What is it About Iceland?

For the first time in its (admittedly short) 10-year history, the women's podium at the 2016 CrossFit Games looked exactly like it did the previous year.

2015 CrossFit Games women's podium
1st: Katrin Tanja Davidsdottir (Iceland)
2nd: Tia-Clair Toomey (Australia)
3rd: Ragnheiður Sara Sigmundsdottir (Iceland)

2016 CrossFit Games women's podium
1st: Katrin Tanja Davidsdottir (Iceland)
2nd: Tia-Clair Toomey (Australia)
3rd: Ragnheiður Sara Sigmundsdottir (Iceland)

A repeat like this has never happened before, so that was surprising, but it wasn't the least bit surprising to see Icelandic women on the podium. In fact, at least one Icelandic woman has stood on the podium every year since 2010, when Annie Thorisdottir (yes, that means Thor's Daughter) took second place, except for 2013, when Annie Thorisdottir took a year off due to injury.

Annie Torisdottir

Only American women have more podium finishes at the CrossFit Games that Icelandic women.

American women have two big advantages. First, CrossFit started in the US - Santa Cruz, CA, to be exact. When the Games began in 2007 all the podium finishers were Americans. The Games only started growing into an international event in 2009. Second, the US has an enormous population from which to draw competitors, and more CrossFit gyms than any other country.

As impressive as the Icelandic women's accomplishments are by themselves, they become mind-blowing when one considers that Iceland has a tiny population of 332,529. By comparison, Wichita, KS has a population of 389,965. That means that a tiny island country in the North Atlantic with a population smaller than that of a mid-sized city in the American Midwest has dominated the women's half of a grueling international multi-sport competition for the last six years. When I compared women's podium finishes to population size (podium finishes per 1 million of population), the other countries practically disappeared.

The Icelandic women's dominance has been a major topic of discussion among those who follow the CrossFit Games.



Icelandic men haven't been nearly as successful in CrossFit. The only Icelandic man to stand on the podium is Björgvin Karl Guðmundsson, who took 26th at the 2014 Games, 3rd in 2015 and 8th in 2016.

Björgvin Karl Guðmundsson

American men are far more dominant in CrossFit with only one non-American champion (Mikko Salo, of Finland, in 2009). Even so, when one considers population size, Iceland eclipses all other countries in podium finishes.

Why don't Icelandic men perform as well at the CrossFit Games as their female compatriots? Maybe because they're too busy with the World's Strongest Man competition.

A photo posted by Björgvin K. Guðmundsson (@bk_gudmundsson) on Jun 15, 2016 at 5:44am PDT

The giant on the right is Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson. Most people know him as The Mountain on Game of Thrones, but he first gained fame by placing 3rd in the 2012 World Strongest Man competition, 3rd in 2013, 2nd in 2014 and 3rd again in 2015. The 2016 competition will take place later this month in Botswana. As you can see from the video I posted above, and Björgvin Karl Guðmundsson's Instagram feed, Icelandic CrossFit athletes train with Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, in large part because the CrossFit Games typically include some Strongman events (though at much lower weights). And also because he's preternaturally strong, and training with someone who's stronger than you are is a great way to get stronger.

Like the CrossFit Games, the US has more podium finishers at the World Strongest Man competition than any other country.

Fortunately, the WSM has been around since 1977, so there is a lot more data to sift. Again, the US has the same advantages in WSM as it does in the CFG (yes, I'm tired of typing both those out), yet tiny Iceland isn't far behind. And when I compared podium finishes to population size...

... no other country even comes close. And, as with the CFG, others have noticed this phenomenon.


The WSM and CFG share a few similarities. They're both strength-based sports. They both feature different events each year, so they both require athletes to adapt to unknown and unknowable challenges. And, as I mentioned above, the CFG often feature events like yoke carries and weighted sled pushes, pulls and drags that are staples of the WSM. But the differences are much greater than the similarities.

So, why does Iceland produce great athletes for these two sports in numbers so wildly out of proportion with its population? Obviously, genetics have a lot to do with it. Every world class athlete is a genetic freak. No amount of hard work or great coaching will turn an ordinary person into a world class athlete.

But, why Iceland, specifically? No other Nordic country is nearly as disproportionately represented in these sports as Iceland. What is it about the Norse who colonized Iceland that makes them such outstanding athletes in these two sports? Is there a cultural component on top of the genetic component?

