My good friend Adam Campbell has touched a few nerves with the ADA.

He recently published an outstanding, well-researched, and well-informed article in regard to low-carb diets and diabetes. Read it here.

Well the ADA responded.

Adam’s response once again shows why he is THE MAN!

Later

If you’re having trouble finding the motivation to hit the gym or feeling like you’re just not making the progress that you should be, perhaps you’re not training.

Training implies purposeful activity in pursuit of a specific, desired result.

Nothing kills motivation faster than having nothing particular to work for. Once your desired result (a goal perhaps) is determined, and the decision is made that your desired result is worthy of your efforts, your actions become meaningful rather than just “going” through the motions or just “getting it done.” Motivation is instantaneous.

Training implies creating an organized plan to move you closer to your desired result.

Once you know where you’re going, it simply becomes a matter of determining how you get there. If you don’t know how to get there yourself, find the necessary information or find someone who knows the information that can help you. If necessary, pay them for the information.

Training implies executing an organized plan.

Nothing is more motivating than taking action toward a worthwhile goal. Stick to the plan without compromise and with total commitment. Otherwise, you’ll never know if it will work for you.

Training implies regularly reviewing your progress toward a specific, desired result.

You must track your progress to determine if you are making progress toward your desired result. Give yourself time to make progress rather than comparing your status from a day to day basis. A watched pot never boils. About every two weeks works for most programs.

Training implies making necessary changes in your plan to produce results.

Continue on your current path until progress slows significantly or stagnates then take immediate corrective action to move closer your desired result.

Train.

Later

I get asked which books are most important in the rehab and strength and conditioning fields quite often. To be honest, over the years I’ve read so many books from a broad spectrum of authors that it’s difficult to really narrow things down.

The following are what I consider to be foundational books that I would recommend to someone who’s just beginning to get their feet wet in the fitness/strength & conditioning field. You need to have a basic understanding of anatomy, the energy systems, training theory and testing, and orthopedic testing

Atlas of Human Anatomy by Netter

Physiology of Exercise and Sport by Wilmore and Costill

Essentials of Strength and Conditioning edited by Baechle and Earle

Othorpedic Physical Assessment by Magee

Muscles Testing and Function with Posture and Pain by Kendall

Winning and Losing: Lessons from 15 years of Physically Preparing the Elite Athlete by Ian King

Get Reading!

Later

If you’ve had or are currently having trouble losing fat, it’s not your fault.

Now I’m a big believer in taking personal responsibility for where you are in life, and when it comes to fat loss, personal responsibility is a big part of the process.

No one forces you at gun point to eat calorie dense, nonnutritious foods that promote fat storage, right?

No one forces you to spend endless hours of inactivity on your butt in front of the idiot box. If you know the nightly TV schedules by heart, you know who you are.

But again, if you’re out there making an effort to really impact your health and physical fitness with a goal of losing fat, I say it’s not your fault.

You’ve been mislead.
You’ve been misinformed.
You’ve been lied to.

You’ve been told to use the wrong technology!

It’s not your fault.

Here’s what “They” told you to do if you want to lose fat.

1. Eating fat makes you fat and leads to countless health problems.
2. You need to severely restrict your calories.
3. Strength training can’t help you lose fat. It only maintains muscle.
4. Aerobic exercise is the key to fat loss.

ALL OF THESE RECOMMENDATIONS ARE WRONG!

Let’s attack these one by one.

1. Eaing fat makes you fat and leads to countless health problems.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one. Rather I’ll just refer you to some articles by my buddy Adam Campbell Here and Regina Wilshire Here

Trust me…wrong technology.

2. You need to severely restrict your calories

Any time I talk to someone about fat loss they always bring up the concept of metabolism.

“I really have a slow metabolism”

“I need to speed up my metabolism”

Well, what is metabolism?

To make it simple. It’s the rate at which you burn food to support all the processes that take place in your body.

It’s that rate at which you burn food?

Well, if you severely restrict your calories that means you have less food to burn. In response to this concept, do you know what your body does?

It slows do the rate at which you burn the food that you do eat.

In other words, it SLOWS DOWN your metabolism.

Oops! Wrong technology.

3. Strength Training can’t help you lose fat. It only helps you maintain muscle

Pardon me while I chuckle.

In less than 2 minutes I can pull a large handful of scientific studies that show how specific weight training protocols increase fat loss from 20 to 38 hours AFTER you finish weight training.

That means that with a proper weight training protocol, not only can you increase strength, gain muscle, but you’ll also burn more fat throughout the next day and then some by doing nothing further.

4. Aerobic exercise is the key to fat loss.

This is one of those points that was grossly misunderstood and then got perpetuated throughout the media and the general fitness community.

Because the primary energy source for most steady-state aerobic energy system training protocols (think long distance running) came from fat stores, the belief became that exercising at a specific level of effort or heart rate level in the “fat burning zone” for an extended period of time was the best way to increase fat loss.

Sorry, wrong technology again. In a head to head comparison, steady state aerobic exercise protocols came up short in the fat loss department compared to a form of training called interval training. Interval training is based on alternating short periods of higher intensity effort (more effort that your typical long distance run) with periods of reduced effort activity or even rest.

Are you catching on yet?

Do you see why so many people have trouble losing fat?

We’ve been told to use the wrong technology.

Imagine if you combined the best technologies of proper fat loss nutrition, strength training, and interval training.

