Time On Task

You'll hear me say this from time to time. It's as much a reminder-to-self thing as much as anything, but it bears repeating:

Time on task matters... a lot.

Honestly, I can't think of a single thing where time on task does not matter.

Want to be better at squatting? Squat more.

Want to be more flexible? Stretch and move more.

Want to be better at math? Spend more time doing math!

Is this a revelation? Of course not - it's simply an extrapolation of the SAID (specific adaptations to imposed demands) principle. It's strange because, for whatever reason, people in the fitness, strength, and conditioning fields (and just about every other field for that matter) seem to spend a lot of time and energy trying to AVOID the one thing they often need more of which is time on task.

This isn't the first time I've referenced this chart that appeared on the Supertraining listserve quite a few years back now, but take another look. It reflects a trend towards less total training hours on the part of elite athletes in various sports.

From: Block Periodization: Breakthrough In Sport Training (Supertraining listserve)

I believe there are two takeaways from this chart; one is that training time among elite athletes has indeed changed - we could point to a number of reasons, but likely training and recovery methods, how training time is computed, and a lower tolerance towards work hours in general are not a small influence. The second takeaway is that elite athletes are still training a thousand hours every year! There's a lot of talk about the 10 years/10,000 hours needed for mastery these days, but people somehow gloss over the 2.74-hours-of-training-every-single-day thing. We can say "quality over quantity" and placate ourselves into thinking that somehow, because our practice is mindful, we can get by with fewer hours and more days off in the gym or on the field, but sometimes less is NOT more. Sometimes less is just less. Something to consider...

SQUATTING IS...

Young AND Old

The guy on the left is in his 70s and works as a museum volunteer, teaching youth about dinosaurs.

Squat Talk @ movementlectures.com

There are A TON of great lectures about health, fitness, strength and conditioning at movementlectures.com

I've bought more than a few lectures myself and have enjoyed them immensely - I'll try to put up some reviews sometime soon. Probably the coolest thing about them is the PDF transcript that's included with each one, so that if you wanted to quote a lecture or find a particular piece of information, you could do so easily.

movementlectures.com

We can look to the squat for many answers. We can see the minimum in squatting—the simple rules, if you will, repeated and expressed in most, if not all healthy athletic movement. From the simple rules of a squat, we can produce the bottomless wonders of movement.

Within the squat, what are the essential components, the simple rules we see repeated in healthy athletic movement? We see healthy, uninhibited extension. We see solid posture. We see external rotation of the arms and hips. We see engagement of the glutes and lats. We see solid breathing patterns.

With a poor squat, what broken rules do we see repeated in unhealthy, painful, labored movement? We see dampened extension and overflexion. We see poor posture. We see internal rotation of the arms and hips. We see poor recruitment of the lats and glutes. We see poor breathing patterns.   - Squat Talk

I Like To Squat

Nothing special, but I found this footage of a meet I did a while back. This was one of those first-squat-at-10am-last-deadlift-at-8pm dealee-ohs.

Here's To Ray Bradbury

Great literature teaches us lessons. I've learned a few, and been reminded of many, from Ray Bradbury.

EVERY NIGHT-BLIND library window chattered with cold.

The man, the two boys, waited for the wind to pass away.

Then Will said: "Dad. You've always helped."

"Thanks, but it's not true." Charles Halloway examined one very empty hand. "I'm a fool. Always looking over your shoulder to see what's coming instead of right at you to see what's here. But then, for what salve it gives me, every man's a fool. Which means you got to pitch in all your life, bail out, board over, tie rope, patch plaster, pat cheeks, kiss brows, laugh, cry, make do, against the day you're the worst fool of all and shout 'Help!' Then all you need is one person's answer. I see it so clear, across the country tonight lie cities, towns, and mere jerkwater stops of fools. So the carnival steams by, shakes any tree: it rains jackasses. Separate jackasses, I should say, individuals with no one, they think, or no one actual, to answer their 'Help!' Unconnected fools, that's the harvest the carnival comes smiling after with its threshing machine."...

Jim was at the window now, looking out across the town to the far black tents and the calliope that played by the turning of the world in the night.

"Is it bad?" he asked.

"Bad?" cried Will angrily. "Bad! You ask that!?"

"Calmly," said Will's father. "A good question. Part of that show looks just great. But the old saying really applies: you can't get something for nothing. Fact is, from them, you get nothing for something. They make you empty promises, you stick out your neck and - wham!"

