The Weight Lifting Hero
Posted: August 17, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bodybuilding, exercise, fitness, health, learning, motivation, psychology, teaching, weightlifting, why, work Leave a commentWhat’s at the center of your being right now? Right this second.
That’s a question my coach asked me once during a conversation, and I froze in my tracks to puzzle it over. I considered possible weighty, metaphysical responses—deep, profound, disingenuous and ultimately without meaning. I also considered broad, simple answers: mind, consciousness, awareness. Accurate, but vague enough that there would be no actual substance to the response.
After I had spent a few moments wondering what the “right” answer was, my coach said, “Well, I would hope that right now ‘listening’ is at the center of your being.” He went on to explain that he didn’t mean anything mystical or mysterious by the question: it was a literal cue to stop and consider what was my current prevalent focus, mood or internal atmosphere. He said we’re often tempted to think “the center of our being” is something set in stone—some completely inflexible core around which everything we are is built layer by layer. But actually, he said, it doesn’t work like that. The center of our being is constantly shifting—being swapped out and renewed day by day, moment by moment. Right now you’re focused on reading, and that is the center of your being. The act and process of reading is central in your mind; your body and attention are aligned towards the text. As long as you’re so aligned, reading is the center of everything you are. Your heart is beating in service of reading. In five minutes, maybe “hungry” will be the center of everything you are, and then you’ll shift “making a sandwich” to the center, because, body and brain, you will turn yourself towards that task.
Staying updated on this, knowing “what’s at the center” at any given moment, is not only a vital part of coaching, it is a vital part of powerful, effective, self-aware action. A coach needs to be aware what’s at the center of others, athletes needs to be aware of what’s at the center of themselves. And it’s not a one-time revelation: it’s an ongoing study.
Think of the first time you ever walked into the gym. What impelled you? Why, deep down, did you decide to step through the door? That’s not in any way a rhetorical question. It demands a specific, direct answer. Being transparent to yourself and commanding deep knowledge of what motivates you would put you in a position to benefit fully from every available resource—both your own internal resources, and the external opportunities that come along to move further towards your goals.
But it isn’t just a one-time revaluation exactly because of the shifting, transforming nature of our motivations and aspirations. Whatever was at the center of your being the first time you walked into a gym, it may not be—in fact, almost certainly isn’t—the center anymore. Your perspective has changed, your knowledge has deepened, your resources have expanded, and you’re aligned towards something new now. Staying up to date on what’s at the center now vs. what was at the center then is the difference between subscribing to a narrative about yourself and having knowledge of yourself.
If you take out all the specifics, every hero’s journey comes down to the same fundamental arc. The hero moves out of familiar surroundings, into the realm of adventure. After trials and striving, the hero arrives at some kind of symbolic revelation; he or she returns to the normal world, but now everything looks different.
Whether you’re a bodybuilder, a weightlifter or just someone who generally aspires to “fitness,” your training can follow a hero arc. Every workout can be a heroic journey. You move out of the common, everyday concerns of life, into a realm where all different values, all different motivations are brought into the center of your being. Strength, power, poise; health, self-care, high aesthetics; self-revolution. Undertaking to lift a heavy thing represents a will to undertake exceptional tasks, a burning fervor to challenge and stimulate your mind and body in a way that perhaps no other sphere of your life enables. Passing out of ordinary life into this realm, you arrive at revelations about your own strength, beauty or steadfastness, and you return to the ordinary world changed.
But to really reap the deepest benefits of this arc, you can’t go through the motions like an automaton. It requires ongoing self-knowledge. It requires you to be transparent to yourself. Just like you become leaner and stronger little by little, you need to become more self-aware, little by little.
Dum Spiro Spero
Posted: August 15, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: beast, exercise, fitness, learning, mobility, motivation, psychology, strength, training, weightlifting, why, work Leave a comment[A short snippet from my book The Man Who Pulled His Own Leg, describing the beautiful moment of lifting a heavy thing.]
You should see my Olympic weightlifter friend in action. First, she steps onto the mat and approaches the barbell—for a few moments she’s merely the friendly, cheerful person I know, walking casually along, a familiar smile on her face. Coming to a stop standing with her toes below the steel bar (which is elevated by the weight-plates at either end) she squats down and takes hold with a wide grip—hands pronated, elbows locked, spine straight, chin raised. Already a transformation is taking place. I’m not simply seeing a friend of mine anymore: I’m now seeing a physiological machine poised to explode into intense action—a kinetic sculpture; an artistic exploration of human capability. Somatic and mental evolution expressing themselves in a playful manipulation of force and matter. Chemical, cellular, musculoskeletal, nervous—every level of physical and psychological organization coming into a finely-tuned, automatically consolidated functional balance.
From this meticulously disciplined starting position (because the lift has already succeeded or failed in its preparation) she takes a deep breath, holds it (making her core a more solid base for what’s to follow by the increase of intra-abdominal pressure) and launches into motion. The muscles of the lower body supply the initial drive; legs extending, hips moving upwards and forwards; simultaneously, her tightened trunk draws backward, pulling her body towards a natural standing posture, very nearly “the anatomical position.” Agonist and antagonist muscles are precisely contracting isometrically and isotonically, locked in a seamless, reciprocal integration of movement—like members of an orchestra upholding their individual parts of a rigidly structured kinetic melody. The bar, rising in her grip as her body rises, slides first up her shins, past her knees as they lock, then to her waist; without the slightest break in the continuity of the movement, she makes a small hop off the ground—a fast-twitch muscle flourish, a subtle, easily-missed token of complete technical mastery of the physics at play—before dropping into a deep squatting position; knees fully flexed and tracking over the line of her toes, weight on heels, crease of hip below parallel to the floor; lumbar region of her back strong and active. Meanwhile, while she made her hop, her upper body was far from passive; shoulders shrugging upwards powerfully, she launched the barbell at the ends of her locked arms; bringing it up from her waist, she takes control of its rise and stops its motion as it comes directly overhead.
By this point, you have already witnessed a dazzling display of neurological communication and control—to say nothing of the counterbalanced muscular strength and diarthrotic joint flexibility involved. But you feel as though you haven’t only seen the movement performed once: rather, you’ve seen the culmination of a thousand (or more) repetitions. Over the course of long practice and entrainment, the complexities inherent have been internalized; their execution is, to a degree, automatic and unconscious, in the sense that they could not be properly performed in all their simultaneous aspects by the conscious mind alone. The brain as a whole, the central and peripheral nervous systems in their entirety, must be recruited. The lifter, for a fleeting instant of powerful motion, is displaying a human brain and body operating at functional capacity; motor cortex output traveling along efferent neurons, winding smoothly into an opposite stream of sensory input, as millions of afferent neurons carry the somatosensory signatures of every muscle’s position in space to a central executive will, a unifying cognition.
Ludwig Wittgenstein said that our first and foremost certainty is of our body. Immersed in a universe of mysterious and metagnostic dubiety, we are grounded throughout our lives by the continuity of our somatic experience. The body is the base of all our experiences—we are viscerally certain of it even when we are certain of nothing else. And so it is only natural that in moments where the body and the mind lock into the operational oneness they were born to enjoy, when every cell is working to a common goal—when the spontaneous and intermeshed expression of the body dominates the entire mind and has the whole attention rapt—it is only natural that everything should make sense. Everything is certain, because this moment is certain, and this moment is everything. In the subjective experience of complete functional integration, nothing falls outside the perfection of the execution.
We don’t ask anyone why they want to be happy; happiness justifies itself. In the same way, immersed in the optimality of integrated movement, the movement justifies itself; the experience, the moment, the body, all justify themselves through the expression of their perfection.
I doubt these are the thoughts going through the lifter’s mind, in the instant she’s coiled at the bottom of the squat, back tight, head raised, the barbell held above by perfectly straight arms. The experience of optimality is too complete, too focused, to allow for such meandering thoughts; it’s alive, and it only lives in motion; doesn’t stop to put itself in words. It can only be put in words after it’s already over; and even then, the words are always inadequate.
