Pull-ups - a misunderstood super exercise

Pull-ups are a super exercise, and they're also misunderstood.

Pull-ups are a super exercise because they comprehensively strengthen the top half of the posterior torso mechanical chain. This chain of muscles holds the human body upright.

The human body is designed to 'pull' - we're natural climbers - and pull-ups are highly specific for this. 

You should have pull-ups in your strength conditioning routine.

Should have, but many people don't. 

The concept of the 'pull-up' is synonymous with the concept of the 'chin-up', whereby the object of the exercise is to hang and then pull until the chin reaches over the bar. It shouldn't be because this is the big misconception.

To get the effect you don't need to get your chin over the bar, or anywhere close to it for that matter. It's also not a necessary pre-requisite for progress in the movement.

There are three basic grips: underhanded or supinated, overhanded or pronated, and a neutral grip (palms face inwards toward each other), provided the apparatus provides this position. 

The basic differences between them is that the neutral grip is the strongest arrangement of the available muscles, followed by the underhanded grip. The pronated or classic pull-up grip is the weakest of the three grip positions. 

There is no best grip. Each provides a different arrangement of arm, shoulder, and back muscles. Cycle them to your hearts content.

What does matter is effort. Whether you can pull yourself most of the way, part of the way, or barely at all, pull with everything you've got. Effort creates stress in the soft tissues (muscles and connective tissues), and this is needed for strengthening, and it also gives feedback to the nervous system. It sends the message: I'd like to get better at these.

If you've read anything else I have written you might have seen this before. The brain is clever. All brains are extraordinarily clever. They are a self-taught, self-organising improvement machine. All they require is information in the form of sensory and mechanical feedback from the body and an idea (a program to enhance). A one-inch pull-up spontaneously becomes a two inch pull-up with persistence.

Jump stretch bands can be used to easily assist range of motion, and then scaled back as you get stronger.

Main points:

• Pull-ups comprehensively strengthen the torso regardless of how far you pull provided you work hard.
• Regular hardwork creates feedback for the nervous system to grow the movement.
• It is not necessary to get your chin over the bar. Just work hard for whatever you can do.
• Jump stretch bands can be used to easily assist range of motion, and then scaled back as you get stronger.

What is strategy in sport? This is.

The terms tactics and strategy are commonly mixed up. Strategy, loosely speaking, are your ideas for success before competition begins, while your tactics are the adjustments you make during performance. You could think of tactics as the practical application of your strategy, taking into account the variations that (almost) always play out.

Here's a clip that exemplifies strategy. It's both wonderfully simple and fantastically successful. 

With that in mind, here's a question for you: does strategy need to be simple to be effective? 

In defence of the humble push-up.

I won't hold you for long. The humble push-up is a fabulous exercise for building shoulder and tricep strength and your core as well! 

Set your feet at least shoulder width apart to support your stability. More stability in any movement allows the bigger, stronger muscles to devote more of their performance to the target movement (instability causes these muscles to be coopted into supporting the smaller, stabilisers).

Next comes hand position. There is no one, right position. Closer together and you will load the triceps more, further apart and the chest and anterior shoulders will have a greater proportion of the work. For what it's worth, I am a big fan of treating the triceps like the most important muscle in pressing movements.

There is a single biomechanical pre-requisite for pressing movements, which is the path and stability of the elbow. At all costs, we need to avoid the shoulders blades elevating and rolling the shoulders up and over when we press. To this end, the elbows need to remain slightly tucked throughout the movement, i.e. they shouldn't flare upwards. 

Pressing is punching, essentially. The elbows come from a relatively low position. The second, important effect of a low and controlled elbow position is that we can lower our bodies using our lats for support. This stabilises the shoulder blades and puts us in a good position to éfficiently 'punch' our bodies back up.

One thing that is not important at all is how low we go. One inch with good control will grow the press over time.

