Fail Safe

Evidently I was so taken with that hilarious photo of Loserboy in the post below that I omitted a few important points about training to failure. So, here they are:

1. It's a higher-risk technique, so don't do it unless you have a reason. All lifting stresses the body. That's why it works: it gives your body a reason to get stronger. No stress means no adaptation. But lifting to failure is particularly stressful and involves a greater risk of injury. So don't do it unless you feel you're at a point in your program where the potential benefits outweigh the risks. If you're continuing to make progress without going to failure, stick with what you're doing.

And be aware that in some instances the potential risks are always too great to justify training to failure. If, for instance, you suffer from hypertension, lifting to failure is not for you. Likewise if you are a teen do not lift to failure unless your doctor has confirmed that you are done growing.

2. It's not appropriate for novice lifters. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, if you're just beginning a resistance training program your body isn't ready to withstand the stress of heavy loads. As a general rule you're best off keeping your weights light enough that you can complete anywhere from 12 to 20 repetitions with good form. In this phase of training your goal is not so much to gain size and strength as to build muscle endurance and strengthen the connective tissues within the joints, and the higher rep range is what works best to meet those objectives.

Second, if you're new to weight training, you probably don't have all that good a sense of what the lifts are supposed to feel like, and as a consequence you may not be able to tell when things are starting to go wrong. If you don't know to jettison the weights or ask for assistance from your spotter before you lose control, you may end up injuring yourself severely.

3. The risk is not just to yourself, so use some common sense. If you think there's a chance you may have to drop your weights, be sure there's no one in your immediate vicinity on whom said weights might fall. (I know, I know, it's tempting to let them land on the cardio bunny in the Bebe sweats who thinks the area in front of the squat rack is a good place to do Pilates exercises ... but please don't, unless she is wearing a lot of perfume. )

(I am, of course, only kidding. Sort of.)

4. Don't feel like you need to train to failure every workout. By all means try to break new ground every workout, but use a variety of techniques to challenge yourself.

5. Be aware that if you train to failure, you'll need more recovery time between workouts. I can't say it enough: working out doesn't make you stronger, recovery makes you stronger. So if you lift to failure make sure you take all the time you need for your body to repair itself, or you'll lose the benefit of the workout. For that reason, if you're the sort of person who has trouble taking rest days, training to failure might not be productive for you and you should do something else. There's no sense in doing something high-risk just for the sake of doing it, know what I mean?

6. If you're having a "weak day" don't lift to failure even if it's on your training schedule. There are days to push hard, and there are days for playing it safe. Know what day you're in before you attempt to break new ground. If you're getting over a cold, or you slept funny and have a weird twinge in your back, or you're female and getting ready to menstruate, don't push the envelope! Save it for when you're feeling 100 percent.

Sometimes we know even before we set foot in the weight room that we're not having a good strength day, More often, however, it's a subtle thing that you may not pick up on until you start in with your preparatory joint mobility work and your warm-up sets. I like to start most client sessions with a short set of unloaded overhead squats, because this fantastic total-body exercise allows me to see at a glance whether the client has muscle imbalances that may prevent her from performing optimally during the workout. If we can't get the imbalances fixed with a little foam rolling and stretching, I'll make it a less intense session with more of a focus on corrective training even if it means deviating from plan.

It really is okay to do that. The bottom line is: what you do for your workout on any given day doesn't really matter; what counts is what you do over weeks, months and years. So be smart, and save the ultra-intense stuff for the days when you're mentally and physically up for it.

7. If kettlebells are your chosen training modality, don't lift to failure. The risks are just too high. Do as much as you can with good form, then set the kettlebell down or drop it if you must. Don't teach your body wrong habits by trying to force reps with poor form at the end of a workout when you are fatigued. Check your ego at the door and do only what you can, even if it turns out to be a lot less than you think.

In all honesty this is a real struggle for me, but I'm working on it.

Flirting With Failure

If you happen to have the Enter the Kettlebell! workbook created by Anthony DiLuglio. RKC, of Art of Strength, the phrase "Do not flirt with failure" will be very familiar to you.

