In this interview, I have been fortunate enough to get under the skin of a throwing coach and find out a bit more about how he plans the year for his athletes and how he approaches training them.

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CB: Hi Jeff, thanks for agreeing to do an interview.  Would you mind introducing yourself in case my readers have not come across your website, A Throw Coach’s Journey?

JN: Well, you are the first person interested in interviewing me.  I’m pretty open and honest so I’ll answer anything you have.

CB: OK, I think I understand that, although it’s very different from the UK system, which I am most familiar with.  So, getting down to the interesting stuff, what kind of workouts do you set your athletes?

JN: I do daily throwing work outs focusing 99% on just throwing.  I don’t have my guys run almost ever.  I’ll do stuff like med balls, hurdle mobility and kettle-bell stuff but usually it’s only throwing at our two-hour practices.

For lifting I do that too, the head coach usually leaves my guys alone there.  I stick to cleans, bench, squat, deadlift and pull ups as the general focus of all my lifting.  I’ll switch them about but I generally cover the same muscles.

Bench I’ll switch to stuff like push presses and incline.  Squat I’ll go front, split or jump.  Deadlift I’ll go RDL, good mornings etc.  Cleans, cleans and jerk, snatch, you know the usual.  Pull ups are pull ups.  I’m coaching 250+ pound guys so I’ll be happy if they can do 5 without help by the end of the year.

I don’t focus too much on rest periods.  Throws last 4 seconds and they get about 10 minutes until their next throw.  They need very little conditioning to get that done. Ideally I want them out of the weight room in 45-60 minutes but if they want to have an epic lifting session so be it.  I’m not there for most of the lifting so putting down resting times is useless as every time I did they never followed it even with me supervising.

CB: I guess the basics work well.  What do you think about warm-ups and deloads?

JN: I also have my guys do throws without implements.  (I don’t think I’m clear on this.  Just like runners do drills the simulate running without running I simulate throwing without throwing.  So like an A or B drills where they focus on technique without worrying about performance I them do throws without implements to focus 100% on technique rather than worrying about the distance.  Everyone gets obsessed with how far the ball goes rather than how well they do.  Taking out that reward system gives them nothing else to worry about).

I notice as they warm up they start going faster naturally. The volume is high going for 100-200 movements or an hour. Then they throw for an hour and lift for an hour.  I’m at 3 hours a day and keep working to cut it down but I end up reading about things to add rather than take away.

I also do like Dave Tate says and have unloading weeks.  Every 5th week or big meet I’ll have them cut the weights in half and go high in reps (8-12).  They usually come out feeling like superman and it gives a good idea of what they will throw at Nationals.  Last year after the last unload everyone went up a meter in hammer.  Nationals/Regionals everyone gained at least 2m.  Beginners always see bigger increases of course.

CB: That all makes sense.  So do you periodise their training throughout the year?

JN: I like the idea of periodization but it’s not practical.  I have heavy guys so there’s no reason for hypertrophy.  If anything I’d rather they lost weight.  I usually spend a couple of cycles working on GPP, but geared more for strength.  I stick to stuff like 5 x 5 and heavier weights.  I’m trying to get as much strength on them as early as possible.

With the amount of reps they put in throwing wise they will adjust to their new strength if they get it early but too much too late and it’s useless.  Maybe not completely useless, but they won’t know how to apply it to the throw without reps.

CB: What about in-season?

JN: Once the season starts I switch over to one limb work.  Split squats, one legged good mornings, dumbbell press, etc.  There’s very little in the throws where people are using both limbs to generate force.  While working both is needed and is the quickest way to gain strength (from what I’ve noticed) working on individual limbs helps them learn how to fire them without the support and the linking of the other limb.

CB: Cool.  And do you do anything special to peak before a competition?

JN: The weeks coming up to nationals I go back to two leg work but it’s all geared towards speed.  At this point any new strength they won’t really use right away.  I’m looking for quick improvements in the throws.

This means jump squats, snatches, speed bench and things of that sort.  Between them adjusting to their new power, throwing full force six days a week (meets included) and lifting fast I’m training them to move explosively every time they move.

CB: Interesting.  That chimes with a lot of the research I have been reading about developing speed and power in athletes.  How long have you been running this kind of programme?

JN: I started doing this two years ago.  Usually the first few cycles they are stale at meets, throwing about their average or personal record (PR) of last season.  Around the single limb phase they have 5,000 throws in and start doing well, if not great.  In championship season my guys always PR.

I peaked one guy for indoor track and he had a 2ft PR in shot then a 1ft PR at outdoor states (high school level).  Last year I had two peak at our regional championship both throwing hammer over 5ft PRs.  The one guy said he was throwing farther than he thought possible the week going up to that.  At nationals the two guys I had peak threw 1m and 3m PRs.  But I’m constantly trying to improve it and see what’s not working.

CB: They’re great results, Jeff.  So how do you approach planning the year and how does the training fit into that?

JN: I always work backwards.  The Nationals is the first week of May.  So working back, that week and the three weeks before it will be speed work.  Four lifts a day, four days a week (some going three because of class schedules).  This four weeks is all about quick bar movement and plyo type stuff.  300lb guys shouldn’t jump a lot so no more than 20-40 a week total depending on their fitness.

The previous cycle is a hybrid.  It’s speed mixed with GPP.  So cleans, front squats for speed, speed deadlifts but keep the bars heavier than the last cycle and no ballistic stuff.  The reason for this cycle is that the Indoor Nationals are in March and the Outdoor Nationals are two months later.

The cycle before that is speed again. Yes, I spend three months focusing on speed so preseason is important for strength gains.  This one is similar to the cycle just before the Nationals.

In January/February my athletes will focus on single limb stuff.  The key here is learning how to use the new strength built in the off-season without the added support.  Also, single limb work does wonders on core muscles which are wildly important for throwing.

October to December is two cycles of GPP.  This means heavy lifts, slow bars, major lifts.  Most powerlifting workouts will look similar.

CB: And thinking about those heavy lifts during the off season, do you have any standards you set for your athletes?

JN: Being a Jr. College I only have two years of eligibility with all my guys.  Dr. Bonderchuk gives numbers for all the lifts that he thinks are maximum before the transfer to throwing becomes insignificant.  For example, he had squats around 200kg.

Most of my athletes come in with little to no experience lifting.  I think my strongest guy puts up just over 140-150kg in squats and he’s gone after this year.  I doubt I’ll ever have an athlete here that hits a ceiling that I have to worry about that.  Although if I do you better believe I’ll be digging up every bit of info I can find to help that person improve.

CB: Finally, what do you think about throwing with overweight implements and partials?  I reviewed an article a while back by Stanley Lampert that was very enthusiastic about these techniques…

I will say in general I love under and overweight throwing.  It’s the closest thing I do to a drill in shot and hammer (I’ve pretty much anti-drills).  The 14lb shot is the best way to help someone transition from the high school 12lb to the international 16lb, at least that’s what I noticed.  I would also spend most preseasons in high school having my guys throw the 14 and even the 16 for stronger guys.

As for the article I seem to take your stands from the summary you wrote up.  I don’t think people put enough emphasis into partials geared towards sport specific movements.

People seem too hung up on looking as squats or cleans (or any other lift) as the athlete event you are training for.  They go on and on about their numbers and always want perfect technique (ass to grass) but really in no throw is anyone getting that depth.  Awesome you can take 500lbs to the floor but wouldn’t a 700lb partial be closer to what you actually need?  But if you go on throwing forums like The Ring, people get heated about this stuff and will call you stupid for thinking differently.

Needless to say many coaches think I’m stupid, then I read stuff by Dr. Bondarchuk or Dan John saying exactly what I did and they are praised for it, but I digress.  (Yes, I am a bitter individual).

I, like you, don’t fully understand the emphasis on isometrics.  For an individual having trouble staying low, I can see the need to work on it.  I can’t say I think it’s good for everyone in all situations though.  This is why I don’t like releasing exact workouts because the guy this workout was written for will benefit from isometric lifts (I hope it’s not just a waste of time) but not everyone will.  Some high school kids will find this workout and do it as written rather than thinking about their needs, because they don’t know what they need, which is why they’re looking for a workout online.

For a pro, I get doing eight lifts.  It’s their job, it’s what they do so go put in the work.  Martin Bingisser has posted work outs that Dr. Bondarchuk has given him and he’ll have two training sessions a day, four lifts in the morning and another four in the afternoon.  I am in the mindset that less is more, but I have college kids who are limited on time.

What confused me about this author is his lifting program seems to revolve around max strength.  Everything is low reps/heavy weight and then he says that after certain numbers for lifts there won’t be much gain.  If he knows this and gives it as a warning why does it focus so much on just max strength, it doesn’t make sense to me.  If this is a workout for a semi-pro or professional athlete than chances are they are already strong enough.

This workout got really confusing at that point.  It seems written for someone at a high level but also seems like it’s written for someone who needs to make major gains in the lifts.  If it got away from heavy slow lifts and moved more towards lighter speed work I’d like this work out.  But like I mentioned at face value it’s slightly confusing.

CB: Thanks for the detailed comments, Jeff.  Regarding the emphasis on strength in that article by Stanley Lampert, it was probably misleading of me to say that the article was published in 1986, because Lampert was competing in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Consequently, Lampert was writing at a time when nobody else was using strength training and top-level athletes were not as strong as you might assume.  Hence, the strange workouts where the volume is high and the focus is on strength.  Anyway, thanks for taking the time to do this inteview!

JN: Thanks for doing this interivew, it’s an honor.

Lee and I got talking and despite his busy schedule, which included a trip to Harvard to catch up with some academic research into bartefoot running at the university, he kindly made time to do a brief interview.

***

CB: Lee, it was great to meet you at Leisure Industry Week.  Having chatted with some of my friends in the fitness industry, many of them already know who you are and are really excited about this interview!  But, for those who don’t, could you give us a little background on who you are and what you do?

Lee: Hi, and thank you for the opportunity.  I have essentially applied the principles of ‘evolutionary medicine’ to running and human movement in general.  My philosophy is based on the premise that the human organism is subject to ‘natural laws’ and has evolved in accordance with them.  If we defy or ignore these laws we eventually end up injured and in pain.

CB: I couldn’t agree more.  Speaking of injury, one of things I picked up talking to you was how many runners get injured every year.  I think I’ve seen a statistic of 80% of runners getting injured!  Why is the statistic so high?

Lee: Injury rates amongst runners are unacceptably high and I believe a large majority of these injuries are due to a lack of technique rather than training errors in volume or intensity.

It is fairly obvious from an evolutionary perspective that human beings are designed to run on the forefoot (just observe barefoot populations and elite runners) and have been doing so for thousands of years.  But 80% of  modern runners heel-strike whilst running which is an unnatural movement pattern that creates unnatural loading forces on the body.

Conventional wisdom within the sports medicine and athletic footwear industries is to try and control the unnatural motion (motion control technology) and try and reduce the loading forces (shock absorption technology). Unfortunately, these interventions have failed miserably. Running injury rates are probably higher today than ever before.

CB: It does seem odd that so many millions are spent on developing running shoes but more and more people keep getting injured.  It’s kind of like the low-fat diet explosion and the increasing tide of obesity.  Anyway, I digress.  So tell me again, how is the human foot supposed to run, from an evolutionary perspective?

Lee: Human beings are designed to run on the forefoot but its not just foot strike that is important. The alignment of whole body is a huge influence on running efficiency and injury potential. Barefoot technique is characterized by an upright posture, a high cadence and a relaxed running action.

CB: OK, I get that now.  So it seems that many people are jumping onto the barefoot bandwagon at the moment.  But am I right in thinking that just switching from cushioned running shoes to barefoot when running is not the answer?

Lee: Barefoot technique is part of our human evolutionary heritage but it is a forgotten skill in modern populations. We may still possess the ‘hardware’ for barefoot running but we no longer have the appropriate ‘software’ to go with it and therefore, just taking your shoes off is normally a recipe for disaster. Most people end up creating a sort of ‘hybrid’ running style that also loads the body incorrectly.

CB: OK, I guess we have the ‘hardware’ in that we have feet but our movement pattersn are governed by our brians.  We need to reprogramme them…  OK, so with that in mind, how does your coaching programme help people learn to run properly?

Lee: The coaching programme has been designed to give coaches the skills to change running ‘software’ and to identify any potential ‘hardware’ problems in ‘wanna be’ barefoot runners.

CB: That makes perfect sense.  So you’ve paired up with VIVOBAREFOOT, the minimalist shoe company.  Why are VIVOBAREFOOT the best option for running shoes?

Lee: I feel very privileged to be aligned with VIVOBAREFOOT as they are the original barefoot brand and very passionate about educating the consumer on the realities of adopting a barefoot lifestyle.  Also, they only produce barefoot/minimal footwear.

On a technical note, they have created a unique puncture resistant membrane which provides runners with an excellent balance between puncture wound protection and maximum proprioceptive feedback.

