Dogfooding

As research for Composite, I’ve been reading like a madman of late: physical therapy textbooks, Eastern Bloc Olympic weightlifting research, NFL team training manuals, behavioral medicine medical journal articles, etc.  And, from it all, I’ve been generating reams of notes, studded with an almost endless list of ideas to test out.  Because, as I’ve learned the hard way over the years in the fitness space, there’s often a gap between what works on paper, and what’s actually successful (or even implementable) in the real world.  No matter how much intellectual sense a training concept makes, you still won’t know if it’s an excellent or terrible idea until you actually try it out.

Fortunately, I have two crews of brave and enthusiastic Composite alpha-release guinea pigs, on whom I’ve been able to test things out, with great results. And even before new ideas make it to those two groups, they first get filtered by testing on Jess.  As she’s still obligated to like me even if the workouts I give her suck, and as she’s most definitely not afraid to express her strong opinions to me (on Composite or anything else), she’s ideally suited to the job.  But even before Jess, the first wave of trials happen in my own workouts, using myself as patient zero.  I’d like to think I’m sort of like Salk or Curie, albeit with lower odds of a Nobel prize, but possibly with better abs.

Surprisingly, most of the ideas I’ve been testing out have turned out better than expected.  But every so often, one goes quite wrong indeed.  Which is how I ended up on crutches today, with a sprained left knee.  (Lesson learned: depth jump sprint reaction drills = no.)  Frankly, it’s a pretty minor sprain, so I can make do without the crutches.  But based on the amount of walking in my schedule this week, and the ‘pimp walk’ I was unintentionally doing when crutch-less, it seemed taking weight off the joint for a couple of days might be wise.  Still, I don’t imagine I’ll be on crutches for more than another day or two, and by the end of next week I’m hoping to be back to full health.  And, therefore, back to self-testing further crazy Composite ideas.

Generally speaking, I tell people “no pain, no gain’” is a terrible piece of fitness advice.  But, I guess, at least for my specific purpose here, it seems to be the cost of doing business.  As the inimitable Twain once put it, “you can learn certain things holding a cat by its tail that you can’t learn any other way.”

 

June 26, 2018

Hit the Road Jack

A couple of months ago, I started having pain in my right hip and far-right lower back when I would do heavy back squats.  Then, a few weeks later, it started to happen during deadlifts, too.  Soon, even running was causing hip pain, light cleans or box jumps would send stabs of pain through my back.

I tried stretches, foam rolling, dynamic mobility warm-ups.  I did pre-hab and re-hab progressions.  I focused even harder on my exercise form.  All of which helped a bit.  But not much, and not in a lasting way.

Throughout, I was mystified.  I couldn’t find anything that had changed in my workout, couldn’t point to a traumatic injury, couldn’t spot a movement dysfunction that could have chipped away at me over time.  I started to think perhaps I’d just never figure it out.

But, after another month of puzzling, I realized something had changed.  Due to a shift in schedule, I was suddenly walking much, much less than I had been before.  And I was wearing shoes – less flexible, heeled, toe-smushing work shoes – vastly more often.

So, with nothing else to lose, I started increasing my steps.  Thanks to my schedule, they were almost all indoor steps, often multi-tasking while walking a figure-eight around a room.  (Lesson learned the hard way: if I just walk around a room in a circle, I end up dizzy and nauseous enough after ten or twenty loops that I need to sit down; a figure-eight turns in opposite directions at either end, so I can loop indefinitely without falling over / throwing up.)  But indoor stepping did allow me to take off my shoes, so I walked the majority of those steps barefoot (or, rather, in sock feet).

I determined that I’d fallen to only walking 3,000-4,000 daily steps, so I inched that up by 500 a day, first to 10,000, then (as I was enjoying it) all the way to a daily 15,000.  And, lo and behold, even before I hit that 15k step count, my back and hip pain had completely and permanently disappeared.