He's not talking about that sleazy guy who's been hanging around your daughter, though. You know, him:


Instead, what DiLuglio means is that if you can't complete all your reps with the weight you've chosen, you should put down (or drop!) your kettlebell rather than risk an injury.

This is very good advice. Even if you end up putting a ding in your floor, better a damaged floor than a damaged rotator cuff. Really. A damaged floor is pretty easy to fix, but a damaged rotator cuff may require surgery and months of rehabilitative work.

On the other hand ... if you want to grow as an athlete or as a person, sometimes you've got to push the envelope a little. You have to step outside your comfort zone and take some risks. Inevitably that means flirting with failure. If you pretty much know from the get-go that you can accomplish everything you undertake, you're not going to achieve as much in the long run as the person who sometimes bites off a little more than she can chew. In the context of getting stronger, that means imposing a demand on the body that it's not quite capable of meeting in its current state. If you dare to fail, you give your body a reason to get stronger.

Of course there's a smart way to do this, and there's also a stupid way. If you're a guy and you're looking to set a new PR on your bench press, by all means load on those plates ... just make sure you're working with a spotter so that if the lift doesn't go as planned, you don't end up getting crushed under that heavy bar. Minimize your chances of failure by doing some strategizing, or by hiring a trainer to figure out a plan of attack.

In other words, flirt with failure ... but use protection and for God's sake don't marry it!

ETK practice: Week 9 "easy" day and "variety" day

"Easy" in this context means 5 clean & press/pullup ladders, 3 rungs to the ladder, followed by as many swings as possible in 10 minutes, working at about 50-60% effort. The suggested protocol in the Art of Strength ETK workbook is 10 snatches per arm, followed by a 1 minute rest, lather rinse repeat until 10 minutes is up. But because my heart rate tends to recover pretty quickly between work sets, I decided to shorten up my rest periods slightly, particularly in the beginning when I was fresh. By doing so I was able to complete 6 work sets in the 10 minutes, for a total of 120 snatches. Honestly, toward the end I felt like I was working a little harder than 60 percent effort, not because my heart rate was so stratospherically high, but simply because my grip and shoulders were starting to fatigue.

Given that that was the case, the snatch-intensive "breathing ladder" workout I chose to do this morning was probably not the best idea. But, hey, I never claimed to be smart :)

The point of doing "breathing ladders" is to build aerobic endurance using resistance training movements. The protocol is outlined on the Gym Jones website: http://www.gymjones.com/knowledge.php?id=27 . Basically, the idea is to pick a single total-body exercise that creates significant oxygen demand, and do reps laddered with breaths. For instance, if you were to choose kettlebell swings as your exercise, you would do one swing, then take one breath. Then you would do two swings followed by two breaths, then three swings followed by three breaths and so on.

There are a couple of different ways you can do it. One way is to choose an exercise and load that will induce a state of "panic breathing" during the work sets, in which case your workout will end when your oxygen demand overrruns supply. Usually that happens somewhere between 20-30 minutes out. The idea here is to teach breath control and efficient recovery in limited time.

The other option is to choose an exercise and load that'll result in less intensity during the work sets, so panic breathing never sets in. If you choose this option you (theoretically) will be able to perform a huge volume of work over a period lasting anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes without becoming excessively fatigued. This is great for endurance, obviously.

To get the desired training effect you have to choose the right exercise, the right load, and the right rep structure. Don't even think about making biceps curls your exercise--they don't use enough muscle to create the necessary oxygen demand. If you're dying to do a pull of some kind a hang clean would be a much better choice. Kettlebell lifts are ideal for this type of workout, but if you're not into kettlebells something like a barbell front squat to push press would work nicely too.