CB: Sounds sensible.  I’m a powerlifter so I am always telling people about the benefits of the squatting movement.  I notice you talk about squatting quite a bit in your booklet “Proprioception: Making Sense of Barefoot Running”.  Why do you place so much emphasis on this movement?

Lee: I don’think its a coincidence that populations who do not wear shoes also do not sit in chairs!  The deep ‘hunter gatherer’ squat is a very functional and therapeutic movement.  I believe most mechanical back pain can be cured using this movement pattern and it is one of my ‘movement skill milestones’ I use to assess a runners potential for injury .

CB: Thanks, Lee!  What’s next for you? A book?  Speaking engagements? What should we watch out for?

Lee: Thank you.  It looks like my diary is starting to fill up with coaching clinics in the US and Europe and I predict the demand will only increase as more research is released showing the benefits of barefoot technique.

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You find more information about Lee and his clinics here.  And if you are in the UK in mid-December, you can catch one of Lee’s workshops in London.  See the details in the flyer below:

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CB: Mike, most of my interviewees tend to work in the strength and conditioning field, either as coaches or personal trainers.  In fact, I don’t think I have ever interviewed a nutrition blogger before!  We’re breaking new ground here.  So can you give a little background on where you come from and what you do?

Mike: I’m the most unlikely blogger on nutrition you’re likely to meet.  I work as a consultant  by day in areas that have nothing to do with nutrition and I’ve never had much interest in anything to do with food and held a pretty crappy diet for most of my life, up until around August of last year when it all suddenly and dramatically changed.

CB: Great opening!  It’s almost like the start to a book… And am I right in thinking that you created your blog, Fat Fiction, because you were interested to see why you had developed gall stones and whether there was a natural cure?

Mike: That was the catalyst but it started a little before that in 2009 when I decided I’d get fit and into shape.  I’d slowly morphed into a fat lookalike of my teenage self over the years, and while I’d never gone on a diet as such, the idea of rolling into middle age looking like a teletubby finally got to me.

So I started running and gymming it, stopped eating ‘junk food’ and went from about 3 stone overweight to 4 and a half.  That’s right – upwards.

The Michelin Man Mike: photo by Hyku

***

I didn’t understand, nor to be fair give it much thought until I got gallstones in the middle of last year.  I set about doing sifting through pubmed papers to see if I could establish why and ‘discovered’ the Pima Indians who really kicked off the obesity epidemic in early 1900s who simultaneously became beset by gallstones (over 50% of the over 30s have them, male and female).

Until that point, I’d never read a single article on nutrition, so I didn’t know that my ‘discovery’ of the Pima obesity/gallstone connection is pretty much the first thing dieticians learn.

However, this ignorance was pretty handy.  The common wisdom is that the Pimas got fat through junkfood which isn’t true, at least not by today’s definitions. The Pimas originally became fat and plagued with gallstones with two small changes in their diet: eating sugar and replacing soaked corn flour with refined white flour.

So after reading that, I cut out flour (I wasn’t eating much sugar) and lost several stone, mostly in the space of a few weeks. I was more amazed than anything else, and thought I’d probably be able to reverse gallstones too – so Fat Fiction was born.

CB: Inspirational.  If only more people were so proactive about seeking the answers to their own problems, our knowledge about what works would be so much greater.  And where are your thoughts at the moment on the gallstones project?

Mike: The weight loss was permanent, but the cure to gallstones it was not.  I’m still convinced of the cause of gallstones – but removing the cause clearly doesn’t provide a cure.  I’ve made a few changes and I’ll see how I get on in a year.  It very much seems like a slow process.  In the meantime though, I’m focusing on things which interest me more that I’ve discovered along the way.

CB: Interesting.  I’ll look forward to seeing how you get on.  And while your site started as a project on gall stones, things have snowballed and now you are investigating a thesis, that our obesity crisis is being caused by malnutrition.  I have to say, I liked the parallel you draw with beri beri and pellagra, it’s a graphic way of bringing your theory to life.  How did that idea come to you?

Mike: Purely through research.  I figured that if refined white flour was that damaging to us, what about other grains?  Have they ever caused illness? Turns out millions of people have died of malnutrition after refining rice and corn. The difference is with wheat is that we tend to eat to compensate for the lack of nutrients: beri beri and pellagra sufferers just starved to death.

Again, as I started reading around, I discovered there was an entire food movement (paleo) that revolves around the idea that all grains, as well as legumes are damaging to humans to us.  I don’t buy into the extremes of paleo but the core tenets: don’t eat processed food, keep off gluten and don’t worry about saturated fat, I agree with.

CB: Sounds pretty much like a decent summary of paleo to me!  Let me impose on you for a moment.  I read a number of entertaining and informative articles on your site and several times came away with the strong impression that obesity is caused by malnutrition.  However, I couldn’t bring it all together myself.  If you had to pitch the idea to a strongly sceptical audience, how would you go about it?

You mean without using an n=1 story right? OK, in a nutshell:

Eat less and move faster – conventional wisdom – is a none too subtle way of saying you’re greedy and lazy.  And of course, a lot of people are greedy, but to even suggest that nearly 2/3 of the western world have suddenly discovered greed in around the 1970s is frankly absurd.  Lazy doesn’t work either.  Gyms and aerobic exercise as routine became popular in the 1970s and we exercise more now than we did then. So if it’s not sloth nor greed to blame.

It’s the hunger that people are feeling that’s causing weight gain. Hunger is cry for nutrients and or energy. As excessive body fat is effectively an energy store, hunger in the obese is a cry for nutrients (vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, protein) and not energy.  And as well as daily functioning, these nutrients are required to burn off body fat. If they had them, they wouldn’t feel hunger and they would burn body fat rather than look for food.

Obesity is a disease of malnutrition, not greed.

This explains the success of protein heavy diets.  Not because man should live off protein, but because if you’re fat, the only nutrients you need to survive other than water can all be found in high doses in meat – protein, fats, vitamins and minerals.

CB: Awesome, remember folks, you read it here first!  Can you explain a bit more about why you think wheat is so bad for the body?

Mike: It’s gluten that I have it in for, and so white flour (concentrated gluten) is the worst, narrowly pipping sugar as the primary cause of obesity.  In short, gluten is stripped of any nutritional benefit, it’s addictive, it damages the GI tract in non-celiacs as well as celiacs which affects ability to absorb nutrients, and like all grains, contains lectin – an effective antinutrient that prevents absorption of key vitamins and minerals. In short, it sucks.

CB: Agreed, but the dieticians out there still won’t accept this.  It’s all this “healthy whole grains” for the heart rubbish.  So there are a lot of people who are criticising the idea that wheat is bad for you at the moment.  I think some of them are the conservative dieticians who just can’t let go of the food pyramid, despite what new research is telling them.  However, I think others are  just uncomfortable with the idea that the obesity crisis didn’t occur in neolithic times but more recently.  How would you respond to this?

Mike: Usually the argument boils down to something along the lines of well Jesus wasn’t fat was he? And it’s true – traditional whole wheat bread never did our parent’s generation much harm.  And it still doesn’t in moderation if:

• it’s  made from grains that have not been bred for higher gluten
•  it’s made with that contains the original bran rather having bran added in
• it’s made without enzymes to unnaturally speed up the baking process to a couple of hours
• it’s made with stoneground flour rather than flour from high speed centrifuges

Good luck finding that anywhere in your local Tescos eh? It’s no coincidence most of these changes happened in the 1960s-70s – the same time the obesity epidemic kicked off in earnest.

And I agree, some dieticians are very sniffy about paleo eating but appeals to authority wash over me.  Barefoot running didn’t come from podiatrists, the economic disasters of recent months weren’t predicted by economists and obesity is not being cured by dieticians…

CB: You are becoming very quotable, you realise?  And lots of people are talking about the importance of gut flora at the moment.  How does that tie into your theory?

Mike: If I could start the blog again, it’d start with gut flora. I’d even go as far to say that all sustainable weight loss requires a change in gut flora, whether you’re aware of it happening or not. Bacteria are crucial in absorbing nutrients, and it’s well known the obese have markedly different gut flora than their normal weight counterparts.

Additionally, the bacteria in your gut digest your food and can suppress or enhance appetite. Wheat and sugar are a particularly lethal combination in disruption of gut flora and although I wouldn’t recommend it, broad spectrum antibiotics plus abstaining from both grains and sugar I suspect is the fastest way of losing weight you could choose.

CB: Our governments here in the UK have allowed the obesity crisis to get completely out of hand.  I’d like to vote for you to be our new health secretary.  Assuming you’d take the job on, what would be your manifesto?

Go on then, thanks!  OK, leaving aside the thorny issue of NHS restructuring and food security, I’d make Eric Pickles do aerobics outside Westminster every day – in lycra hotpants – until the British public agreed not to eat any more crumpets.

Failing that, in terms of obesity it’s all about the food supply. I’d look to baseline obesity numbers, then tax food shops and the processed food manufacturers for any increases in national obesity rates, but share the reduced NHS costs of any decreases too.

At the moment it’s in the drug companies interest to find medical solutions, the food manufacturers to make people eat more, and the big shops to make us buy more of the lowest quality, cheapest fodder you can buy which incidentally has the highest mark up. The only way out that mess is to incentivise and/or punish the root cause – low nutrition processed food.

And as for food labelling and all this traffic light nonsense – bin it. Instead, take the average size of the punter who eats your food, and put their silhouette on the label by law. The bakery aisle would look like a Viz cartoon in no time.

The Viz version of Superman: photo by So_Rayne

***

CB: Pull no punches, Mike!  Finally, I have to say that I really enjoy reading your writing, I always come away from your blog having learned something and your sly sense of humour is one of the few that makes me laugh out loud when reading.  Are you going to write a book? (hint, write a book)

Mike: Thanks Chris, no plans not least because keeping one site update takes time enough.  And if I did I may have to change the name – about half the traffic to the site comes from people looking for fiction about fat people.  Or change the content, one or the other…

***

CB: Matt, we’ve both been posting away in blissful ignorance of each other for about a year now so it’s safe to assume that some of my readers won’t have come across you before.  Can you just give us a quick introduction to your background, to what you do and why you do it?

Matt: Hi Chris, firstly I’d like to say thanks for speaking with me – it’s always great to connect with others who have a real passion for training.  My background is principally in strength and conditioning and I’ve been coaching individuals and teams for around 12 years now.  I also run a Health and Wellbeing company Elevate Wellbeing.  We focus on delivering employee health and wellbeing programmes for organisations.

I love to see people improve in any aspect of health and wellbeing and I’d say this remains my driving motivation.

CB: That’s a great motivation to have and one that I certainly share.  But as well as all of that, you run a awesome blog dedicated purely to training with sandbags, Sandbag Fitness.  Why the focus on sandbags?

Matt: After returning to the UK after a year abroad I found I was struggling to get into the gym as often as I would like.  I had an empty garage so got hold of a couple of 25kg bags of sand and started training with them.  At that point my strength and conditioning was pretty low so it worked well for me.  I started the blog as a way to inspire others who perhaps didn’t have access to the traditional training options.  I’m a huge fan of ‘odd-object” lifting anyway so the sandbag was a natural choice.

The benefits of lifting unstable objects like the sandbag are not really mainstream yet – we have plenty of unstable surface options like wobble boards and stability balls but we still tend to focus on balanced “weights”.  In reality it is often the weights we lift that are unbalanced and not the surface we’re standing on.

CB: Interesting thoughts about unstable object lifting, I tend to keep my sandbags fairly tightly bound so I tend not to get that benefit.  Anyway, I had a skim through some of the daily workouts on your blog and I noticed a couple of things I wanted to ask you about.  I couldn’t help noticing, for example, the CrossFit T-shirt you wear in some of your videos.  Has CrossFit been a big influence on you?

Matt: I was one of the original guys to start Crossfit Bath back in 2008 before taking a year out to travel… and generally loaf around the world a bit.  I’m no longer directly involved in Crossfit but the guys at Crossfit Bath continue to run a great gym.

Crossfit has been great for a variety of reasons – not least bringing Olympic Lifting to the general public.  Like anything though, you need to find yourself a good set of coaches to work with.  I wouldn’t really say that Crossfit has had a huge influence on my coaching style – I’ve been focusing on both metabolic conditioning ands strength/power for a few years now.

CB: That’s pretty much exactly the same place I am in on CrossFit.  Great minds and all that.  Still thinking about training, what would you see as the key sandbag movements to master?

Matt: The sandbag is essentially a weight that we can all use for resistance training.  And like other modalities I’m a fan of big, compound movements that develop strength, power and agility. The added benefit of working with the sandbag is that it can be a harder object to work with (at comparable) weights that a traditional free weight. It moves around with you lift it so you’ll find yourself working hard just to stabilise the bag.  With this in mind I prefer to use it for overhead movements like the press, push press and jerk.   It’s also great for load carries – hill climbs with the sandbag are tough.