Unfortunately, I don't have answers to my questions, but maybe someone reading does. If so, please comment. Hopefully, I'll get to watch the WSM later this month and marvel at the near-super-human feats the athletes will perform.

PS: The current WSM champion is American Brian Shaw, who's been on a winning streak since 2009.

PPS: Australian Tia-Clair Toomey will compete in Olympic weightlifting at the XXXI Olympiad in Rio de Janeiro next week. This is the first time any athlete has qualified for both the CFG and the Olympics in the same year.  

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.

Scott Panchick's 500 lb Back Squat

Scott Panchick, three-time CrossFit Games competitor and 5th-place finisher in 2014, recently posted a video of himself squatting 500 lb, a new PR for him.



When you film a squat from a relatively high angle, looking down at the athlete, it's often difficult to tell if the athlete lowered his/her hips below the top of the knee, as they should.  Scott Panchick's squat dropped so low that its below-parallel depth was easy to see even from the relatively high camera angle.

Mr Panchick lists his weight as 190 lb on the CrossFit Games website.  A 263% body weight back squat is an impressive accomplishment, but the reason I posted this here is that I think this example - along with many others - contradicts some criticisms commonly leveled at CrossFit as a training regimen.

The most obvious is that CrossFit keeps people weak.  Clearly, Scott Panchick and all other CrossFit Games athletes are far from weak.  Yes, they are elite athletes, and therefore not representative of all people who train using CrossFit.  However, their programming demonstrates how pretty much anyone can train with CrossFit and get a whole lot stronger.  Mr Panchick's training sessions, like those of most CrossFit Games athletes, typically start with a weightlifting movement, followed by some high intensity conditioning.  Obviously, few of us would want to employ the level of volume or intensity they do, but if a person scales that kind of program to his/her ability level and progressively increases the load over time, that person could continue to improve for years, just as all CrossFit Games athletes have.

That brings me to the second criticism often leveled at CrossFit.  Critics often claim CrossFit only helps novices improve, and that improvement ceases after a few weeks or months of training.  Mr Panchick and other CrossFit Games athletes are clearly far from novices, and yet they continue to improve year after year, just as ordinary athletes of all ages in CrossFit gyms all over the world continue to improve year after year.  That wouldn't be possible if CrossFit only worked for novices and only for a few weeks or months.

Finally, I'll address one criticism that is accurate, but misses the point.  Many who see Mr Panchick's squat will comment that if he focused exclusively on strength training, he'd be even stronger.  That is undoubtedly true.  It is also true that if a decathlete focused exclusively on the 100 m sprint, or the long jump, or the shot put, or the pole vault, or the 1500 m run, he'd be much better at sprinting, jumping, shot putting, pole vaulting or running 1500 m.  But then he could never hope to earn the title of "World's Greatest Athlete".

Likewise, the CrossFit Games does not claim to find the strongest on Earth, but "the fittest on Earth".  Fitness is a combination of ten components of which strength is only one.  It's the most important one, but it's still only one.  Were Mr Panchick to focus exclusively on strength, his competence in the other nine components would decrease.  That's fine for a power lifter who is chasing absolute strength exclusively, but not for an athlete who wishes to maximize fitness as a whole.

Mr Panchick comments on his Instagram video that he is also chasing a five minute mile.  Think about that.  Many people can run a five minute mile.  Many can squat 500 lb.  How many can do both?

As Rich Froning said upon winning his fourth straight CrossFit Games, "This stuff works".

Matt Chan Takes a Bad Spill

Talk about unknown and unknowable!  Multiple-time CrossFit Games athlete, Matt Chan, and his wife Cherie (one of the coaches at my Level 1 course) went on a seemingly benign mountain bike ride and Matt took a spill that almost killed him.


Check out the graphic scene at 4:15!

My favorite quotes from the video:

Cameraman: You're definitely the most jacked dude on Earth using a walker.
Cherie: That's what the nurses thought, too.

...

Cherie: My mother-in-law said, "This is why you guys do CrossFit, because when something like this happens - and you never know when it's going to happen - you can bounce right back, because you're so much stronger.  Look how much better he can support himself because his upper body is so strong."

You got it, Mama Chan.

Muscle Mass Predicts Longevity Better Than BMI

I'm on record stating that BMI is a crock.  I arrived at that conclusion through reasoning, not scientific research.  But now there is scientific research that demonstrates that BMI is a poor predictor of longevity, and that muscle mass is a better predictor of longevity.