Previously, I could have told you about the importance of daily movement, and of walking in particular.  Looking at our ancestors and current hunter-gatherer tribes, I would have said, it’s pretty clear that we evolved to walk 3-5 miles (or, funny enough, 10-15k steps) every single day.  And I would have theorized that not getting that amount of daily walking was one of the underlying drivers of pain and dysfunction in modern life.

But this was the first time in my adult life that I’d fallen to such a low level of daily movement myself, and had directly paid the price.  Which highlighted the big difference between knowing something intellectually, and really understanding it at a visceral level.  I now know, first-hand, what happens if you don’t stay active.  And I can definitively say: the truth hurts.

June 4, 2018

Break it Down

When I was a kid, my parents splurged, and bought the (at the time, rather expensive) Encyclopedia Britannica.  My father had wanted to own it himself as a child, though the purchase was clearly mostly for my benefit, as the heavy volumes lived in my room, taking up the entire bottom rows of my three bookshelves.  And, frankly, I loved it.  As anyone who, in the years since, has fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole can attest, it’s remarkably easy to get engrossed in random encyclopedia entries, whether on how the Tower of Pisa got its famous lean, or on the mechanics required for a snake to swallow and digest animals (including whole people) wildly larger than itself.

The Britannica was divided into three parts: the Macropaedia, which had long-form articles on major subjects; the Micropaedia, which had shorter entries on a far wider array of topics; and, my favorite, the Propaedia, a single, relatively slim volume.

Let’s say you wanted to construct an encyclopedia.  Where would you start?  How would you decide which topics to include?  Britannica’s answer was the Propaedia, a taxonomy of all the world’s knowledge.  Like the phylogenic tree of life, it started from a single root, and sub-divided endlessly: ‘Matter & Energy’ split to ‘The Universe’ then to ‘Galaxies & Stars’ to ‘Extragalactic Radio Sources’ to ‘Quasars.’  ‘History of Mankind’ broke into ‘The Modern World’ then to ‘Western Europe 1500-1789′ to “The European States’ to ‘France’ to ‘The Age of Louis XIV.’  I spent almost as much time poring over that single volume as all the others combined. I loved the structure, the organization.  I loved the way it linked across seemingly disparate fields and bodies of knowledge. I intuited, even at a young age, that the better my framework for the big picture, the more easily I would be able to understand, retain, and connect all the details.

These days, I’ve been thinking about the Propaedia a lot, as I’ve been spending much of my time working on the algorithm for Composite.  The idea is simple: if you’re a professional athlete, or a movie star prepping for a role, you have an excellent, experienced, and educated coach who designs a workout plan, a nutrition plan, a set of lifestyle changes, etc., all tailored specifically to you and your goals.  And those plans, plus accountability to the coach to help you actually stick to them, tend to yield extremely impressive results, as a trip to the ballpark or cinema illustrates.

The rest of us, however, just go for a run, copy workouts from fitness magazines, or hire trainers at local gyms whose primary credentials usually include having played D3 football and being great at yelling “it’s all you, bro, it’s all you!”  None of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, work quite as well.  So, fundamentally, Composite is about leveraging the power of AI (as well as technology in general, plus recent research in sport science and behavioral medicine) to let everyone get the pro athlete/movie star custom treatment—and results.

Composite’s algorithm is a neural network, so it will evolve over time, continuously improving its prescriptions as it learns from members’ results (as measured on things like blood panels, body composition, and benchmark workout times).  But, to set the algorithm up, we had a sort of Catch-22: you can’t train a neural net without a ton of data, but because there’s never previously been a use for that kind of data in the fitness world, it doesn’t really exist (at least not in a central, digital way).

To get around the chicken and egg problem, we’ve had to do some heavy lifting, initially building the algorithm using GOFAI (“good ol’ fashioned AI”), setting the symbol weights entirely by hand.  Doing that, in turn, has meant coming up with taxonomy after taxonomy after taxonomy.  We’ve had to reduce all possible, beneficial exercises, all possible nutritional approaches, all training periodization structures, all healthful lifestyle changes, all stretches and mobilizations and pre-hab movements, etc., into meaningfully structured trees.