(From Chapter 39 of Something Wicked This Way Comes)

Amazing passage, isn't it? In a country where there is so much, you see so many men and women praying (and paying) for help to eat better, move with less effort, and feel with less pain. In our little diet-slash-fitness-slash-strength-and-conditioning circus, there are all types; the performers, the clowns, the pitchmen, the shills... And, the carnival is only too happy to prey on the desperate and naive.

Ray Bradbury, may you rest in peace. Thank you for all that you have given us.

Related Squat Rx Posts:
Ray Bradbury On Training
Fahrenheit 451

REALLY?

Barbell Squat: The Worst Exercise in Existence?

I don't know if hysterical laughing punctuated with cries of "WhhhaaaaAAAAT?" was the response he was going for, but that's what he got from me.

If nothing else, this guy has increased his readers by the thousands, so good for him.

Maybe I'll send him a t-shirt...

Virtuosity vs. Virtual-osity

I often have conversations with people who've been lifting weights for a few years, put up some adequate numbers, and maybe even trained a few people. In real life, most of these people are humble and open to learning new things, but I'll run across the occasional hard-ass - you know, the trainer that's read every T-Mag article and can recite this year's complete NFL combine results without batting an eye. Their enthusiasm is infectious. Unfortunately, their pretentiousness is tough to take. 

There's a wisdom vs. knowledge thing here that they're missing. For every "Well, I've tried this with quite a few kids and they did well..." you offer, they come back with "WELL, SO AND SO ATTACHED AN ELECTRODE TO 5 PEOPLE'S ASSES AND THE RESEARCH SHOWS...." I'm all for research. I really am. I believe it points us in new directions and raises questions where we might have previously followed blindly. And I believe in the value of this amazing thing we call the internet. I really do. At our fingertips, we have endless resources - when I was growing up, you had to go to a gym to ask questions about "lifting", but now a five-second search will give you hundreds of potentially valuable links. But let's not get ahead of ourselves - a study or two does not completely invalidate training exercises and methods that thousands have found to be effective, and time in the virtual world reading articles and commenting on GymRat89's training log does not, does NOT equal time in the gym training yourself and others. 

From "Virtually You":  

With all this information at our fingertips - information that previous generations would have had to work very hard to track down - many of us feel informed in a diverse range of fields, or at the very least capable of quickly becoming informed in the time it takes to do a few Google searches. But the surfeit of false information circulating online, from the extreme (conspiracy theories on 9/11) to the subtle (the misspelling of a historical figure's name), can make it difficult to separate truth from lies, fact from opinion. In fact, the Internet bestows on many of us a false mastery of knowledge as it convinces us that we are more qualified, educated, or mature than we truly are. In doing so, it facilitates a potentially dangerous social phenomenon - the dissolution of offline hierarchical relationships when it comes to information, be they child-parent, student-teacher, patient-doctor, or layman-expert.