The result is what my friend Alwyn Cosgrove calls the AFTERBURN.

Later

There’s a great book out there that if you don’t already have it, you should buy it.

It’s a called Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe with Lon Kilgore.

Especially if you work with young strength trainers or weightlifters, put this on your essentials list. It’s that good.

Mark outlines technical and coaching cues for each of the following exercises:

The Squat
The Bench Press
The Deadlift
The Press
The Power Clean

He then discusses Misconceptions about Training Youth and briefly touches on programming. I say briefly because he’s got another book coming out any day with a focus on programming. You can see a preview at http://www.practicalprogrammingforstrengthtraining.com/preview.html

One concept within the book that I question is Mark’s (I’m an informal guy so if you get to read this Mark, I hope you don’t mind me calling by your first name) contention that the reason that an athlete has difficulty keeping his knees out during a the performance of a squat is due to weak adductors.

Certainly a small technicality because Mark goes on to give coaching cues to resolve this training error as well as for all the other basic exercises many of which I use myself.

However, I found myself lying awake at night trying to rationalize why he felt that it was weak adductors that caused the knees to cave in during a squat. So I looked around a bit to try to either support or refute his contention.

For the sake of discussion, I’m eliminating poor technique as a cause. It’ll just get in the way because even well-trained lifters will at times cave at the knee during very heavy lifts.

On to it.

The first common belief is that it is due to weak hip abductors. Mark doesn’t feel that this is correct.

I agree.

In fact, there’s evidence that shows that adduction of the femur in a single leg squat was independent of hip abductor strength (this may cause many to rethink their position on anterior knee pain and weak glute medius, huh?). I think we’re safe here in extrapolating this information to a bilateral squat situation.

Myth debunked perhaps?

My gut reaction was that the adduction in the squat (knees caving in) was simply the body moving into a position of strength. The body will tend to select movement pattern that are safest based on your current abilities. We agree on that point, however, Mark states that the hip adducts to allow the stronger quadriceps to do more of the work. I think it may be something else.

Comparisons of different stance widths of squatting show that there’s no significant affect on the involvement on the quads in general. Using this as a guideline, I’m going to say that quad involvement doesn’t change because of the knees moving inward.

Sumo deadlifts (wide stance thus wide knee position) have also been shown to have greater quad EMG activity compared to traditional deadlifts (narrower knee position). Again, I’m taking some liberty here but if bringing the knees inward is supposed to increase quad involvement, I’m not finding it.

So I can’t bring myself to agree that it’s an attempt to bring the stronger quads into a more advantageous position.

If you look at squat mechanics, on the descent there is a natural abduction and internal rotation of the femur. At the bottom of the squat, there’s a big jump in adductor and glute electrical activity. This is followed by a natural adduction and external rotation of the femur on the ascent.

A wider knee position can certainly magnify the degree of adduction at the bottom and on the ascent from the squat if whatever should be holding the knee outward isn’t strong enough.

So what holds the knee outward?

Could it be gluteus maximus?

Maybe, but I doubt it. In a hip flexed position, like in the squat, the glute max is a lousy hip external rotator and a better hip extender.

But here’s something else to consider.

In a wide knee position, the ends of the glute max are closer together which may make it actively insufficient. By adducting the hip, it may realign the glute max and allow it to produce more force into hip extension. Even so, the glute max has a poor moment arm for hip extension in the bottom of a squat which improves as the ascent continues. The EMG for the glutes increases dramatically, but my guess is that it’s simply working harder due to a lesser mechanical advantage.

So what does have a great hip extension moment arm in the bottom of a squat?

Adductor magnus and the biceps femoris.

Let’s look at the adductors first.

We kind of know that adductors are involved because of the hip adduction (knees caving in or rather pulled in) in question. But you need to look at how the adductors work.

They’re not one muscle nor do they have one function.

Adductor longus is a great hip adductor regardless of hip position. So the wider the knee position in the squat the more active the adductor longus becomes. Remember the natural adduction of the hip on the ascent from the squat.

Adductor magnus can be divided into 3 sections: anterior, middle, and posterior. The anterior portion is a good hip adductor regardless of the measure of hip flexion. The middle and posterior portions are weak adductors but great hip extenders. So much so that it’s frequently referred to as another hamstring muscle.

How much does the biceps femoris/hamstrings contribute to the hip extension from a squatting position?

They actually produce as much as 50% of the hip extension strength. In trained powerlifters and weightlifters, biceps femoris (the lateral hamstring) showed an increase in activity by 50% from the descent to the ascent.

So what happens if the biceps femoris is relatively weak?

First here’s a bit of information. The biceps femoris has a direct attachment to the lateral aspect of the femur, the lateral knee ligament, and it’s well-known attachment to the fibula. The makes the biceps femoris a good lateral knee stabilizer as well as producing an external rotation force at the tibia.

If the biceps is unable to do its job as in the case of too heavy a load or simply relative weakness compared to the other hip extensors, the knee will cave inward (actually a combination of adduction at the hip and internal rotation of the tibia).

The result and my best guess is that your brain will want to move into a position of strength and emphasize the muscle with the greatest leverage and muscle mass…the adductor magnus.

So in my estimation it’s a biceps femoris weakness and not the adductors.

Regardless, Starting Strength is definitely a book to own, read, and apply. Get it right here.

At least I can sleep now.

Later