Matt in action with a sandbag

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At this point I’d say the following exercises would be my Top 5 (that could change next week though!):

1. Sandbag Clean and Jerk
2. Sandbag Zercher Squat
3. Sandbag Hill Climbs (over the shoulder)
4. Sandbag Push Jerks
5. Sandbag OH Walking Lunges

CB: Everything’s always subject to change!  Taking the whole sandbags thing a bit further, if someone is training conventionally with barbells, how could they add a little bit of sandbag training into their routines and get a lot of benefit without compromising their barbell work too much?

Matt: For pure strength I absolutely recommend that people keep up with their barbell work.  As an additional element, utilising the sandbag for it’s primary benefits i.e. odd object stabilisation, would be the best approach. Taking one day a fortnight to substitute in sandbag cleans and presses would work well.  Working hard for those sandbag lifts will definitely have a great transfer back into your regular barbell work.

CB: Cool, that sounds doable.  And you work closely with Brute Force sandbags.  Why are they such great sandbags?

Matt: The guys at Brute Force Sandbags sent me a bag late last year and I was very impressed.  I’m keen that the people who use my site know that it is possible to work out with both homemade sandbags and the custom made ones (like Brute Force).  Having handles on the bag make it far easier to do rows and pulls so they’re a great option for people who don’t have access to other weights.

Plus, the Brute Force Sandbag is virtually indestructible (well, so far at least) and the customer service is awesome. I’m now the official strength and conditioning representative for the company. This really just involves giving practical advice to those who want to incorporate sandbag lifting into their training programme.

CB: Hmm, indestrucibtle, I have some friends who might be able to put that to the test… Moving on, you’ve recently released an e-book all about sandbags.  I’ve had a quick look so far and I really liked what you’ve done.  What made you realise that there was a gap in the market for a resource like this?

Matt: Thanks for the compliments. It really makes these things worthwhile when you know that people are out there following and enjoying your work. There is always a gap for any resource that empowers people and that was really the goal with the e-book. You can follow the programme for free and get yourself a homemade sandbag for less than £5 – there is no excuse not to give it a go.

CB: Great answer, I am all for giving people the tools they need to get the job done.  Now let me ask you now about the health and wellbeing aspects of your work.  I note that you are a fan of Robb Wolf’s book, The Paleo Solution.  How did you come to the paleo way of eating and how beneficial have you found it for yourself and your clients?

I first tried a low carb dietary approach back in 2004 and it really clicked for me.  Bodyfat just dropped off and my energy levels went through the roof.  I have pretty much followed a low carb, un-processed diet ever since. This diet suits me but I’m not too far off your average caveman! I’m of Northern European stock – short, stocky and can live happily on meat.

For others I try to get them to try it and see how it suits them. But, whatever approach people follow, I’m always keen that it be based around un-processed foods.

CB: Sounds like we probably have similar ancestors, then.  Still on health and wellbeing, looking at your videos, I see that you clearly have an interest in good movement patterns and good mobility.  How important do you find this aspect of health and training is for your clients?  Do you find that the hip hinge, for example, is lacking in many less-active people?

Matt: I have a degree in Sport Science and Biomechanics and this is one of the areas I find to be lacking in much of todays coaching. The ability to move well is paramount as it is the base for so many different things. Coaching these days seems to be as much about motivation as correction and I find this to be a problem.

I always stress the concept of “freedom of movement” to my clients. This is particularly important when working with athletes who need to work at high intensity. There needs to be a balancing act between the intensity needed to achieve results and the preparatory work needed to be able to work efficiently. Unfortunately it is often the latter that gets neglected.

CB: I agree completely.  Outside of the internet coaches who seem to talk about nothing else, there are very few personal trainers who are spending any real time on movement preparation, in my opinion.  Finally, let me put you on the spot now at the end of the interview.  Can you sum up what for you are the key messages that we as health and fitness experts need to be advising (a) athletes, and (b) the general population to focus on to get the best results for performance and health?

Matt: My honest answer would be that athletes and the general population should actually be focusing on the same things, just not necessarily at the same intensity. I’ve been involved in the commercial fitness sector and it always baffled me how the “regular” people were training in a completely different way to athletes. We should all be able to do what athletes do – move with speed and agility, apply strength and power and perform with great skill. Whether I’m training athletes or not, all my clients learn to think and act like athletes.

The age old advice of “you get what you focus on” is so true. So turning up at the gym to “tone” up or “get some abs” isn’t going to cut it if you want to improve health and performance.

CB: Another great answer, Matt.  Thanks for the interview!  I hope your business and blog continue to do well and I look forward to corresponding more with you in the future.

• Brent Barbe
• Isaac Wilkins
• Mike T Nelson (part one and part two)
• Rob Newman (part one and part two)
• Doug Brignole

But I have to confess that the interview I have been really excited about for some time is this one.  I have finally persuaded Sumoman to take some time out of his busy schedule of lifting ridiculously heavy weights at a tiny bodyweight so that I can pick his considerable brains about lifting, partials and the strange and wonderful world of homemade gym equipment.

***

CB: Sumoman, thanks for agreeing to do this interview.  I’ve been wanting to discuss a number of things with you for a while but with all that has been going on it’s been tough to find a moment to pull it all together.  But let’s start at the beginning for those people who might not have come across you, despite your astounding strength and acumen.  Could you give us a brief introduction to your background, your training and your lifting history?

SM: I started lifting in 1981 and wanted to be the Incredible Hulk and wrote in my training diary: “in 5 years I would like to have a Mr Olympia physique with a 600 lb squat and 400 lb bench press.”

I read Weider magazines, couldn’t make sense of the routines and then came across HIT, which to my teenage Asperger’s type mind seemed very logical.  I was very intelligent, but as smart as a cabbage, so followed HIT for some 10-12 years.  I got nowhere and put this down to being genetically disadvantaged.

I came across Stuart McRobert’s stuff, which was really just a version of HIT, but from his writings decided that a power rack would be an excellent safety device. I built a rack, I built another 40 racks, I sold them. I tested each design of the rack by calculation and loading it with weights. I also tested it by lifting on it, but with my HIT strength I was too weak to use heavy weights so I tested it with partials. I tested it for about 7 years. in the process building up to 1,000 lb loads, the rack handled them with ease.

CB: That’s an interesting way of looking at it.  Let me ask you a bit more about HIT.  You said that you wasted a lot of time doing HIT routines.  What kind of routines were you doing exactly?  Why do you think they didn’t work?

SM: I followed routines that Ellington Darden wrote about in his various books and joined a Nautilus Gym at one point (that was a waste of £200). I even tried Superslow, which is the worst protocol known to man, even Fred Hahn and Drew Baye abandoned it and they are hardcore nouveau HIT.

• HIT doesn’t work because it is all about intensity and safety, rather than lifting weights.
• HIT is the sort of thing that is foisted onto the corporate wellness brigade because it is simple to understand and sounds scientific and has machines designed to fit into plush surroundings.
• HITers fear that using weights will create magical forces via acceleration and momentum.
• HITers are rubbish at Newtonian mechanics and will make up pseudo crystal ball physics that sounds alarming.
• HITers don’t cycle loads and volumes.
• HIT is worshipped by customer advisors and Ayn Rand fanatics all loyally following ex-multi-millionaire entrepreneur Arthur Jones.

CB: OK, I get the point.  Don’t do HIT.  But what happened to change your approach to lifting?  What kind of routines did you follow once you had abandoned HIT?

SM: After a dozen years of HIT I had a 130 kg Trap Bar lift… after 7 years of testing my rack with partials and not doing a single full move I lifted 180 kg in the Trap Bar lift. I therefore concluded that HIT with its strict form, full range of motion, high intensity regime was nonsense. That and the gradual realisation that on joining the web in 1997 that loads of HITers existed in the same predicament as me. They all claimed 300 lb squats, which to me seemed enormous, except that over time I discovered that they were adding +100 lbs to their claimed lifts. Some of them didn’t even lift.

At first I tried some Louie Simmons stuff, I also added mid-range partials and fuller moves. I now do everything from full range to lockouts. I cycle poundages, I cheat, do partials, ‘power’ stuff, bodyweight, dangerous exercises, etc.. Basically whatever HIT recommends, do the opposite.

CB: And now, having moved away from HIT, do your current routines have any over-riding framework to them?  (I freely admit that I have a mild form of OCD and that my programmes are planned for weeks in advance).  

SM: I’m freestyle in deciding what I want to aim for, unless its the yearly Strongest Man in the Village competition. When aiming at say a squat I will follow Sumoman’s 1-2-3 system.

Basically choose a former gym max to beat, then decide what my current gym max is, lets say its at 80%, do 1 rep. Next squat session do 2 reps, then 3 reps, then increase the weight to 85% and do 1 rep and so on until I am 2.5% over my previous best gym max.

For accessory moves I will do all sorts or things, a bit of Prilepin, a bit of repetitions, partials, strongman, whatever…

CB: OK.  You mentioned partials just now.  Recently, I came into possession of two things that have really piqued my interest for doing partial lifts: a power rack and a set of seminars by Andy Bolton, in which he describes his extensive use of pulls from blocks in training.  Why are partials such a good idea for a lifter seeking strength?

SM: I don’t really think of partials as partials but as lifts in their own right. When I was doing superheavy partial sumos on my SumoBar device for 7 years, my over-riding concern was how much can I shift off the floor. It didn’t matter that the weight moved only a few inches.

At some point I decided that I would calculate how much force it would take to lift the back of my 1,002 kg car off the ground and the number came out as 350 kg. So I worked up to 363 kg on my SumoBar device at which point I went up to the back of my car and put a dumbbell rod across the tow bar and, using a wide stance, lifted it off the ground.

The fabled SumoBar device

I continued all the way up to 524.8 kg (at about 160lbs) at which point, using a narrow stance, I lifted the car for a quick 10 reps.

The fabled Sumoman

HITers tell me that partials won’t make one strong… but I say how can shifting 1,157 lbs off the floor not make one strong? Partials don’t require ‘skill’ or mobility just brute strength, the work per inch is much greater than a full lift.

CB: What partial lifts would you recommend to a lifter like myself who is just starting out on the road to partial prowess and who otherwise just does full lifts?  Until very recently, I only ever did full lifts.  I have just this last couple of weeks started working with pulls from blocks (which are 4″ below the knee, or a 14″ bar height) and have been very interested to find that they seem to allow quicker recovery from session to session than pulls from the floor.  If I were to introduce a partial squat, what height would you recommend that I start with and how might I fit it into my programming?

SM: Chris, you are using partials as an accessory/assistance move to your full lifts.

For the regular style deadlift your method of doing the partials seems fine.  Any partial up to just below knee level closely simulates the forces of the full deadlift so doing it in similar fashion to the deadlift but with more weight and less wear and tear than the full lift is the way to go. However, I don’t really do partials as accessory moves so am not the best person to ask.

For a parallel squat I would mostly stick to the usual parallel squat but sometimes I do a bench/box squat where I sit on my 18″ high bench because this gets the notions of sitting back then sitting up with a heavier weight than normal. I suppose this is a sort of partial.

I always treat partials as lifts in their own right rather than poor relations of their ‘superior’ fulls. Partials are much more brute strength than ‘full’ lifts because the muscles are closer to their force producing zones, they are easier to perform so more effort can go into lifting rather than ‘skill’ or mobility.  As such I would reverse the question and ask what fulls are of use to the partials… except that I haven’t found any.

Lockouts/super-heavy partials, for me, were kind of like GPP for lifting heavy weights. They were the first lifts that I actually made continuous long term gains on. Once the gains started leveling out, I started investigating other lifts.

Thus it is not a case of, “are super-heavy partials superior to other lifts” so much as, “what effect do super-heavy partials have on lifting?” My answer to this is that super-heavy partials are the best way of getting used to supporting super-heavy weights and thus to making progress on weights in general. My supposition is that before the super-heavy partials I was too weak to impose enough resistance on myself to have a training effect. I still do super-heavy partials but nowadays it is mainly to keep me used to heavy weights, occasionally I may push the envelope on some of them but mostly the fuller lifts dominate in terms of volume.

Just get used to hoisting big poundages, supporting big, bone crushing, disc splitting loads. Find ways of doing partials that elicit this effect.

CB: OK, but what partials have you found give you personally the best results and which ones have you found to be effective for you in competing at strongman?

SM: The super-heavy partial sumo deadlift performed on my 4×4 Bar (aka SumoBar) is the most effective lift I have ever done. This got me used to supporting superheavy poundages.

By this I mean if a lifter is presented with a poundage which he has either never lifted before, or has never lifted and moved with before, he will feel overwhelmed, the lift will feel crushingly heavy like the lifter will break or suffocate and this will root the lifter to the ground. To avoid this effect get used to hoisting big poundages, supporting big, bone crushing, disc splitting, ear bleeding, capillary leaking loads.

One time, a few years ago, we had a competition with our yoke. We’d done a bunch of walks with 260 kg and 280 kg. My strongman buddies were better at the walk than me. We then loaded the yoke to 330 kg and none of them could even lift it off the ground, I picked it up easily and went a few steps at which point I was, paradoxically, the better walker. I then went all the way up to lifting 460 kg (though not walking with it). I relate this story because it makes me feel superior.