Anyway, I decided to give it a shot this morning using kettlebell snatches as my exercise. I probably would've picked swings except that my heaviest kettlebell at the moment is only 12 kg, and I didn't think that would be enough to get me gasping for air during the work sets. Of course I could have opted for a more endurance based, longer workout but I think what's most useful to me at this point is improving my breath control and rate of recovery. Besides, I like fast, intense workouts :)

So here's what I did, and here's how it went:

snatches, 1R/1L, 2 breaths
snatches 2R/2L, 4 breaths
snatches, 3R/3L, 6 breaths

and so on up to 15 snatches on each side followed by 30 breaths. It took me very slightly over 20 minutes, during which my heart rate averaged 144 and got up to 172 at the highest. It wasn't until the last few work sets that my heart rate really started climbing, which is pretty much par for the course given that if work sets are less than about a minute long, heart rate doesn't accurately reflect intensity of effort. Interestingly, even though my heart rate consistently got higher as the work sets got longer, I always ended my recovery periods with my heart rate in about the same place (low-mid 140s), reflecting the increased length of the recovery times.

Because I am an intensity junkie I didn't make as much of an effort to control and deepen my breath during the recovery periods as I probably could have. I've actually got decent breath control, probably because of my yoga practice in which movement is linked to breath. We also use the breath in ballet. And, of course, correct breathing during resistance training is critical for safety, especially if blood pressure is a concern. So, anyway, the concept of focusing on my breath and using it to slow my heart rate and induce a state of calm is not new to me, which I think helped.

What was more of an issue for me was the fact that I'm not used to doing sets of more than 10 consecutive snatches with a 12 kg kettlebell. The last 3 work sets, when I was doing 13, 14, and finally 15 reps on each side, were a real struggle toward the end and my form on the last reps of those sets was pretty tragic. I actually debated setting the kettlebell down, but I'm one of those people who, when I get it in my head that I'm going to do something, I do it ... even when I maybe shouldn't. In retrospect, though, it really would've been smarter to do something like two 10 rung ladders and get my volume that way instead of doing a single 15 rung ladder.

Speaking of volume, total for the workout was 240 snatches in just over 20 minutes. So, about 12 per minute on average, which is the same as yesterday's workout, which was only a 60 % effort. Interesting. I definitely felt like I was working at more than 60 % effort today, at least toward the end of the workout.

I definitely plan to experiment with breathing ladders some more, just for grins.

ETK practice: Week 8 "hard" day

Per Enter The Kettlebell, "easy," "medium" and "hard" days differ only in terms of the volume of work performed during the strength portion of the workout (the clean & press/pull-up ladders) and the intensity of the work performed during the conditioning portions (snatches or swings for time).

Actually, that's a bit misleading because it's only in week 8 that the volume of work during the strength portion becomes variable. From week 8 on you do 5 3-rung ladders on "easy" day (same as week 7), while on "medium" day you do (or attempt) 5 4-rung ladders and on "hard" day you do (or attempt) 5 5-rung ladders. Before that, volume builds from week to week but stays the same during the week.

Anyhoo, since I'm just finishing Week 8 today was my first "hard" day of 5 5-rung ladders. It went okay. As in, I completed all reps and had enough energy at the end to attempt a test of my pressing strength using my 12 kg kettlebell. Instead of doing clean & presses I did strict military presses to failure, and got 7 reps on the right side and 8 on the left. Strict militaries are harder than clean & presses because if you've done the clean properly your body has stored energy that it can use to drive the weight overhead without doing anything funky like a push press.

(Don't get me wrong: I love push presses and have been doing them for years. They're a big part of why I am as strong as I am. But today's workout was not about my push press.)

With the conditioning part of the workout, the idea is just to work for a set period of time at a predetermined level of effort: about 60% on "easy" day, 80% on "medium" day, and 100% on "hard" day. You roll the dice to determine the length of the work period. Or, you buy the ETK workbook from Art of Strength and you let Anthony DiLuglio roll the dice for you. I have the workbook, so that's what I have been doing. Thankfully today called for only a 3 minute effort so instead of doing sets of 25 with a 5 second rest between sets I opted simply to work continuously for the entire 3 minutes. Had I felt it necessary to rest I would have, but I didn't, so I didn't :) I got 117 reps in the 3 minutes--about 39 per minute, which seems to be my cadence for swings.

