Strength and deconditioning 9: To gear or not to gear

Something that I have wondered about for a few months now is the place of gear in power lifting competition. I began by thinking that the use of gear--any gear!--was cheating and that no lift accomplished with the aid of anything more supportive than a particularly tight pair of gym shorts should count for towards your personal record. These opinions were held before I started doing any serious max work, this summer. The first time I squatted 525, benched 405 and pulled 455 on the same day... I felt all my joints just crinkle up, like off brand french fries, and my central nervous system sizzle like a cheap steak. I had to go home and lie for basically three days to recover. I was suffering from a great level of deep muscle fatigue and nervous exhaustion. I can only imagine how awful it is for men who are attempting to pull, push or squat twice that amount. If that was attempted without some supportive gear, even just wraps, I can imagine that exhaustion and missing the lift would be a best case scenario; total joint failure and a loud ripping noise seems more likely.

I am still not a fan of the more elaborate set ups. One does not seem to need a suit of armor made out of vulcanized rubber for squatting and dead lifting, and one certainly doesn't need an extra layer or two of pectoral muscle for bench pressing. This is sort of sneaky and gives an unfair advantage over lifters who don't use that kind of equipment; there are many power lifting federations which don't even allow double-ply equipment. I am a strong believer in taking care of your joints, however, and may even buy a Z-suit, elbow wraps and knee wraps in the future, to make sure that I don't suffer any injury to body parts where I am prone to it.

Strength and deconditioning 7: Getting strong

I have coached a few people, in the weight room, when I have worked out in public places. This is one of the hazards of working out while very strong. People see you loading four or more plates onto any given bar, and they just sort of assume you have a duty to the public to help them work out. Maybe you do... I don't know. I do know that I don't mind helping somebody out when that person is dedicated and serious about weight training, about getting stronger. One of the best students I ever had, in the weight room, was a tall, thin young man whose leverages were absolutely and utterly wrong for lifting weights. He was able to do a lot of running and to hop around like a tree frog on crack, doing P90X, but wasn't able to bench press, squat or dead lift more than 135. His bench might have been 145; I forget. The point was that he wasn't very strong, in absolute terms, and the program he was doing of four sixes wasn't doing him any favors. I put him on a program of alternating 3x3 and 5x2 workouts (I chose against adding in a cycle of 8-12 singles, due to the fact that I couldn't watch him closely and do my own workouts) and, within a few weeks, his max bench press had leaped to 165! This is a pretty impressive step forward and I was incredibly proud of him. He also made progress on bench press and squat, which are excellent indicators of overall strength.

This is one of the reasons that it confuses me, then, when someone comes up to me in the weight room and says, "I want you to help me, but I don't want to get strong/I don't care about getting strong. Can you help me?" I have to say, after looking at them confused, for a moment, "No, no I don't think I can help you, at all, and furthermore I can't understand you." It's not that I don't get where they're coming from, you know... I understand them intellectually, I guess, I comprehend the words that they're saying, and all, but I just don't get what they want to get if not, you know, stronger. If you don't want to get stronger, then what do you want, to get weaker? Do you want to be weak? Really? Really? If so, then, why? I've had people tell me everything from that they want to get "bigger" to that they want to "lose fat." Well, buckaroo, you can't get big, you can't get really big, without getting strong. You can get a blood pump happening in your muscles, you can develop a certain amount of liquid hypertrophy, but a few hours out of the gym will bring you down to earth, leaving those little swollen guns, of which you were so proud a little while ago, posing in front of the mirror, will be deflated like balloons. If you want to lose fat, well, then, you need to pack on some muscle, which can be accomplished by getting stronger. You might weigh more--muscle ways more than fat, after all--but each pound of muscle will burn four times the amount of calories that a pound of fat will. Your body will literally revolt against fat as you get stronger, stripping it away. Besides, when a person is truly down and out, you don't hear "I want to get buff," or "I want six pack abs." When a man or woman can't walk, or work, or get out of bed, he or she says, "I want to get stronger." That person is at their lowest, back to basics, and that's where the deep work, which feels like it's being done at the cellular level, gets done. Get back there and start building. Get strong. All the other stuff you want will come.

Strength and deconditioning : The importance of a rest day

The most important thing you can do, if you're trying to get bigger, get strong, lose weight, whatever, is to exercise with great intensity every time you step into the gym or onto the track. By the time you finish you ought to be staggering, dripping and gasping, but not hurting... endorphins will keep you from hurting, and if you're truly hurting, you're doing it wrong.

Anyway, that's the most important thing: working out hard. The second most important thing is to take a rest day, when you need it. When one lifts weights, one causes micro-tears in the muscles affected by the movement you engage. If you never allow these tears to heal, then they'll continue to get bigger, making you weak and eventually causing an injury. If you give them a day or two to heal, however, they muscle fibers will knit together, a little bigger and tougher than before, and produce a world class physique! That feeling of soreness, common to beginners and those just returning the Iron Game, is called Direct Muscle Soreness. Serious strength athletes, like power lifters, face a more insidious problem called Deep Muscle Fatigue. DMF is a leaden feeling that pervades the body, emanating in waves from the core and making it impossible to move the limbs. When the symptoms of DMF are ignored, and you keep punishing your body, you'll end up blowing a lift and hurting yourself, or find yourself simply unable to get out of bed in the morning, since advanced DMF feels like a mild form of paralysis. I can remember one of my biggest limit squats, taken earlier this summer... I had been working out hard for two weeks with little rest, and knew that a limit squat was a bad plan. I was all hyped up, though, and there were a couple of cute girls over on the cardio machines watching, and that can make a man foolish. After barely beating my old PR, I staggered two steps back, got light headed, and fainted into my two spotters arms. I was just glad that I didn't get a nose bleed. I have seen that, during a max on squat or dead lift, and worse. For the next three days, I moved through life like something out of a zombie movie, sluggish and moaning for food. It was the worst!

