Maggie's Farm

It's a topic which is rarely discussed, but one which can make a big difference. After all, almost no exercise is improved by holding one's breath during its execution.

-Aerobic exertions (ie, not sprints which are anaerobic, but swims, runs, biking, elliptical, etc) call for a good breathing rhythm. A typical aerobic breathing rhythm is 2:2, that is, breathing in for 2 steps and exhaling during 2 steps. Swimmers know all about breathing rhythm, typically one breath every two strokes or maybe every three strokes, and exhaling with face down in the water. I like to swim with breaths every 4 strokes, but it's just endurance swims, not speed.

- Breathing during sprints (as in HIIT):  Sprints are of short duration. Many sprinters inhale once every 10-20 yards.  Slow deep breaths, slow exhales. Panting is counterproductive. However you breathe in sprints of any sort, you will not keep up with oxygen needs. You can pant and gasp after you finish.

- Breathing during planks: Planks are typically 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Lots of trainers' advice is slow "in thru nose, out thru mouth," while others suggest in and out both thru nose. The latter is better.

- Breathing with resistance work:  As the weights get heavier, breathing patterns become more important.  Typically, inhaling during the eccentric motion and exhaling during the concentric motion. (Eccentric and Concentric movements).  An exception might be an exertion which demands special core stability, like weighted squats.  In such cases, a deep breath can be taken before the eccentric movement begins, and the breath held until exhaled on the concentric stand-up.

Also, with the powerlifts, there is no federal law against taking an extra breath after 5 or 6 reps of an eight rep set, at the end of a concentric motion. Why not? It's not meant to be a sprint. The purpose of weights is just to stress the heck out of muscle to the point of some micro-tears, not to be anaerobic cardio even if it tends to be.

Here's more on the topic of breathing and exercise. 

Your internist might give you a Cardiac Stress Test every few years to check your cardiopulmonary function, but other than that never a physical fitness evaluation beyond, maybe, a body fat composition. A very thorough physical exam might include an SF-36. This is not used often enough. (It is used in $5-10,000 "Executive Physicals," but that is often because companies take insurance on the functioning of their essential execs.)

The reason doctors don't do it is because your physical fitness at any age is your problem, not his or hers. OK, they will advise "exercise," but they know you won't do much of it, or "watch your diet" but they know you will do no more watching than looking at what is on your plate.

Serious fitness evaluations are done by the military, police, fire departments, etc. For us civilians, the only people who will give us a serious fitness evaluation are skilled fitness trainers. Trainers tell me that 3/4 of their new clients are in terrible shape. That's why they are there. About 1/4 are in decent condition, but want to get to a higher level of fitness. 

Fitness evaluations include basic measures of cardio function, endurance, strength, agility, and balance. The Mayo Clinic offers this do-it-at-home fitness evaluation.

Regardless of age or level of condition when you decide to get serious about conditioning,  The Maggie's program of HIIT cardio, endurance cardio, calisthenics, and weights (plus proper nutrition for a svelte physique) addresses all of the areas of fitness.

Keto-style nutrition (ketogenic) is only for people whose habits and life-styles tend towards excess fat deposits. There is no reason to fuss with your nutritional habits if you are in good shape and good conditioning. Food is not medicine - but if you lift heavy 2-3 times weekly, keep the protein up for muscle repair.

All "keto" means is that you are burning fat. Burning fat is difficult, because your body wants to hang on to it and exercise does very little for that at ordinary intensities and durations. 

Kruiser explains it here:  Jillian Michaels Is Mad That Keto People Lose Weight Without Buying Her Products

An interesting side effect of ketosis is that appetite tends to be reduced and energy increased. For people who are serious about it, you can buy Keto-strips to check your urine. That will instantly tell you whether you are burning fat or not.

If overweight, you probably have some degree of insulin insensitivity, sometimes termed "pre-diabetic" at some point. A keto nutritional habit can correct that, but remember that if you have ever been fat, your body will want to restore it back to where you set your highest weight. Fat cells are as greedy as governments and they never forget.

Your basic physical architecture is a product of a genetic potential, a genotype. Your genetic potential (design) is effected to some extent by environmental influences: intrauterine nutrition, nutrition during growth, disease, physical activity during growth, and so forth. All the same, your genetic potential can not be exceeded because it is pre-programmed.

What do I mean by basic physical architecture? I mean things like basic body structure: height, bone lengths and widths, and number of muscle cells and their distribution (yes, you are born with all of the muscle cells you will ever have, and these vary a good deal between people).

As an adult over age 17- 21, your life-long basic physical foundation is complete. As with your IQ, personality strengths and weaknesses, athletic talents, what we do with our given physical architecture after that point is up to us. A good trainer, a physical therapist, or a sports physician can see through our appearance and phenotype and get an idea of our basic physical architecture and our potential for development of what we are.