Hailed by many as the "great equalizer," the Internet is a societal leveler the likes of which humankind has never seen before. In the way it spreads information, the Internet evens out the playing field by bringing together people whose lives would otherwise never intersect and whose voices in almost every other setting would carry differential weight, in proportion to their class, race, profession, or age. Here is the analogy that early Internet proponent Howard Rheingold used in 1991 to describe the promise of emerging e-mail technology: "Just as the advent of the Colt .45 revolver during the taming of the West equalized the balance between a small person and a larger one, telecommunications, properly used, can equalize the balance of power between citizens and power brokers." Computer-mediated communications were at long last going to peaceably erase unwarranted privilege, bringing us closer in class and stature to one another than ever before, thereby boosting our democratic system of governance and way of life.
Almost 20 years later, however, one can say that there has been a downside to this "Athens without slaves," as Rheingold called it. A lack of boundaries between groups online has led to situations that challenge the utopian version of democracy, as everybody feels equally informed and qualified. The free flow of information, open access to knowledge, and glut of data can be seen, paradoxically, as threatening our democratic ideals. The life experiences of a fifty-year-old mother, for instance, ideally should help inform decisions made by her fourteen-year-old daughter, particularly in matters on which parents and children may disagree: choice of school, dress code, alcohol, drugs, and sex. Similarly, in matters of health, the medical opinion of a board-certified physician should carry more weight than the smattering of information gleaned, either from Internet sites or by exposure to drug companies' direct-consumer marketing, by a layperson. However, the daughter and the layperson may nurse the illusion, fostered by the Internet, that their opinion is as valid as the mother's or the doctor's, a phenomenon that can impede the efforts of the parent or the doctor to have seasoned, evidence-based advice accepted. An example from my practice helps illustrate the limits of "one man, one vote" in the virtual era.
Ashley, a sixteen-[year]old ballet student, was brought in by her mother to see me for a consultation. Ashley had already decided to prescribe to herself the antidepressant Wellbutrin, ostensibly for depression, and was on the verge of ordering it online from an overseas supplier when her mother insisted on making the appointment. "I'm sure Wellbutrin would help," she told her daughter, avoiding a fight that might have made Ashley reluctant to see a doctor. "But let's at least have a specialist prescribe it. This way we know we're getting the real thing."
Ashley's mother, a medical social worker, had used her maternal and clinical instincts to accurately diagnose her child's problem: not depression but a serious case of anorexia nervosa that required immediate medical attention. Objective signs for the disorder abounded: the smell of vomit in the bathroom shortly after the family's meals, the weight loss and accompanying arrest in menstruation, the obsessive calorie counting, and the number of bookmarked nutrition Web sites on the family computer.
It didn't take long during my first meeting with Ashley to agree with her mother that she was not depressed. Ashley was social, enjoyed ballet, was doing relatively well in school, and smiled broadly when a text message from a friend arrived to her cell phone during the meeting. Yet she quickly blurted out, "Insomnia, poor concentration, poor energy, and anhedonia" in describing to me how she was doing. When I asked her to explain what she meant by anhedonia, a formal clinical term with a Greek pedigree, Ashley grew nervous and impatient. It was obvious that whatever Web site she had consulted to memorize the symptoms of clinical depression apparently did not explain what anhedonia was. (She could have looked up the term on Wikipedia, where it is accurately defined as the "inability to experience pleasure from normally pleasurable life events such as eating, exercise, and social or sexual interaction.") I told Ashley that given her very low weight Wellbutrin was a poor choice for antidepressant, as it could cause serious seizures in underweight people and might lead to further weight loss. That had little effect on Ashley, however, who threatened to buy the medication on the Web if I did not write her a prescription for something she "knew would work for her."
Wellbutrin, I had learned from other patients with anorexia, had a reputation in online eating disorders circles for being an appetite suppressant and is commonly sought out by anorexics to help them lose weight. Just as Ashley learned online how to more effectively induce vomiting ("stick the bottom of a toothbrush down your throat, it'll all come out," according to funadvice.com), she also learned how to manipulate her mother and doctor into prescribing the last medication she needed.
Still, I did not completely close the door on the possibility of prescribing this medication at some point in the future for Ashley, in part to keep her in my clinic and to encourage her to join an eating disorders therapy group. Unfortunately, Ashley barely last two meetings before the psychologist running the group, a colleague of mine, had to ask her to leave. She could not handle Ashley's constant defiance and the distorted, partial knowledge clearly gleaned online that Ashley would use to refute every fact the group leader was trying to communicate - how, for instance, the human race did not evolve to eat 2,000 calories a day; how the research showing that the brain of anorexics shrinks as the disease progresses was "seriously flawed" because it "didn't include a control group"; and how most religions of the world have incorporated some element of fasting into their rituals, so how bad can it be? In addition, Ashley would blurt things out, drown out other participants, and speak out of turn. "She acted like she was in a chat room!" my exasperated colleague commented. "She wouldn't let me do my job of moderating the group."
It's easy to see how children and teenagers like Ashley can pretend to be adults and make adultlike decisions about their health and other important matters without being equipped, experience-wise, to be making those decisions. It is also easy to see why people like Ashley have a  hard time accepting the fact that, in real life, one person's voice sometimes should carry more weight than another's - this is not the case online, where everyone's opinion is equal. Increasingly, whenever their half-facts are challenged, people are quick to accuse others of dismissing the vast knowledge and equal status they have earned through hours of ... surfing.

Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality (pp. 198-201)

Unorthodox Design Ideas For Kettlebells

For a lot of years now, I've been telling my RKC friends that what the world needs is a more eye-catching kettlebell. These are obviously motorcycle helmets, but a little design creativity wouldn't hurt weight training's appeal to the sedentary masses, AND it's fun!