Five sets of 5 reps or 3 sets of as many as you can do with 60s rest between.

The humble press-up, complimented by pull-ups, will develop a strong and muscular upper body. It's also a fabulous bridging exercise and hits the core superbly!!

The main points:

• The push-up will develop a strong and muscular upper body and strengthen your core.
• Don't sweat depth.
• Set feet shoulder width apart to aid stability and support the shoulders.
• Hands can be narrow to favour the triceps or wider for more chest/ shoulder.
• The only mechanical necessity is that the elbows remain slightly tucked and don't flare up because this put the triceps and lats in an excellent position to support the push. It also ensures we avoid rolling the shoulders up and over, which we don't want!
• Five sets of 5 reps or 3 sets of as many as you can do with 60s rest between.

 

Running as an adult: the perspectives I wish someone had shared with me.

I'm in my 14th year of running after taking much of my early adult years off. I ran as a teenager and though I loved it, I gave it up for the lifestyle of a typical young adult in which cardio or endurance exercise had no place. Twenty years later, my body was not the same and I paid a big price for refusing to consider this.

Depending on your point of view, running has been extraordinarily generous or tragically unkind to me. I have experienced most of the common injuries, including an early and nasty bout of compartment syndrome (shin splints), and even discovered I have an unusual reaction to electrolytes - where for most they reduce symptoms of fatigue and discomfort, they actually cause them in my body. Running is never easy for me and, occasionally, it's brutally hard. One particular event has broken me every time. I have only ever ambled under considerable duress over the finishing line. So, why bother?

Why is the most important question, and my first bit of advice is to take time to carefully consider your answer. When I started out, my 'why' was performance related. For me, that was a big mistake because, as it has transpired, my body wasn't up for that. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to compete but your capability needs to match your expectation or there will be nothing but disappointment and frustration. There is also a risk of an imbalance between internal (instrinsic) and external (extrinsic) motivations. 

External motivations are those set of ideas or values that involve value judgements in relation to others and they typically play out as feelings before and afterwards. Internal motivations, in contrast, centre on how something makes use feel in the performance of the task. An experience that makes you laugh or cry is an internal effect. Internal motivations reflect how our minds and bodies connect with the task. A basic rule of thumb is that the stronger our internal motivations, the stronger our connection to the task. Not surprisingly, we are more likely to participate for longer and with greater interest or engagement.

In my case, the difference between what my body was capable of and my running ambition caused problems that impacted my enthusiasm and my understanding of how my body operated. Too much external motivation drowned out what my body was trying to tell me. If I had taken the time to consider what my internal motivations were or could have been, I may have put myself in a state of mind to hear the feedback and make changes that would have improved the experience. 

This provides the basic answer to the question of why I participate in an activity that hurts as often as it does. Because the discomfort and pain is balanced by many moments of enjoyment, and this is only possible because of the changes I made to my plan. These changes, that were designed to improve how I felt when I run, led also to a better understanding of how to engineer greater levels of fitness and overall capacity.

In the early days, I felt frustrated and trapped by the physical experiences. I tinkered endlessly with the training equation for little reward. It wasn't until I got out of my own way by examining my motivations, that things began to improve. What I learned was that my sport was not primarily a physical challenge but a psychological one. 

We have to be able to listen and hear what happening within us. We also have to put ourselves in a position to enjoy and be grateful for what we have. It also helps to know that signals of fatigue and discomfort are not absolutes. They are experienced through the lens of how we feel, emotionally and generally speaking. Physical discomfort after an emotionally taxing experiencing registers far above what it does when we feel good. 

The true extent of what we're physically and athletically capable of has to be discovered through experience. We have to learn that not only are we ok when our bodies are sending us messages that its uncomfortable, but there can be a big difference between our perceptions, informed as they are by how our bodies feel when we're exercising, and the limits of what we can cope with and adapt to.

