Reposted: Fielding your questions about the Maggie's Fitness for Life recommendations

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Saturday, March 20. 2021

Reposted: Fielding your questions about the Maggie's Fitness for Life recommendations

I'll do my best to field readers' questions about the Maggie's Fitness for Life suggestions (which readers know includes sessions of heavy weights, sessions of calisthenics, and sessions of HIIT cardio plus maybe some plain "cardio."

Ask me, and I will attempt to explain the rationale. Bear in mind that exercise is not for fat loss

I keep getting caught up by our own anti-spam filter, so I will post further responses to questions here:

OG:

Unless somebody is a well-experienced gym rat, we recommend using an experienced trainer to make personal recommendations.

Injuries are avoided by correct techniques.

Road-running is terrible. Treadmill or trails, not so much.

Juan:

Most gyms are open now. For the weight-training part of your program bands are no substitute for dumbells and barbells, but are better than nothing.

Anon:

That is surely better than nothing, but I tend to view my workouts as a sort of torture. Then I derive the life benefits. We recommend balanced exercise programs, so one has to hate a lot of it. It hurts.

RJP asked us this question:

Since you bring up calisthenics again, I'll ask the same (unanswered) question from a previous post:

In your day-to-day life, where exactly are you applying all this hard-earned endurance? What makes you think you won't have enough endurance for those activities if you build up more strength?

Why do you think getting your squat and deadlift up will hamper your ability to do things like burpees?

Our program recommendations (4-6 hrs/wk) are designed for general life functionality. That includes sports and things like hiking 15 miles. It is "general," not designed for body-building or marathon-running.

Squats and deadlifts will not harm your burpees. Every category of exercise makes demands on, and builds on, different energy systems. Power, agility, and endurance are completely different. That's the reason for a mix.

I will welcome more questions...

Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss in Physical Fitness at 13:06 | Comments (16) | Trackbacks (0)

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1. The collective YOU often refers to the program the collective WE adheres to. As specific goals dictate program design, what is the goal of YOUR program?

2. What is the goal of your calisthenics sessions? Your "heavy" weight sessions? Your HIIT sessions?

3. Why do you equate "intense" calisthenics with recovery? Just because something is relatively less intense than heavy weights or HIIT does not mean you are recovering.

4. "Your" reports indicate "you" (ok, BD specifically) has had trouble achieving what many of "us" feel are unrealistic gains in muscle mass for an "older" gent (assuming he's not on HRT) and also has had limited strength gains (after the typical beginner gains attributable to neurological improvements). Yet you/he (please let us know your preferred pronoun ;-)) persists going "balls to the wall" in multiple fitness facets leading many of us to suggest his problem is not lack of stimulus, but lack of recovery. See question #3.

5. Do you think any of you have what has been called exercise addiction and that contributes to resistance to adequate recovery?

6. How many have read Dr. Sullivan's "The Barbell Prescription"?

#1 mike on 2021-03-18 18:29 (Reply)

Mike:

Re recovery, the needs depend on level of fitness, age, intensity of workouts and types of workouts.

Goals of our recommendations? Fitness for Life. Keeping up recreational and functional fitness for as long as possible.

Addiction? No way. I have seen exercise addicts, mainly anorectics. People with manual jobs do a lot more exercise than 5-6 day 1 hr exercisers.

#1.1 drjoy on 2021-03-19 08:29 (Reply)

Many people incur sports/exercise injuries. Usually these injuries are the result of A: inadequate warmup. B: Excessive weight, reps or sets. C: Exercising beyond your ability.

I don't think that these risks are adequately discussed. Part of the problem is that many sports injuries don't show their full consequences when you are in your 20's 30's 40's etc. but typically become serious long after you have passed that opportunity to moderate your exercise program. I.e. younger people are more or less ignorant of the long term effects of over doing it. Worse! That trained professional at the gym telling you to do more, pump heavier weight, give 110% is just as ignorant of the very real consequences.

I am absolutely sympathetic to a professional or Olympic level athlete pushing themselves to maximize their strength/fitness because they know the risks and have a risk benefit analysis that supports their decision. But for the average person who simply wants to improve their conditioning and maybe their health they don't understand the risk/benefit equation.

Another factor, especially for men, is that your major muscle groups will easily and quickly strengthen while the many supporting muscles will take years to catch up. What this means is if you are pumping iron and trying to maximize your gain your major muscle groups will allow you to lift more than you should and a slight imbalance or adjustment will put that weight onto your weaker supporting muscle group and you will incur an injury. Some of these injuries will stay with you for life growing more painful and debilitating with age.

I don't think that these risks are adequately explained to people who choose to exercise and especially when they make that decision well past their teens (late 20's to 40's) when these risks are greater for someone who has not maintained physically conditioning during those years.

#2 OneGuy on 2021-03-18 20:47 (Reply)

I appreciate your point about "over doing it", but it seems that we have many more people who are UNDERexercising than OVERexercising. Of course, either extreme has its negative consequences, but the joke among over-exercises has been that when they're in their 60s, they would rather see the orthopedic surgeon than the cardiac surgeon.

One problem I see in the over-40 crowd that is preventable and almost always attributable to CrossFit "trainers" whose education consists of a weekend course is tendon injuries (usually tendonosis) due to eccentric motions performed in a ballistic fashion. Examples include the Achilles tendon in the rear leg doing a split jerk or catching a medicine ball doing "wall balls". The danger and the damage far outweighs any potential benefit. The over-40 crowd should not train like the high school or college athlete. Newsflash: If you're in your 40s and the Green Bay Packers haven't come knocking yet, they never will.