But the lift hasn’t ended yet. Extending her legs once again—as if attempting to press the floor beneath her away—she rises into a standing posture, the barbell high aloft, the very picture of triumph. Completion. The end of the kinetic score. The orchestra falls silent and only the reverberations remain to tell what has just occurred. Dumping it forward, she drops the dead weight of the barbell from its height to the floor. A quick bounce, a slight roll across the mat, and it is still: disengaged from the hands of the lifter, it has lost its living motion. It, which seemed such an active character in the preceding performance, is revealed to be lifeless without its connection to the honed proprioception of the athlete.
Turning away, she walks from the mat, a wide smile crossing her face. The barbell has returned, essentially, to the spot where it started. Nothing has been changed. But everything has changed. The lifter’s smile shows that she understands this; she, immersed in the motion, conducting the band, felt its relevance, its absolute self-justification. She has acted out the lyrics “Do not die without knowing what your limits were.”
No, I Don’t Work Out.
Posted: May 7, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bodybuilding, diet, exercise, fitness, health, learning, misconceptions, motivation, psychology, strength, training, weightlifting, work Leave a comment“You look good. Do you work out?”
No, that’s not what I do. I don’t like the vernacular “I work out.”
It sounds like a meandering, generic, unreflected concept—because it is one. People who think in terms of “workouts” don’t actually train. Training is a systematic, goal-oriented, efficient, no-nonsense, graduated plan. A background in the martial arts preps you for thinking in these terms. You don’t walk into a martial arts studio for a “workout.” Sure, you’ll get one, but the physical exercise is sort of incidental. You’re specifically training to develop a range of skills, to advance your rank, and to increase your knowledge-base in topics relevant to your field.
Serious weight-lifting or gym-going is the same. You’re not in it for a once-off workout—every training session builds on the last, and they carry you towards a definite objective with steadily increasing momentum. Whether your goals are aesthetic and qualitative (i.e., you’re after a tapered torso and bigger biceps) or quantitative (i.e., you want to deadlift 405 pounds,) the objectives cannot be reached in the short term. It is a long-term objective, something that takes systematic training and perseverance to attain. If you thought only in terms of once-off, individual workouts, your goals would evaporate.
Now, the Zen saying that “If you keep your eyes on the goal, you won’t be able to see the path” is true. If you are so consumed with your goals that your relationship with individual workouts becomes stoney-faced, militant and unenjoyable, you won’t actually reach those goals that you cherish. You have to value the experience to build on the experience. Every workout is a unit of currency for, in essence, buying you the effect you want. Each one is a penny. A hundred make a dollar. You want 20 inch biceps? Okay, that’ll be $100 dollars. Better start hoarding those pennies. Careful not to get too self-satisfied with small change, because you need real money here. But also, don’t get too casual about undervaluing pennies, because if you don’t value them as well as they deserve, they’ll never collect in large enough quantities to amount to much.
And as you “mature” in your training, you’ll have an evolving relationship with the currency. When you were five, having $20 felt like being rich. You could practically buy everything you could imagine wanting. By the time you were sixteen, you were dropping $25 dollars a day, easily. By the time you reached adulthood, you would hardly feel rich with anything short of $1,000,000. So as your training goes on, your accrued “wealth” of effort and experience is still divisible down to the level of individual pennies, but the sheer volume of pennies you need to approach the goals you have at your level is staggering. Your goals are not only evolving, but your ability to formulate goals is evolving. As you go, you are unlocking an understanding of things you want that you didn’t even know you wanted in the beginning.
It’s a balancing act. Cherish the pennies—but remember you are dealing in dollars.
And then you’re not just meandering from workout to workout. You’re training.
Four Things About Fitness I Wish I’d Known Sooner
Posted: February 13, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bodybuilding, exercise, fitness, health, learning, misconceptions, motivation, psychology, training, weightlifting, work Leave a commentFour Things About Fitness I Wish I’d Known Sooner
1.“Fitness” describes a capacity, not a state of being.
Saying someone is “fit” describes a capacity they have; being fit is not a thing in and of itself. “Fit” is an adjective, not a noun.
Think of it this way. A noun describes a thing, a thing that exists and has characteristics of its own. A pistachio. A walrus. Those are things. They are the same thing no matter where you encounter them: a walrus out of its natural habitat is still a walrus. No matter how incongruous the context in which it appears (“Why the fuck is there a walrus in my bathtub?”) it is still the same thing. Fitness, however, is not a thing. It does not exist, and it has no characteristics.
Fit is an adjective. It describes something, and what it means always varies depending on where it’s used. A fit marathoner and a fit weightlifter are not the same thing. Speaking of their “fitness” describes their ability to do their own sport, but in each case it describes something wildly different. And not only are those capacities different, they don’t necessarily overlap at all.
The capacity to lift a lot of weight is not suitable or appropriate to help one complete marathons—hence, in that context, it is not fitness. The capacity to run a long way without stopping is not suitable or appropriate to help one set a new bench-press PR—hence, in that context, it is not fitness. The two athletes probably look different and certainly perform differently, but they are both fit.
This may seem like hair-splitting semantics, but it actually isn’t. Understanding that “fitness” does not exist and has literally zero innate characteristics topples the entire popular conception of what being “fit” means. The media make Fit a noun. It’s touted as a thing that exists—a specific thing that can be aspired to and achieved. Unless they’ve somehow never been exposed to modern media, the vast majority of people have at least some stereotyped ideas about the “innate characteristics” of fitness. —Six-pack abs. Thick arms in men, thin arms in women. A certain percent body-fat. Certain activities and certain foods are paired in people’s minds with a “fit” lifestyle. Maybe even certain clothes.
But this is entirely based in sloppy thinking, fantasy, media and marketing. Fitness is without characteristics. Fitness is no more about the size of your waistband than the size of your shoes.
There are as many ways to be fit as there are different things in the world that people do. And there are as many body-types associated with fitness as there are, well, body-types.
2. You’ll Probably Need To Expand Your Thinking.
Whatever you’re doing right now in your training, odds are good that your program is going to change. No matter how great the sense of all-in-one completeness you derive from the routine you’ve found or created, in ten years you will have learned so much more, your thinking will have changed on so many topics, and your body will have changed enough, to cause you to change your approach. That’s not a bad thing, and it’s not a criticism of whatever you’re doing. Think about it: what you do now is the optimal approach to fitness-training according to your current understanding. In a year or two, you will know exponentially more, and what you think is optimal now may no longer look optimal. Your approach may be refined, tweaked, tightened up in some places, loosened in others. Or whatever. But it will change. Your thinking will expand—new knowledge will come in and shake up the settled order of your training.
That’s important to keep in mind because of our tendency to grab onto our programs or approaches and think we’ve found the One True Way.
“Man, you’ve gotta try this yoga class I’ve started doing. It’s an unchanging sequence of poses every time—same timing, same temperature in the room. Everything the same. It’s designed perfectly. Perfection: nothing to add or subtract. It’s the magic bullet—all you need wrapped up in one class. Everyone should be doing exactly this, and if you talk to me about anything else I’ll excommunicate you immediately.” That’s a pretty extreme example, but it’s too easy to tend towards that mindset in anything we do, fitness-wise.
“THIS IS IT! I’VE FOUND THE GRAIL.” Just take the guess-work out of it, and accept from the beginning that you’ll never find the grail, because there isn’t one. What you may think is the answer to all your fitness questions right now almost certainly will not be the answer anymore a decade from now. That’s not a bad thing—that’s as it should be. Help yourself along the road of continually expanding your thinking and practice by treating everything you do in your training like a tool. Firm grip on the handle, but don’t clutch it. If you clutch the handle of a tool too tightly, you wind up wielding it awkwardly.