Doctors routinely measure a patient's body mass index, or BMI. And if that weight-to-height ratio points to obesity, the doc might prescribe exercise, to shed the extra pounds. But when it comes to longevity, a focus on weight loss may be misplaced. Because BMI isn't actually a very reliable indicator of life span. A more useful measure, some physicians say, might be muscle mass. 

Researchers analyzed BMI and muscle mass data from more than 3,600 seniors in a long-term study. And they tracked which seniors had died, a decade later. Turns out BMI wasn't much good at predicting chance of death.

But muscle mass was: more muscle meant better odds of survival. The study appears in The American Journal of Medicine. [Preethi Srikanthan and Arun S. Karlamangla, Muscle Mass Index as a Predictor of Longevity in Older-Adults]

From the abstract:

Objective
Obesity (as defined by body mass index) has not been associated consistently with higher mortality in older adults. However, total body mass includes fat and muscle, which have different metabolic effects. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that greater muscle mass in older adults is associated with lower all-cause mortality. 

Methods
All-cause mortality was analyzed by the year 2004 in 3659 participants from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III who were aged 55 years or more (65 years if women) at the time of the survey (1988-1994). Individuals who were underweight or died in the first 2 years of follow-up were excluded to remove frail elders from the sample. Skeletal muscle mass was measured using bioelectrical impedance, and muscle mass index was defined as muscle mass divided by height squared. Modified Poisson regression and proportional hazards regression were used to examine the relationship of muscle mass index with all-cause mortality risk and rate, respectively, adjusted for central obesity (waist hip ratio) and other significant covariates. 

Results
In adjusted analyses, total mortality was significantly lower in the fourth quartile of muscle mass index compared with the first quartile: adjusted risk ratio 0.81 (95% confidence interval, 0.71-0.91) and adjusted hazard ratio 0.80 (95% confidence interval, 0.66-0.97). 

Conclusions
This study demonstrates the survival predication ability of relative muscle mass and highlights the need to look beyond total body mass in assessing the health of older adults.

I probably shouldn't have read the comments to the Scientific American article, but I did, and they are sadly typical of the kind of ignorance, laziness and plain stupidity one encounters on the internet.

Jerzy v. 3.0. March 21, 2014, 7:23 AM
Low muscle mass in elderly people may mean that all their systems are falling already. Questionnaire about exercise might be more meaningful. Correlation doesn't imply causation, sorry.

jtdwyer to Jerzy v. 3.0. March 21, 2014, 7:34 AM
Exactly! What's most important here is that BMI is a (loosely) quantifiable indicator of lifestyle health for children and young adults - for whom lifestyle factors contribute most greatly to long term health and survival.
Unfortunately, increasing muscle mass in the elderly is not likely to reduce morbidity! 

The responders obviously didn't read the abstract, because the answer to their objection about frailty in old age, near death is right there where I highlighted it in bold.  The researchers measured the subjects' muscle mass index when they were 55 (men) or 65 (women) years old between 1988 and 1994, not when they died.  They analyzed the causes of mortality in 2004.  They also eliminated all subjects who were underweight in the first two years after the survey to eliminate individuals whose "systems are failing already".

Worse still, the responders obviously didn't even bother to read the article to which they responded.

There's no cause-and-effect here—just correlation for now. But study author Preethi Srikanthan, of U.C.L.A., has this recommendation: "Get up and start moving. Focus on trying to maintain the maximum amount of resistance training that you can, and stop worrying so much about dropping calories." Which could take a little weight off your mind, too.

Jeeze.

Anyway, Dr Srikanthan's advice isn't all that helpful.  How exactly does one "get up and start moving" and "focus on trying to maintain the maximum amount of resistance training that you can"?

People gain muscle and strength most easily in their teens, twenties and thirties.  After that, a person's hormone profile makes it increasingly more difficult.  The solution then, is to increase ones muscle mass as much as healthfully possible while young and maintain it as much as possible as one ages.  But how?  And what if one is already past 50?  Is it too late?

One shouldn't expect a physician to have the answer (it's not their specialty) and Dr Srikanthan doesn't, but that's OK, because Mark Rippetoe does.