Our naked physical appearance today may or may not tell us much about our basic architecture, because it might be hidden under layers of fat or simply unmanifested by lack of stressors and demands. In underweight people, it can be concealed by underdevelopment of potential.

It's common to talk about endomorphs, mesomorphs, and ectomorphs, but that is simplistic because everybody is built differently. The length of your femur, for just one important example. 

Do these things matter in general fitness efforts? Not too much. Do they matter in physical training? Yes, because the architecture sets limits on, and offers opportunities for, what can be achieved.  Do they matter in athletic potential? Certainly, but it depends on the level which is aspired to. 

Despite my advice not to undertake a conditioning program in January (because few keep their resolutions), I know people who did and that some readers did. Oh well.

A reminder for those people:

1. If you've been away from exertion for a while, it's a good idea to begin with a month of daily or near-daily mixed cardio just to wake up your body, to alert your brain and neuromuscular system that you are going to make demands.

2. For Fitness for Life, after the above you will benefit most from a balanced program:

- Resistance (weights) for building muscle and bone strength. Start light with higher reps and work up gradually to higher weight and fewer reps. If not knowledgeable about weight work, get some instruction.

- Calisthenics for building general athleticism (balance, quickness, endurance, muscle conditioning, with some HIIT cardio)

- Mixed cardio for endurance and heart stress. Since you can hardly build endurance in a one hour session of speed walking, say, your cardio needs to be uncomfortable, a much higher intensity than recreational.  We think the Stairmaster machine is the best cardio trainer, but mixing it all up is the right idea. (Stairmaster tips: step on your heel more than balls of feet, stand up straight, and don't lean on the bars. Also, mix it up with double steps or high speeds if you can)

The Maggie's Fitness for Life program includes both. Still, we tend to agree that calisthenics classes offer more bang for the buck (or for the time.)

The logic is that 50 minutes of intense calis (with maybe only 6-10-second breaks between routines) is a good heart stressor while also working on athleticism, balance, flexibility, light-weight endurance muscle work, and body-weight exercises.  In addition, most calisthenics classes include specific HIIT routines like rowing sprints. Obviously, each person works at his or her own level.

Some thoughts about it here. 

If you take three tough calisthenics classes weekly, do you need to do your own HIIT cardio? Maybe not, because calisthenics classes that keep your heart rate up are stressful cardio. It depends on how intensely you want to condition, and on how ambitious you are. What sorts of circuits do typical calisthenics classes include? Rowing sprints, kettlebell swings, pushups, jumping jacks, jump rope, heavy ropes, body weight squats, heavy ball throws, sandbag slams, floor and core work like planks and crunches, hand weights, stretches, etc etc. Fun stuff, never boring because the routines are only 30-60 seconds each.

We do like the idea of one "long, slow" cardio hour, like swimming, jogging, high-incline walking, stair machine, etc as a recovery day from a week's exertions with heavy weights and calisthenics. There is evidence that "active recovery" like that makes for more effective physical recovery than doing nothing. A 4-5-hour hill hike is a perfect recovery activity from demanding workouts.

With calisthenics, the less spare fat you carry, the better you will do and the more quickly you will move. To shed spare fat, cut the food volume and get rid of those carbs. (Our readers know what carbs are: fruit, juices, grains and grain products, beer, root vegetables, anything with sugar, etc.)

Is weight training to muscle failure a good idea?  It depends.

With smaller muscle groups, we all commonly train to failure, or close to it, but more often just to the point of excess pain. I'm thinking of examples like curls, forearm exercises, pushups, pullups, cable pull downs and push downs, rows. In fact, many gym machines (which I rarely use) isolate smaller muscle groups in ways that lend themselves to high-rep muscle endurance work (ie 15-20 reps).

With the powerlifts, we do not recommend lifting to failure very often. Just occasionally, to beat the heck out of yourself, and with a spotter. Rule of thumb with powerlifts is mostly to do the number of reps you can manage to accomplish 4-8 times in a row. If you can, for example, deadlift a weight 12 times, raise the weight right away to get down to 6-8 reps for each set. 

 You Need to Know About Muscle Failure

I have warned about people who make New year resolutions to exercise but, in case you are one of those who do so, do me a favor and get a Stress Echo first if you are a male over 40 or in bad shape over 30, a post-menopausal woman, or anybody who fatigues with either extended activity or exertion.

A Stress Echo not only can identify heart issues before they appear in daily life, but can give you a metabolic physical stress tolerance baseline.  Most Stress Echo protocols push you to your max unless you have prior identified cardio-pulmonary disease, so the attending cardiologist will be able to give you a thorough cardio fitness assessment and a numerical metabolic fitness level. (This test is required regularly for firemen, pilots, athletes, etc.) Serious fitness trainers also want an OK before pushing their clients hard.