Which, on the one hand, is kind of bananas.  But, on the other, has been absolutely the best part of the job.  All of those taxonomies have gone through a crazy number of iterations already, and I still regularly jump out of bed at 3 AM to scribble down an epiphany that sends at least one of them straight back to the drawing board.

Each time I work on those taxonomies, I think back to the Propaedia.  And I’m still not sure: did all that time perusing it change my brain and how I look at the world?  Or did it just so perfectly fit the way I already saw things, and gave me a master class in structured thinking, done rigorously and at scale?

Either way, that book was the best thing I could have had sitting on my bedroom shelf.  And I wonder if my own future kids, skipping around Wikipedia, but unable to hold in their own hands a single, unifying big picture, won’t be missing something beautiful and important as a result.

May 21, 2018

Back to Uni

About 15 years ago, ‘functional fitness’ became a hot trend in the fitness industry.  Suddenly, people everywhere were doing squats on top of BOSUs, bench pressing on stability balls, and doing crazy one-arm, one-leg movements using cable pulley machines.  At the time, I dismissed the trend as garbage.  And, in the years that followed, studies backed that opinion: EMG muscle readings showed that people simply used their muscles less intensely when they used them in weird, unstable, cockamamie ways.

But as fitness expert Alwyn Cosgrove has observed, we tend to overreact to new ideas in the short term, and under-react to them in the long term.  So while the functional fitness trend has largely now passed, I recently read Mike Boyle’s newly updated *New Functional Training for Sports, 2nd Edition*, and I think Cosgrove may be right.  While there was certainly much to disdain about the functional fitness trend, I’m also pretty sure I threw out a valuable baby with that bathwater.

For example, as we’re working with a bunch of Baby Boomers and older adults through Composite, training to prevent falls is an increasing element of our programming.  Previously, I had always thought of that as a ‘software’ question – improving the proprioception needed for balance.  However, it’s increasingly clear to me in practice that the functional guys had it right: it’s not that your brain doesn’t know when your shin isn’t vertical, or when your hips aren’t parallel to the ground; it’s that you don’t have the strength to stabilize them correctly while you’re moving and on one leg.  And, similarly, it’s not that your brain doesn’t try to move a foot to catch yourself if you start to fall; it’s that you don’t have the speed to move that foot fast enough.  While strength falls off at 1% a year as we age, power, the fitness attribute that underlies foot speed, declines twice as quickly.  So making sure we strengthen on one leg – and build unilateral power in particular – seems like a wise training priority.

Or consider “core work,” which often focuses on lumbar flexion (sit-ups) or lumbar rotation (Russian twists). However, as the functional training crowd points out, that’s not really how the body moves in sport or real-world pursuits.  Instead, if you watch carefully, you’ll notice that almost all athletic movement comes from flexion, extension, and rotation at the hips and thoracic (upper) spine.  The lumbar (lower) spine mostly just braces in place, to transmit power.  Therefore, exercises focused on anti-flexion (like roll-outs) and anti-rotation (like Paloff presses and plank reaches) probably better translate out of the gym.

Even the stability ball – a device I’ve long derided – might be worth its salt.  For the past few weeks, I and handful of our athletes have been using them for hamstring curls (back on the floor, feet on the ball, rolling it in and out), and we’ve found they activate the hamstrings in a remarkably intense way (especially for anyone not yet ready to graduate to a full glute-ham developer raise).  Which is to say, I’ll definitely be including the movement in programs going forward.

So, in summary, when it comes to functional training, I now stand corrected.  Possibly even on one foot.

January 22, 2018

Couch Potato Head

“An interesting illustration of the uselessness of a brain in a body without movement is the sea squirt, which spends the first part of its life as an animal moving around, and the second part attaching itself to a rock and then camping out as a plant.  As soon as it settles down, does it use this time as an opportunity to meditate or think about the meaning of life?  No, it eats its brain for the energy.  This should make us very curious about what happens to a human brain in a body that spends too much time on the couch.”