Strength — as well as a tolerance for childish nonsense — is the thing we all lose as we age. Squatting down, standing back up, putting things overhead, pulling things up the driveway, loading the groceries, wrestling with the grandkids, teaching the dog who’s boss, mowing the yard, putting the broken lawnmower in the truck again: simple physical tasks we took for granted years ago are often problems for older, weaker people, as well as a source of potential injury that can be expensive and debilitating. 

Source: PJ Media

For most of us, this happens because of inactivity. If you do not use your muscles to produce enough force to maintain their ability to do so, it shouldn’t be surprising that they become less capable of doing it. And walking, running, riding a bicycle — physical activities whose performance is not limited by strength for even moderately active people — cannot increase or even maintain strength.

So, how does one fix this problem?

The absence of skeletal loading is typical for older people, since we now hire the heavy work done instead of doing it ourselves. And just like muscles, bones adapt to the “stress” of being unloaded by getting thinner and less dense. Running is not a weight-bearing exercise in the sense that strength training is. It’s just a “you-bearing” exercise, and the impact of repeated footfalls affects only the legs. In fact, people sensitive to impact have far fewer problems with the static nature of barbell training than they do the repeated impacts of running. A barbell sitting on the shoulders or held overhead in the hands loads the skeleton in a way that other exercises cannot do, and a strength training program always results in the preservation of bone density. Coupled with the strength necessary to control your balance, this is the best insurance against the tragic and often fatal pelvic fracture that an older person can acquire. 

Source: PJ Media

But the loss of strength can be slowed down quite a bit, and for older people who have never trained before, a vast amount of improvement can take place in a relatively short span of time. I have trained many older competitive “masters” lifters who started out as disinterested gym members and then experienced a sudden change of attitude when their strength doubled with six months of lifting weights. These people will tell you about the difference strength training — not running — has made in their lives. 

Here's a quote from the 3rd edition of Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training.

Weight training is precisely scalable to the age and ability of the individual lifter... We have 11-pound bars - or even broomsticks - for kids to start lifting with... This logic also applies to every group of people who might be viewed as a "special population" - the frail elderly, people with skeletal and muscular disease, the completely sedentary, the morbidly obese... In fact, the adaptation to weight training is precisely the adaptation that these special populations need... (pages 322-323)

For further details, read the rest of Rippetoe's articles on PJ Media, then get the book.

Finally, the subject of BMI reminded me of this.

My life insurance policy went up $98 a month after my BMI was checked. Blood work, body fat, overall fitness.....not important. @CrossFit
— Jason Khalipa (@JasonKhalipa) December 14, 2013

This is Jason Khalipa.

Jason Khalipa BMI = 31 (obese)

See what I mean?  BMI is a crock.

Lauren Fisher at the 2014 Junior World Championship

Those female weightlifters sure are bulky, right, ladies?

Earlier, I wrote about CrossFit athlete Lauren Fisher sweeping her weight class at the 2014 USA Weightlifting Junior National Championship.  She also earned the title "Best Female Lifter" at that competition.  It would be an amazing accomplishment for anyone, but it's even more impressive for
Ms Fisher, because she's not exclusively an Olympic weightlifter.

“I do a lot of Olympic lifting, but I don’t do as much as most of these lifters do.” ~ Lauren Fisher

Unfortunately, the US is not as competitive on the world weightlifting stage as a country of its size should be.  On the men's side, I think that's primarily because the most genetically gifted power athletes in the US go to the NFL (where they stand to make millions) not to the USAW (where they'd have to keep a "day job" [night job?] to make ends meet).

Of course, there is no women's equivalent of the NFL, so that reason may be invalid.



This month, Ms Fisher competed at the Junior World Championship of Weightlifting.  She took 10th in the 63 kg (138.6 lb) weight class.  She weighed in at 60.53 kg (133.17 lb), and is probably the only woman I've ever read complain about losing weight.