First Snatch Test

Enter The Kettlebell! recommends that every 4 weeks you test your strength by attempting to press a heavier kettlebell than the one you use for ladders, and by seeing how many snatches you can perform in 10 minutes. The goal is to be able to press the kettlebell that's closest to 1/2 your bodyweight if you are a man, 1/4 your bodyweight if you are a woman, and also to be able to perform 200 snatches in 10 minutes using a 24 kg kettlebell if you are a man, a 12 kg kettlebell if you are a woman.

The kettlebell that is closest to 1/4 of my bodyweight is the 12 kg bell, which is what I am using for ladders. I don't own anything heavier at the moment, although I have a 16 kg kettlebell on order. I think I will be able to press it once it arrives, but we'll see.

So, anyway, I couldn't feasibly test my pressing strength this week, but I did do the 10 minute snatch test. I got 100 snatches in the first 5 minutes, and another 70 in the second 5. I think they were decent quality too. At least, I'm not feeling pain anywhere and I don't see any marks on my wrists. I probably could have gotten another 10 or so but was starting to notice a bit of floppy wrist action and decided to slow things down in the last couple of minutes.

All things considered, I'm pleased.

The Emperor's New Crosstrainers

In my opinion the absolute best footwear for resistance training is, well, no footwear at all.

Thing is, for optimal performance you need optimal proprioception, which is basically personal trainer geekspeak for body awareness. Shoes, even good ones that fit correctly, can interfere with your ability to perceive subtle shifts in balance and centering of your bodyweight--and shifts that go unnoticed inevitably go uncorrected, resulting in compensations elsewhere in your body. If, for instance, you can't see your feet rolling inward because of your shoes, you won't think to pull up your arches, and voila! your ankles will likely wobble and your knees may bow inward when you squat or lunge.

But what about corrective shoes and orthotics? Won't they solve the problem by forcing your feet into good alignment? I would argue no ... but if by some chance a podiatrist happens upon this blog post I would totally welcome a dissenting view. My feeling is that orthotics can encourage the feet to get lazy. It's like wearing a belt or using straps: I believe it's better to develop a strong core and grip than rely on props. I do see where reasonable minds can differ on this issue, but I think it's better to strengthen one's arches than to use arch supports. Likewise I feel that, rather than running out and buying the latest "motion control" shoe from New Balance or Saucony, it's better to address the muscle imbalances that may be causing one to overpronate.

I also feel that it's just about impossible to use the pronoun "one" without sounding unbearably pretentious, but there you have it.

Of course, if you like to exercise outside or your gym prohibits barefoot exercising, some sort of footwear obviously is de rigueur. My preference is for something flat and minimally supportive, that will replicate the feeling of exercising barefoot as much as possible. My own personal choice is Chuck Converse All-Stars, but I have also heard very good things about Vibram Five Fingers, which are sort of a sinister hybrid of Aqua Socks and toe socks from the 70s. Problem is, I'm not sure they come in bubble-gum pink. Converse All-Stars do.

So, those are your good footwear choices for resistance training: barefoot, or something that replicates the feeling of being barefoot as much as possible:

Preferably something pink :)

Some bad choices are depicted below:

The shoes on the far left are motion control running shoes from Saucony, with orthotic inserts. Not only do these promote lazy feet, but they do not allow for proper grounding through the heel. Also, they are ugly and not pink.

The shoes in the center are my Suffolk Pointes. They're actually pretty great for ballet because I can totally tell whether I'm on the tip of my big toe when I'm wearing those babies. But since they do not allow for grounding through anything other than the big toe, they obviously are not a good choice for resistance training, and really I only included them for fun, and also because they are pink.

Ditto for the shoes on the right, which are pretty much useless you're doing the Zsa Zsa Gabor workout. (Look for it on eBay. It's a hoot.) Every woman should own a pair of pink marabou mules, and every woman should lift weights. But she should not wear the mules when she's lifting the weights. There's multitasking that works, and multitasking that doesn't, and this would be an example of the latter.

Getting off my "but," with some help from Rachel Cosgrove

Even fitness professionals have moments of self-doubt. Lately I've been having lots of them.