3. You’ll Also Probably Need To Expand Your Timeframe
We want jumpstarts and reboots and six-week transformations. We want to “kick our metabolisms into gear” and “shed pounds” and do all kinds of things that sound like rapid changes and drastic overhauls. But rapid changes generally don’t last. Think of an illustration from nature: a plant that grows quickly withers just as fast. It explodes out of its seed, spreads around, bears a yield of fruit, then dies. On the other hand, a tree grows slowly. A bit at a time. And 100 years later? It’s gargantuan. And it’s still growing a bit at a time.
We make healthy, lasting changes to our bodies more like the tree than like the plant. Expand the timeframe in which you demand results. What you’re measuring in days, start measuring in weeks. What you think of in terms of weeks, you should probably be thinking of in terms of months. And so on.
4. You Really, Really Need To Be Having Fun
I’m not saying you need to work out exclusively on playgrounds. I’m not saying you need to pause after every set of deadlifts to have sex with your workout partner against the gym wall (though I’m not not saying that.) All I’m saying is, if the attitude you bring to your training is rigid, militant and devoid of joy, you probably aren’t going to get where you want to go. It’s a long road. If you’re not deriving any joy at all from what you’re doing, it’s unlikely you’ll stay with it over the long haul.
Think of joy in your training as being equally important to getting protein in your diet. Put the same level of attention into it. Give it the same level of precedence in how you gauge your progress. It will make a difference.
If you absolutely positively can’t find any joy in what you’re doing, it means you’re doing the wrong thing, and that’s that. If you analyzed your diet and realized you were getting way too little protein, you would obviously know that you needed to change your diet. If you analyze your fitness training and realize that you’re getting no enjoyment out of it, you need to change your training. You need to find ways to move, strive and challenge yourself that compel you and that you find joy in.
It’s a long road. Actually, scratch that: it’s an infinite road. There is no final destination. You may have concrete goals, but when you reach those goals they always turn out to just be milestones. You pass them, and move on. The goals you set at one moment in time, when you finally reach them, no longer seem like enough. You’ve expanded: the old goals are small compared to you now. So you move on.
And so it goes, on and on. There is no finish-line to cross. If you put your head down and barrel onward, as if you’re just going to tough it out until you get there, you’re in for a harsh surprise. It’s an infinite road. If being on the road itself isn’t joyful, you’re bound for disillusionment.
Stretching
Posted: January 6, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bikram yoga, clinical trials, exercise, fitness, health, learning, misconceptions, mobility, research, training, warmup, why Leave a commentMy girlfriend & I have joined forces on an ebook geared towards providing anyone walking into a Bikram yoga class, whether newbie or veteran, with basic information about how their body functions when exercising in intense conditions, and what they need to know to take proper care of themselves.
(My girlfriend is a professional Bikram yoga instructor, and blogs here: http://yogamattes.com.)
You can see other sample chapters from the ebook about sweating, hydration, electrolytes and nerves either here on Planet Beast or over at her blog. Most of the chapters we’ve put up have been in order, but now we’re taking it out of order to share some basic information about the role of stretching in health and fitness. Again, the ebook is geared towards Bikram yoga students, but any kind of athlete could benefit from the info.
7. Stretching
Proper stretching has a host of benefits for the body. When done regularly, stretching can help to improve range of motion (ROM,) can help prevent injuries and arthritis, relaxes the muscles, can increase flexibility, improve posture, help prevent hardening of arteries and increases blood-flow. Those who stretch regularly benefit more than those who stretch occasionally, and those who perform a variety of stretching exercises benefit more than those who only perform only one or two. By both those criteria, a regular yoga practice is just the ticket.
Types of stretching
There are actually four different types of stretching: ballistic, dynamic, proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, and static. Static stretching is the only kind we do in Bikram yoga class. As the name implies, static stretching is performed by stretching the muscle until a gentle tension is felt and held for a certain amount of time, or until muscular release is felt, without any movement or bouncing. The hold is static. This is an important distinction, because bouncing and moving “to get farther into the pose” is a common mistake made by beginners. This is ballistic stretching, which is an entirely different animal. Ballistic stretching exercises are a thing, but they are not at all like yoga exercises. Yoga poses are not designed to be performed ballistically, hence it is not safe, biomechanically, to treat them that way.
Physiology of Stretching
To understand the tight, pulling sensation experienced during stretching (called passive muscle tension,) it is necessary to look at the physiology of the muscles themselves, simplified to the aspects most relevant to our discussion. An individual muscle is made up of bundles of individual muscle cells. When you think of a body cell, you might imagine a little round glob with a single nucleus. Muscle cells, however, are different than other body cells. They are long threadlike things, which is why they are also called muscle fibers. They are incredibly thin—10 to 100 nanometers—but they generally run the entire length of the muscle they comprise, and can contain multiple nuclei. So, for instance, the individual threadlike muscle fibers that make up your biceps run the whole length of your upper arm; those that make up your hamstrings run the whole length of the back of your thigh, etc. We’ll see why in a moment.
Inside the outer membrane of the threadlike fiber is an even thinner fiber. This tiny inner fiber is called the myofibril. The myofibril, in turn, is made up of individual microscopic contractile filaments called sarcomeres. These sarcomeres facilitate the movement of skeletal muscles (the muscles that move your skeleton; the ones you use all day every day, whenever you do literally anything.) When the muscle fiber is stimulated to contract, these tiny overlapping filaments pull together. On and on down the chain, they pull together, causing the entire muscle to contract towards its origin point and pull against its insertion point. And because the skeletal muscle is anchored to a freely moving joint, the contraction pulls on the joint and causes its angle to be either increased or decreased, depending on what that particular muscle’s “job” is.
Think of a bodybuilder flexing his biceps. As his elbow bends, the biceps muscle suddenly looks larger and rounder. What’s happening? The microscopic sarcomeres inside the muscle fibers are pulling together and overlapping—rather than resting laid out along the upper arm in a long chain, they are piling up: the muscle is contracting. That same contraction is what causes the elbow to bend. Contracting towards its origin point in the shoulder, the muscle pulls on the opposite end—it exerts leverage against its insertion point in the elbow and causes the straight arm to bend. That’s why each muscle fiber runs the full length of the muscle—so they can exert a pull all the way from origin to insertion.
The cause of the passive resistance felt during stretching was once supposed to be extracellular (in the connective tissues,) but a study by Magid and Law demonstrated that it actually comes from within the myofibrils themselves.
What this means is, when you’re stretching, you’re stretching against the elastic resistance of those microscopic sarcomeres. And due to neurological safeguards against injury, it is normally impossible for adults to stretch most muscle groups to their fullest possible length without extensive training, due to muscle activation of antagonists as the stretched muscle reaches the limit of its normal range of motion. While stretching is highly beneficial to the body, over-stretching is detrimental. The body is wired to protect itself against over-stretching injury, and the upper limits we experience in our flexibility are often not mechanical limits at all but rather due our body’s hardwired resistance to the stretch itself.
Stated another way, some of the increases we see in our ability to stretch with practice are not due to increased capacity to stretch but rather increased neurological stretch-tolerance in muscles. Safe, effective stretching increases stretch-tolerance within a healthy, biomechanically sound range, thereby improving range of motion, better aligning joints and relieving chronic muscle tension. Another benefit of stretching is that it stimulates the production of synovial fluid (the fluid that pads and lubricates freely moving joints.)
Understanding that the passive resistance felt during a stretch comes from within the muscle itself illustrates an important principle in safe stretching: when stretching a muscle, it should be relaxed. Contracting the muscle, as we’ve seen, pulls the sarcomeres together, whereas stretching pulls against those sarcomeres. Thus, attempting to stretch a contracted muscle is physiologically unsound, because the muscle will be physically unable to stretch and the tension will be transferred to surrounding connective tissues. Ligaments and tendons do benefit from gentle stretching, but yoga poses are not designed to safely allow connective tissue to bear the full brunt of the stretch. That is not the intended effect of any pose. And yet, stretching against tight, contracted muscles tends to transfer the brunt of the stretch in exactly that way, potentially making the pose more conducive to causing soft-tissue injury. In short, you’re doing it wrong.
References:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4071053.
Moderation in Fitness Training
Posted: December 28, 2014 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bodybuilding, exercise, fitness, health, learning, misconceptions, training, weightlifting, work Leave a commentI was talking with a client this morning after her weightlifting session; we discussed the concept of moderation in her fitness routine. Before we started working together some months ago, she had a highly driven, hi-octane approach to her physical conditioning. Less than half an hour on the treadmill, for instance, and the session didn’t even count, as far as she was concerned—she told me how she had to abandon her habit of running before work, because by the end of her intense cardio sessions she would be sweaty and tired. She’d need a full half hour to cool off, shower, and pull herself together. It took too damn long.
She gave up on the idea of getting in some physical activity before her largely inactive workday, because there just wasn’t time for that rigamarole. As a result, her exercise sessions clustered together at the end of the week—she was inactive all week because there was no time to work out, then made up for it with a bombardment of rapid-fire, soul-crushing workouts all through the weekend. That story isn’t unique. Plenty of people do exactly the same thing.
I think moderation gets a bad rap. We look on moderation like a markedly uninspired, pantywaist reluctance to push ourselves, or a general policy of backing away from hard work. We have given “moderation” a negative connotation just like we’ve given “decadence” a positive connotation. How many times do we need to call a dessert “decadent” before decadent is functionally a synonym for “delicious?” How many times do we have to call something wimpy “moderate” before moderate is functionally a synonym for wimpy?
But Moderation, be it with a capital “M” or otherwise, is “the avoidance of excess or extremes.” Excess and extremes are, by definition, too much of something. So making moderation your goal is, literally, making it your goal to do the right amount. Being moderate is bringing critical thought and discernment to bear on your fitness and health. It means designing a plan that works for you and, on the nitty-gritty practical level, is rational and ultimately effective. Moderation means doing things in a sustainable way that works well in the long term, rather than an extreme way that is short-lived and doesn’t work as well. Moderation is a function of clear judgment and critical thinking.
Which is why, when my client told me about how she didn’t run before work anymore because it took to long to cool down and recover, I gave her a piece of moderate advice.
I didn’t say, “Suck it up! This is your health we’re talking about. Work for it. Do the session.”
Nope.
“Don’t work so hard,” I said. “Instead of half an hour running, do fifteen minutes.” And she did. And it was easily manageable. Fifteen minutes of running before work was no problem—and she didn’t get as sweaty and worn out, so she didn’t need all that recovery-time before moving on with her day. It became her new habit to run for fifteen minutes before leaving for work, not getting up much of a sweat, not wearing herself out.
In other words, she had been thinking in extreme terms and ultimately had to give up on her before-work sessions because they weren’t manageable. As a result, she was largely inactive all week. Then she started thinking in moderate terms. Her before-work sessions became manageable—and thus she got in up to 75 additional minutes of exercise per week, between all those short sessions.
So, that’s a pretty significant change in her level of activity during the workweek. Extreme attitude towards exercise, 0 minutes of exercise. Moderate attitude towards exercise, 75 minutes of exercise. (Who’s pantywaist now, Extremism?)
And this morning, she said something to me about the change in her attitude that inspired me to write this post: “It used to be like I was at a banquet.”
You see, I had described a moderate approach to exercise like this: exercising is no different than eating. When you eat, you eat until you’re satisfied, then you stop. You plan on eating again later. That’s just how it is. This meal isn’t going to last you forever—soon enough, it will be time to eat again.
Workouts should be the same. No one single workout will ever make or break you. Each one is an increment. Each one is a small part of an ongoing series. The series, the plan, the overall habit and tendency, is where moderation asserts itself. Moderation thinks in terms of the right amount to be sustained across a long haul.
It creates an overarching framework to continue building upon as time goes by. Someone with an extreme attitude, on the other hand, tries to get done with everything, JUST ABSOLUTELY ALL OF IT RIGHT THE HELL NOW, HURRY, HURRY, THERE’S NO TIME. Extremism thinks too much in terms of each workout having discrete, individual importance. —“This is the big one. This is the one that counts. This is the one that it’s all about.”
But a single workout only has value in as much as it is part of a habit—as a stand-alone event, a single workout can’t do much for you. No matter how drawn-on the marathon session is, no matter how thoroughly you annihilate yourself, no matter how many calories are burned or how many pounds of water-weight are sweat out, a single session is not going to bring the results you seek. Those results come over time.
Moderation eats a little, planning to eat again later. Extremism gorges itself, sitting at the head of the table at a massive banquet—but all that food isn’t going to bring much nourishment if it just goes and goes until it is fucking vomiting all over the floor.
Or think of it like this: You want to grow an orchard. You plant apple-tree saplings, and water them. Later, the soil is getting dry, so you water them again. That’s moderation: you think critically about how much water the trees will benefit from at this stage of their development, and give it to them when they need it. You do that over and over again.
Now, suppose you decided to skip those little individual watering sessions, because who has time for that? Better to do it all at once—over the weekend, when you have time to do some serious watering. So you give the parched, withering trees a sudden influx of massive amounts of H2O—more than they can possibly take up through their roots all at once.
Congratulations! You’ve killed your apple-trees. Or if they survive and mature, they’re not going to produce anything close to optimal apple-yield.
Now I’m done spouting metaphors and similes. Go apply it to the real deal, instead. Consider your workout plan—is it moderate (i.e., well-thought out for maximum effectiveness and sustainability over time) or is it extreme (i.e., poorly thought out, causing it to become unbalanced in actual practice, spiral off course and prove itself ultimately unsustainable.)
Why Weight-Loss is a BS Goal
Posted: December 23, 2014 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bodybuilding, diet, exercise, fitness, health, misconceptions, motivation, strength, why Leave a commentFirst of all, let me just get this off my chest:
WEIGHT IS SUCH A FUCKING STUPID METRIC TO MEASURE A HUMAN BEING WITH, HOW DID THE IDEA CATCH ON IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Ahem.
Don’t think I’m starting off on a moral note or being anti-vanity. I’m making a neutral statement, there. I’m not saying “It’s wrong to aspire to certain physical aesthetics,” I’m just saying that thinking only about weight is a fundamentally misguided way of approaching those aesthetics. Even in completely vain terms—purely as a means working on one’s appearance—weight is a stupid absolute metric to be following. What I’m saying is, there are more effective ways of being vain—worrying exclusively and obsessively about weight is a clumsy method.
As a bodybuilder, I recognize that my relationship to my weight is literally inverted from the average person’s. Most people want to lose a few pounds and keep them off—whereas I want to gain twenty-eight pounds and keep them on. Most people would get depressed if they realized they’ve “outgrown” their clothes and need to shop for a new wardrobe. I, one the other hand, get wicked excited when I can no longer squeeze into a pair of jeans, and feel like we should go out to dinner and celebrate whenever it becomes impossible to fasten the top button on one of my dress shirts.
But the inversion of my value system around weight doesn’t change the fact that it is a stupid metric to attach absolute meaning to. Still looking at this purely in terms of vanity, there are too many other variables involved in physical aesthetics for weight to be really useful as the be-all-and-end-all measurement. Muscularity, symmetry, etc., etc. If my concern is creating a certain physical image, I need to be thinking about a whole slew of other things besides my weight—including qualitative rather than qualitative things, like posture and movement. Those all factor into appearance—most of them are vastly more significant than weight.
Weight is the sole measurement by which a farmer determines the value of a pumpkin. If you judge yourself primarily according to weight, you are cultivating yourself like a farmer cultivates a champion pumpkin. (That goes whether you’re trying to lose weight like most people, or trying to gain weight, like a bodybuilder. Whichever change on the scale you attach value to, the scale is fundamentally the same, and fundamentally lacking as a real measurement of what you’re trying to achieve.)