60.15... I'm losing weight here @cjinvictus! 😩
— Lauren Fisher (@ltfisher12) June 20, 2014

Ms Fishers lifts went as follows:

• Snatch: 75 kg (165 lb), 79 kg (173.8 lb) [fail], 79 kg (173.8 lb) [fail]
• Clean and jerk: 102 kg (224.4 lb), 107 kg (235.4 lb), 110 kg (242 lb)
• Total: 185 kg (407 lb) 

This time, her American teammate, Martha Ann Rogers, beat her by one place.  Ms Rogers's lifts went as follows:

• Snatch: 88 kg (193.6 lb), 91 kg (200.2 lb) [fail], 91 kg (200.2 lb) [fail]
• Clean and jerk: 98 kg (215.6 lb), 102 kg (224.4 lb), 104 kg (228.8 lb) [fail]
• Total: 190 kg (418 lb)

The first place finisher was Diana Akhmetova of Russia (big surprise).  Her lifts went as follows:

• Snatch: 102 kg (224.4 lb), 106 kg (233.2 lb), 108 kg (237.6 lb)
• Clean and jerk: 124 kg (272.8 lb), 126 kg (277.2 lb), 128 (281.6 lb)
• Total: 236 kg (519.2 lb)

See what I mean about the US not being as competitive as other countries in weightlifting?  Still, a 10th place finish in a world championship is outstanding, and even more so for someone who doesn't specialize in the sport.

Here's a video clip of Ms Fisher's opening clean and jerk.



This clip is of her final clean and jerk.


Holding 242 lb overhead isn't easy when you weigh a mere 133 lb.  Notice how her midsection moves around as she waits for the judges to give her the signal that she executed a good lift.  Every muscle underneath the bar (i.e., all of them) is fighting to keep the bar balanced over her midline, which is a perfect example of why isolation movements waste your time.

Ms Fisher recently placed third in the 2014 CrossFit Southern California Regional competition, and qualified for the CrossFit Games.  Here's a short video clip of highlights from the competition.



You can watch a much longer summary here.



All the current elite CrossFit athletes transitioned into CrossFit after competing in some other sport.  Most of the top female athletes are former gymnasts.  Lauren Fisher is the first of a new generation of elite CrossFit athletes.  She started training with CrossFit when she was 12.  She used to play soccer and other sports back then.  She's been training exclusively with CrossFit since she was 16.  Now at 20, she's one of the best examples of CrossFit's efficacy as a training program.  The next few years should be exciting, as more kids who grew up training with CrossFit make it onto the international stage.

UPDATE: The Olympic weightlifting enthusiasts at Hokkgrip posted two more videos of Ms Fisher on their Instagram page.

Isolation Movements Waste Your Time

Hang around people in the fitness industry long enough, and you'll undoubtedly hear/read the term "muscle imbalance".  Muscles apply tension on joints, and that tension keeps joints operating like they're supposed to.  But some athletic pursuits strengthen the muscles that apply tension on one side of a joint more than their opposite counterparts.  That's an imbalance.

For example, long distance runners' hamstrings are often weaker than their quadriceps.  The difference in tension between the hamstrings and quads often results in knee injuries after years of running.

The conventional method of balancing the strength of muscle groups acting on opposite sides of a joint is to isolate the muscle groups and exercise them individually, often using machines.  Most physical therapists would advise a long distance runner with weak hamstrings to strengthen the quads and hamstrings separately with leg extensions and leg curls.

But that brings up a fairly obvious question.  Or, it should, anyway.  How does an athlete performing leg extensions and leg curls know if  his/her quads and hamstrings are balanced?  How does he/she know if they are operating as they are designed to?  Put simply, he/she can't know.  It's impossible.  Because the movements he/she is performing are movements his/her body is not designed to perform.  In fact, the human body can't perform those movements without the assistance of machines that were invented in the 1970s.

So, how can an athlete strengthen his/her quads and hamstrings evenly and help prevent knee injuries?

Simple.  Squat.

Unlike leg extensions and leg curls, the squat is a natural movement our bodies are designed to perform.  Because of that, when an athlete performs a squat correctly, all the muscles involved in the squat are automatically balanced.  The athlete doesn't need to think about which muscles to "fire" (I hate that term, by the way) because his/her nervous system does it instinctively.

You can find the following illustration on page 19 of the third edition of "Starting Strength".

Figure 2-11, page 19, Starting Strength Basic Barbell Training 3rd Edition

It demonstrates how the quads and hamstrings work together to help perform the squat.  As helpful as this illustration is, however, I recently ran across a video that I think makes this point much more effectively.



In the video clip above, CrossFit athlete Brooke Ence performs the squat with excellent technique, and you can watch the quads and hamstrings engage, contract and stretch in perfect concert with each other.  And it's not just her quads and hamstrings.  Her hip adductors, tensors, glutes, etc. work together to flex and extend her hips and keep her knees pointing over her toes.  Simultaneously, her abs and the muscles in her back maintain proper spine alignment and thus transfer force from the ground all the way to the bar.  And every muscle from the bar to her feet works to keep the weight balanced and centered over her feet.