CB: Speaking of strongman, I was amazed to hear that you suffered a back injury just two weeks prior to competing at a strongman event last year.  Can you explain a bit more about what happened and how you managed to rehab yourself in time?

SM: I’d been doing a lot of strongman stuff and was feeling strong but also muscularly fatigued over the weeks. Then on that particular session we did walks with 260 kg and 310 kg on the yoke. I then went to pick up the 310 kg again and went a few steps and could feel a vertebral disc beginning to squidge sideways, I immediately went to put the weight down but the disk went before I reacted. My back immediately went stiff and I figured that I would have to miss the Strongest Man in the Village contest. I had dark thoughts. I figured that my disc was squirting jelly.

However as I’d spent months preparing I decided that I might as well rehab it. My back was stiff so I couldn’t stand up straight or breath properly. This meant I had to make the back limber with back bends, twists, traction, anything to pump fluid in the discs and ease the muscle rigidity. I’d do this every half hour or so. I did bench presses and superman’s to arch the back, i.e. squeezing the disc the opposite way to its injury.

Then I did barrel carries with a light barrel (66.7 kg) for 60 metres. Farmer’s with 186 kg for 3 metres (using my DeadBar which is more stable than normal Farmer’s). Then plate carries with 102.5 kg. Then DeadBar holds with 226 kg. Getting closer to the contest… I didn’t do any Yoke or tyre flip. 226 kg was the heaviest I used during this period.

The fabled DeadBar

The fabled Sumoman using the DeadBar

It was 2 weeks of active rest, so I came back stronger.

CB: I understand that you don’t really see yourself as a powerlifter but your squat is a thing of beauty.  Every time I stand in the rack with the bar on my shoulders, I find myself visualising how my squat is going to go and the first image that pops into mind is one of your videos.  How did you get such a great low-bar position and groove such great form?

SM: I would like to claim that I was a powerlifter but HIT does terrible things to you, or rather me. I’m amazed that I can do a local strongman contest with big brawny blokes because deep down there is a little HITer claiming that it is not genetically possible to do strongman with big brawny blokes.

The way to get a good low bar position is to go stupidly low with the bar and work up from there. Maybe having an upper back pounded by 1,000 lbs helps.

Flexibility isn’t needed because the weight pushes the bar into position, though perhaps an ability to shrug the shoulder blades back also helps, most men have shoulder blades that hardly move.

Good wrist wraps help.

Get the elbows forward grab the bar tight so that when the elbows spring back the bar has an upward rolling force applied to it to counter its downward rolling. Matt, my strongman/powerlifter buddy, also directed me to bringing my grip in. He uses a girlishly narrow grip for such a big man but it locks the bar in. Too narrow, though, and it is difficult to get the lungs full of air.

CB: And finally, are there any specific strength goals that you are working towards at the moment?  Do you have any long-term goals that you feel able to share?

SM: In 5 years I would like to have a Mr Olympia physique with a 600lb squat and 400lb bench press.

CB: Well, I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same…

***

CB: Doug, you kindly wrote to me expressing some thoughts about my post.  In particular, you wanted to clarify your thoughts on the overhead press, since one of the Bill Starr articles I referred to was in fact written in response to an article you wrote, called “The case against overhead presses.”

DB: Yes, I wrote to you in response to a comment you recently made about the debate between Bill Starr and me regarding overhead presses.  I would say that it would not be quite accurate to say that I’m suggesting that “the overhead press be confined to the annals of history as a dangerous and unnecessary exercise.”

Here’s what I’m actually suggesting: for someone whose goal it is to make maximum visible improvements to their physique (as in bodybuilding), and/or to achieve a reasonable level of strength, and/or to achieve optimal health, the overhead press is not a good choice, in that it has a high injury risk, and a compromised benefit for the goals mentioned.  Other exercises are much more productive and safer.

CB: So I think what you’re saying is that, for bodybuilding, general strength and optimal health, there are better options than the overhead press.  But I assume that if you want to overhead press a lot in a competition, you’d still need to overhead press?

DB: Yes, for someone whose goal it is to use the overhead press as a goal unto itself (i.e. “how much weight can you overhead press?”) or to maximise their power in sports with movements similar to the overhead presses, it’s useful and necessary , although potentially risky.  How much risk depends on one’s own, individual shoulder mobility.  Many people are not able to externally rotate their upper arm far enough to do an overhead press correctly.

CB: But you don’t think that the overhead press is an effective test of overall body strength?

In regard to whether or not the overhead press is, as you say, an “effective test of someone’s overall body strength”, I would disagree.  It’s an effective indicator of the strength of the muscles used specifically in that movement only.

This includes the three deltoid heads (primarily the front deltoid, secondarily the side deltoid, and least of all the rear deltoid).  It also involves the triceps, and, to a much lesser degree, the traps.  The overhead press involves very little pectoral work, very little lat work, an extremely small amount of abs and lower back work (only as stabilisers), and very little leg work (even if standing but especially if one is seated).  It involves zero biceps, because “reciprocal intervention” automatically shuts off an opposing muscle when, as in this case, the triceps are engaged.

So, as you can see, the overhead press involves far fewer engaged muscles, than non-engaged muscles.  Unless you refer to the engaged muscles I mentioned above as your “overall body”, it hardly measures the strength of the whole body.

CB: I am sure that is true but it doesn’t really feel like that when you are pressing!  It feels like the world is bearing down on you and your whole body is getting squashed by the weight and your abs and lower back are having to work really hard.

DB: In terms of the degree of involvement of the abs and lower back during an overhead press, it clearly depends on the degree of forward or backward lean during the movement.  Yes – there is certainly a squashing effect – with the weight pushing straight down on the spine.  But this would be more of a vertebral disk issue.

If one were to perform the press the way Bill Starr suggests – leaning back while the weight moves past your head – it definitely involves more work on the part of the abs, but it also forces an arc in the lower back, while loaded.  So while the abs are getting more work (which would be good), the vertebrae are closing on the outside and opening on the inside, encouraging the intervertebral disks to push inward in herniation (which would be bad).

One could do a very steep incline press (about 15 degrees shy of 90 degrees), while on a bench set at that degree of incline, and avoid most of the risk to the shoulder joint, as well as the strain to the spain.  This angle, by the way, is ultimately the angle that Bill Starr is suggesting, when he says to lean back while doing an overhead press.  But, interestingly, it might not be called “an overhead press” then.

However, if you look at some of the powerlifters who are doing an overhead press, that is about how far back they are leaning.  Naturally, the farther you lean back, the more the pectorals come into play.  So while you might be lifting higher amounts of weight by leaning back farther (while standing), you strain the lower back more.

But ultimately, it’s impossible for one single exercise to represent the strength ofthe entire body because – again, due to reciprocal intervention – one cannot push and pull at the same time.  When one muscle is working, whichever muscle opposes that movement (i.e. pushes or pulls in the opposite direction) must be completely un-engaged, to not impede the movement taking place at the moment.

As a test, try to activate your biceps, while simultaneously activating your triceps (I don’t mean “flex”, I mean activate, as in doing a curl, or doing a triceps pushdown).  Try activating your pecs, while simultaneously activating your lats (you cannot push forward, and simultaneously pull back toward you).  Try activating your quads, while simultaneously activating your hamstrings.  It can’t be done – not at the same time and not with the same movement.

I understand the desire to “mark” or otherwise measure your current level of strength.  But why not use the exercises that specifically activate those muscles as a measure?  In other words, max out on a rowing exercise,  for example, to measure your lat strength.  Max out on a barbell curl to measure the strength of your biceps.  Max out on a “skull crusher” to measure the strength of your triceps.

Having said that, I accept that exercises like the overhead press, and some other compound movements like the squat, are considered good indicators of “general strength” because they involve a group of muscles, and require a certain amount of technique (or perhaps “athleticism”) in order to execute them.  Plus, people tend to like the idea of having a single barometer, or gauge, as a measure of total body strength.  The idea of powerlifters using the total of several lifts makes a bit more sense to me.

So you can certainly max out on an overhead press (as long as it doesn’t seem to be hurting you) but understand that it’s only measuring the strength of certain muscles, and is not measuring the strength of the muscles that do not participate in that movement.

CB: OK, that’s reassuring, because I still like to press!  Much more than benching anyway.  And it hurts a lot less, too.

DB: I’m glad you like the overhead press (in that the movement might feel good to you) but liking it because you think it measures the overall strength of your entire body is simply incorrect.  Personally, I don’t find a value in knowing how strong any part of my body is, in comparison to anyone else.  I think it’s irrelevant, in the big picture but that’s just me.

I care about being strong enough, certainly.  But my strength level is already much higher than the vast majority of thepopulation, so why would I care whether I’m in the top 0.5 % of the population or the top 1.0% percent?  I also care about looking great: being lean and muscular (I still compete in bodybuilding and have since I was 16years old… I’m now 51).  I also care about being super healthy and that includes keeping my joints pain free for the rest of my life.

I’d like to make one more comment, in regards to your statement that your shoulders felt better when you switched away from the bench press, over to the overhead press.  Each of those exercises have a different strain to the shoulder joint.

The type experienced on the bench press, by almost everyone, is that as the humerus (upper arm bone) swings out laterally, it enters a “mechanical disadvantage” – which means that the pectoral muscle begins pulling on that bone from a less perpendicular angle, and more from a parallel angle.  When the arm is all the way down (bar touching your chest), the pectoral muscle literally is pulling on the humerus from around the corner (because it’s pulling toward its origin, which is the sternum).

So, as the weight has reached its greatest point (because of the “resistance curve”), your pectoral muscle is pulling the humerus mostly in, rather than up, as you attempt to push the bar upwards.  This forces in enormous inward pressure into the shoulder socket, which is exacerbated by maxing out, and using inertia as you attempt to bounce the bar off your chest with a sudden reversal of the downward movement.

Conversely, the strain that the overhead press places on the shoulder joint is mostly related to the excessive external rotation of the humerus.  But for some – maybe you – the external rotation required when doing an overhead press is not excessive, given your degree of shoulder mobility.  For most people, however, it is excessive.

CB: Well, I’m a former masters swimmer, so that probably explains it.  So I understand that your goals aren’t strength-related but other people may have different goals, right?

DB: Yes, I’m not suggesting that everyone should have the same philosophy as me.  But I speak to a specific audience of like-minded people, and I usually make that quite clear.  In one of my last articles – the one called “Different Strokes for Different Folks” – I make it clear that I speak to a different audience than the one that Bill Starr speaks to (hence the title of that article).

One’s goals determine the method of training.

But, ironically, Mr. Starr stated in his article that I was correct – he said that one’s shoulder joints do experience strain“if one stands rigidly erect when one does the overhead press but no one stands upright when they do it”.  Those were his words.  He stated that one should lean back as the bar goes up, which – of course – changes the angle to one of a slightly inclined press (and could possibly strain the lower back).

In term of sheer muscle development, my deltoids are now extremely well developed without doing ANY overhead presses.  They truly are.  I’ll be competing again this coming June and July.  My delts are now more developed than ever – accomplished entirely with a variety of (heavy) side raises, front raises and rear raises.  And I have no shoulder problems (pain) at all now.  Ten years ago, when I stopped doing overhead presses, my shoulder joints ached all the time.

CB: I can understand why you made that choice, Doug.  Tell us more about these competitions you are doing.  Are they your last ones?

DB: Well, I told myself when I was 17 years old that I would stop competing in bodybuilding when I was no longer a teenager (I started at 16).  But, after having won the Teenage Mr. America contest at 19, the temptation to go for the Mr. California title (as an adult) was too great to turn down.  Then, after winning that (my division, as well as the overall), the temptation to go for the Mr. America title, was also too much to pass up.  Later, after winning the Mr. Universe contest at the age of 26, I again told myself that I didn’t need to continue competing, although I would certainly continue working out.

But, feeling a need to prove something, I emerged again at the age of 31 and retired, again.  But only until I was 40, at which time I felt compelled to do it again – but only one more time – I thought.

After having spent two years in the Nicaraguan jungle (2005 to 2007), I realized how lucky I was to be born in the US, and to have the advantages I have here.  I began training hard again, and soon several friends were encouraging me to compete again, saying I had been one of the best in earlier years.  I thought the idea of competing again was absurd – at 50 years old.  But, to my surprise, I arrived at a condition that made that prospect – again – too hard to pass up.

So, yes, as you can imagine, I’ve already told myself these will be my final two contests.  The song I’m using (for my presentation) is Andrea Bocelli’s “Time to Say Good-Bye”.  I figure I have to stop somewhere.  Better to stop while I can still make a respectable showing, than wait until people start to feel sorry for me.  But maybe I’ll be in denial enough to never admit that.

CB: That’s been awesome.  Thanks for your time, Doug, I hope you enjoy success at your competitions in June and July.

DB: Thanks, Chris, and keep up the good work, I enjoy reading your blog.

What’s more, Rob trained as a personal trainer and is currently part way through training as a physiotherapist.  Now he practices functional fitness in his garage.