If we take the pursuit of an “ideal weight” out of the context of vanity and place it in the context of “health” or “fitness,” it becomes an even more wildly misguided and fundamentally absurd, abortive fiasco. Muscle weighs more than fat. Bone and cartilage weigh something, too—and since the process of getting “more fit” involves getting more muscle, denser bones and stronger joints, changes in weight associated with increased fitness are influenced by many more variables than just fat loss.
(I can’t stress this enough to anybody lifting weights or building strength in any way: even if you’re not trying to “get bulky,” you’re still building more muscle as you get more fit. Touching very briefly on the subject, literally every body movement is facilitated by little contractile proteins in the core of each muscle fiber—getting stronger is a measurable mechanical effect of new proteins being added inside the fiber. That translates to weight. A stronger muscles weighs more, even if it isn’t visibly “bulkier.”)
And as you get more fit, no matter what kind of training you’re doing, nine times out of ten you’re perforce going to start adhering to better habits of hydration. BAM, more water in your body, more weight to your body. Think about that. It obviously doesn’t mean chronic dehydration is a healthier option because you’ll weigh less. It means weight is, for yet another reason, fucking flawed as a measurement of health or fitness.
Imagine for a second that you’re a sedentary guy, on the hefty side. You work a desk job, and have decided that your New Year’s Resolution is to become more active. You start a new fitness routine.
When you tell somebody that you want to get in shape, you say, “I want to lose weight.” That’s shorthand for what you mean, which is “I want to alter my body composition and increase my level of general physical conditioning in order to enjoy improved health and quality of life, and potentially greater longevity, and, coincidentally, enhance my physical aesthetics.”
That’s a mouthful; of course you go for the weight-loss shorthand. But here’s the kicker: that’s absolutely not an accurate or acceptable summation of your objectives, because even though a corollary of your overall goal is to lose fat, fat loss is not what you’re measuring—the only thing you’re measuring is your weight. If you’re judging the success or failure of your new routine by changes in weight, and that means you’re judging it wrong.
Perhaps, after a few weeks, no significant reduction in weight causes you to become frustrated, lose motivation and give up on your resolution.
This isn’t a gray area. If you’re just going by weight, you’re doing it wrong.
If you instead judged your new fitness routine—which we’re just assuming is being done well and intelligently, so it carries the maximum possible benefit for your work—by the fact that your back and joints no longer hurt all the time, you can walk up a flight of stairs without having to pause at the top and catch your breath, you can actually enjoy playing outside with your kids; your mood is generally staying in a more positive emotional range day-to-day, you’re happier with how your body looks than you’ve been in years; your sex life is better than it’s been in years; you’re more energetic and more interested in life and engaged with the world than you’ve been in years—and I’ll stop there, because this list could still keep going on for a while—if you judged your success by all these things instead of weight, maybe weight would be fucking ousted from it’s central position in your view of “health.”
Electrolytes and Nerves
Posted: December 21, 2014 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bikram yoga, diet, exercise, fitness, health, learning, misconceptions, nutrition, teaching, training, yoga Leave a commentMy girlfriend & I have joined forces on an e-book geared towards providing anyone walking into a Bikram yoga class, whether it’s their first time or they’ve been doing it for a while, with basic information about how their body functions when exercising in intense conditions, and what they need to know to take proper care of themselves.
(My girlfriend is a professional yoga teacher, and blogs at: http://yogamattes.com )
You can see the chapters on sweating and hydration in older posts, on my blog or hers. Again, these are chapters from an e-book geared towards hot yoga class, but the information in it is applicable to all kinds of athletes. We’re writing this guide from our experience in hot yoga, but we’re not just hot yogis—we’re hot no matter what we’re doing. (Har, har. See what I did there?) Anyway, here is some basic information about maintaining electrolyte balance, and what those electrolytes are actually doing in your body.
Chapter 3: Electrolytes
Balancing your hydration level is about more than just water. When thinking about sweat-loss and water intake, you also need to think about electrolytes. Your body’s nerve reactions and muscle functions depend on the proper concentration and exchange of these chemicals.
What exactly are electrolytes? Chemically, they are substances that ionize in solution (that is, dissolve in water) and acquire the capacity to conduct electricity. Some of the specific ones that are commonly measured by doctors are: sodium, potassium and chloride. These substances are lost through heavy sweating—and if you rehydrate with only clear water, then your electrolyte levels will be thrown out of balance; the ratio of water to electrolytes in your body will be altered.
Sodium is a majorly important positive ion in the fluid outside of cells (the interstitial fluid, like we talked about above.) The chemical notation of sodium is Na+. You know sodium best after it’s been combined with chloride—that’s the chemical composition of table salt.
Sodium regulates the total amount of water in the body, and the transmission of sodium into and out of individual cells plays a vital role in critical body functions (as we’ll see when we talk about nerve impulse conduction below.) Many, many processes in the body and brain require the conduction of electrical impulses for communication, integration and control, and the movement of sodium (a positive ion) is essential in generating these electrical signals. Therefore, too much or too little sodium leads to cell malfunction.
Potassium is a major positive ion found inside of cells (it’s chemical notation is K+.) Proper potassium level is essential for normal cell function—among many other things, it regulates heartbeat and the function of the muscles. A serious disruption of potassium levels can critically affect the nervous system and increases the risk of irregular heartbeats (arrhythmias.)
Hypokalemia is a decreased level of potassium. It can be brought on by kidney diseases, or excessive loss due to vomiting, diarrhea, or—most relevant to our subject—heavy sweating.
Chloride (Cl-) is a major negative ion found in the fluid outside of cells and in the blood. It is closely regulated by the body, and plays a role in maintaining a normal balance of fluids. Just like all the other electrolytes, it can be thrown out of balance by various diseases, but, relevant to our discussion, excessive loss can occur through heavy sweating.
Symptoms of Electrolyte Imbalance
An electrolyte imbalance can create a number of different symptoms—and the specific symptoms that manifest will depend on which of the electrolyte levels are affected. Altered potassium, sodium, magnesium or calcium levels can lead to: muscle spasm or cramping, weakness, twitching and convulsion.
When the levels are low (the more likely scenario in a Bikram Yoga class, as opposed to high,) it can cause: irregular heartbeat, confusion, blood pressure changes, headache, dizziness and nausea.
In a hot yoga or Bikram Yoga class, by far the most common signs of electrolyte imbalance will be headache, dizziness, nausea, and cramping.
Replenishing Lost Electrolytes
So we know now that these ionizing substances are essential for a host of critical body functions, and that they are lost during heavy sweating, potentially, and very likely, to the point of excess. So the next step, logically, is to replace the lost electrolytes and maintain the balance. The best way to do that is with consistent intake of electrolytes.
A good rule of thumb to follow: drink your water with electrolytes. Don’t just chug clear water before, while, and after sweating heavily—replenish your lost water and your lost electrolytes together by adding sources of electrolytes directly to your water. As one example: try clear water with added raw honey to taste, a pinch of unrefined salt, and freshly squeezed lemon juice. Take this concoction with you into class—steadily replete both your electrolytes and water together, even as you deplete them through sweating.
When, during or after class, you need an extra boost of electrolytes, supplementation is appropriate. If you experience symptoms of electrolyte imbalance as you practice, you should seek out some concentrated source, such as electrolyte-replenishment packets (like “Emergen-C” or “Ultima,”) or simply a small pinch of sea salt dissolved on the tongue.