That's why isolation movements waste your time.  It would take hours to train all those muscle groups by isolating each of them.  A 5x5 set of squats does it in minutes.  And even if you did manage to train all those muscle groups by isolating them, you'd never know if they were really in balance with each other.

Are there cases in which isolation movements are not a waste of time?  Sure.  Competitive body builders need isolation movements to compete in their sport.  Besides, they get judged on appearance, not performance.  Also, if an athlete is injured and can't perform compound movements like the squat, it's better to do something than nothing.

If, however, an athlete is not injured and wants to improve performance and prevent injury, compound movements - squats, deadlifts, presses, the Olympic lifts, etc. - are the way to go.  For such an athlete, isolation movements are an unnecessary, counterproductive waste of time.

Champion Boxer Trains With CrossFit Coaching Staff

Robert "The Ghost" Guerrero has an incredible resume.

Robert Joseph Guerrero (born March 27, 1983 in Gilroy, California) is an American professional boxer. Nicknamed The Ghost, he is the current interim WBC welterweight champion. He is also a former IBF Super Featherweight world champion, a former interim WBA and WBO lightweight champion and a former two-time IBF featherweight champion. He vacated the IBF Super Featherweight belt due to his wife's battle with leukemia. Guerrero's coach is Ruben Guerrero. He is managed by both Bob Santos and Luis Decubas Jr.

In case you weren't counting, those are six different championships in four different weight classes.  After going undefeated since 2006, he lost to Floyd Mayweather on 4 May 2013.

Apparently, Guerrero thought part of the reason he lost to Mayweather is that - in stepping up to a higher weight class - he simply could not out-fight a bigger, stronger athlete who is also arguably one of the most talented boxers ever.

He doesn't explain how, but Guerrero happens to know Dave Castro, former Navy SEAL and CrossFit HQ's programming director.  Castro somehow convinced Guerrero to make CrossFit his strength and conditioning program.  Warning: cursing ahead.



Castro chose Brian "Tosh" Chontosh to train Guerrero.

Major Brian R. Chontosh (born 1974 in Rochester, New York) is a retired United States Marine Corps officer who was awarded the Navy Cross for his heroic actions during the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. At the time, he was a platoon commander for Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division.

You can watch part of a presentation Tosh gave to the American Society of Exercise Physiologists here.



If I could choose anyone to coach any athlete, I think the first thing I'd do is ask Kelly Starrett to identify inefficiencies in his movement and fix them.  Here's a video of Starrett explaing pull-up mechanics.



Tosh did that, but Starrett is the master when it comes to the mechanics of athletes.  Also, boxers need to stay loose to be quick, and Starrett is the the mobility guru.

I like that Castro brought in Chris Spealler.  Spealler wrestled in college, so he's well acquainted with combative sports.  Perhaps even more importantly, the CorssFit Games have no weight classes, and at 5'5" and 150 lb, Spealler is accustomed to using efficiency to beat much bigger, stronger athletes.

You can watch a perfect example of that in this video of the 2010 CrossFit Games event named "Amanda", which pairs two very technical movements, muscle-ups and snatches.


Where bigger, stronger athletes muscled their way through those movements, then fatigued near the end and were no longer able to do so, Spealler's impeccable technique made him more efficient, wasting much less energy and carrying him through the end with what looks like ease (it isn't, but Spealler makes it look easy).

Spealler is also an outstanding coach, which you can see from the Guerrero video.  I really would've liked to see Spealler as Guerrero's strength and conditioning coach.  Anyway, I'm not as familiar with Tosh, but I'm sure he's doing a great job.

My favorite part of the Guerrero video, though, is where they talk with his head coach (and father), Ruben.

I like what I see... he's using his hips.  He's bending, punching up, and that's more explosive right there... And before it was really hard to get him to do that.  He wouldn't really do it.  He would do it, but only when I told him to do it. 

At the CrossFit Level 1 seminar I attended, the coaches preached over and over that the most powerful movements begin at the hips and radiate outward to the extremities.  That is true whether one trows a ball, swings a bat or throws a punch.  Spealler makes that point very clear in the video.  The best way to train that physical adaptation (regardless of ones sport) is to first strengthen the hips using squats and deadlifts, then increase power and coordination with the Olympic lifts.  Sport-specific training then applies the adaptation to the skills necessary to compete in the sport.