I’ve split the interview into two parts because we really got into it.  In the first part, I asked Rob about his wild life, and he made some general comments about fitness, martial arts, boxing, yoga and the armed forces.  This second part is just about his experiences as a bodybuilder.

***

CB: So, Rob,  let’s talk about bodybuilding now.  Just before Christmas, you recommended I read “Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder” by Sam Fussell because it was the book you would have wanted to write.  After I read it, I went back and read your post about how to be a bodybuilder.  I noticed two things: firstly that you both mention being in pain a lot of the time because of the rep ranges you were doing and secondly that you were both eating a very low-fat diet with plenty of protein and carbohydrates.  Do you think that both of those things are a necessary part of being a bodybuilder?

RN: I read Sam Fussell’s book after I left bodybuilding in one sitting when I was supposed to be studying. It mirrors my own experience of the scene, my training and what eventually lead me away from it.  Like Fussell, my bible was “The Encyclopaedia” and if Arnold had said it, I did it.

“No pain, no gain” is the backbone of “The Encyclopaedia” and of all of the media in the 1990’s and so I set out to achieve it. Rep ranges were 10-12 for 5 sets, hitting every separate muscle group in three or four ways. It’s a pumping routine and it was just what everyone was doing in the gym’s I went to and we all believed we were so much smarter than the old school compound movements power / strength approach that has come back into favour.  Diet-wise, it’s the same thing.

Back in the day, it’s what everything I read said you should eat. I religiously bought Muscle & Fitness and I studied both “The Encyclopaedia” and Bob Paris’s “Beyond Built” and did as they said. It worked, in that I grew, but it was fecking boring and set me up to gorge on crap for years after I came off the gear and out of the scene – fine whilst running 10 miles a day carrying 40-80lbs, not so fine when I later took to shining a chair with my rapidly expanding flabby arse!

It’s funny when you sometimes mention your work colleagues at your day job, for as you know I once did the same thing as you do to pay the bills, and if we had met in the middle of the last decade you wouldn’t have ever thought I had run a mile in my life or lifted a weight in anger.  I was that chair-shaped, donut munching, doubled-chinned, espresso-fuelled, finance geek!

Rob Newman: fueled by espresso

And yes, I still think that the boring diet and the pain are necessary parts of being a “bodybuilder” (as understood by the media), if that is the road you are trying to take.

CB: Nice image.  I don’t think my co-workers shine chairs nowadays – all the chairs are padded.  In his book, Sam Fussell talks extensively about the side effects of the “pharmaceutical assistance” he was taking to further his bodybuilding goals.  Notably, he comments on the mood-altering effects, which made him very aggressive, but he also discusses feelings of paranoia and a lack of energy.   Much of this discussion is made while recounting his cutting phases, however, which muddied the waters for me a little, as I perceived that some of what he was recounting was probably due to a poorly designed diet (no fat, for example) and a calorie intake that was probably too low.  In your experience, how close to reality was his account?

RN: As I have stated before, I took steroids for 2 years. I took D-bol, Deca, and Anadrol (not all at the same time). The simple fact is steroids make you gain muscle mass very quickly (indeed, a “close friend” once watched a world champion boxer get ready for a fight in the gym he went to back in the mid 90’s put on a stone of muscle in 4 weeks taking A LOT of gear).  But I also believe that steroids triggered other problems for me.

In 2008 when I ended up very ill, I was diagnosed as suffering from Bipolar disorder (or Manic Depression). To an extent there is a genetic element to this condition and my family have a history of it – together with a history of extreme behaviour – but even if you have a disposition for it, something must be in place to ignite it and in my case I know I began to experience serve mood swings when I went on my first cycle that continued until I collapsed years later and began treatment.

Although I never got ripped for a competition and have never been on a calorie restricting diet, I would totally go with the paranoia and aggression. Another “close friend” of mine (ahem) actually bodily threw his then girlfriend out of a moving car whilst on a cycle, for the singular crime of repeatedly changing the radio station!

The same “friend” has also spent a number of nights out and about trying to start fights with people by bumping into them, tripping them up and generally being an arse. One particularly bad night in Blackpool readily come to mind… but the trouble is (or is a good thing?) no one is that keen to rumble with a 220 pound shaven headed nut job itching for any excuse to give you the good news!

CB: I’m not sure I even want to know!  But there must have been benefits or you wouldn’t have done it.  You reached around 220lbs at 11-12% bodyfat at 6′ as a bodybuilder, which I guess is not far away from Sam Fussell’s build at 245lbs and 6’4″.  How did you feel walking around at that weight?  Do you ever miss being that size?

RN: I can’t lie, I loved being big and I miss it. It’s like being rich. It gives you a confidence that you can walk in anywhere and nobody is going to mess with you and that they are going to pay attention to you.  One of my best days out was going to the swimming baths and practically stopping the ladies aqua aerobics class as I did the walk from the changing rooms to the free side of the pool in my Speedos (I stress I don’t wear Speedos anymore!!!) 

I also loved getting my shirt off whenever I could and have very fond memories of ladies running their hands over me!That said, I don’t miss what I took to get it – that feeling of being full to your throat all the time, eating for function rather than taste and then, of course, the subsequent 3 rolls of toilet paper a day and the permanent pain that throbs, throbs, throbs across your body all the time from 3 on, 1 off.

CB: Some great memories, clearly.  And, personally, as a former competitive swimmer, I can’t see anything wrong with Speedos, but each to their own, I guess.  Finally, let’s finish on a positive note.  If you were to start from the beginning again, with bodybuilding, how would you go about it?  How would your new approach be better than the way you did it before?

RN: I wouldn’t encourage anyone to be a bodybuilder. Being big for the sake of being big is a never ending reflexive circle. When is enough, enough? Bigness alone will cause you more damage than I want to express, but if you grow as the result of trying to get strong to stay well and function day to day, that is all good.

As I set out at the beginning of this interview, I am actually trying to increase my body weight this year and look again like I lift some weights, so technically I am bodybuilding, but this time I am doing it without any supplementation – and that includes whey, creatine or anything that it not whole foods – and based on strength training rather than muscular isolation and pumping up.

In doing so, I am concentrating on the basics of deadlifts, squats, bench press and overhead press, increase weight each workout and limiting myself to 5 x 5 for each, spilt over workout “A” and “B”.  It’s an old approach – one taken by my Father-in-law in the 1950’s (who wanted to be Reg Park), and I am in the early days of it so we will have to see how it goes. Based on his shape and condition in his late seventies, it worked for him! He built long term muscle that has stayed with him and is easy to maintain allowing him to function like your average 40 year old.

With any project like this, your diet is key, and this is always my failing. I cannot stand eating the same shit again and again and I just don’t have the discipline any more to force it down my neck, so I know I am not going to get as big as I once was and cannot stay as lean as I did when I was on the gear eating tuna and rice 6 times a day. And whilst I am with you on not eating sugar, I work better of a high complex carb base.

My average day, 6 weeks in, is proving to be something like:

• 0600: 2 eggs any style, 1 cup porridge oats made up with 1 cup of water and 1 cup of milk with a little honey to taste.
• 0930: 1 cup of brown rice or two medium potatoes with a tin of tuna or salmon or 200g cold meat with 1/2 cup green vegetables
• 1300: Lunch from the staff canteen, usually fish / chicken / beef casserole, jacket spud and veg
• 1600: 1 pint whole milk, fruit and 250g mixed nuts
• 2000: Dinner as normal.

I am up 7lbs on this in 6 weeks, but some of this is bodyfat, which I’ll accept for now, but will strip off when I get closer to summer. I am also approaching what I know to be my present maximum lifts so the next few weeks are going to be interesting… come back to me in a year and I’ll let you know if I am right or not.

Oh, and sleep. Get as much of it as you can. My day job is shift-based with lates and earlys so it can be hard for me to get a regular 9 hours, but that’s what I am aiming for, remember you grow when you sleep, the training and the food is just the stimulus and the fuel…

CB: Sounds like you have a great plan, there, Rob.  And thanks for sharing that routine and meal plan with us, I’m sure people will find it helpful.  And I am so pleased I finally pinned you down and got you to share so many of your remarkable life experiences and lessons, I can’t think of anyone who has lived as fully and as fast as you have!

RN: Chris, thanks for the interview, I am going to have to shoot. It’s been emotional.

What’s more, Rob trained as a personal trainer and is currently part way through training as a physiotherapist.  Now he practices functional fitness in his garage.

I’ve split the interview into two parts because we really got into it.  This first part is about Rob and his wild life, including general comments about fitness, martial arts, boxing, yoga and the armed forces.  The second part is just about his experiences as a bodybuilder.

***

CB: Rob, thanks for agreeing to do this interview, as I know you’ve been incredibly busy recently.  Let’s dive straight in with a general question about fitness, as I think you have a uniquely broad perspective in a world that is becoming increasingly specialised.  You’ve seen an enormous number of sides of the thing that we all call “fitness”.  What do you define as fitness these days?

RN: Hello Chris, thank you for taking the time to do this interview.  For me, fitness today is about being able to do any of the physical things I want to do on a day to day basis without pain either now or tomorrow. Simple as that.

I have other goals I want to achieve that are physical, but they are not necessarily within the realm of what I consider fitness. For example, my goal for 2011 is to gain some size and “look” more like a weight lifter again. This is not fitness training, its bodybuilding, albeit hopefully achieved in a way that would not be recognised as such by the bodybuilding media.

To achieve my type of fitness I believe that the individual needs to partake in a range of activities that complement each other and balance out the function of the muscles and respiratory system. These include walking, running, swimming, cycling, rowing, weight training, bodyweight training, stretching, massage, myofascial release, heat treatments (sauna and wet rooms) and relaxation…

So you can see why I was drawn to CrossFit when I was lucky enough to be introduced to it in the first UK CrossFit gym that opening just a couple of miles from where I lived in 2004.  That said, I am not a CrossFitter anymore and I am also prepared to get out of what I consider balance this year to gain the weight and size that I want back.

CB: That’s interesting.  I was also briefly tempted by CrossFit but my need to see myself progess defeated my curiosity.  Let me ask you about the martial arts now.  We’ve talked about martial arts a few times, me from a position of complete ignorance and you from your lofty height as a 3rd Dan black belt Shotokan karate teacher.  How does martial arts influence your life now?

RN: Erm, only that I feel a bit guilty that I’ve become as rusty as I have, despite all the years of training I put in!  I first started Karate at a local sports centre when I was 6 years old. It was not something I wanted to do, it was a dream of my Father’s and indeed for years I did everything I could to avoid going.  Especially as we moved around a lot when I was a child and I changed clubs every 9 months or so and was forever getting my arse kicked by some dickhead who fancied giving the new boy the good news.

I was 13 and several grades in, before I got into it. It’s the classic story: I went to a posh school in a good area but lived in a rough one some miles away. One winter’s evening as I was walking home, a local lad decided to give me a kicking for being different to him. I ended up in hospital, and swore there and then that it would never happen again so I started training every day both practicing my karate and doing push ups and sit ups and lifting my 2.5kg Weider plastic dumbbells for 300 reps!

Yet I was still terrified every time I entered the dojo and went out in the streets… and so began a 20 years campaign of chasing everything that frightened me and my own sort of attempt at being a Nietzschean superman.

I joined the army for it. I jumped out of planes. I fought boxing matches, learned Krav Maga in Israel, climbed rocks, gambled, drank, took all sorts of chemicals, travelled everywhere, enjoyed ladies’ pleasures whenever possible, read every book I could get my hands on, did big deals and dodgy deals and mixed with people I detested all just to know what I had.

And I suppose the adrenaline became addictive and I kept on faster and faster until I blew up and collapsed into hospital.

Ironically, the Yin to the Yang that martial arts also introduced to me was Buddhism, which has floated in and out of my life since my mid teens. Whilst I am not quite able to call myself a Buddhist, I am almost there and become closer to being so with each day and each new experience.

Yin Yang: the Newman school of thought (image by MAMJODH)

Essentially, Buddhism teaches that life is full of crap (pain) and that the way to deal with the crap is to follow a path of acceptance and calm (the eight noble truths). It’s the complete opposite of what I tried to be for many, many years, but then perhaps that’s just the path I needed to see the truth?

CB: That’s a very enlightened perspective, I think.  I still tend to rail against the idiocy of my youth rather than seeing it as the path to something better.  Let me pick up on one thing there, which is the boxing, as I know that you renewed your boxing licence at the end of 2009 after ten years.  What is it about boxing that made you want to go back for more after so long?

RN: Adrenaline. I used to cry and piss myself before a fight, but whilst you are in a situation like that you never feel more alive.  For the record, I have done nothing with my licence since 2009 and don’t see anything on the horizon either.

CB: OK, so you’ve definitely become a man of peace, it would seem!  I hope it brings you what you need.  So let’s move away from the martial arts and boxing now and towards something more meditative.    You seem to keep coming back to yoga as something that you want to invest more time into going forward.  What is it about this practice that draws you and how do you see it benefiting you and other people?

