Blog Archives - Page 33 of 81

It’s Running Season, Don’t Make These Mistakes

The balmy spring weather we’ve been having this week has, in part, reminded me that it is again running and race season.

The other part of the reminder is that I’m starting to see the social media posts from people who are getting a hurt a week or two before the race they’ve been training for all spring. Not good. And I’ve learned, mostly preventable.

The single biggest mistake that I see runners make is overdoing their training mileage. There are many ways this manifests but the net net is simply too much training stress for the available recovery ability. Lifters are guilty of this too, but at least in recent years the understanding of sub-maximal training has become more prolific and I don’t see it as often.

To use a lifting analogy, you don’t ever need to pull 600lbs in training to pull 600lbs in a meet. In fact, you might not even need to dip into the 500s.

So for runners you’ll see runners training for a marathon running upwards of 20 miles before the actual race, and it’s totally unnecessary and usually results in injury.

Here are three articles with you that go over both theory and application of a better way to train:

– Endurance Training with Gym Movement is a high-level overview of how to usebiofeedback in your endurance training.

– Tapering, You’re Doing it Wrong explains why many people and many programs approach tapering incorrectly and it leaves you flagging on race day instead of fresh and ready to accomplish a new level of performance.

– The 5-run Marathon is an account of how, under extreme circumstances, I prepared a runner for a marathon with only 5 runs over 16 days.

If there’s one idea that I want you to take away from each of these is the idea that all you need is the minimal effective amount of stress to induce adaptation – any more and the cost is too high, any less (not usually the issue) and you don’t see improvement.

Even if you have no interest in ever running a marathon or anything like it these ideas can still be applied to improve your overall cardiovascular health and adaptability.

by david Leave a Comment

How Constraints Help You Make Better Decisions

In the early 1970s the United States Air Force issued a request for defense contractors to design and a new advanced lightweight fighter jet. A team from General Dynamics would go on to design the F-16 Fighting Falcon which is still in use today by over 25 countries and is widely considered the most effective and best-designed air combat fighter ever designed.

Long time readers will know what a fan of military strategist and engineer John Boyd I am, and may recognize him as the originator of the O.O.D.A loop, a model for approaching decision making in everything from design to combat. What you may not know is that John Boyd was one three members of the Fighter Mafia that made the F-16 what it is.

If there is one way to summarize how these three men designed the greatest fighter jet the world has ever seen it’s to understand how they constrained the design and decision making.

The first contraint that Boyd introduced was that it had to use a particular engine. That simplified a lot of their design decisions, but it also meant that certain parameters like the amount of power available were fixed from the beginning. If they wanted more speed, they’d have to make a lighter and smaller aircraft. The result contributed to incredible power-to-weight ratio that made it extraordinarily maneuverable.

The second constraint was that they wanted it to have long range, but refused to do what you typically would do to increase range which is to increase the amount of fuel it can carry. Instead they again focused on making it more aerodynamic, lighter, and smaller. Think of this in a way like the difference between a super-heavyweight lifter and a weight class lifter. The weight-constrained lifters are shredded and boast incredible strength-to-weight ratios. The unconstrained lifters have extreme strength, but they’re encumbered in nearly every other way by their size.

The third important constraint is that this wasn’t a blank-check project. They were to design a $3 million dollar plane, which is a hell of a lot of money, but in terms of a combat aircraft it is pennies. As a result they couldn’t add all the bells and whistles that would add size, weight, and complexity – they had to keep it simple.

Ultimately these three key (and other smaller) constraints allowed the designers to stay on a path that resulted in this legendary aircraft.

Setting constraints is counter-intuitive – you might think that limiting your options or freedom will make it harder to reach your goals. On the contrary, appropriate constraints make it easier make good decisions.

– Setting daily caloric or macro targets makes it easy to lose or gain weight, but still gives you the freedom to eat whatever you want. Or, flipping that, constraining the types of foods you eat usually limits your intake as well as a result.

– Having a training program planned out ensures that the unlimited variety of options in the gym doesn’t overwhelm you but still gives you the flexibility to make adjustments on the fly.

– Planning your day out with specific activities at certain times virtually always ensures that you get more done than a day when you have nothing planned and you could have done anything. Bumpers keep you out of the gutter.

Take a minute to look at what you’re trying to achieve or create and whether or not you’ve put appropriate constraints around it so that you’re setup for success. If you haven’t, time to limit your options.

by david Leave a Comment

Stop Trying to Get Fit

I see them almost every day. Articles with titles like “10 Reasons You’re Not Fit Yet”, “If You Want to Be Fit, Do These Things” , and “The Surprising Reason You Aren’t Fit”.

Fitness as an objective state of being does not exist. It’s not a thing. It’s not real. There’s your surprising reason.

No matter where you start and no matter what you do there is not a situation in which you wake up from one day to the next, look in the mirror or jump on the scale or go for a run and go “I did it. I am fit.” My friend and comedian Joe Larson does this little bit where he talks about the gym not working because he keeps going and he never gets fit.

Fitness enthusiasts and people who work in this space love to have discussions and arguments on Facebook complete with lots of hand-wringing and responses formed in such a way that you can tell the author is pretty sure they’ve made their argument so eloquently that they’ve finally found the perfect way to define it.

But it doesn’t mean anything. I can give you some arbitrary definitions, like being able to deadlift twice your body weight, do a few pull-ups, run 3 miles in under 30 minutes and then I can promptly find someone who I would consider “fit” who can’t do one or more of those things. I could then abstract it totally away from exercise movements and say something like you’re fit if you can go for a several-hours-long hike without getting winded or carry a couch up a flight of stairs but it would still be arbitrary and ultimately meaningless.

Which wouldn’t be such a big problem if the idea of “achieving” fitness wasn’t sold as such an objective end point. Something you can succeed or fail at and once you’ve achieved it somehow things change for you. It becomes a thing that some have and other’s don’t. I don’t want that for anybody.

Time For A Language Change

I’ve written several times before about how changing the language you use can change your frame of reference and frame of mind. Here’s another one for you:

Out with fitness, in with better.

You’re only one day away from better.

When you make the pursuit of better your goal, instead of the pursuit of “fitness” then you are winning every single day. Every workout, every lift, everything you do that moves you forward and makes you better.

In changing the entire frame of the conversation to being about better you do away with the idea that fitness is a video game to be beaten by mastering all the levels and defeating the end boss to rescue the princess. You just get better, you get more capable, you get to do more things with more ease. And you never have to wonder if you’ve arrived yet.

Why Does This Even Matter?

Because this matters so much more than most of the stuff we spill gallons of digital ink on in the fitness and training world. Beyond covering the absolute basics of doing productive exercises and making it progressively harder your actual sets and reps don’t matter that much, the minutia of your program probably doesn’t matter, the movements you choose don’t make much difference, it doesn’t matter if you combine your lifting with your cardio, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. It’s all splitting hairs.

But the fact that humans need movement and to be physically challenged is not up for debate.

What matters is whether or not you’ll actually make the effort on a regular basis to challenge yourself physically with some kind of stimulus. And what will have the most profound impact on whether or not you do that is your frame of mind towards it, therefore the language you use to talk and think about it.