– Todd Hargrove, A Guide to Better Movement

December 20, 2017

Wintertime Sadness

While most people assume that emotions start in your brain, and then spread into your body as physical feelings, cognitive science has long backed the opposite.  It’s called the attributive theory of emotion, and it posits that you first feel the bodily physical sensations, and then your brain notices, interprets, and labels those sensations as emotions.  In one famous study, subjects held pencils in their mouth in one of two different ways, which surreptitiously used the same muscles as either smiling or frowning. After just five minutes, the subjects rated themselves significantly happier or sadder, respectively, than just before they started with the pencil holds.

But many body feelings are fairly nebulous, and could match up with several different emotions.  So your brain also looks at context cues to try and figure out what you’re feeling, and why.  Fear, for example, is physiologically indistinguishable from excitement.  Which, in fact, is the basis for a great Cognitive Behavioral Therapy trick for dealing with anxiety or phobias: if you feel fear in your body (racing heart, sweaty palms, clenched stomach), but then consciously label that feeling as ‘excitement,’ the feeling matches the label well enough that your brain will play along.  So you’re not nervous about giving a speech – you’re excited to share your message.  You’re not afraid of flying – you’re extremely excited imagining how great the vacation is going to be when you land.  (Try it out – it works surprisingly well.)

Recently, I’ve been thinking about that in the context of Seasonal Affective Disorder, the wintertime blues that many people feel, especially in less sunny climes.  During the winter, people are often tired, slow, and low-energy; they want to stay indoors, huddled up in a blanket on the couch.  Because the physical feelings match, we call that feeling sad and depressed.  And so we treat the feeling, either with drugs, or with exposure to intense daylight-spectrum light and mega-dosing of vitamin D (the latter two of which are often as effective as the drugs, in case you want to Google those options up).

But over the past decades, we’ve increasingly realized that a lot of the ‘negative’ physical reactions your body produces actually serve positive purposes.  So if you get rid of those reactions, or substantially tamp them down, it often comes at a longer-term cost.  Consider inflammation – say, as a child’s fever, or in an athlete’s sore quads and hamstrings after a training run.  Sure, if a fever pitches dangerously high, meds to keep it down saves lives.  And if the athlete’s muscle soreness is bad enough to keep her up all night, the lost sleep may offset any upside from the training.  But, at slightly lower levels, that fever is actually helping the child’s body fight off the infection – something it would do less quickly and effectively if he’s given meds to drop his temperature back to normal.  And while a handful of Advil will make our runner feel better today, it will also interfere with the hormone signaling pathway needed to build muscle; in other words, those NSAIDs negate much of the point of going for the training run in the first place.

Human bodies fluctuate cyclically over a number of time periods, from our daily circadian rhythms, to our yearly circannual ones.  And many of the aspects of these cycles are still a mystery.  Though it takes up a third of our lifetimes, for example, we’re still not sure why people need to sleep, or what, exactly, it does for us.  Similarly, we know that there’s a swing over the course of the year – during the spring and summer, we have more energy, need less sleep, can more easily shed pounds of fat; whereas in the fall and winter, we bulk up, conserve energy, and want to curl up and sleep somewhere warm.  While a bunch of that likely stems from a basic evolutionary fact – it was harder to find sufficient calories in winter back in our hunter-gatherer days, so it made sense to hoard them during that time – I strongly suspect there are other physiological reasons for the swing.  Much as a field needs to lie fallow to recover between harvests, perhaps the winter slowdown allows for longer-term recovery in our bodies and brains, much as sleep allows at the daily level.

So, in short, I’m not sure ‘winter mode’ is something we want to cut out entirely, even if we have the tools to do so.  At the same, time I am also sure that calling that winter mode ‘sadness’ and ‘depression’ is a quick way to feel, well, sad and depressed.  So, take a page from the CBT book, and see if you can make that winter shift seem less terrible by smarter labeling.  I’m done with Seasonal Affective Disorder, and am instead referring to it – in my brain to myself, and in conversation with anyone else – as Happy Hibernation Mode.

Embrace the fact that being low-energy in the winter actually feels good – in other words, it’s nothing to be down about.  Happy hibernating!