RN: Yoga is a complete system of exercise and a calming experience. The Yoga I practice is Iyengar style and was founded and is still lead by Mr Iyengar, an octogenarian who is as flexible as rubber and has the glowing eyes of a teenager. I find peace in Yoga and it helps me to balance myself.

CB: Sounds great.  I hope I look like that when I’m that age.  And what life lessons, skills or mentalities did you gain from your time in the army?  Did you feel that your “army fitness” was fit for purpose?  How close was it to true fitness?

RN: Lot of questions here and I could waffle on for hours over dinner and drinks. The major life lesson would be to get and keep your shit together, which can be summarised as: Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

You can do amazing things if you have a plan, work together and stay on focus. I try to live “square” and organised and tidy.  It doesn’t always work, and I’ve yet to train my wife who is wonderfully bohemian, but structure gets you through. It’s also amazing how little you need to live. I lived out of a Bergen for years, and lived well.

Army fitness is bang on purpose. The British Army needs you to be able to move weight over a distance, to be able to run and jump and climb over things. As such the focus is endurance training under load and calisthenics. The need to tab long distances carrying weight is an operation necessity (in the infantry, all you have on an op is what you can carry) and one not recognised or understood by our American cousins who in my opinion rely too much on helicopters.

The PTI’s are amazingly fit and I remember being astounded by the speed and strength that some of these 9 and 10 stone guys had surviving on a diet of Guinness and chips! I joined up when I was a bodybuilder, lost it all (the muscle weight) in 6 weeks and felt the best I had done in years and years.

It depends on what you want and what you are trying to do, but for everyday Real World Fitness I don’t think you can beat the approach the Army takes and I would heartily recommend one of the best summaries of the approach written by Robin Eggar in the early 1990’s called the “Royal Marines Total Fitness: The Unique Commando Programme”. You won’t look anything following this approach and depending on your job and your diet you won’t even be too lean, but you will be able to move and lift and carry anything you come across on a day to day basis.

CB: I think that’s a great motto: “you can do amazing things if you have a plan, work together and stay on focus”.  I will remember that.  Keeping with the theme of the questions, what life lessons did you learn from being an entrepreneur?  Specifically, how does it affect the way you approach hitting your goals?

RN: Let me tell you a little story, which I think it fully explains my entrepreneurial experience: I was a rising corporate star, then in 2001 I was gripped by the entrepreneurial myth. I set out on my own and swiftly gave birth to an elephant (editor’s note: this is a metaphor).

1. Phase 1 – When the elephant was born I was bigger than it, could see a great future with it and foresee no problems. The only snag was that I didn’t have any skills in managing elephants – I knew HOW to do what elephants did, but did not know how to GET THEM to do what they did, but I thought that this wouldn’t really be a problem and off I went.
2. Phase 2 – The elephant soon grew much bigger than I was. I was no longer strong enough to control it and it took over my whole life. It pulled me along, wreaking destruction in its wake. Standing behind it, it blocked my whole vision and I could neither see nor know where I was going. I was so preoccupied by being dragged along by it that I thought that there is no way to ever bring it under control, it ruined my life and my family’s life.
3. Phase 3 – I was trampled under the feet of the elephant and came to in hospital in 2008 after suffering a nervous breakdown. The elephant continued (and continues) to thunder forward, but it was stolen by those I trusted with it when I was injured.
4. Phase 4 – My health has been ruined, my finances have been atomised and I have lost everything I had worked for. I now work for an international retailer earning in a year less than I did in a month, whilst continuing to fight two large organisations through the Courts neither of whom have any desire to settle.

What did it teach me? That I am mortal, that I am not indestructible and that I have very clear limits. However, since the elephant was stolen I have learned far, far more than I did when I was being dragged behind it. I now know what I value, what I want and more importantly what I don’t want. You see, EVERYTHING I did before the elephant WORKED, whereas the elephant was my Vietnam and it’s only been through its loss that I have seen saved.

Elephants: Rob Newman’s kryptonite (photo by Sarah McCans)

But hey, in terms of my goals, I am – and have always been – with Rocky Marciano: “You can be anything you want to be, if you want it bad enough… most people just don’t want it bad enough”

CB: Well, I’ve heard that story a few times, now, as you know, and I think you saved the best version for this interview!  I like the metaphor, too, it’s a nice way of putting it.  Moving on.  Knowing you as I do, I know that you have been through a number of incredibly stressful experiences, both in the army and as a businessman and as a result of illness.  Nowadays, everyone is a little stressed most of the time so it’s great to hear tips on how to manage it.  How do you manage stress?

RN: I really am not the person to ask about managing stress. On the surface I appear not to really suffer stress at all. I have a way of boxing things up and putting them away for ages and just getting my head down and my arse up .

A great example being that I bought my first proper company on the very day my Mother died, saw a client later on, arranged my Mum’s funeral and then flew to London for a three day bender – but underneath of course I am not really dealing with things. Yeah sure I am functioning at a high level, but I am not dealing with it, I’m just saving it up until the box is overflowing with stuff and then I’ll disappear for a week or explode in rage. (I have a history of just disappearing and have been the terror of many a poor secretary!)

My wife has helped me with this. Her patience – and the help of my former very good CNP – has taught me to recognise when I am starting to fill the box up. When this starts to happen I now try to take on less, eat well, sleep well and get the balance back. It’s a day to day process and it’s worked for the last couple of years, but, like an alcoholic, I just have to live with today and not think too much about tomorrow. 

CB: OK, I won’t talk to you about stress.  It sounds like you manage it even worse than I do.  In fact, let’s avoid any more stress by pausing there and picking up next week.

For part two of the interview, tune in the same time next week…

In this part two of the interview, we get into the nitty-gritty of metabolic flexibility.

 *** 

Introducing Mike T Nelson (in case you missed the first part)

In case you missed the first part of the interview: Mike is not a run-of-the-mill internet “expert”.  He has spent the last 16 years in college, completing a BA in Natural Science and a Masters in Mechanical Engineering (Biomechanics) before starting his PhD.  He’s also a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS), adjunct faculty at Globe University and a founding member of The Movement who will have three certifications for trainers this year which are conducted by invite only: The Biomechanics of Physique Transformation, The Biochemistry of Nutrition and Biopsychology.

In the past, he has completed the RKC, Z-Health Master Trainer and is currently a professional member of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) and the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN).

Also, Mike’s going to have a book chapter out later this year in the academic book entitled “Protein and Strength Athletes: A Sports Nutrition Controversy.”

  ***

CB: Mike, can you start by defining metabolic flexibility for us?

MTN: Metabolic flexibility is the ability of your body to use the right fuel at the right time.  When you are doing low levels of activity, you want to be burning lots of fat.   When you go to the gym and put in a hard training session you want to switch to burning carbs to allow your body a higher output (better performance in the gym).    The key is to be able to SWITCH back and forth between those two states.

CB: Thanks for that succinct definition!  And given that most people who read my site are interested in getting stronger, building muscle and losing fat, how does focusing on metabolic flexibility help you lose fat or gain muscle either more quickly or more effectively?

MTN: If you can go to the gym and provide more overload to the muscle, this is absolutely key to more growth.  The readers here are wicked smart and know that already, since we strive to constantly do more work (volume), in less time (better density which is volume / time) and lift more weight (great intensity).   If you are very metabolically INflexible, your body will not be able to shift to carbohydrate metabolism as fast (or as well) and impair the lifting process in the gym. 

Once you finish your training session, you want to switch back to burning fat as soon as possible.   If you are still trying to burn carbs, you are using the wrong fuel for the wrong task.  

We also know that there are some indications that metabolic flexibility is also a marker for health.   Diabetics, for example, have a very hard time using carbs and it is the definition of a Type 2 diabetic, which is not moving towards a state of health. 

*** 

Calories Rant

I also need to mention a rant on calories, since many readers will rightfully have questions.

There is lot of BS going around how calories do not matter.  Pure BS.  Calories matter, and physics is still a valid science.

• Take in more calories than you burn and you will add weight.
• Take in fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight.

Notice that I said WEIGHT and what we really want to change is body composition (more muscle and less fat), but I will get back to that.

The hard part is that in free living people (read, you and me), it is not that simple!  If it was, I would not see so many large and in charge people at the mall!  Most people’s goal is not to see how “hardcore” they can be and eat chicken and broccoli every day of their life.  They want to see how many “bad” foods they can eat and still maintain their health and body composition (read, look good naked) goals.

If you are a metabolic wreck (metabolically INflexible), you don’t have much wiggle room in your diet and you will have to be more strict.  Especially if you are already cutting your calories.

If you are very metabolically flexible, eating some “bad” foods from time to time (or often-oh ya!) should not be an issue as your body can convert them into fuel without many side effects.   Weight loss also has profound effects on health too.  Perhaps you eat “bad” but lose weight and feel better and your blood lipids get better?

The fellow in the US who did the Twinkie diet is a great example.   I am not going to say that Twinkies are a great nutritious food and we are all very low on refined corn products, so eat up.   Twinkies will never be a nutrient dense food (unless you are looking for your density of corn products), but on the flip side they should not send you into a metabolic tail spin either.

The human body is amazingly adaptable, which I believe is the key to health, performance and body composition (looking good naked). 

Back to our diabetic friend who is very metabolically INflexible to carbohydrates.  They have a hard time using them, causing all sorts of other gummed up machinery in their body.  If we look at someone who’s very healthy, on the other side of the scale, they should be able to use carbohydrates very efficiently -very metabolically flexible to carbohydrates. 

The other main fuel source, as we know, is fat.  It can be body fat or that can be fats taken in from food.  There are some people who have a hard time metabolically processing fats – yikes. 

The switching of fuel sources is key.  When you are walking around during your everyday life, you’re not training, and you really want to be using primarily body fat to fuel those activities.  If you are the reverse and still trying to burn more carbohydrates at rest you will need to take in even more carbohydrates and never tap into store body fat as a fuel, in addition to taking in more calories.

Calories matter both in quantity and quality.  We want to be able to use a wide variety of calories from both a compliance and lifestyle without ill effects on our health and performance in gym.  This equates to more muscle and less fat long term.

***

CB: And for those trainers who work with endurance athletes, who aren’t necessarily interested in building muscle or losing fat, why is metabolic flexibility important for them?

MTN: Bob Seebohar has a great book on this entitled “Metabolic Efficiency Training” and it is a very similar concept to metabolic flexibility.  I saw his presentation at the ISSN conference in 2009 and I about fell out of my chair since it was so similar to the work I had been doing at the time, even though we had never met or talked before.

Most cardio bunnies take in way too many carbs in relation to their activity level.  If you are Scott Jurek (who lived two doors down from me when I was at St. Scholastic in Duluth years ago) and out running 100 miles or more at a clip, there is no getting around that you need a crap ton of calories.   Many though, take their Gatorade as they walk to the treadmill to walk and watch Oprah (what do they watch in clubs where you are at?)

Now that I have pissed off every endurance athlete, there is a better way.   Teach the body to bun fat primarily since their activity is at a low to moderate intensity.   The awesome part about doing this is that 1) you will drop body fat since you are burning it 2) you avoid what Bob calls the “GI distress monster” since you don’t need to take in very many EXTERNAL calories as carbs in the form of Gatorade and packets of paste-like things since you are using body fat as a fuel, thus dramatically reducing your chance of having an upset stomach.  This alone will save you time during your race since you are not hiding behind a tree in the woods or feeling like Broc Lessnar hit you in the gut. 

Bob has actual lab data showing that some endurance athletes do NOT switch to burn fat very well.  In a laboratory setting, which obviously not everyone’s going to have access to, the simplest thing to look at is what’s called the respiratory exchange ratio (RER).  When you go to a lab for metabolic testing (and I’ve tested hundreds of people this way), they stuff this tube thing in your mouth that measures all the air that you expire.  The expired air enters a machine (metabolic cart) that gives you a little number for each breath you exhale during exercise (the RER number).   The RER tells you the percentage of fat and percentage of carbohydrates you are burning.  Sweet!  

The next question is “What if I don’t have access to a lab?”  A substitute solution is to pay attention to how you feel (your mood) and your performance.  For example, the other day I got up and had a breakfast of mostly fat and some protein – 5 whole eggs, 2 egg whites, spinach and some feta cheese – I felt great afterwards.  If I had pancakes (high carb meal), do I feel like I’m going to fall asleep and my face it going to end up on the pancakes by the end of the meal?  Or, do I feel pretty good?  Ideally, I want to be able to do BOTH conditions (metabolic flexibility) to a high fat and high carb meal.

The next big question is around training times.  Some people do very well having a protein/carbohydrate beverage before or during training.   For those looking to add lean mass, a simple tip is to take a protein/carbohydrate beverage 30-60 minutes before training.  This works to elevate insulin which is a potent vasodilator (increase blood flow to muscles for a better pump since those nitric oxide stimulating products are worthless), increase acute protein synthesis (taking protein and stuffing it into muscles, thus making them bigger) and the high(er) levels of insulin shift the body toward carb metabolism needed for strength training session.   