Meanwhile, take electrolytes in steadily through diet in your daily life. Don’t rely on concentrated supplementation alone. What that means is, if you do something that causes you extreme electrolyte depletion all the time—like sweating heavily in a Bikram yoga class several times per week—take the initiative. Take steps to prevent imbalances in the first place. You should always be attempting to take in replacement electrolytes at a steady pace throughout your daily life—not only in occasional concentrated mouthfuls after you have already realized the balance is drastically off. This is done through a diet rich in electrolytes. For instance, you know you’re going to consistently lose potassium through sweat in class—so take it in just as consistently, from dietary sources like bananas or coffee. Or whatever—just find sources that work for you and make electrolyte replenishment a dietary priority.
Electrolytes should be taken in in the same consistent, gradual, measured way that you supply your body with water. You know you lose a great deal of water in class, so you consistently take in reasonable amounts of water during the day, every day. In other words, you keep hydration in mind even when you’re not dehydrated. In the same way, keep electrolyte balance in mind, even before you experience symptoms of imbalance.
Extra Notes on Sodium
Sodium warrants special attention for a couple of reasons. One, it is among the main electrolytes lost in sweat (hence sweat’s salty taste.) Two, you generally don’t get much of it from commercially available electrolyte drinks and powders. As a result, you may be taking in a healthy amount of other electrolytes, but, because you are losing so much through sweat and taking in so little through electrolyte drinks or powders, you may still fall short of replenishing lost sodium.
General medical guidelines for low sodium levels recommend restricting fluid intake in order to prevent hyponatremia (too little sodium in the body, relative to water,) but in the context of Bikram Yoga practice, limiting fluid intake is not appropriate. That guideline is general, and does not apply to anyone who regularly loses huge amounts of water through sweat. In the case of low sodium-concentration brought on by massive loss through sweating and dilution by clear water intake, the solution is, logically, increased intake of sodium. A pinch of salt on the tongue, a pinch of salt added to your water, a sprinkling of salt on your food after class. However you take it in, you will need a little boost of sodium to properly replenish what you lose while practicing, before you’re ready to go into the room and sweat again.
Special Concerns
Certain medications may cause electrolyte imbalances, such as: chemotherapy drugs, diuretics, antibiotics and corticosteroids. If you are on any of these medications, it is important to keep track of your electrolyte levels. Make sure your doctor knows you are practicing hot yoga and understands how much heavy sweating is involved.
Chapter 4: Nerves
Electrolytes are essential for generating the electrical impulses that facilitate the nervous system’s communication and control. How exactly does that work? We’ll take a short, simplified look at it, to a) illustrate how the electrolytes we’ve discussed actually function by conducting electrical impulses and b) to set the stage for the next chapter, wherein we’ll look at the nervous system. There are two main types of cells in the nervous system—neuroglia and neurons. Neurons are the one we’ll be considering here. They can be afferent (conducting impulses towards the brain) or efferent (conducting impulses away from the brain.)
A neuron consists of a cell body (also called the soma or perikaryon,) the axon, and one or more dendrites. The dendrites of a neuron are processes that stick off and branch like tiny trees (in fact, the name comes from the Greek word for tree.) The dendrites receive impulses to conduct from other neurons. Once received, the impulse travels down the axon—a long process, like a thin tail—and reaches the next neuron by way of terminal branched filaments called telodendria. Axons can vary in length from a meter long to a few millimeters. They also vary in width—from about 20 nanometers down to a single nanometer.
In order to understand how impulse conduction works, and how electrolytes are involved, it pays to get familiar with a few relevant terms.
Potential difference—an electrical difference, or an electrical gradient. A potential difference is the difference between the electrical charge present at two points. A potential difference is a form of potential energy. It is a force that has the potential to move positively charged ions down an electrical gradient, that is, from a point of higher positive charge to a point of lower positive charge.
Polarized membrane—a membrane whose outer and inner surface have different amounts of electrical charges. Basically, a potential difference exists across a polarized membrane.
Depolarized membrane—a membrane whose outer and inner surface have equal amounts of electrical charge. A potential difference does not exist across a depolarized membrane; it is zero.
When a neuron is not conducting, the inner surface of its membrane is slightly negative to its outer surface. There is a potential difference across its membrane—in a nonconducting neuron, this is called “resting potential.” The mechanism that creates this resting potential is primarily a sodium-potassium pump, built into the neuron’s plasma membrane (the outer membrane of the neuron.) This pump actively transports positive sodium and potassium ions through the plasma membrane in opposite directions and at different rates. For every 3 sodium ions it moves out, it moves 2 potassium ions in. If, for instance, it pumped 100 potassium ions into a nerve cell from the extracellular fluid, it concurrently pumps 150 sodium ions out of the cell. This makes the inner surface of the neuron’s membrane slightly less positive—or, slightly negative—to its outer surface.
Blamo—there you have the potential difference in a nonconducting neuron known as resting potential. Now, an impulse comes along for the “resting” neuron to conduct.
1) When a sufficient stimulus is applied to the neuron, it vastly increases the permeability of its membrane to sodium ions at the point of stimulation (it lets more sodium in.)
2) The positive sodium ions rush in towards the point of stimulation. The excess of sodium outside the membrane, therefore, diminishes. It quickly reaches zero. In other words, the stimulated point of the membrane is no longer polarized. But only for an instant. Quickly—within milliseconds—the positive sodium ions streaming in create an excess of sodium inside the cell and trigger an action potential. An action potential is a potential difference across a neuron’s membrane with the inside positive to the outside. So, since resting potential has the inside negative to outside, action potential is a reverse polarization. The inside becomes positive to the outside. Development of action potential at the stimulated point of the neuron marks the beginning of impulse conduction.
3) A chain reaction occurs. The action potential of the stimulated part of the membrane becomes the stimulus for the adjacent part of the membrane, and that next stimulated point goes into the same process. The action potential moves along the length of the neuron, point by point, conducting the electrical impulse on to its destination.
[Next up, the nervous system and the fight-or-flight response.]
Sweating and Hydration.
Posted: December 10, 2014 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bikram yoga, exercise, fitness, health, learning, nutrition, training, yoga 2 CommentsMy girlfriend and I have joined forces on an e-book, geared towards providing anyone walking into a Bikram yoga class, whether it’s their first time or they’ve been doing it for a while, with basic information about how their body functions when exercising in intense conditions, and what they need to know to take proper care of themselves.
(My girlfriend is a professional Bikram yoga instructor—here’s a link to her blog: http://yogamattes.com)
So, we’re writing the book with a Bikram Yoga class in mind, but the basic information in there could be useful to pretty much any kind of athlete. These first two chapters are on sweating and hydration—those are important no matter what your sport or style of training is.
1. Sweating
Well over a century ago, a French physiologist named Claude Bernard (1813-1878) made a very important observation. He observed that body cells survive in a healthy condition only when the temperature, pressure and chemical composition of their fluid environment remains relatively constant. This is still a pivotal observation in modern physiology. We don’t call the environment of cells the milieu interne, like he did—we call it the extracellular fluid. Extracellular fluid fills the microscopic spaces between cells, and it is actually of two types: interstitial fluid, and blood plasma (the fluid part of whole blood, as opposed to the red or white blood-cells.)
The relatively constant state of the cellular environment is called homeostasis. The literal meaning of homeostasis in Greek is “Standing or staying the same.” That doesn’t mean our body’s homeostasis is something that stays the same all the time and never varies, it just means that, while the internal environment will vary, the body will work ceaselessly to keep it relatively constant—because there is a narrow margin for change in our internal environment before the cellular and chemical processes that are the literal basis of life cease to move along properly. As an example, the homeostasis of blood temperature is 98º F, but it will vary slightly above and below that point. For the most part, though, the body has mechanisms in place to keep blood temperature there, even when environmental factors outside the body threaten to change it. Mechanisms for maintaining homeostasis involve the functioning of nearly all the body’s organs and systems. The body has its metaphorical hands full, working endlessly to maintain the constant internal environment upon which its survival depends, adjusting continually to a changing external environment.
