Olympic Lifting and Aging

Posted on October 22, 2013 by Justin

Strength and conditioning is a “now” kind of thing. What goals do you have right now? What do you want to achieve soon? What can you do today to work towards your goals? Sure, we do things with foresight in mind like mobility or sleeping well, but we hardly consider the big picture: life.

And the outlook is dim. Our future, if we are so lucky to get there, will involve slowing down, getting weaker, and pooping our pants. Two of those things are very unpleasant.

Well my friends, training is the way to stave off the inevitable shit show that is aging. Strength training will keep the structures from falling apart, conditioning will help keep the cardiovascular and respiratory functional, and mobility work will keep everything pliable, safe, and prevent injury. This comprehensive training approach will help maintain neuromuscular efficiency, or how well your nervous system innervates muscles. Being efficient would be a symphony of fluid, beautiful movement, and being inefficient would look like a spasmodic Frankenstein ejaculation.

The Olympic lifts can augment training programs for older gents.

Have you seen an old person lately? I’m talking about a person that makes you think, “That guy is old as fuck.” How does that guy move? He’s probably hunched over, using a cane, and shuffling along slower than Mike Tyson’s intellect. He’s not efficient. He doesn’t have kinesthetic sense (the ability to control one’s body through space). That’s what happens, and it’ll happen to all of us, so we need to hang onto what physical ability we do have for as long as we can.

Losing neuromuscular efficiency and kinesthetic sense is a big deal to the elderly. It’s the difference between falling down a flight of stairs or visiting family. We know that intelligent training will keep us spry, but I also think regularly performing the Olympic lifts in a comprehensive training program will help maintain kinesthetic sense more so than not doing them. Here’s why.

1. Olympic lifting provides a different structural stress than the regular strength lifts.

How often do you guys do anything other than stand on your two feet and squat, press, or pull a weight? Some of you do a bit of conditioning, fewer of you compete in a non-lifting sport, and I’d bet that hardly any of you do any agility work. Olympic lifting is essentially jumping around with a barbell (ignoring discrepancies in coaching styles). The ankles, knees, hips, torso, shoulders, elbows, and wrists will experience and transmit force in a different way than slower strength lifts. This will keep you prepared for non-lifting activity (like going up for a rebound), but it will keep your joints adapted to explosive forces as you age.

2. Olympic lifting places greater mobility demands than regular strength lifts.

I know some guys that can barely get into a squat position in their house, much less with a barbell on their back. Having a shitty end range of motion in your 20s and 30s means that you’ll at least have that deficiency going into old age. By working on the Olympic lifts regularly now, it’ll encourage or force non-mobile people to fix their shit so they can hit a decent front squat rack or overhead squat. Well executed weightlifting will help maintain joint and muscle ROM.

3. The explosive nature of Olympic lifting maintains or improves neuromuscular efficiency and coordination.

Lifting weights fast recruits more motor units compared to lifting slow. More motor unit recruitment practice increases the neuromuscular efficiency overall, which essentially helps you stay “coordinated” as you get older. This is the most important reason that the Olympic lifts should used with aging trainees. Combine the “lifting fast” with the complicated movement patterns inherent in Olympic lifting, and it definitely helps total body coordination. For example, when starting a clean, the hips are flexed or closed. As the trainee jumps, their hips extend or open. Lastly, the hips flex or close again as the trainee receives the weight in the squat position. It’s a complicated movement that requires coordination.

Some coaches would argue that the “pounding” nature of the snatch or clean would be injurious to an older trainee, I would argue that even doing the lifts with light weight, and therefore avoiding the pounding, would be enough to result in maintaining coordination and efficiency. Note the two keys here: 1) large amounts of weight aren’t necessary in geriatric populations and 2) including the Olympic lifts, even with light weight, will help maintain coordination with each passing decade.

Considerations

Keeping or adding the Olympic lifts in a program of someone approaching their 50s or 60s does have a few considerations. First, if the lifts hurt them, then they obviously shouldn’t do them. Second, they shouldn’t belligerently perform the lifts if their mobility or technique are very poor. And lastly, variations can be used. Would it be nice if a 60 year old guy could stroke a light snatch with perfect positioning? Yeah, but instead, you might need to emulate the close-open-close hip movement with another implement or exercise if he can’t use a barbell or has crappy mobility. Power variations can be used if deep squat positions are unrealistic.