If you do, you are statistically almost certain to fail in an exercise program. If serious about it, you will begin today. Of course, January is when gyms make all their money and when they are busiest. By March, they have collected all those fees and are right back to their usual daily volume of people.

As they say, "Someday" is not one of the seven days of the week.

I want to say a few words about exercise goals because it only makes sense to define, or re-define, exercise goals. I don't mean specific goals, like being able to bench press 300 lbs, or to run 10 miles at a 7.5 mph pace. I mean general goals. Your goals will determine your program.

For examples:

- Specific goals, like the two I mentioned above, require very specific training approaches designed by experts.

-  Weight loss: Forget exercise. Eat right and body fat will melt away. Some cardio might help prime the pump, but not necessary.

- Psychological goals. Any form of daily exertion (not walking) is excellent for mental attitude.

-  Body-building. This requires a specific sort of program to look buff. Focus a lot on isolated muscles. It's not functional so much as an aesthetic. I think it's silly, but to each his or her own.

- Strength training. This entails 4 days/week of heavy weights, powerlifts, with some accessory weight exercises.

-  General conditioning for out of shape people. This is the bread and butter of professional trainers, and in some ways the most rewarding for them because these people, if dedicated, can make the most dramatic progress because they have so far to go. I have seen schlubby people make remarkable changes in one or two years. Including grandmas.

- "Functional fitness".  This is the goal for most people aged 30-80, and why Crossfit is so popular. This is about building or even just maintaining strength, agility, balance, power, appearance, endurance, speed, athleticism, etc. for a vigorous life. All that is a lot to ask for, which is why we feel it takes 6-7 hours/week. It won't make you a marathoner or an impressive lifter, but should make you ready for anything life offers - especially sports and recreation.

The Maggie's Fitness For Life (where is that TM thing?) is for Functional Fitness. We sometimes have good ideas for conditioning, but once basic conditioning is achieved (ie fat control, ability to participate in exercise classes, ability to jog a mile, basic hand weights and cables) is where our ideas come into play. Calisthenics, Heavy weights, HIIT and Endurance Cardio.

HIIT and endurance exercise are good for your telomeres. I hope that that is true. HIIT probably more than slow "cardio."

Whatever "anti-aging" is, it sounds good to me. So fit those things into your program. What we feel is important, at least to us, is "Fitness for Life" which means Strength, Endurance, and Athleticism. So, without neglecting your telomeres, it's good to get balanced fitness so as to be as fully in life as possible. 

No exercise can extend your life to any important degree (for life extension, try not being heavy, and getting full medical check-ups every few years) but a balanced fitness program can keep you active as long as you do not do too much road running. That destroys joints and cripples many people.

I suspect this is correct, and has to do with the intensity of the demand on the heart. Many things are thrown into the "cardio" category which use the heart, of course, but make no constructive demands on it. Walking, hiking, speed walking, swimming, and jogging are like that.

HIIT exercises, on the other hand, do stress the heart because of the intensity of all kinds of sprints. 30-60 second maximum sprints of any form are good stressors. So is moving heavy weights. Heavy, not light weights. Sets of deadlifts reaching up to 70% of your max is a serious stressor on the heart. When you finish each set, you feel it in your heart. And you feel a bit dizzy from that stress.

What true cardiac training does is to stress the heart to the point that it is forced to build its muscle and to grow new arteries. Those new arteries can save your life when others get blocked up with gunk. If your breath can keep up with your exertion, it's not real cardiac training: it is endurance training.

What most people term "cardio" is endurance maintenance and endurance training. These are important in life, but have little or no heart consequences for the otherwise healthy.

Here's the article (via Instapundit):  Weight lifting better for heart health than running, new study finds

Our Maggie's Fitness for Life program (heavy powerlifts, endurance cardio, HIIT cardio, calisthenics) incorporates all fitness aspects: Muscle and Bone strength, Endurance, True cardio, and Athleticism. We are convinced that's a balanced program for vigor for all ages.

The moving parts of our skeleton operate as levers, powered by skeletal muscles. Levers are nifty mechanisms which make force application more efficient. Using a crowbar is easier than grunting a boulder out of the dirt.

It's high-school physics applied to the body: Levers are classified according to the relative placement of the fulcrum, the resistance and the force.

Any form of exercise can be made more interesting by thinking about the sort of lever action applied in single-joint exercises (like bicep curls or calf raises) or the multiple lever actions applied in complex, multi-joint movements like squats or running.

If you are fortunate enough to use the services of a professional trainer,  that trainer will not be focusing on your muscles. He or she will focus on the mechanics of your movement(s) - proper lever use - to make your motion or activity as safe and effective as possible. That's why a trainer will make frequent corrections to your technique: Palms out (or in), wider stance (or narrower), head up (or down), chest up (or down) etc.

Even if you are not a fitness person, everybody knows that there is a right and wrong way to pick up something heavy, or to get out of a chair. It's all leverage.