CrossFit HQ makes some big claims about what CrossFit can do for an athlete, and they've always insisted on testing their claims.  The CrossFit Games are the ultimate testing ground for those claims, but few world champions have been willing to apply CrossFit to their training.  That makes sense.  After all, if their current programming made them champions, changing it could mean flirting with disaster.

Robert Guerrero will fight Yoshihiro Kamegai on 21 June 2014 at the StubHub Center in Carson, CA, where the 2014 CrossFit Games will take place from 25-27 July, appropriately enough.  We'll get to see then if CrossFit can really make a world champion even better.

Actually, we'll really get to see that if/when Guerrero fights Mayweather again.  Good luck, Ghost!

Can we mere mortals who'll never be world champions at anything learn from Guerrero's training?  Yes.  Tosh evaluated Guerrero's movement, identified inefficiencies and weaknesses, then spent a lot of time training him on technique before going heavy or adding a lot of volume.

CrossFit HQ emphasizes over and over that we should work on technique first, then add intensity, then add volume.  Too many coaches and athletes neglect that progression with disastrous results.  They skip right over technique, jump head first into intensity or - even worse - volume, and injure themselves.  Then they blame CrossFit, even though they failed to follow CrossFit's prescription.

So, remember, whether you're a champion (like Guerrero) or ordinary (like me), the progression and priority goes:

1. Technique
2. Intensity
3. Volume

Happy training! 

More Rippetoe on PJ Media

I haven't written much the last few weeks, and in the mean time, Mark Rippetoe wrote three more articles in his series at PJ Media.  So, let's take a look at them in chronological order.  First, Coach Rip engages in a bit of heresy.

Not everybody that goes to the gym wants to lose weight. 

This may come as a surprise to some of you who either need to lose a few pounds or think everyone wants to be skinny. Many underweight men would love to be bigger, stronger, and more physically imposing, and gaining muscular body weight is a simple process. 

Popular culture is currently at war with the notion that a man should be big and strong, because popular culture is at war with the idea of independence and self-sufficiency, and a big strong man literally embodies the concept. 

We are inundated daily by print and video advertising, as well as by essentially every non-action/adventure film, with images of men who weigh about 150 pounds at 5’9” (that’s 10 stone 10 for the Brits, and about 68 kg at 175 cm for the rest of Europe). The image of Obama’s “Pajama Boy” is burned indelibly into the national conscience, but it made a very small blister. 

Ah yes, Pajama Boy, the ideal "Liberal" "man" - small, weak and completely dependent on government.

If you doubt Coach Rip's assessment of the popular desire to keep men weak, recall celebrity fitness guru Tracy Anderson, whose weakness regime, in which women never lift more than three pounds and men never lift more than ten pounds, receives plenty of breathlessly adoring media coverage.

Coach Rip goes on to explain his program for gaining strength and body weight, which in the simplest terms amounts to lifting big, eating big and getting lots of rest.

You go to the gym three days per week, and you do a basic workout that consists of squats, overhead presses, bench presses, deadlifts, and power cleans. You squat every workout, alternate the two press variations, and deadlift or power clean every workout. The lifts are easy to learn, and barbells are commonly available in gyms all over the world — and can be purchased for use in a home gym. Sets of five reps have proven to work best for our purposes. 

... 

The things your body needs to recover from the work are food and rest — lots of both. This is really the hard part. Most people find it easier to train heavy than to eat enough to both recover from the training and to build the new tissue that adaptation to the work requires. If you want to do a program like this for muscular weight gain, you have to eat more than you want to, more than you’re accustomed to eating — perhaps as much as 6000 calories per day for the few months the program will take.

He's absolutely right.  The gym work is the easy (and fun) part.  It's the recovery that gets me.  Getting a minimum of eight hours of sleep per day is almost impossible for me.  And eating that much is really difficult.  If you're a naturally skinny dude like me, that means eating a lot of fat, because fat is the most calorie-dense macro nutrient.  At least it's tasty!

But what if you're not a naturally skinny dude?  What if you need to lose some fat?  Coach Rip covers that in the comments.