The take away is that there’s no perfect indicator.  It’s a little bit of playing around with it and seeing how your body responds to it, but it’s really not too much work and the results are well worth the few minutes of time.

CB: And I understand that there are four key variables for manipulating metabolic flexibility, being (1) exercise, (2) fasting, (3) body composition, and (4) nutrition.  For someone like myself, who trains pretty hard, walks a lot and only eats carbohydrates just before a workout, what can I do to manipulate those variables to help me increase my metabolic flexibility?

MTN:  Sweet, sounds like you are right on track.  I will break each one down: 

I.  Exercise

If you were to do ONLY one thing (which is not reality, but everyone asks this one all the time), I would pick exercise for its long term effects upon health and metabolic flexibility.  This is a bit different than if your goal was fat loss, then calories must be dropped and most will not do enough exercise to put themselves into a calorie deficit by ONLY increasing exercise.  The great part is that in the real world, we can change more than one thing over time. 

We know that type 2 diabetics, post exercise are much more sensitive to insulin and thus can handle carbohydrates much much better.  I will save you the diatribe on GLUT-4 translocation.    Strength training also increase the amount of muscle mass (muscle hypertrophy) thus increasing the most metabolically active tissue in the body – muscle!

Without a stimulus (lifting heavy objects), there will not be an increase in muscle and you will being to lose muscle.   Send someone up to the space station in zero gravity and they lose muscle (and bone) at a wicked fast rate since there is not even the effect of gravity on their system.  To look good naked, perform better, be healthy and enhance metabolic flexibility, exercise is a must. 

***

II. Fasting

You will need to hang on with me through this section as there is so much BS to be sorted around fasting it could be post all by itself!  As I have been pounding away now, I believe (a la metabolic flexibility) that your body should be able to perform well under a variety of conditions.

The 2 most basic conditions for training are:

1. Lots of food (high levels of insulin)
2. Low levels of food (thus low levels of insulin)

Each has a specific purpose and a time to be used best.

• High levels of insulin – when insulin is very high, your body is shifted towards carbohydrate metabolism.  This is great right before a high intensity weight training session since the main fuel source to power your workouts will be carbohydrates.
• Low levels of insulin – when insulin is low, your body is shifted towards fat metabolism.   This is awesome when you are trying to drop some fat and lean up a bit.

Here is a 3 step approach to add some lean mass without tons of fat in the process.

1. Moderate insulin levels during the day – your food for these meals will be protein (about 20-40 grams), fats, and veggies.   While all foods have an insulin response, a mixed meal with protein and fats as a base results in a more moderate insulin response (especially if you add in some fiber from the veggies).
2. Spike insulin levels pre-workout – we want to shift the body to carbohydrate metabolism for the upcoming weight training session, so by using a simple carbohydrate and protein (whey protein works great) drink consumed pre-training we can increase insulin, and vasodilation effects as a side benefit. (Sample pre-workout drink: 2 scoops dextrose, which is about 80 grams (or 1 packet of Vitargo), 1 scoop of whey protein, 5 grams creatine monohydrate (optional), 3 grams beta-alanine (optional): mix with about 750mL of water and drink half about 30-60 minutes before training and the rest during training. Note: if you have not done this before and have been on a low carb diet for a long time, I would recommend that you test this beverage in place of your breakfast to determine your response. A few people will experience a drop in blood sugar after consuming it and become a bit dizzy, which is not conducive to lifting heavy objects. This is rare, but test it out at breakfast on a non-training day and note your response to it.)
3. Monitor and continue – if your muscle to fat gain ratio of your new weight is still good, then continue on. That ratio will depend on each person. For me, if I can gain at about 2:1 or even 1:1 muscle to fat, I am happy with that since adding lean muscle is more difficult for me than dropping fat.  At times in the past I was happy with a 0.5 to 2 lb ratio.

When you are gaining more mass and calories are higher (especially carbs), your body gets really good at using carbs, but not as good at using fat (constant higher levels of insulin = burning more carbs and not fat).  One symptom is that when carbs are spiked, you may get a bit hypoglycemic and dizzy.  A recent study by Færch K et al. (4) in 2011 provided data that messed up glucose/insulin regulation is associated with metabolic INflexibility.

Getting Dizzy

Remember what I said about testing it first?  This happened to me a few nights ago here at the Extreme Human Performance Center.  I went to lift and just felt bad during lifting and dizzy.  I came back in and crushed 2 glasses of water and 2 Cliff bars.  About 20 minutes later I felt better, cranked out a personal record (PR) and called it a night.

Even during a bulking phase, we want to maintain some ability to burn fats when needed! In a perfect world, we want to be able to go back and forth between burning fats and carbs seemlessly (metabolic flexibility) to use body fat to fuel muscle growth. While it is hard to get the body to do this without drugs and extreme approaches, it can be shifted that direction.

Once I get the hypoglycemic feeling, I schedule a fast starting that night to sensitize my body to carbs and teach it to burn some fat again.  A recent study by Harvie, MN et al. (1) showed that intermittent fasting was a bit more effective than even caloric restriction for reductions in fasting insulin and insulin resistance.  One of the benefits of caloric restriction is centered around its positive effects on insulin and glucose management.

How often do I do an intermittent fast when looking to add lean mass?

It will vary from person to person, but about 1 every 14 to 21 days seems to be average for those training 4-5 days per week with pretty good levels of training volume.   If you are looking to build muscle and you are skinner to start with, you will need to increase calories. The goal is to get those increased calories shunted towards muscle growth and not your gut.  We only want to fast the minimal effective amount (mEA) to keep insulin in check and not lose the ability to burn fat between meals.

How often do I do an intermittent fast when looking to drop body fat?

I recommend people work up to one 24 hour fast once a week and see how it goes.  If you are still drop fat and strength is good, stay with it!  If fat loss has stalled, then add in another fast that week.  Rarely do you need to ever do more than 2 per week and most do fine on just one a week.  
There is nothing magical about the 24 hour mark, so don’t kill yourself trying go from eating every 2 hours to not eating for 24 hours, gradually work into it.   This leads us into more broscience and BS about meal frequency.

Busting Broscience: Meal Frequency

This will always bring up the question of meal spacing next.  Newer research by Dr. Layne Norton has shown that CONSTANT levels of amino acids (proteins) in the blood may ironically NOT be best for muscle growth (2); so eating every 1-3 hours is not ideal. Plus it is a huge pain in the butt.   Typical spacing is about 4-5 hours since this gives the body time to burn a bit of fat between meals (insulin drops a bit, but for it to get really really low takes up to 24 hours) and appears to “reset” the mechanisms involved in protein synthesis (stuffing proteins into those muscles).

In an experiment done by Bohe et al. (3), a constant infusion (via an IV stuck in their arm) was done to keep amino acid levels high for 6 hours. What they found was that DESPITE high levels, muscle protein synthesis started to DROP at about 2 hours; so CONSTANTLY high levels of amino acids is not ideal.

What about calories?

I already addressed this, but the confusion around calories is endless. I get emails from people stating,
“Bro, Metabolic flexibility is crap.  I don’t eat much and I am ripped, so screw you.” Or “All this talk about metabolic flexibility has not done crap for me getting hyoooooge.”

Each time I get a reply back, these twigs trying to gain lean mass (or any mass for that matter) are barely eating 1,500 kcalories a day.  You can’t build a large frame from nothing!

Calories are king, so if you are looking to gain some lean mass and your calories are really low, it will take quite some time.  If you are looking to drop some fat and your calories are still sky high and you are not doing Michael Phelps 3 hour training sessions, you will need to drop them down. No matter what anyone tells you, calories do matter and should be accounted for first!

One final thing is data showing metabolically INflexible subjects become more metabolically flexible during a 24 hour fast as their body can still tab into body fat as a fuel source.  If they could not do that, they would be dead pretty fast since there is no incoming fuel (this is a true fast, not that maple syrup, lemon juice and hot pepper BS) and there is a limited amount of stored carbohydrates (glycogen in the muscles and liver).  

Fasting key points

1. High levels of insulin = carb burning, low levels of insulin = fat burning
2. We want to be able to effectively switch back and forth seemlessly between both conditions
3. Space meals farther apart to about every 4-5 hours
4. Calories matter and are king

***

III. Body composition

In general, those with better body composition will be more metabolically flexible.   We used to think that fat cells sat around on their collective fat butts all day, but we now know that fat cells are some of the most hormonally active little buggers around.

As you add more visceral fat especially, your ability to use carbohydrates gets worse.  Data from Sparks et al. (7) in 2009 showed that reduced metabolic flexibility was associated with higher body fat.   Waist to hip measurement is also a much better predictor than body mass index (BMI) in addition to being a risk factor for early death (all-cause mortality) (5,6).

Don’t forget that we all want to look good, and there is nothing wrong with that at all.  A more optimal body composition (more muscle and less fat) also looks much much better.

I know Tim Ferriss states in his 4-Hour Body book that if you can recomposition someone’s body by 20 lbs, you will see a huge difference and I would agree.  That could be dropping 20 pounds of fat or gaining 20 pounds of lean mass; but the visual difference of those 20 pounds either way is huge.  

***

IV) Nutrition

I covered quite a bit of it above, but one more tidbit for all of you.  In most healthy people, when you eat more fat, your body will shift to burn more fat.  When you eat more carbs it shifts to burn more carbs.

Using the metabolic cart machine described earlier, will show a change in the RER (the amount of fat/carbs being burned) with the consumption of carbohydrates.  This is also why a low carbohydrate approach for fat loss works well for many people.  It provides low(er) levels of insulin and more fat for their body to burn.

***

CB: And I think you have a product coming out soon about metabolic flexibility?  What can you reveal about it at the moment?

MTN: Yes I do!  There is so much confusion out there it’s insane. 

Low carb diets work for everyone, right?  Fat will make you fat.  Too much protein is not needed and will destroy your kidneys.  Calories don’t matter.  Carrots will make you fat.

No wonder people can’t figure out what to do since each week they are bombarded with more and more information.   Just hop on the ole’ interwebz and you will find enough nutrition information to make your head spin like an owl. 

People are so confused that they don’t take action, and that is a mistake.  I’ve been there too, so its time to clear up the confusion.  I’ve been working on it for the past few years, both in the lab with my PhD research, talking to other researchers, reading everything that I can find on metabolic flexibility and even presenting it to the elite military research group DARPA here in the USA.

Most importantly, I have tested it on people just like you and me to ensure that all this geek speak works in the real world.  The end result is a very simple to use system that will allow you to lose fat, gain lean muscle and strength. 

In addition to the concept of metabolic flexibility, I give you the TRUTH about proteins, fats and carbs so that you will know how to optimize each one.  These are the building blocks to the body and performance that you want, so I cut through all the massive confusion and retarded broscience out there to give you the simple principles to make massive changes in your body.  To find out more, click here!    

CB: That’s great to hear.  I hope it’s a tremendous success.  Thanks so much for your time, Mike.

MTN:  Thanks again Chris for allowing me the chance to do this interview.  I really appreciate it and keep up the great work you and all of your readers are doing.  You are making a difference!!

 ***

References

1. Harvie MN, Pegington M, Mattson MP, Frystyk J, Dillon B, Evans G, Cuzick J, Jebb SA, Martin B, Cutler RG, Son TG, Maudsley S, Carlson OD, Egan JM, Flyvbjerg A, Howell A. Int J Obes (Lond). 2010 Oct 5. [Epub ahead of print] The effects of intermittent or continuous energy restriction on weight loss and metabolic disease risk markers: a randomized trial in young overweight women. Genesis Prevention Centre, University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester, UK.
2. Dr Layne Norton “My Powerpoint presentation from the 2008 International Society of Sports Nutrition Symposium” accessed on December 31 at 10:01am from http://biolayne.com/
3. Bohé J, Low A, Wolfe RR, Rennie MJ. Human muscle protein synthesis is modulated by extracellular, not intramuscular amino acid availability: a dose-response study. J Physiol. 2003 Oct 1;552(Pt 1):315-24. Epub 2003 Aug 8. Division of Metabolism, Department of Surgery, University of Texas Medical Branch, Shriners Burns Hospital, Galveston, TX 77550, USA.
4. Færch K, Vaag A. Metabolic inflexibility is a common feature of impaired fasting glycaemia and impaired glucose tolerance. Acta Diabetol. 2011 Jan 5. [Epub ahead of print]
5. Seidell JC. Waist circumference and waist/hip ratio in relation to all-cause mortality, cancer and sleep apnea. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2010 Jan;64(1):35-41. Epub 2009 Jul 29.
6. Chan JM, Rimm EB, Colditz GA, Stampfer MJ, Willett WC.  Obesity, fat distribution, and weight gain as risk factors for clinical diabetes in men. Diabetes Care. 1994 Sep;17(9):961-9.
7. Sparks LM, Ukropcova B, Smith J, Pasarica M, Hymel D, Xie H, Bray GA, Miles JM, Smith SR. Relation of adipose tissue to metabolic flexibility.Diabetes Res Clin Pract. 2009 Jan;83(1):32-43. Epub 2008 Nov 26.
   