I need to add an important disclaimer at this point. Know your body! Endurance exercise and physically challenging events are fatigueing and will make you feel uncomfortable. That is their nature. There is an importance difference, however, between a healthy level of duress and acute physical distress. If you are unsure of the health of your body please consult your GP. Even then, time is needed to learn the meaning of the signals associated with fatigue and significant physical exertion. The reality is that adaptation is a very slow biological process. The only way you're gonna climb that really big mountain is slowly. Patience is also one of the best friends of long-term participation.

For the first few years in the resumption of my running, I boxed on with a poor understanding of my physical needs engendered by unhelpful expectations. The basic difference between the early and later years was progress. Hard work and duress are not side effects of the endurance training formula - feelings to be tolerated regardless. They must have the correct meaning. My training plan was not a match for my body, so the fatigue did not produce meaningful adaptations.

I'm getting at two things here: there is a difference between learning to live with the discomfort of hard work, and operating a bad plan. Fortunately - I wish someone had given me this information at the start! - endurance training plans are comparatively straight forward and only really involve an understanding of the responses in a single tissue: the heart. What's very useful about the heart is that it informs us immediately about changes in cardiovascular demand by increasing or lowering heart rate. 

My early plans had me running too fast and my heart rate was, as a consequence, too high to efficiently stimulate and grow my cardiovascular capacity (and my VO2max by extension). The improvements started when I discovered polarised training. The term was made popular by an American physiologist: Stephen Seiler. Seiler profiled Norwegian skiers, the most successful endurance athletes in the history of the Winter Olympics, and he discovered and then confirmed in his laboratory that there are essentially only two critical heart rate zones for endurance training: 

• A low HR zone, termed Zone2, of between 60 and 70% of our max heart rate, and 
• Zone4 in which your HR is at about 90% of its maximum. 

Seiler's critical discovery was the training time required to be in these zones. 80-85% of total training time or volume should be in Zone2 and about 10% in Zone4. The remainder is what's termed, drift. Your heart rate will naturally drift upwards as your body fatigues. Some drift up and out of Zone2 is permissible and actually impossible to avoid. What Seiler says about endurance training in general is that it's not slow enough on the slow days or fast enough on the fast days.

A short note about the difference between endurance plans for high performing athletes and the rest of us. Endurance athletes very often have a third training zone: tempo work in Zone3. As far as I am concerned, these sets are much less about stimulating physiological gains and are primarily 'psychological' sets. They condition the mind to coping (and ideally thriving) under the duress the body will experience on race day. 

The key for athletes is to understand the balance of the work required to meet their physiologic and psychologic needs. For us nonathletes, Zone3 represents 'junk' mileage. It is not a match for event day as we're not racing in this zone and it's a weak stimulus of cardiovascular capacity.

My final piece of advice is to fully appreciate what the human body gains from being really fit. In short, high cardiovascular capacity is number 1 on the list of effect sizes for therapies that improve health and extend human life. I run (and gym) to give myself the best chance to participate in life's awesome events as I age. Naturally, this wasn't something I thought about when I was younger but it certainly is now. 

Here's a summary of the ideas:

• cardio is good!
• endurance exercise is sustained hard work. this is it's nature.
• the nature of endurance exercise also makes it a psychological challenge.
• know your body and learn to listen to and intrepret the signals correctly.
• your training plan needs to match your body. Polarisation is an excellent, evidence based methodology, that can be easily adapted to all bodies.
• be patient as you have almost nothing to gain by rushing and potentially everything to lose.
• I have intentionally stayed away from talking about the tissues of the lower legs and how running affects them. Get in touch if you have any concerns or questions about this.

How do parents navigate alcohol with teens?

The safe amount, the challenge of adult consumption, and where it leaves us

I write this as a parent of a twenty-something year old and a not quite fifteen-year-old.  Both are smart, independent young women who have made all the normal mistakes.  I’m on my second go round raising a teen and it’s only on this second spin that I’m really beginning to comprehend the nature of the challenge for them and for us as parents. 