And I am in total agreement that whatever trainer "they" are using is worse than useless. He is downright harmful.

#2.1 mike on 2021-03-18 21:50 (Reply)

Your (OneGuy's) comment about supporting muscles not being built up is much more relevant for those who do isolation exercises and/or rely on machines. Barbell squats, deadlifts and overhead presses are all done while standing, so all your supporting muscles are being trained as well. This is one of the big disadvantages of things like the leg press machine: you can't fall down. Same with the Smith machine, it's doing a lot of the balancing work for you. You do a heavy squat or deadlift, there are no muscles, supporting or otherwise, that are not being used and strengthened.

#2.2 RJP on 2021-03-18 22:43 (Reply)

Two basic suggestions for fitness/health/weight:
1. Find a kind of exercise you ENJOY and do lots of it, at least some of the time do it intensely.
2. If you want to be a thin person, you have to eat like a thin person.

#3 anon on 2021-03-18 20:58 (Reply)

Before Covid I was training with barbells. The gym went out of business and I have no place to safely use barbells at home. Mark Rippatoe says bands can’t substitute for weights. Is that right for everyone? Is there something else to substitute? Kettlebells? I’m 72 and want to remain active, avoid falling, etc.

#4 Juan Paxety (Link) on 2021-03-19 07:26 (Reply)

I am 66 and have come to the conclusion that I can no longer train as I did when I was in my 20's. I like Coach Rip but there are lots of alternatives to barbells. I use kettlebells, sandbags, clubs, and calisthenics. They don't take up the space that barbells do weights do, but you have to know how to do them and how to work them. The advantage of barbell training is they are the fastest way to achieve strength. People can get hideously strong just using cals but it takes a bit longer

At our respective ages, strength-endurance is the key. So if your goal is general fitness, why train to DL 600 lbs?

The nifty thing about being retired is that you are your own lab rat, so give other things a try.

#4.1 Steve King on 2021-03-19 09:57 (Reply)

Hideously strong from calis? That would be rare, but good.

Getting the body moving with intention daily is a good thing.

#4.1.1 BD on 2021-03-19 10:57 (Reply)

My questions you answered here are taken slightly out of context. I asked them after suggesting to BD that he cut back a bit on the cardio/endurance stuff and focus more on building strength for a couple of months. He flatly refused to even consider that plan of action, prompting my questions, as the clear implication was that squats and deadlifts will hurt his burpee performance. I was curious to know why he thought that.

#5 RJP on 2021-03-19 11:19 (Reply)

I understood the point you were making with your question and am surprised that it either went over their heads or they sidestepped it.

In case the management is listening, I think RJP's point - and it's an important one - is that if you cut back your cardio to maintenance levels and focus on strength for a training cycle (say 6-8 weeks), the increased strength will make you better at your cardio/calisthenics by (1) giving you the strength to perform the movements better, and (2) allowing you to perform more reps (at least in the rep range you are working).

As I have noted, when you get greedy and try to achieve too much too fast, you don't recover. While gains depend on an adequate stimulus, gains are made during the recovery phase, not the training phase.

#5.1 mike on 2021-03-20 21:51 (Reply)

It depends on the reason you exercise. Most people exercise because they believe that they should, people tell then to and then a 20 something 'expert' tells them how they should. They then evolve into seeing how much weight they can move because they are there without a real purpose and what the hell pushing more and more weight feels like "gains". Don't conflate pushing heavy weight with "gains" or any other nice sounding label. Your goal in exercise should be long term health benefits and not short term bragging rights about how much you squatted.

#5.1.1 Health not harm on 2021-03-21 10:20 (Reply)

I've never said "get as strong as possible", I've always said "get stronger than you are now".

The reason you exercise is to improve your physical interaction with the outside world (which brings other health benefits). The best way to do this, hands down, is to increase your strength. From previous posts over the past couple of years it's obvious BD is skinny and weak and would greatly benefit from getting stronger.

And yes, a lot of people have no idea how to do that. That's why I have repeatedly recommended books like "The Barbell Prescription" and "Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training". For whatever reason, BD has also steadfastly refused to look at these resources.

#5.1.1.1 RJP on 2021-03-21 11:30 (Reply)

"Road-running is terrible."

I guess that is a matter of opinion. The freedom, exhilaration and sheer joy of running is an incredible high. It is an achievement, a satisfying conquest of a very difficult challenge. You can't just one day decide I want to run a marathon and do it. It literally takes years to build the cardiovascular system to be able to do it. It is a long process of hour or more runs 6-7 days a week for months or years. Nothing else in sports/fitness can match it. Yet... most people can do it IF they are willing to make the commitment. Not a record breaking marathon run but a full marathon run in 4-5 hours or so.

I ran for years/decades. I did this and lifted weights and calisthenics my entire life. At 77 what do I have to show for it. an enlarged heart, typical of a distance runner. Lung capacity at 140%. Told by a X-ray tech to tell them in the future to put the film in sideways because my lungs are too big for the regular x-ray. And so much more.

#6 OneGuy on 2021-03-19 13:49 (Reply)

Terrible for many, hard on the joints. I was lucky - never had a prblem with that but most do.

#6.1 Bird Dog on 2021-03-21 13:53 (Reply)

BD still avoiding the questions about strength. :-)

#6.1.1 RJP on 2021-03-21 19:41 (Reply)

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Saturday, March 20. 2021

Reposted: Fielding your questions about the Maggie's Fitness for Life recommendations