PR Friday, Motivation, Not Dying, etc.

PR Friday

Post your weekly PR’s or training highlights to the comments. We can also talk about sports and food or anything else. We should also make fun of Jake Briskin for apparently eating the same three meals over and over for the past few months.

Motivation

70’s Big boils down to having fun while training hard, but some times times may get difficult. There are hundreds of reasons your training can deteriorate, and even more reasons that can prevent you from striving for success in life. Most of the time your mindset is the primary culprit or beneficiary. I saw this picture yesterday and felt kind of bad about myself. Then I heard he had an assistant, was majoring in creative writing, and probably paid for some credits. I’m still impressed that he has a successful acting career and wants to get an education, despite this.

In any case, I have an interest in successful people. I came across this article about a guy who graduated from California State University with two degrees in three semesters (no summer school). If you aren’t impressed, his degrees were in Computer Science and Mathematics. He talks about fully committing himself to a given goal and eliminating anything else that would inhibit the process of achieving that goal:

Think about what would happen if you elevated one of your goals or projects to the level of “mission” or “purpose” and became deeply committed to it for 30-120 days, ruthlessly triaging out of your life everything that wasn’t connected with that purpose. Some type-A behavior patterns would naturally emerge, such as being driven, hard-working, and busy. But the negative side of type-A (aka “hurry sickness”) need not be present. That type of behavior is in fact induced by a lack of clear focus, trying to label too many things as urgent AND important instead of taking the time to discover the core of what’s most important and meaningful to you.

Too often people will create excuses, avoid risk, and convince themselves that they aren’t capable of something. I think that life success is more important than training success, but training can create the foundation to other successful routes. If you’re struggling with decisions in life or a commitment to training, evaluate what’s important, where you want to go, and push forward with a committed mindset. There isn’t such thing as luck, so start putting the time in. I know I will.

Strength Makes You Harder To Kill

You’ve seen quotes about how strength can help you survive in various ways. Well, there is actually some research that shows how strength can improve a man’s survivability. Dr. Kilgore has been using an article from the British Medical Journal since it was published, and has even put it on a t-shirt (use the code “70BG” without quotes to get 10% off any order over $25). The article, Association between muscular strength and mortality in men: prospective cohort study, is a great step towards mainstream health and fitness appreciating the utility in strength.

Conclusion Muscular strength is inversely and independently associated with death from all causes and cancer in men, even after adjusting for cardiorespiratory fitness and other potential confounders.

There have been several sites that summarized the article, such as this one, and they had this to say:

After adjusting for known risk factors for cancer, heart disease, and death, the men with the lowest level of muscle strength had:

* 1.46 times greater risk for death
* 1.59 times greater risk of death from cardiovascular disease
* 1.24 times greater risk of death from cancer

Cardiovascular fitness did appear to have a stronger beneficial effect than strength training. The benefits of strength training carried across all age groups. It also appeared to provide benefits even if a participant was overweight or obese.

The large sample size and variation in age and medical conditions in this longitudinal study makes the findings very interesting. Additionally, this study used 1RM leg and bench presses to measure strength as opposed to the often used hand grip test (there is a correlation between hand grip strength and overall strength which is why it’s used in epidemiological studies — and it’s easy to implement). This study continues the trend in other related studies that strength is inversely related to mortality rate.

This isn’t profound to what we do; this website has a mantra of strength as a primary goal and then using that strength to get conditioned for something. Yet this BMJ adds to the growing mantra that strength = health.