Partly I think it's been because I've been feeling a bit under the weather physically. I picked up a bug of some kind while I was traveling to Chicago for my grandfather's funeral, and I've been having trouble shaking it off. I've been trying to keep up with my workouts, but the energy and focus hasn't been there, and my performance has been lackluster as a result.

The other part of the problem-the real part-is mental. I've been wondering: is the RKC a realistic goal for me at my age, with my lack of a fitness background? My brilliant career (hah!) as a ballerina was cut short by a badly broken ankle at age 15, and after that the only exercise I got on a regular basis was the mental gymnastics required to come up with a convincing excuse for getting out of gym class. It wasn't until I was in my late 30s that I began anything remotely resembling a fitness program, and even then my goals we pretty much limited to fat loss, stress reduction, and avoidance of some of the health problems (diabetes, osteoporosis, high blood pressure) that run in my family. It never occurred to me that I might one day make fitness my career, or even that I might turn out to have an aptitude for strength training.

True, there are athletes in my family-- a cousin who danced professionally, a grandfather who boxed his way through graduate school--but my parents themselves have never valued physical accomplishments. My mother in particular has very poor balance and coordination due to a congenital inner ear problem, and has never liked to exercise because she is convinced she will hurt herself. Without meaning to she taught me to think of myself in the same way, as someone incapable of vigorous physical activity.

Of course that was then, this is now, and I'm pretty much over it. Pretty much. Until I start to struggle. Really struggle, as in not being able to follow through on the commands of my "inner coach," the one who's telling me to drive down through my heels (or big toes if I'm in ballet class), lock out my knees, contract my glutes, pack my shoulders, straighten my wrists, lock out my elbows, breathe, yadda yadda yadda. Way too soon, the inner coach walks away in disgust and all that's left is my inner playground bully telling me "You suck," and even worse, "You can't."

So what's a girl to do? (I bet Pavel asks himself that all the time :)) I wouldn't be posting about this if I couldn't end on at least somewhat of an upbeat note, although I frankly admit that this awful negative inner voice/self-doubt thing is probably always going to be an issue for me. So here are my strategies, imperfect as they are:

1. Recommit: This is where I remind myself of the reasons why failure is not an option for me. When it comes to kettlebells, I want to be able to share the physical benefits of Hardstyle kettlebell training with as many people as possible, and the RKC certification is what will best prepare me to do that. Therefore I must do what it takes to get myself in "elite athlete" condition so I can get RKC-certified.

2. Regroup: This is where I look at my training. If I'm not making the strength and endurance gains I feel I should be making, there probably is something about my program that's at fault. First I try to pinpoint the problems with my performance, and then I try to come up with the appropriate corrective strategies. If I can't figure it out on my own, I enlist the aid of another trainer.

3. Be real: This is where I look at everything else going on in my life that might be interfering with my accomplishment of my physical goals. These obstacles are genuine and nontrivial for the most part. But they are not insurmountable. This is where Rachel Cosgrove helped me. In a recent blog post, "No More 'Buts' To Get Your Butt In Gear," she demonstrates the power of changing "but" statements to "and" statements.

Note the difference between these two statements:

1. "I am preparing for RKC certification but I have a lot of bad workout days due to the hormonal fluctuations of perimenopause;" and

2. "I am preparing for RKC certification and I have a lot of bad workout days due to the hormonal fluctuations of perimenopause."

In the first sentence I'm essentially giving myself an out, whereas in the second I'm posing a problem to be solved. And let me tell you, it's astonishing how quickly your mind gets to work devising solutions once you start seeing your problems as soluble!

I guess the takeaway message here is: the mind is an incredibly powerful thing. It can be your biggest enemy or your greatest ally. I recommend the latter. It's more fun that way unless for some reason you like abuse, in which case call me. (No, don't. The "Mistress Laura" thing is a joke, except maybe to the people who take my Tuesday lunchtime cycling class. And maybe a few others. Maybe :))

http://rachelcosgrove.blogspot.com/2009/07/no-more-buts-to-get-your-butt-in-gear.html