Children use alcohol for the same reason adults do.  They like the warm glow, and it’s socially desirable.  There is an issue for them straight off the bat, however, which is that they have little self-awareness.  They simply don’t know what’s happening and where it’s leading.  They have little or no experience with which to counter the lowering of inhibitions and self-control.  One drink leads to the next.  Children depend on familiarity and intuition to keep themselves safe, and the loss of situational control makes them incredibly vulnerable.  The immaturity of their bodies is a second level of vulnerability.  My girls Mum made an excellent point in conversation about drinking recently.  She pointed out that the problem with a small amount of alcohol for a child is not just the physical effect but the effect on decision making.  It was spot on, as any parent who has observed children drinking can attest to.  They don’t have a stop button in the way an adult hopefully learns.  For this reason alone, the safe amount of alcohol for a child can only be nil.

In a recent radio discussion with a child psychologist discussing the challenges of parenting teenage children who wish to drink alcohol two ideas stood out for me: a zero-tolerance, uncompromising or ‘do as you’re told’ approach is very likely to cause resentment and rebellion; and the idea that we can socialise or model our children into safe, mature drinking behaviours is deluded.  Excessive drinking is commonplace in NZ, just as it is in many Western nations.  The lesson our children learn from us is not how to drink in moderation but how to drink to excess.  Continuity of heavy drinking over many generations confirms this.

Put together, we have a big challenge guiding our children with alcohol consumption if as parents we are essentially asking them not to behave like we do.  If you’re one of a small number of families with low or no alcohol consumption, then you’re off to an excellent start.  As far as the recommendations by the child psychologist is concerned, one principle stands out for me: work together on the challenge and accept that your children will have to make their own decisions.  You won’t be there.  Let them know that you understand this.  Empowering them with the knowledge that they will have to decide for themselves opens the communication channel.  The next recommendation that I have is the importance of explaining the various challenges and issues to them.  Bring it out in the open.  As a parent, you’re in an excellent position to share your experiences and what you’ve learned.  This at least provides something for them to reflect on after the fact.  How did I feel?  How was my thinking and behaviour changed? 

The big lesson I have learned from my journey as a parent who drinks is that I haven’t been an effective role model for responsible drinking.  I am also far more aware second time around how complex the social network of significant others is.  Other parents play an important role through the expectations created imposed on our children by their significant friends. 

Our children sit at the centre of a dynamic set of influences over which they have little control.  Asking them to show more maturity than we demonstrate ourselves is also fruitless and hypocritical.  The best advice that I have is to see the process as shared journey and to embark together.  Your journey alongside theirs.  With an open communication channel, there is an opportunity to reflect together on the experiences and to agree on sensible choices.  Beyond that, it’s up to them to decide what role they want alcohol to play in their lives.

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Low versus high heart rate conditioning for fitness. Which is best?

You want to improve your cardiovascular fitness.  What approach will you take?  Aerobics classes, such as spin and pump, are one option.  These classes combine low intensity movement with high heart rate.  Another option is cross conditioning, e.g. CrossFit or F45, which combines high intensity movement with high heart rate.  A final option might be to go for a run or to cycle.  Observe anyone running or cycling and you're very likely to also observe someone working hard; exercising with a high heart rate. 

There may be more than one way to get fit but the common denominator appears to be that improvements in fitness are associated with exercising with a high heart rate.  If I want to get fitter, I need to work hard.  The harder I work, the greater the outcome.  As one goes up, so does the other.  Is this correct?  No, it's not.

The human body has two energy systems for exercise or activity: an aerobic or low power system, and an anaerobic or high power system.  The aerobic system powers us more or less all of the time.  The high power system does not kick in until muscle work approaches a peak.  It's only good for a few seconds up to about one minute.  The body draws on the aerobic system for work below maximum and when muscles are working at peak.  The aerobic system is used to replace the fuel used during anaerobic and aerobic work.  We experience this as high breathing rates during and after exercise.  Where fitness is concerned, regardless of context, the aerobic or low power system is paramount.