I say all of this because today is a good day for rest, like Dr. Seuss used to talk about a great day for up. I've been exercising hard for a full week, and just need to rest. There are bruises all over my body... my neck is bruised from back squats, my chest from bench press, and there are huge, ugly, purple blotches on my shoulders from cross-grip front squats. The ever present scuff marks on my shins, from dead lifting, are raw and ready to bleed, and I have a huge, ugly abrasion on my stomach from a clean that I almost lost at the top without racking it completely. I look like I just lost a fight with a small, angry bear, and to prevent something bad from happening I took today off and am mostly sitting still, aggravating as that is to me. Resting can be as hard as working out, but it's just as important!

Strength and Deconditioning 3: Back up

What's the major problem with most young men in the gym today? Well, other than the fact that most of them are unrepentant douche-bags. And the fact that they have a love affair with Nautilus machines matched in passion only by the Brownings. And the fact that they do biceps curls in the squat rack. And the fact that they pick up girls by leaning (usually against a squat rack I want to use or a tree with weights on it that I need) into them and murmuring, deeply and soulfully I assume, "Yeah, brah, doo, yah, I'm, like, a cage fighter, brah, do, yah, brah..." The girl usually eats it up and they sleep together that afternoon, touching off a torrid two year affair which ends with her crying and him still saying, "Yeah, brah, doo, yah, brah, doo, fun, just fun, no strings, yah, doo..."

Actually, come to think of it, there are a lot of problems with young men in the gym today. Is it any wonder that I built my own gym to work out in? Anyway, the thing that I'm thinking, the major problem, is that young men don't pay any attention to the development of their backs! The level of attention which these guys pay to their chests, and especially their abdominal muscles, leads to a dreadfully unbalanced physique. No one wants to see a six pack on a cadaver (well, with the advent of Twilight who knows...), after all. The men who have been most dominant at Mr. Olympia in the past thirty years have been men like Sergio Olivia, Lee Haney, Ronnie Coleman and--most of all--the great Dorian Yates have all dominated the field with their broad, overpowering backs. Power lifters and Olympic lifters build their entire base of strength, for clean and jerk, snatch, dead lift, squat and even bench press off of enormous traps and lats. Although most "fitness professionals," who usually look like someone grafted the Miz's head onto Edward Cullen's body, advocate isolation exercises for the back, the fact that they look like they have the Miz's head grafted onto Edward Cullen's body should suggest, perhaps, that their advice probably won't make you a whole lot stronger. Disregard it and stick to big, sweeping, compound exercises that work the back as a whole. The body's muscles are all interrelated anyway, and so torturing them one at a time doesn't really do anything other than waste a lot of time. With compound exercises, you can torture all these muscles together, save a lot of time and actually get some results!

I work my back once or twice a week, depending on what else I'm doing, and use one of two protocols. Sets are always done with heavy weights and low reps, either three sets of three reps or five sets of two reps, and each rep is done with a strict pull and full muscular contraction at the top.

One protocol that I use is made up of dead lifts and power cleans. The dead lift is an excellent full body exercise, and develops the lower back, lats, glutes and thighs like nothing other than the squat. The proper dead lift is done with the bar close to the shins--you will get scuffs on your shins doing this right, it's the mark of a power lifter!--and the thrust should come from your thighs and posterior chain forcing your back to straighten, driving your heels through the floor. Observe this video, cribbed off of youtube, of Andy Bolton's world record 1008 pound dead lift: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5groVHlMkRE Do not pull with your arms. If the weight is at all an honest weight for your dead lift, pulling with the arms will result in failure at best and a torn biceps at worst. A torn biceps isn't pretty... it leaps off the bone and rolls up your arm like a slug wincing away from salt. You do not want to experience it!

The second exercise on this protocol is the power clean. This lift, popular with football teams all over the country and closely related to the Olympic full clean, is a pulling movement that works the upper and lower trapezius and medial and anterior deltoids. The bar is pulled from the floor the the waist, and then scooped under the the thighs with a double knee bend. At this point, pull explosively from the traps and shoulders--keeping the arms straight to avoid injury--and flex the quadriceps. This movement should be follow by a jump off the floor. As counter intuitive as it sounds to jump while holding a barbell in your hands, this allows you to fling the weight high enough for you to pull your body under it and catch it, in a quarter squat position (as opposed to the Olympic clean's full squat) in a rack across your collarbones. Recover, stand straight, and replace the weight on the floor. For an example, watch this video of a gigantic, 400 pound power clean from youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LyV7fwr7ik.

Although there are many other exercises to work your back--including the Romanian dead lift, row, high pull and--my favorite of these--the Kroc row, the above exercises helped me to reach a 500 pound dead lift. I hope that they help anyone else who comes across them just as much.