save the max workouts for those occasions you just wanted to test yourself; maybe two, three time a year.  Personally, I am still of the opinion that overtraining for recreational or hobby exercise is overstated and recovery can be improved just by pushing yourself on a regular basis. Your body will adapt; that’s why they call it training.

The second area I found interesting was the authors view of Cross Training; more of a rant than anything. There are several paragraphs dedicated to Nike’s marketing conspiracy (?) to sell more sneakers, specifically Cross Trainers. Yes folks the author actually states that back in the 70’s and 80’s, when jogging (steady state exercise) was popular and many, many amateurs were running their hearts off for cardiovascular health and maybe a bit of weight loss, Nike had to come up with a product and marketing strategy to accommodate the many, many running injuries. You can’t sustain sales if all of your customers are broken. In the same time period step classes and group cardio sessions were getting started; you remember Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons don’t you? It was thought that these routines allowed for injury recovery from all of that steady state running; maybe. So Nike, to keep profits maximized, invented the term Cross Trainer; use this do-all shoe for running, step classes and of course, weight training.

When (if) you read this book, you will note that the author is really, really opinionated on how to develop sport specific skill sets and Cross Training ain’t one of them. He is a firm believer in specificity. And yes, I kind of agree. So I wonder what all of those CrossFit folks would think of this book………..

And the last area that I would like to mention is Epigenetics. Basically epigenetics is using an outside influence to turn on or turn off different parts of your DNA. WOW!!! This is not reprograming your DNA, you will always be you, your bones, your muscularity, your hair and eye color will not change. However, as a human, this is how we adapt to a shifting environment. For example, if you are overweight, over fat, that part of your DNA that controls the endocrine system (hormonal response) is basically set for a fat mode. If you change your diet, add a bit of exercise and lean out, over a period of time those DNA switches will reset your endocrine system to a lean mode, your hormonal response will shift to that lean person. However, in the interim, you are busting your tail trying to overcome those fat switches. This is probably why many people fail at any type of fat loss; they bust a nut getting leaner but can’t manage to sustain it long enough for the switches to reset. What I could not find in this part of the book was how long this would take or what a threshold leanness would be. Also one should note that if you are not diligent, once you have reset the switches, if you overeat, if you quit moving and you gain back the weight, gain the fat, those DNA switches will switch back to fat mode. Our bodies are smarter than we are!!!

So in an effort to gain on that Last 10 Pounds; lift, run, step, jog, swim, eat reasonably, stay away from sugar, just do what it takes to change your environment and get those DNA switches set to a lean mode.

Have fun and ‘Just Do It’!!!!

MMJennings