November 26, 2017

It’s a Lie

This morning, I arrived at the gym feeling like crap.  Tired, sluggish, weak; mostly, I just wanted to go home and get back into bed.  Even carrying the empty bar felt hard.  As a friend used to joke, it seemed like a ‘heavy gravity day.’

Despite my own whiny objections, I buckled down, and starting lifting according to plan.  Lo and behold, I still felt like crap.  But I also managed to hit every one of my lifts.

In the bodybuilding world, a lot of gurus push the idea of “instinctive training” – crafting each day’s workout on the fly, based on what your body tells you it needs.  And, indeed, for some small set of experienced professional bodybuilders, that approach (plus a bucket-full of steroids) seems to work wonders.  For pretty much everyone else, it quickly devolves into blindly wandering the gym, randomly doing whatever exercise someone else happened to have just done nearby.

To be sure, there’s real value in listening to your body.  Don’t be stupid, and if something hurts, stop.  (Or, to quote the orthopedic advice of my old friend and famed physical therapist Kelly Starrett: “If it feels sketchy, it is sketchy.”)  But, for the most part, when people skip workouts, reduce the weight on a lift, or cut the speed or distance on a swim, bike, or run, it’s mostly because they just don’t feel like doing it.

That’s one of the best reasons to hire a good coach: with the distance of an outside perspective, it’s easier to craft workouts based on what’s beneficial, rather than on just what you’d like to do.  Even without a coach, you can simulate some of that yourself (as I do the roughly 50% of the time I write my own programming), by separating the planning and doing by at least several days in time; a week in advance, I’ll wisely assign myself something valuable but unpleasant that I’d otherwise never have chosen the day of.

But, however you get there, ideally, when a workout comes around, you should be able to turn off your brain, and power through.  Even if, like me this morning, you’re not sure you can pull it off.  In fact, you might be right.  But, more often, you’ll be surprised by how well things go once you get started.  As the great weightlifting coach John Broz once told me: “just pick up the weight, bro; how you feel is a lie.”

October 30, 2017

Process, Results

A few days ago, I ran into a friend at the gym. He’s an executive in his mid-50’s, a guy in good shape who takes fitness seriously. When I saw him, he had 315 pounds racked for a back squat. But, he told me, his knees had recently been acting up on heavy squat days. Could I watch the next set, he asked.

I did. And sure enough, my friend’s form was atrocious. Valgus knees and ankles, forward weight shift over his toes, depth about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way to parallel.

“That was a disaster,” I told him.

“Oh, I know,” he replied. “But if I squat with good form, I can’t lift nearly as much weight.”

He was willing to humor me for the sake of his knees, however, so we went back to the basics. Beginning with a 45 pound dumbbell goblet squat, drilling until it looked perfect. Then we went back to an empty barbell, until that looked perfect, too. And then we added weight, ten pounds at a time.

At 135 pounds, his squat looked great.
At 145, it was back to disaster.

“If you want to fix your knee issue,” I told him, “then squat with 135 pounds next time, and only add weight in subsequent sessions, no more than ten pounds from one session to the next, if your squat form still looks this pretty.”

At which point he balked.
“I can’t do that!” he exclaimed. “The guys here will think I can only squat 135 pounds.”
“And they’d be correct,” I told him. “That’s how much you can squat right.”

Still, I understood my friend’s concern. Six months ago, I tweaked my shoulder while bench pressing. For two weeks after, it hurt every time I lifted my arm above my head. And just when I thought it was getting better, concluded I could just power through, I benched again and tweaked it a second time.

So, taking my own medicine, I went back to ground zero. I worked face-pulls, bottom-up kettlebell presses, scapular drills, perfect bench press reps with just the empty bar. And then I slowly built back up, in ten-pound jumps, one workout to the next.

At the end of those six months, I’m now back to using more weight than I was before, and my shoulder feels great. But for the first few months, I dreaded seeing anyone I knew at the gym when I was building back up. Members and trainers I was friendly with would walk past, and I had a nearly irrepressible urge to explain, disclaim.