Pictures from http://good.kz/ (link found at www.toxel.com)

Gumption Traps

I first read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" over 20 years ago. Loved it then. Still love it now. A lot of things were lost on me the first time and I'm guessing many are still lost on me even today. The lessons about "gumption traps" could be very relevant to strength training practices and there's a lot to be gleaned from them. The following paragraphs are an introduction to external gumption traps (the things that erode self-efficacy) but Robert Pirsig goes on about the topic for another 15 pages - if you like it, you'll have to check out the book!

A few book-club questions to think about as/after you read:

*Does this passage apply to your training? Is so, how? If not, why not?

*What do you think of the author's thoughts on the "specialist"?

*Do you see parallels between the author's use of a notebook and a gym-rat's training log?

*Have you ever experienced "gumption desperation"?

Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven't got it there's no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it there's absolutely no way in the whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed. It's bound to happen. Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption.
This paramount importance of gumption solves a problem of format of this Chautauqua. The problem has been how to get off the generalities. If the Chautauqua gets into the actual details of fixing one individual machine the chances are overwhelming that it won't be your make and model and the information that fixes one model can sometimes wreck another. For detailed information of an objective sort, a separate shop manual for the specific make and model of machine must be used. In addition, a general shop manual such as Audel's Automotive Guide fills in the gaps.
But there's another kind of detail that no shop manual goes into but that is common to all machines and can be given here. This is the detail of the Quality relationship, the gumption relationship, between the machine and the mechanic, which is just as intricate as the machine itself. Throughout  the process of fixing the machine things always come up, low-quality things, from a dusted knuckle to an accidentally ruined "irreplaceable" assembly. These drain off gumption, destroy enthusiasm and leave you so discouraged you want to forget the whole business. I call these things "gumption traps."
There are hundreds of different kinds of gumption traps, maybe thousands, maybe millions...

In traditional maintenance gumption is considered something you're born with or have acquired as a result of good upbringing. It's a fixed commodity. From the lack of information about how one acquires this gumption one might assume that a person without any gumption is a hopeless case.
In nondualistic maintenance gumption isn't a fixed commodity. It's variable, a reservoir of good spirits that can be added to or subtracted from. Since it's a result of the perception of Quality, a gumption trap, consequently, can be defined as anything that causes one to lose sight of Quality, and thus lose one's enthusiasm from what one is doing. As one might guess from a definition as broad as this, the field is enormous and only a beginning sketch can be attempted here.
As far as I can see there are only two main types of gumption traps. The first type is those in which you're thrown off the Quality track by conditions that arise from external circumstances, and I call these "set-backs." The second type is traps in which you're thrown off the Quality track by conditions that are primarily within yourself. These I don't have any generic name for - "hang-ups," I suppose. I'll take up the externally caused setbacks first.
The first time you do any major job it seems as though the out-of-sequence-reassembly setback is your biggest worry. This occurs usually at a time when you think you're almost done. After days of work you finally have it all together except for: What's this? A connecting-rod bearing liner?! How could you have left that out? Oh Jesus, everything's got to come apart again! You can almost hear the gumption escaping. Psssssssssssssss.
There's nothing you can do but go back and take it apart again... after a rest period of up to a month that allows you to get used to the idea.
There are two techniques I use to prevent the out-of-sequence-reassembly setback. I use them mainly when I'm getting into a complex assembly I don't know anything about.
It should be inserted here parenthetically that there's a school of mechanical thought which says I shouldn't be getting into a complex assembly I don't know anything about. I should have training or leave the job to a specialist. That's a self-serving school of mechanical eliteness I'd like to see wiped out. That was a "specialist" who broke the fins on this machine. I've edited manuals written to train specialists for IBM, and what they know when they're done isn't that great. You're at a disadvantage the first time around and it may cost you a little more because of parts you accidentally damage, and it will undoubtedly take a lot more time, but the next time around you're way ahead of the specialist. You, with gumption, have learned the assembly the hard way and you've a whole set of good feelings about it that he's unlikely to have.
Anyway, the first technique for preventing the out-of-sequence-reassembly gumption trap is a notebook in which I write down the order of disassembly and note anything unusual that might give trouble in reassembly later on. This notebook gets plenty grease-smeared and ugly. But a number of times one or two words in it that didn't seem important when written down have prevented damage and saved hours of work. The notes should pay special attention to left-hand and right-hand and up-and-down orientations of parts, and color coding and positions of wires. If incidental parts look worn or damaged or loose this is the time to note it so that you can make all your parts purchases at the same time.
The second technique for preventing the out-of-sequence-reassembly gumption trap is newspapers opened out on the floor of the garage on which all the parts are laid left-to-right and top-to-bottom in the order in which you read a page. that when you put it back together in reverse   order, the little screws and washers and pins that can be easily overlooked are brought to your attention as you need them.
Even with all these precautions, however, out-of-sequence reassemblies sometimes occur and when they do you've got to watch the gumption. Watch out for gumption desperation, in which you hurry up wildly in an effort to restore gumption by making up for lost time. That just creates more mistakes. When you first see that you have to go back and take it apart all over again it's definitely time for that long break.
It's important to distinguish from these the reassemblies that were out of sequence because you lacked certain information. Frequently the whole reassembly process becomes a cut-and-dry technique in which you have to take it apart to make a change and then put it together again to see if the change works. If it doesn't work, that isn't a real setback because the information gained is a real progress.
But if you've made just a plain old dumb mistake in reassembly, some gumption can still be salvaged by the knowledge that the second disassembly and reassembly is likely to go much faster than the first one. You've unconsciously memorized all sorts of things you won't have to relearn.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (pp. 390-394)