Temperature regulation is of the utmost importance, because life depends on various chemical reactions taking place inside the body at a certain rate—and changing temperature changes the rate of chemical reactions. Unchecked internal temperature fluctuation would have catastrophic effects for the body, so there are thermostatic mechanisms in place to maintain—yes, you guessed it—temperature homeostasis. To maintain an even temperature, the body must balance heat production with heat loss—if extra heat is produced, that amount must be lost. Heat loss, primarily, occurs through the skin by the processes of evaporation, radiation, conduction and convection.
And that (finally!) brings us to sweat. Sweat is produced by sudoriferous glands, the most numerous of all the skin glands. Histologists estimate that one square inch of skin on the palm of your hand contains 3,000 little coiled, less-than-0.4-mm-diameter sweat glands. The number of sweat glands all over your body can exceed 3 million. These glands will work throughout life to produce a watery fluid rich in salts, ammonia, uric acid, urea and other wastes—a fluid which in addition to excreting wastes helps maintain a constant core temperature. And obviously, if the replenishment of lost fluids is not adequate, serious dehydration will occur. (In extreme conditions the body is capable of an astonishing sweat-production of 3 liters per hour for short periods—a prodigious rate which will almost always exceed what we can replace by drinking.)
Heat energy must be expended to evaporate any fluid, so evaporation of sweat is a major method by which the body loses excess heat. (When you’re in a Bikram yoga class and your teacher says, “Don’t wipe the sweat! It’s helping to cool you down,” that’s what she means.) The process of evaporation taking place on the surface of your skin is contributing majorly to heat loss. Evaporation is especially important in high-temperature environments, where evaporation is the only means the body has for heat-loss. Radiation and conduction involve the transference of body heat to a nearby surface with a cooler temperature (that’s what happens, it’s just thermodynamics) but in the hot-room during a Bikram class, everything around you is just as hot as you are, so you can’t lose heat that way. Evaporation is literally your body’s only shot at cooling itself down. So, leave that sweat there, and if it tickles a little as it drips down, just deal with it.
A humid atmosphere inevitably retards evaporation, which is why a really humid class leaves everyone flat on their mats, even if the temperature wasn’t any higher than usual. But that doesn’t mean you have no hope for heat loss through evaporation in a humid room: a ceiling fan, no matter how slowly it’s rotating, can be your saving grace. Convection is the transfer of heat away from a surface (for instance, the surface of your skin) by movement of heated air or fluid particles. The moving air, even if it doesn’t feel cooler, will allow your body to lose more of the excess heat than it could in a stagnant atmosphere. So avail yourself to the fan, if possible, even if it doesn’t feel like it’s doing much.
Sometimes your teacher will mention the antimicrobial properties of sweat. That doesn’t mean exactly what it sounds like—your sweat isn’t some natural cleaning product that will leave the hot room, by virtue of the gallons of sweat shed into the carpets daily, a sterile environment which never needs cleaning, where we could safely perform surgery or assemble microchips. But sweat does play a part, along with the sebaceous or oil glands, in maintaining a surface film which covers your skin, providing a protective barrier against bacteria and fungus, hydrating the skin surface, buffering against various caustic irritants, and blocking a verity of toxic agents. So, there’s another reason not to hastily wipe sweat away as soon as it starts to glisten on your forehead.
2. Hydration
All this talk of sweat brings us to a strongly related topic—hydration. Water is lost through sweating, and water regulates your body temperature, lubricates joints, and helps transport nutrients. So obviously you don’t want to lose it without replacing it.
If you’re not properly hydrated, your body simply cannot function at its highest level—and dehydration can lead to fatigue, muscle cramps, dizziness and more serious symptoms.
There are no rules set in stone, when it comes to guidelines for water-intake before, during and after exercise. Everyone is different. And there are a lot of variables affecting water-loss—heat and humidity, exercise intensity and duration, general level of physical “fitness.” Body weight makes a difference, age can make a difference, etc., etc. Your specific need for water is just that—specifically yours.
The simplest way to monitor that you’re staying properly hydrated is to check your urine. Don’t wince, this is science. If your urine is remaining consistently clear or light yellow, you are most likely staying well hydrated. (Before actually walking into a Bikram yoga class, you should be well-hydrated enough that your urine is clear, but day to day, straw-colored urine is ideal.) If your urine is amber-colored or dark brown, it’s a sign that you’re becoming dehydrated.
There are further general guidelines to be found on the internet regarding water intake in relation to exercise, but, again, your need for water isn’t general. It’s specific to you. And a good guideline that’s specific to you is—yes!—your level of thirst. If you’re thirsty, drink. Stop drinking when you’re not thirsty anymore. Then, when you’re thirsty again later, drink some more. Following that golden rule, and also being aware of the color of your urine and learning to “read” it to judge your level of hydration in realtime, will very quickly lead you to an intuitive understanding of how to balance your water intake with water-loss in your own body and life.
The signs of dehydration include headache, dizziness or lightheadedness, nausea or vomiting, muscle cramps, dry mouth, cessation of sweating, and heart palpitations. Signs of severe dehydration include mental confusion, weakness and or loss of consciousness. Obviously, you should seek medical attention immediately if you experience any of those symptoms.
Severe dehydration is no joke.
But over-hydration is also a thing. Hyponatremia occurs when there is too little sodium in the body—as can happen when someone, like an endurance athlete for instance, drinks too much water. Hyponatremia is a rare condition involving swelling of the body-cells with water, including, potentially, swelling of the brain. This is an extreme and it’s rare, but it pays to be aware of it, and aware of the trend of excessive water-intake that can lead to it. Excessive water intake of such a catastrophic, heroically disproportionate level comes from ignoring your thirst-level and drinking to some outside guideline. That is, not drinking because you’re thirsty, but drinking because someone told you how much water to drink, so you think you need to force down that last bottle.
Drink to thirst, keep an eye on your urine. That’s the way to self-regulate your hydration and keep it in healthy parameters.
[Next chapter will be on maintaining blood electrolyte balance.]
Wildly Off Topic. Kind Of.
Posted: December 6, 2014 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bodybuilding, learning, misconceptions, psychology, research, teaching Leave a commentSo, a while back, a research professor at Boston college named Peter Grey, Ph.D., and his collogue Gina Riley (adjunct professor of special education at Hunter College) ran a survey of “unschooled” adults, for analysis and publication in an educational journal and also for a four-part article featured on “Psychology Today.”
(Here’s that: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201406/survey-grown-unschoolers-i-overview-findings)
Since I was “unschooled,” a friend of mine directed me to the survey. I’m was one of the 75 responders.
Since it might conceivably be interesting to somebody who wants to know what unschooling is or what it’s like, here’s my response to the survey in full. (Don’t worry, I at least drop a few references to weightlifting and bodybuilding in here, so it’s not completely unrelated to this blog.)
Survey of Unschooled Adults (Age 18 and older)
Name:
Silas David Lamprey Jackson
Gender:
Male
Birthdate:
10/24/89
1) Please tell us about your history of schooling/homeschooling/unschooling:
I am the youngest of four brothers, all of whom were unschooled.
(a) Did you ever attend a school, as a regular student, when you were between the ages of 5 and 16? If so, please list any schools you attended by type of school (e.g. public, Montessori, etc.), your age when you attended and when you left, your grade level(s) at that school (e.g. kindergarten through 5th grade), and your understanding of why you left that school.
I never attended a school of any type.
(b) During the years when you were not in school, between age 5 and 16, did you ever do homeschooling—that is, school at home, where you were following a curriculum determined by your parent(s) or another adult? If so, please describe that experience, how long it lasted, and your age at the time. If you switched from homeschooling to unschooling, what led you and/or your parent(s) to make that switch?
I never followed a curriculum set out by my parents. I did study with tutors occasionally, but only in subjects that interested me specifically that couldn’t be approached as effectively without a teacher—my parents sought out and made available the resources I would need in those cases. My two oldest brothers did follow a curriculum with my parents briefly (long before I was born,) and my parents gradually drifted away from homeschooling into pure unschooling as they observed how effectively the kids were learning organically, with self-direction driven by their own individual interests. They were inspired to step back and allow them to, essentially, do their own thing—trusting that they would learn what they needed to learn, when they needed to learn it.