“Rehab,” I would tell them, gesturing sheepishly at my nearly empty bar.

It’s a hard impulse to fight, and one I see people struggle with all the time. Most people training in any gym are, first and foremost, trying to look cool while they’re training. But there’s a difference between developing a skill, and demonstrating it. Almost by definition, when you’re learning something new, or building strength or endurance, you make progress only when you’re right at your limit, out of your depth, looking terrible and incompetent, but challenging yourself enough to grow.

Which leads to a fundamental choice: you can either impress your buddies in< the gym with your performance, or you can impress the rest of the world later with your results. Put differently, you can look good while you’re working out, or you can look good from your working out.

So choose. Because, in my experience, you can’t really have both.

September 17, 2017

Type 1

Over the last decade, there's been a bunch of new research around the idea that type 1 diabetes might actually be caused by allergic reaction to food. In short, in certain genetically susceptible individuals, specific foods might be the trigger that kicks off the autoimmune attack on islet cells in the pancreas, the core of the disease.

While that's interesting for discovering ways to prevent new cases of type 1 diabetes in the future, given the very slow regeneration of pancreatic beta cells, researchers long assumed that it didn't really apply to people who are already diabetic. Once those cells were gone, they appeared to be gone for good.

However, a recent set of mouse studies, and a follow-up set of studies with human pancreas biopsies, has shown that intermittent use of the Fast Mimicking Diet led to substantial regeneration of beta cells, even in current type 1 diabetics.

It’s all still preliminary stuff, but it’s certainly suggestive of a route to a cure for current type 1 diabetics, and, even better, a safe and non-invasive one. If you or someone you know has type 1 diabetes, keep an eye on this research going forward.

[And, while we’re on the subject, if you or someone you know has type 2 (‘adult onset’) diabetes, the news is even better: we already know it can be reversed by lifestyle change.]

July 24, 2017

It’s the Shit

I get asked a lot of questions about gut bacteria these days, and for good reason; over the last decade, research on the importance of the intestinal microbiome for fitness and overall health has exploded.

Take, for example, one particularly persuasive study, which took fecal bacteria samples from pairs of identical twins in which one twin was lean and one was obese, and transplanted the samples into the intestines of germ-free mice. Lo and behold, the mice with transplanted microbiota from the lean twins stayed lean themselves, while the mice with obese twin microbiota quickly piled on weight.

Similar microbiota transplants between humans are already being used very successfully to fight deadly infections like C. difficile colitis, and are being researched for conditions ranging from multiple sclerosis to Parkinson’s disease.

Which leads to the obvious question: will poop transplants for weight loss be the next big fitness craze?

In short, I hope not. While I strongly suspect that managing our microbiome will be an important part of health in the decades to come, at the moment, we just don’t really know what we’re talking about. Clinical data is still scarce, and possible complications are immense. Even if getting microbiota from your skinniest friend did turn out to be a great diet plan, we still have no idea about all of the other effects of that same bacteria down the line.

And, based on historical record, there’s good reason to be concerned. In the 1950’s, for example, doctors began prescribing transplanted Human Growth Hormone to smaller children deficient in HGH. While the treatment proved effective for spurring growth, it wasn’t until decades later that hundreds of cases of the rare and fatal neurodegenerative Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (colloquially “mad cow disease”) began to crop up in those HGH recipients. Scientists quickly discovered that prions (the cause of CJD) had inadvertently come along for the ride with the transplanted hormone.

So, in short, the microbiome is something we should be keeping an eye on.

And it probably would be wise to start doing the common-sense things that research has begun to show as likely to help your microbiome: eat a whole food diet, and include some pre-biotic (raw garlic, onions, etc.) and pro-biotic (pickled stuff, yogurt, etc.) foods; avoid unnecessary antibiotics; get a dog (seriously!); exercise; manage your stress.

But when it comes to more invasive ideas – whether fecal transplant or even just probiotic supplements (which are currently a bit of a wild west), I’d hold off for now. Whatever the short-term upsides, from my perspective, at least, the long-term unknown risks are just too great.

July 18, 2017