Parting Words

At the end of the day, if an aging trainee is exercising, they will have better longevity and quality of life over non-exercising populations. If the aging trainee actually performs a comprehensive training program that includes strength training, conditioning, and mobility work, then they’ll be way ahead of the curve. I’m just suggesting that the inclusion of the Olympic lifts will augment their efforts in having a happy, healthy life into old age. But I’m also suggesting that if some of you youngsters currently can’t do the Olympic lifts, then start working on ways to include them. If your mobility sucks, then fix it! If you snatch like a dope, stop smoking it and work on your technique. Or you can just wait until we are all 50 years old and hormone therapy is regularly used; we’ll probably live to be 150 years old regardless if you start snatching now.

PR Friday — 18 OCT

Posted on October 18, 2013 by Justin

Quick Tip #1
Lots of ideas and little time means you will get a quick tip with each PR Friday post.

Consider adding an agility work into your program, especially if you aren’t signed up for any competitions or meets. Since you aren’t locked into peaking for an event, you can afford to add training to develop non-strength physical attributes.

In FIT we define fitness as strength, mobility, and endurance (this is also the foundation for performance). Navigating your body through space is an element of mobility, and it shouldn’t be ignored. The easiest way to throw it in is part of your warm-up. Add some tuck jumps, carioca, side shuffles, and power skips into your warm-up and you’ll get a little dose of explosiveness and lateral movement. Will it turn you into an athlete? No. Will it help make you a bit more athletic if you’re a goon? Yeah. More importantly it will let your joints and structures in the legs adapt to some non-lifting and non-linear activity. Joints that are able to withstand explosive forces are less prone to injury, something that will be a key in longevity (more on this next week). The basic movements above are not invasive, easy to do, and don’t take a lot of time if you do a few sets of each. If you don’t have great joint mobility (range of motion), then use movement prep instead of agility work to help rehab your body.

Ladder work is another great agility tool.

Discuss your training week and highlight your weekly Personal Records in the comments.

70’s Big Radio – Episode 11

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Justin

70sBig.com
Welcome to the new podcast.

Topics:
– Mike’s meets
– World Weightlifting Championships and World’s Strongest Man scheduling
– Forearm/bicep pain while benching
– Weight differences between Texas Method volume and intensity days
– When to schedule conditioning with the Texas Method for a military trainee
– How much can Mike eat?
– Differentiating between an injury and prolonged pain.
– Hernia or muscle pull?
– Adding a second squat day to 5/3/1
– Getting bigger on Texas Method, but strength is lagging (firefighter)

Next week we’ll log time stamps for the questions. Discuss the show in the comments and post questions for the next episode.

Search “70’s Big” on iTunes or listen/download HERE.

Edit: Not on iTunes yet.

Preventing Rhabdo

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Justin

It was everywhere. If you waded through social media’s megalomania, cries for attention, and narcissism, you may have seen the shouts and whispers about…the terror of CrossFit.

A little article, CrossFit’s Dirty Little Secret (it came out in late September), struck fear in everyone’s heart, whether they religiously hit the WOD (workout of the day) or merely blow their wad watching the CrossFit games on ESPN2. The article, written by a physical therapist who unfortunately doesn’t lift, discusses the danger of Rhabdomyolysis or “rhabdo” for short. In his words from the article:

“So what is rhabdomyolysis exactly? Under extreme conditions your muscles cells explode. They die. They leach protein out into the blood stream, including one form called myoglobin. Ever stalwart, your kidneys take up the job of clearing these dangerous proteins from the blood. Why? It’s just what they do. Unfortunately, myoglobin proteins aren’t designed to be in the blood in the first place and they can easily overload the kidney. This can produce injury or death to all or part of the kidney in a short amount of time, and is potentially lethal. Locally, the muscles are left damaged and dying. Swelling ensues and weakness occurs as pressure builds around the remaining muscle cells. Your body’s systems that normally can assist with this local muscle damage are now offline trying to help you not die. If you get to this stage, you’re in serious trouble.”

Yikes. And the thing is, rhabdo cases are all too common in CrossFit. In fact, back in the early days of CrossFit, it was “cool” to puke when you pushed your body too hard. Getting “rhabdo” was a badge of honor to some, and CF surely didn’t help by putting out the stupid-ass cartoon to the left.

Are physical therapists right to lambaste CrossFit? Is it dangerous, a crazy exercise fad that only hurts people?

I don’t care. Search “CrossFit” on this site and you’ll pull up a number of articles regarding my opinion on CrossFit. Whether HQ is shaking in their boots or greedily rubbing their hands together because of the free press is beyond my fucks to give. What I can tell you is that rhabdo is extremely easy to prevent.

It’s called programming, and it’s not that hard.

Doing even a half-assed job at programming will net you almost zero injuries and progress if you adhere to two main ideas: 1) don’t do anything stupid and 2) condition the bodies of trainees and clients to their workouts via some sort of progression.

