The Best Defense Against a Violent, "Unarmed" Bad Guy...

Is a good guy with a gun.

“This large gentleman just pounding on this lady, closed fist you know multiple times and heavy heavy elbows to the face and neck” says Kreag. 

Kreag has a license to carry a concealed handgun and he served in the U.S. Army for eight years. He worked as a private security contractor in Iraq and he’s a firearms instructor. 

“I was yelling commands at him to stop assaulting her, stop assaulting her.”

"He stopped attacking her and she was screaming, yelling for help and very much hysterical” says Kreag.

The man got out of the car but he was still very angry. 

“Then he turned his attention to the fire arm and was saying ‘don’t shoot me, don’t shoot me.’ I said I’m not going to shoot you, just stay still, don’t do anything crazy. The cops will be here any minute.”

The "large gentleman" (Mr Kreag is clearly being too kind) is MacMichael Nwaiwu.

By the way, is this an unfortunate coincidence?

I put "unarmed" in quotes in the title because the word seems to imply that the person is harmless, which is false.  According to the FBI's annual crime report, in 2012, murderers killed 678 Americans using only their hands and feet as weapons.  That same year, murderers killed 322 Americans using rifles - even those scary "assault rifles".  That's less than half.  Obviously, that doesn't mean that hands and feet are more dangerous than rifles, but it does mean that one should always assume that a violent person is capable of killing, even if that person possesses no weapon other than his/her own body.

It's fortunate that Mr Kreag had his gun at the time of the incident.  Without it, Mr Kreag may have chosen to not intervene.  We don't know how much damage Mr Nwaiwu inflicted on his victim, but it's clear that he would've inflicted much more damage had Mr Kreag not intervened.

If Mr Kreag had intervened without a gun, on the other hand, it seems clear that Mr Nwaiwu would have turned his wrath onto Mr Kreag.  We don't know what would've happened then, but real life isn't a Bruce Lee movie.  Good guys sometimes get curb-stomped.  A gun makes that far less likely.

That being said, good guys with their concealed weapons permits must always remember that a gun is no guarantee of safety either.  It's a tool, not a talisman.  And like every tool, it has limitations.

Strength Training Beats "Cardio" for Fat Loss

We know that strength predicts health and longevity much more accurately than BMI.  And we know that - within a surprisingly broad range - body fat doesn't make much of a difference to health.  Now we have further evidence that strength training is more effective than "cardio" at keeping body fat within healthy levels. 

2014 CrossFit Games Masters Competition: Deadlift Ladder Event

...weight training is the most effective way of keeping abdominal fat in check, compared to other activities such as running or cycling. 

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health measured the activity levels of over 10,000 men aged 40-plus, monitoring their weight and waist circumference over a 12-year period.

2014 CrossFit Games Masters Competition

I'm glad that the researchers chose to conduct their study on men 40 and older, although I wish they'd conducted the study on women, too.  Most researchers conduct fitness studies on healthy young men - typically in their 20s.  People in their 20s don't need as much help staying healthy as people in their 40s.  And the kind of physical activity that produces improvement in a young, healthy 20-year-old may not work for an older person, because the older person can't recover as quickly as a younger person.  As a general rule, older people simply can't handle the kind of training volume younger people can.

They found that those men who spent an extra 20 minutes a day weight training gained less abdominal weight over the course of the study than men who increased the amount of time they spent doing aerobic exercise.

2014 CrossFit Games Masters Competition

 Guess what's even better than strength training alone.

Combining weight training with aerobic exerise led to even better results, the study found. 

Frank Hu of Harvard School of Public Health said: "This study underscores the importance of weight training in reducing abdominal obesity, especially among the elderly. 

"To maintain a healthy weight and waistline, it is critical to incorporate weight training with aerobic exercise."

2014 CrossFit Games Masters Competition

It seems intuitively obvious, doesn't it?  Our bodies are designed to move themselves slowly over long distances, quickly over short distances, and to move heavy external loads over even shorter distances.  It simply makes sense to train the body the way it's designed to work, as opposed to limiting the body to only one time domain and/or modality.

Now, guess which training program covers all those time domains and modalities.  That's right.  CrossFit.

2014 CrossFit Games Masters Competition: Sprint Sled Event.

Unfortunately, although the article's title is "Why weight training is better for your waistline than running", it doesn't actually explain why.  The following video does.  I encourage you to watch the whole thing, but you can skip to the actual explanation at 7:28.



The short version is that when you do "cardio", you burn fat during your training session.  So, if you do "cardio" for an hour, you burn fat for an hour.  When you train for strength, and even more so when you perform high intensity training like CrossFit, you burn sugar during the training session, but you burn fat for hours following the training session as you recover.

The photos I linked above are from the Masters Competition of the 2014 CrossFit Games.  All the athletes that compete in the Masters Division are in their 40s, 50s and 60s.  The video below is a good summary of the competition, and the kind of training these athletes do.


Stay healthy, my friends.