Without exception, I was simply blown away by their generosity.  They all gave freely of their time and expertise in discussing all manner of training tips and issues and I learned a great deal from them.  If you missed any of them, you can find them here: 

• Tim Henriques
• Bret Contreras
• Eric J Moss
• Rob Russell
• Steve Kamb (Nerd Fitness)
• Josh Hanagarne (World’s Strongest Librarian)
• Brent Barbe
• Isaac Wilkins

Going into 2011 with a bang…

So I am both pleased and proud to announce that I am starting 2011 with a number of interviews, including this great two-part interview with Mike T Nelson A.K.A the Crazy Professor, a PhD candidate in kinesiology at the University of Minnesota in the department of Exercise Science.

The two-part interview

This post covers part one of the interview, in which Mike answers a number of questions about different topics, including stress, sleep, oldtime strongmen, kiteboarding and why you shouldn’t fall in love with your foam roller.  In part two, we get into the nitty-gritty of metabolic flexibility.

Introducing Mike T Nelson

Let’s be clear about one thing: Mike is not a run-of-the-mill internet “expert”.  He has spent the last 16 years in college, completing a BA in Natural Science and a Masters in Mechanical Engineering (Biomechanics) before starting his PhD.  He’s also a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS), adjunct faculty at Globe University and a founding member of The Movement who will have three certifications for trainers this year which are conducted by invite only: The Biomechanics of Physique Transformation, The Biochemistry of Nutrition and Biopsychology.

In the past, he has completed the RKC, Z-Health Master Trainer and is currently a professional member of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) and the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN).

Also, Mike’s going to have a book chapter out later this year in the academic book entitled “Protein and Strength Athletes: A Sports Nutrition Controversy.”

 CB: Mike, thanks so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to do this interview.  I am sure that most of my readers will have come across you before but, just in case, could you give us a quick summary of where you are working at the moment, your PhD research project, your role in the department of Exercise Science and what you are working on at the moment?

MTN: Thanks Chris!  I really appreciate you taking the time to interview me today as it is a great honor.  Yes, I tend to be a “little” busy these days.  I am in the process of wrapping up my PhD and working on publishing three papers that will go out for peer review.

The first one is on heart rate variability (HRV) which is a method to look at the state of your nervous system.  The second is a study done on human subjects (college students, not rats) looking at Monster Energy drink in relation to heart rate, rate of perceived effort (how hard did the exercise feel), and ergongenic ability (do the darn things really give you more energy during exercise) along with a few other things.   The last study will be more focused on metabolic flexibility that we will talk more about later in part two of this interview.

In the past I worked as a teaching assistant and research assistant there too at the University of Minnesota for many years.  Currently I own Extreme Human Performance and I work in White Bear Lake training various athletes of all types and doing more nutrition consulting both here in Minnesota and across the world via the internet.

CB: Thanks for that introduction, Mike.  Let me ask you a couple of shorter warm-up questions to ease into the interview gently!  Firstly, you are proverbial for working as hard as anyone in the industry.  But while working hard is as good a guarantee of success as any, it can lead to stress.  Do you experience stress in your current schedule?  If so, how do you manage the stress?

MTN: Great one!  Experiencing stress would be an understatement.  I also work part time as an engineer for a medical technology company where I’ve been for almost 11 years since it allows me some stability while working on research.  I don’t have any kids or even a pet fish, but I did get married this past year to the most wonderful person ever.  

The biggest tip is that despite what you think, stress is actually NOT how much stuff you have going on, but is related to how much you THINK you have going on at the current moment in time.   The reality is that you can only efficiently work on one thing at a time, but your mind will wander to all the other POSSIBLE things you COULD be doing.  Everything from water the plant, finish a report, update your blog, to what is for dinner.  The brain is not wired to keep all these things in order at once and David Allen calls this “psychic RAM.”

Just like the RAM on your computer it can only hold so much at once.   The fix is to write down the other items on a list, sorted by location; so if you are at the grocery store, you only want to see the grocery list not a note about a blog post you need to work on since you are not going to bolt out of the store and drive home to work on the blog post without groceries!

Once items are sorted by location or resources (phone, computer, internet), you scan the list and work on the one that jumps out at you first –the highest priority.   This dumps the psychic RAM in your head allowing you to focus on the task at hand.  If something else pops into your head while you are working, you make a note and drop it in your inbox to be dealt with later.   In the process of writing up this interview I created about 12 other notes of things to do later.  I did not jump from one half done thing to the next, combined with checking email, twitter and facebook 47 times a day.  

Bonus tips: when I get really stuck, I need to go move and lift some weights in the Extreme Human Performance Center (my own garage gyms as we all know garage gyms kick butt).  Sir Richard Branson of Virgin was recently quoted that working out easily gives him an extra 4 hours of productivity during the day.  Hard to argue with his results.

CB: Thanks for the great tips, there Mike, and thanks for picking a Brit as an example!  Moving on from stress, let’s talk about sleep.  I remember hearing you post one time about how you worked so hard that you went 38 hours without sleep.  Obviously, that’s not your normal routine!  But I also read somewhere that you’ve worked on various strategies for optimizing the amount of sleep you get.  Can you give us some tips?

MTN: Yes, that sucked large moose balls.  I had a revision of my Monster Energy drink study due the next morning and I had to turn it in and I had to pull an all-nighter to get it done.  The great part is that I got to see Seth Godin speak right after I sent it in and then Dr. Lorimer Moseley (my favorite pain/brain researcher) speak that night = awesome!

When I get really stuck and sleep is not an option, movement is not helping, and I have a deadline looming, I will pull a caffeine power nap.  Take some pill form of caffeine of around 100-400 mg (or Biotest Spike works great too), sleep for about 20-40 minutes and when you wake up you will have peak blood levels of caffeine and a bit of rest too.  Not recommended for daily use, but works amazing well in a pinch. 

Going to bed and getting up around the same time each day is a great start.  Everyone will be a bit different, so work to find your best times.  Once you get a baseline established, I like to have my clients then work to see how much variability they can add to it without any deleterious effects.  In a perfect world, everyone (ok I do for sure) wants to get by on less sleep and stay up later at times.  If you sleep 10pm-7am for 9 total hours and feel great, try going to bed around 11pm and see how you feel.  If ok, then try midnight, etc.

Perhaps a good friend comes into town and you stay up until 2am at the pub, that adds a lot of variability to your sleep schedule.  How do you react?  The goal is to be as ADAPTABLE as possible, especially in regard to movement, food and recovery (sleep).   For most people, life will add enough variability in for them so they need to work on establishing a baseline first where they don’t need four pots of coffee to sleep walk through the day (not the readers here per se, just the people you see out there). 

CB: Interesting.  I’m not really a caffeine responder so it will interesting to see if that works for me.  I imagine I might have to set an alarm as well!  You often have inspirational pictures of the oldtime strongmen such as Eugen Sandow on your blog.  And I recall that you were very complimentary of my series on oldtime strongmen, saying at the time that there is a lot of knowledge there that we have lost.  Are the oldtime strongmen a significant source of information and inspiration for you in your work or in your lifting?

 Eugen Sandow: a source of inspiration for Mike

MTN:  Definitely.  It will probably shock some people that outside of research, I don’t read hardly any new books on exercise at all.  I will read research on nutrition, physiology, stress, neurology, but virtually nothing on exercises as I get in my time machine and read all the early works.   The athletes back then did not use drugs (I don’t recommend drugs, but in the end it is a personal choice for each athlete), so the information they collected is more relevant to most trainers today. 

If you are whacked out of your mind on tons of anabolics, that is NOT going to work for a natural trainer and is a very poor starting point.   They also had limited equipment back then so they were much more creative and not afraid to experiment.  What worked was passed along and what did not work was thrown aside.  Results mattered.  I loved your piece on the old time strongman since I really believe people “out there” in the commercial gyms need to look at those lifts again. 

How often do you ever see people even doing a deadlift in a mainstream gym?  In most US gyms it is about as rare as a purple unicorn.  If you go beyond that and get into lifts like the behind the back deadlift, suitcase deadlift, Zercher squat, drag curls, overhead press, plate presses, plate curls and other amazing exercises that people really need to test out for themselves. 

CB: It’s great to hear that you’re reading that stuff, Mike.  Getting a little more serious now, reading your blog, I noticed how you explained recently that you are stereoblind, i.e. you can’t see properly in 3D.  I can’t imagine what that is like but I understand you are working on improving it.  I hope that you make progress with that.  I also know you love kiteboarding.  Has problem impacted negatively on that sport for you?

MTN:  I am currently stereoblind – I don’t see in 3D.  I suppress the image from my right eye.  You have two eyes that your brain uses to construct a 3D view of the world since each eye is off just a bit from the other one, so it sees things just a bit differently.  Your brain uses this to allow you to see in 3D.  I can “see” from both eyes, but when I am given specific tests to analyze 3D vision, I fail them outright.  My right eye is set out and up a bit since I had a “lazy eye” as a kid.

Through help from Dr. Cobb of Z-Health at the time several years ago, I found that my scar seemed to be linked to my ability to turn on and off (unsupress) my right eye.   I have a large midline scar from open heart surgery to repair an atrial septal defect when I was 4.5 year old.  An atrial septal defect is literally a hole in your heart, so they cracked my chest and sewed it up.  This left me with a scar about 1 foot long in the middle of my chest.

Back to my eyes, I found that the movement of my right eye was related to my chest scar.  This goes to show that the WHOLE body is all connected in weird and wonderful ways.  Fast forward through a few more years of working to improve my movement, and my vision started to get much better.   Right now I need a few more “cool toys” that behavioral optometrists have to get my eyes synched up again.

In the US, this is not recognized as an “issue” insurance will pay for, so the cost will be all out of pocket.  I am in the process of saving some money (and releasing a great product for all of you, more on that soon) to offset the cost of more intensive visual therapy as my structure seems to have stabilized.   So far two doctors have told me it is impossible for me to ever see in full 3D.  I don’t believe them. 

“Don’t tell me it’s impossible,” he says, “tell me you can’t do it.” “Tell me it’s never been done.” – Dean Kaman, inventor of the Segway 

We know through many studies that the plasticity of the brain is huge.  It has the ability to change throughout our life.  The eyes are controlled by muscles, and muscles can be trained; so it is as “simple” as retraining my eye muscles and getting my brain to accept the new 3D image.  

For kiteboarding, it makes getting air a real trip!  If you have not seen kiteboarding, image attaching yourself to a small surf-like board and four 100 feet long razor sharp lines that lead up to an upside down parachute looking thing.  These are not your Charlie Brown kites and create enough power to pull you straight up off the water and if you do it correctly, and you can land feather soft too.

If you screw up, you get dropped out of the sky like a stone.  The first time I really sent the kite up, it picked me up off the water and I had no idea how high up I was since I can’t look down and tell how far away the water is!  Yikes!  I ended up cannonballing back into the water butt first and realized I need to do a bit of work on that! Ha!

It is still an absolute blast and I am getting better at timing my jumps now too.  Most people can tell when they are in the air about how high up they are.  For me, I have to “guess” based on how hard I was cutting the board, wind speed and angle, line tension, kite speed, etc without many visual cues.  It is still a blast though! 

CB: I’m glad to hear you have a plan, Mike, and it’s great to hear you describe kiteboarding – makes me want to go and try it.  Plus, that is a great quote from Dean Kaman!  And finally, before we finish part one of the interview, let me confess to you that I really appreciate using my foam roller after a training session but I know you are sceptical.  I don’t want to put you on the spot but can you sell me your alternative approach one more time?

MTN: Ha!  I wrote a post called Get Off the Foam Roller back in early 2008 and it was like taking a stick to a hornet’s nest.  My whole point is that creating pain to get out of pain is a very stupid idea.  A 4 year old would tell you that.  I don’t mind if people use a foam roller on occasion and it is a tool just like many other things.  I do have an issue of people using it to CREATE pain.

They look to get a stiffer foam roller, then a PVC pipe since that is really stiff, next they are using rolling pins, and sharp pointy things to really get in their and “release” tissue, but also causing lots of pain.  If you come to me and say that your right shoulder hurts really bad, I can take my trusty cow brander and brand “XHP” (Extreme Human Performance of course!) on your LEFT shoulder and I can guarantee your other shoulder will not hurt any more.

Did I fix your other shoulder?  Nope.  Did I make the pain go away in THAT shoulder?  Yes.  Are you leaving my place not in pain?  Nope, just DIFFERENT pain.  Don’t confuse different pain with absence of pain.  While I will get tons of hate mail on this, the same theory applies to all soft tissue work too.  Enough with people posting picture of how bruised and beat up they look after “soft” tissue work.    Stupid idea that has got to end.  There is a much better way.

CB: OK, I didn’t appreciate that people were performing self-torture with these devices.  I guess sometimes I don’t let my imagination run riot when considering just how daft some people can be.

Stay tuned for part two of Mike’s interview, next week, where he talks about metabolic flexibility, and check out Mike at his site, Extreme Human Performance