I realize the irony in number 1; if you’re stupid, how would you know that you’re doing something stupid? Well, in the case of high intensity conditioning, “stupid” means telling your trainees to do a bunch of shit they aren’t prepared for. That translates to high levels of volume or intensity beyond what they are currently adapted to. Don’t ask for 100 reps of a given exercise if they haven’t done more than 50 in a workout — or if they just showed up at your gym. Don’t ask them to do several hundred reps of anything ever.

Care should taken when programming new movements or exercises that the trainee is unadapted to. In FIT — a general fitness and strength and conditioning book I helped write — I actually provide a repetition cap for new exercises.

“Generally speaking, when introducing a new weighted or ballistic exercise into the program, a strong trainee should not do more than 30 repetitions in any given high intensity workout. Thrusters, Kettlebell Swings, and Box Jumps can cause exceptional soreness if carelessly performed for high repetitions. Calisthenics that haven’t been normally performed as part of a trainee’s previous strength program shouldn’t be done for more than the maximal amount of repetitions the strong trainee could do for one set. This cap will help prevent debilitating soreness by dividing the work into several sub-maximal sets. For example, do three sets of eight repetitions of Dips instead of doing one set of 25 repetitions (pg 168).”

30 reps may seem low, but I’m concerned with inducing an adaptation of improved performance, not excessive soreness or difficulty. Besides, making clients excessively sore will either deter them from coming to the gym or, more importantly, be debilitating for future strength training sessions. And the strength training is what actually matters anyway since it’s the fundamental capacity for conditioning, but I digress.

30 reps is an arbitrary number; it was chosen to give readers a quantifiable marker to prevent them from doing something stupid. And that’s much more than what CrossFit has done for their coaches or trainees. I remember a year or so ago when the CF Open WODs (competitive workouts that select competitors for regional competition — it’s the gateway to the CrossFit Games) had a lot of jumping movements and achilles ruptures were unfortunately common. While CrossFit explains how to scale their workouts on their website, they also foster a “tough guy” mentality and many trainees don’t know when to quit.

But this shouldn’t be about CrossFit, this should be about the coaches. It’s up to individual coaches or trainers to be able to determine the current adaptive state of their clients and structure their exercise regime in a way that isn’t injurious. It’s really not that hard as one of the oldest affiliates can attest.

Preventing rhabdomyolysis isn’t hard, but it requires actually programming training instead of randomly choosing exercises and workouts. If you or a coach you know are completely in the dark on this, then start consuming strength and conditioning literature. FIT is a great resource — especially for programming high intensity conditioning with strength training (and not just because my name is on the cover) — but there are plenty of decent resources available for free.

Hopefully the news about rhabdo will push many coaches to educate themselves on effective programming. There’s no excuse for sending trainees to the hospital.

PR Friday – 11 OCT

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Justin

I am here.

2013 has been busy. Some of you regular readers may be wondering, “What the PISS is going on?” I’ve just been busy with a job that doesn’t leave a lot of free time. That being said, I’ve got some things planned for 70’s Big.

First, posts will pick back up a little bit. I’ve got at least seven topics to write about right now, and plenty of stuff I’ve been mulling over. The goal is to get two posts up a week. I’ll admit it’s hard to get topics up with a hectic schedule, but it is my doody. Ahem; duty.

Second, I’m putting together the logistics to start doing a regular podcast again. Mike and I will be doing it, and it’ll function similar to the Paleo Solution podcast with a main topic of the day followed by a reader submitted Q&A. The availability of the show will depend on scheduling, but I at least want it to be every other week with the hope of doing it every week. You can listen to past shows with the old show format by searching “70’s Big Radio” on iTunes.

Third, I’m working on some ways that will allow our community to interact and mingle a bit better. The best part about 70’s Big is that it’s fun getting to chat with other lifters, male or female, and talk about this big part of our lives that ‘normal people’ just don’t understand.

Fourth, 70’s Big is still open for content submissions. If you have images or links to share, just throw them up on the Facebook Fan Page and we’ll re-post them for everyone to see.

My goal is to teach readers about training, lifting mechanics, anatomy, physiology, programming, nutrition, recovery, mobility, performance enhancement, and so on while providing a dash of entertainment. Expect to see a little push out of 70’s Big as the year winds down, and hopefully we’ll have some fun along the way.

And we need this education. Look at this stupid-ass product that Sorinex is selling from their website. It’s a back extension bench with a swiss ball on it. For 1,000 doll hairs. (Pictured below to avoid giving the company hits on their site.)

This is what we’re up against.

For PR Friday, discuss your training week and highlight your week’s Personal Records.