2) Please describe briefly how your family defined unschooling. What, if any responsibility, did your parent(s) assume for your education?
I hesitate to say my parents “assumed no responsibility,” because it might imply a semi-neglectful attitude. They assumed the responsibility of standing back, prepared to teach if we approached with questions, but otherwise patient enough not to involve themselves overmuch in our learning while it was progressing on its own.
3) In your opinion, why were you “unschooled” instead of going to school or doing school at home? Is this something that both you and your parent(s) wanted to do?
Both my parents chose unschooling. The brief answer is, they didn’t believe in the formal educational system. They were admirers of John Holt and his educational philosophy, and chose to make this experiment despite its unusualness at the time my older brothers were born. By the time I came along in the late eighties there were plenty of other home/unschoolers in the area, but earlier there were very few. My parents were pioneers in that regard, unschooling my brothers in the old days when it required special permission from the State (which they acquired easily by presenting their views on the matter to the principal of the local school and outlining the subjects my brothers were working with,) and was still met with a certain apprehension by others in the community. That changed slowly as the general social attitude towards homeschooling changed. It was always understood that any of us could have opted to attend school at any time if we decided we wanted to.
4) Are you currently employed? If so, what do you do? Does your current employment match any interests/activities you had as an unschooled child/teen? If so, please explain.
Thankfully, both of my current jobs relate directly to my interests earlier in life. I am a writer and a martial arts instructor. Writing is a craft I’ve always been involved with and have always had ample room to explore in a slow, thorough, unstructured way. I don’t hesitate to say that it is unschooling which allowed my to develop my writing however far I have—reading classic literature with my father from a young age (of course by “reading” I mean “having it read to me”) and bumbling through my family’s extensive library year after year were two totally informal and totally essential components of my education. Later on, when I began to study and practice more structured aspects of writing—finer details like poetic meters and forms, literary composition, the arcana of English grammar, the processes of editing and publication—it was all placed on a foundation of natural love for words that had developed entirely in its own time and way. I wouldn’t trade the opportunity I had to read and think aimlessly for any other type of education in writing. Anything I’m now required to learn in a more formal way as a professional writer, I can seek out on my own. What I couldn’t ever give myself, is more time. That had to be given to me originally—and the time I had, to spend exactly as my own interests directed me to spend it, is something that will continue to benefit me for my entire life.
Martial arts are another subject I was able to immerse myself in exhaustively, thanks to the freedom I was allowed in how I used my days. I began instructing at my Taekwon-do school a few years after beginning to train there, and when my grand-master died and the studio closed recently, I began to run my own classes and take on my own students, blending martial arts organically with the other arenas of physical training I’ve been studying over the years. My academy (“Planet Beast”—the absurd name hopefully conveys what a good time we have, and how much time we spend laughing) in a lot of ways mirrors the paradigm of unschooling. Students come for Taekwon-do, but before the class is over they’ve experienced weightlifting and strength training, military-type exercise, flexibility training drawn from yoga, all blended in a natural way as it applies to and interacts with the original subject they wanted to learn, giving a broader perspective and a sounder understanding of the underlying principles involved. In my mind, that is the philosophy of unschooling. First chew, digest and understand the principles behind things, then worry about finer details.
5) Please describe briefly any formal higher education you have experienced, such as community college/college/and graduate school. How did you get into college without having a high school diploma? How did you adjust from being unschooled to being enrolled in a more formal type of educational experience? Please list any degrees you have obtained or degrees you are currently working toward.
I haven’t undergone any formal higher education.
6) What was your social life like growing up? How did you meet other kids your age? How was your “social” experience as an unschooler similar/different to the types of social experiences you have now?
Growing up, I mainly met kids my own age either through friends of my parents, or through my mother’s students (she is a music teacher.) As a kid I had a small group of friends, but close-knit and, years later, the friendships have endured and remain of absolute, paramount importance to me, not even second to blood family. Over the years, my social circle expanded exponentially through involvement with various activities that brought me into regular contact with comparatively massive numbers of people. So the sheer number of friends and acquaintances is one key difference in my modern social experience versus earlier in my life. A seven-year-old me, for instance, likely wouldn’t have been able to handle them all.
Another key difference is that many of my friends now have a context that we mainly connect through—yoga friends, bodybuilding friends, martial arts friends, author friends, etc. We have our specific thing that we generally do together, and when we’re not doing it, we’re talking about it. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy genuine, satisfying relationships with them—it’s just that we relate in a different way than my older friends because there’s a specific framework that our friendship developed within, rather than being a slow, aimless, markedly unschooled-like experience spanning from childhood on.
7) What, for you, were the main advantages of unschooling? Please answer both in terms of how you felt as a child growing up and how you feel now, looking back at your experiences. In your view, how did unschooling help you in your transition toward adulthood?
If maturity can be measured by self-knowledge, then unschooling allowed me to mature (in a personal sense) in a fairly smooth way that, given my natural temperament, may have been impossible for me otherwise. That is, had I not had the rich allowance for quiet introspection I always had. Growing up, I had no grasp of what this meant, because I had no palpable frame of reference outside of my own educational experience—I was what I was and learned as I learned, without any particular critical evaluation of either. Looking back, however, I see that unschooling—by allowing me to gravitate towards my own interests and digest them at my own rate, not moving on until I thoroughly understood them and how they related to me—gave me the strong comprehension of what I want to do in my life, and the strengths and weaknesses I will be working with as I attempt to do it, that many of my peers seem to struggle to attain. Simply put, I feel I arrived at a sense of purpose earlier than the average person because I had leisure to mull the matter over earlier than most people. Shifting from subject to subject in a formal setting, tangled up in homework and tests and grades and schedules, there’s not enough time to do nothing, and the brain isn’t given enough time to think.
8) What, for you, were the main disadvantages of unschooling? Again, please answer both in terms of how you felt as a child growing up and how you feel now. In your view, did unschooling hinder you at all in your transition toward adulthood?
I suppose the main hinderances were related to an asynchronization between how I operate and how the larger world operates. We had drastically different paces of life. My early existence was never governed by schedules, and as a result my functional relationship with time developed to be quite loose (my difficulties with conceptions of time led to a running joke that I don’t know how old I am or what year I was born in.) Basically, when the world got up and moved, it was difficult for me to to keep step with it. I was used to leisurely meals and time to sit and digest, in a world that thrives on fast-food, eaten on the go. The challenge for me was, and is, to learn to thrive on fast food when I have to.
It occurs to me that what I just called a hinderance is basically the mirror image of what I above called an asset. Oddly, this isn’t an inconsistency. Many factors of my personality that were developed through unschooling, I find, can be assets or hindrances equally in different contexts. The value of each trait isn’t innate, but rather depends on how effectively it can be adapted, in motion, as the situation demands it.
9) If you choose to have a family/children, do you think you will choose to unschool them? Why or why not?
If I have a family, and assuming my future wife is of the same mind, I will certainly be unschooling my children. If my own experience with it were not enough to fix unschooling in my mind as the best educational option, I now have the added reinforcement of watching my nieces grow and learn, unschooled by my oldest brother and his wife. Oddly enough, my brother, having been unschooled, was at first adamant that his daughters go to school. His wife, who was formally educated, was adamant that they home- or unschool their children. Once he observed his little girls’ natural learning, my brother agreed with his wife and decided that unschooling was the best option.
So the main reason I would unschool my children, is I trust a child’s natural capacity to learn even without professional intervention. Since my general philosophy in life is that every step taken away from our nature carries a steep price, I would prefer to model something as major as my children’s education along a paradigm that follows, rather than in many ways antagonizes, their nature.
Planet Beast 