Blogs of Note VIII

Dan John
Dan John has been absolutely killing it lately on his blog. Dan John does NOT do short blurbs full of links, bullet points, and embedded pictures or videos (created by others). He writes full-blown entries, chock full of wisdom, most truly worthy of being called articles, or even "chapters". This article, entitled "Training for Middle Age and Beyond", is great advice for anyone of any age.

Adam "Unbreakable" Glass
I love this post from Adam. One thing you can always count on from Adam is that he will call it like he sees it. This post, "Who Do You Think You're Kidding?", is directed toward people who put their fitness goals on hold...

Glenn Pendlay

True story - I didn't know that Glenn Pendlay was keeping a blog until today. This post, "I'm still pissed (Part III)", is great. I agree completely.

Jim Wendler
I think the first piece I ever read from Jim Wendler was this article: Training High School Athletes on elitefts.net (which was elitefts.com at the time, I think). I've always been a fan of his writing. This piece, Ode and Origins by Paul Carter, is actually written by Paul Carter and it is great, great, great. It's one of those reminders that no matter how "scientific" or "advanced" your training methodology is, nothing can take the place of time and hard, hard work.

Related Squat Rx Posts:

Blogs Of Note I

Blogs Of Note II

Blogs Of Note III

Blogs Of Note IV

Blogs Of Note V

Blogs Of Note VI

Blogs of Note VII

The Final Issue of PL USA

Powerlifting USA

On the newsstands right now, the final issue of Powerlifting USA. It's a very solid magazine - always has been. I will miss all the lifters, competition results, top 100 lists, and writers that Mike Lambert and his crew introduced to us over the years. 

Does the loss of this publication mark a turning point in the strength publishing industry? I don't know but without PL USA on the stands, we are left with little more than dozens of Men's Health/Maxim hybrids. Perhaps someone else will be able to fill the "just-strength-and-numbers" void that is left with Powerlifting USA's passing, but those are some big shoes to fill. 

Thank you Powerlifting USA for 35 years of service to the sport and people of powerlifting. You will be missed.

A Clean and Orderly Training Space

I have the world's messiest desk, but I understand the importance of having a tidy workspace. A clean and orderly space gives you room to breathe. 

The Garage - not bad

When everything is accounted for and in its place, there's freedom to play and be creative. A mess limits options - you gravitate towards what is available, the things you don't have to find under the pile... A clean training area, on the other hand, makes many choices more easily accessible, makes it easier to downsize when you realize this or that piece of equipment is not a good use of space or time, and helps you focus on what matters. A mess is distracting and potentially dangerous - a misplaced plate or kettlebell can be easily tripped upon. The only time I've ever fainted in a gym was when I was 17 years old after a set of pull-ups - I should thank the gym gods (and management) that the floor was clean and free of loose equipment on that day.

Dan John said in this thread (a discussion of the book "Willpower") that "A clean weightroom is a strong weightroom." I absolutely agree. Understand that this does NOT mean you can't be strong in a messy weightroom, simply that a clean weightroom is conducive to clean (and strong) lifts.