Returning to our question: which training approach is best, the question we need to ask and answer is this: what is the strongest signal to expand the aerobic system?  The aerobic system works at every intensity level but are they all equal where outcomes are concerned?  The answer to this question is that there is a heart rate band or zone that produces the strongest signal for the aerobic system to expand and it may surprise to know that it's not very high: 60-70% of max heart rate.  In this heart rate zone, your breathing rate is often not elevated much above normal and it is possible to chat with someone.  That's why the advice given to endurance athletes is to work at levels that would allow you to talk.  

Low heart rate training is not the only level of work endurance athletes need to complete but it should be most of it - about 80% of total training load or volume.  Aerobic fitness is also not the only kind of capacity for work needed for exercise.  Strengthening muscles, for example, is also useful!  However, if fitness or endurance are your primary goals then you need to know how to effectively perform and distribute work to gain the best outcome.  The most common mistake in endurance training and exercise for fitness is believing that the harder I work, the greater the outcomes. 

Walking is a profound human activity

I wrote a post a few weeks back about walking in which I downplayed the transformational properties of walking.  I am ‘walking’ that back a little today.  Walking is a profound activity for humans; probably for all quadrupeds and bipeds.  Walking is human design at its most obvious.

I recently watched a Netflix documentary about a Mexican woman: Lorena Ramirez.  Ramirez is a native Raramuri Mexican.  She lives with her family in the high canyons of Chihuahua, many miles from their nearest neighbours.  The Raramuri or Tarahumara are famous for their capacity as long distance runners.  Running is how the Raramuri move between communities.  

Ramirez loves to run but running is not at the beginning of her story.  Like any individual who lives a subsistence life, Ramirez's life is made of walking.  For the Raramuri, like their more storied counterparts, the Africans of the Rift Valley, walking is a constant.  There is no data that I can find for this - it would make an illuminating research topic - but my educated guess is that subsistence farmers like the Raramuri would accumulate tens of thousands of steps in an average day.  Moreover, Raramuri children would rise to a daily step count far exceeding that of an adult in a modern Western nation very early in life.

Lorena Ramirez lives in a valley or canyon and her walking (and running) is consequently highly varied.  She is strong and balanced.  There is an obvious rhythm to her movement.  When she runs, it is an extension of her walking gait.  Ramirez is no slouch over half and full-marathon distances but she comes into her own for distances above 60 miles or 100 kilometers.  At these distances, running gait is not concerned with power but with rhythm and balance.  Every system in the body is in harmony and for Ramirez this comes naturally because she has a foundation of millions of walking steps with which metabolic and biomechanical balance was built.  

Herein lies the secret.  As we raise power - increase the rate of work - our bodies must 'know' how to locate balance or harmony to properly harness energy.  Without balance across and within systems, one or more of them will overwork and we experience that as fatigue and discomfort.  It was while watching Ramirez that I saw this.  She holds no expectation of herself when running.  She simply seeks harmony within the act and when it arrives, as it usually does, she is then able to accelerate if that is her wish or stay the course.
There are compelling lessons for all of us through the example of individuals like Lorena Ramirez:

• walking is a profound functional and health platform for the human body
• the more walking we do, the stronger and more adaptable our bodies become
• first seek balance or harmony - physiological and psychological - and then raise power
• moving back down in the gears, to re-establish harmony, is a sensible choice and solution.  Ramirez walks when it is sensible to do so
• harmony reduces wear on the body and 'spends' energy far more effectively and efficiently
• low intensity cardio is the most important training zone with which to build performance
• high volume supercedes and must precede speed and power for mid and long distance runners
• learn to listen to your bodies messages.  Walk-jogging is not weakness, in the moment it is exactly what your body is instructing you to do