Basically, a man who is already overweight (fat) is in a completely different anabolic state than a skinny underweight man. We advise that fat guys do the program on what is basically the Paleo diet, at about 3000kcal/day, as opposed to the advice for underweight guys, which is 4 meals/day and a gallon of whole milk. 

By the way, I'm lactose intolerant, so drinking a gallon of milk per day would kill me!  Fortunately, I've discovered that I can drink half and half or heavy cream without trouble.  Don't ask me why.  I don't understand it.  Also, the extra fat means I don't have to drink as much of it.

What about women?  Coach Rip doesn't address the ladies in this article, though he does promise in the comments to do so later.  I've never met a woman who actually wants to gain muscle mass, but some do for athletic reasons.



Do read the whole thing.

In the second article, Coach Rip addresses my favorite lift - the deadlift!

The deadlift may be the simplest and easiest exercise to learn in all of barbell training. You pick up a loaded barbell and set it back down, keeping the bar in contact with your legs the whole way.

That's probably why it's my favorite.

“Kinetic chain” is an exercise term that refers to the musculoskeletal components (the “links”) of an exercise between the load (the barbell) and the base of support (your feet against the floor). The kinetic chain in the deadlift is essentially the entire body, and everything between hands and floor is doing its anatomically-determined proportion of the work of moving the bar

....

Here’s the best part about barbell training: if you use good technique, your anatomy sorts out each body part’s contribution so that you don’t have to. 

These large exercises — essentially normal human movement patterns loaded with a barbell to make them progressively heavier — eliminate the need for dozens of smaller exercises, and the strength you obtain is directly applicable to your job of being an active human. 

That's why, as Coach Rip stated in an earlier article, isolation movements are a waste of time.

Unfortunately, the deadlift inspires fear in many people.  After all, there really is a risk of injuring ones spine during a deadlift attempt.  However, as Coach Rip explains, good technique is the key to safety.

Source: PJ Media

Exercise strengthens muscles. If an exercise requires that you use certain muscles to perform the movement, and the movement is performed correctly, then the exercise strengthens all the muscles used in the movement as you lift progressively heavier weights. Doing it wrong doesn’t count, because poor technique means some part of the kinetic chain didn’t do its job — it failed to do the work, and therefore didn’t get strong. The use of less-than-perfect technique allows some of the muscles to weasel out of doing their job, then they fail to get strong, and then they cannot do their job. 

In other words, if you want a strong back - and you should, if you want to protect your spine - you need to deadlift.  People of any age or athletic ability can perform deadlifts safely as long as they do so with good technique.  Even pregnant women can.  Aimee has through two pregnancies now.

Here's a side note on the subject:

The world’s second-best performance on Open Workout 14.3 was set by a 39-year-old athlete from Buford, Ga.
...
Steven Platek completed the same number of reps as worldwide winner Austin Malleolo, but fell behind on the tiebreak time. Malleolo finished his last set of box jumps in 7:07, while Platek finished them in 7:17.

By Workout 14.3, they mean the third workout of the 2014 CrossFit Open; the first step toward the 2014 CrossFit Games.  Workout 14.3 is a deadlift-intensive event.  You can watch a demo here.


Most men start falling apart physically in their 30s.  Mr Platek - and thousands like him - prove that isn't necessary, and strength training is the key to preventing that from happening.  This was my favorite part of the article:

Four years ago, Platek wouldn’t have been excited by a workout with a lot of deadlifts. The former self-described meathead hurt himself deadlifting in his old globo gym, and thought his heavy lifting days were over.
...
It wasn’t until a friend suggested he try CrossFit that he eventually started to lift again and work on correcting his technique.
...
Now, after years of deadlifting and focusing on technique, his deadlift one-rep max is somewhere in the range of 625 lb.

Again, good technique is crucial.  Read both articles in their entirety.

The latest article in Coach Rip's PJ Media series covers the strict overhead press.

Pressing a barbell overhead is one of the oldest exercises in the gym. It might well have been the first exercise invented after the first barbell was discovered. Since it is performed while standing with the bar in the hands — after the bar is cleaned from the ground to the shoulders, or taken from the rack at shoulder height — the entire body is involved in the exercise. From the floor to the hands, the job of pressing the bar overhead is shared by all the muscles in the body.

Notice a pattern here?  Every movement trains the entire body.

Due to a poor understanding of the mechanics of the movement, doctors and physical therapists commonly advise against performing this perfectly natural and perfectly safe exercise. The alleged problem is an injury known as “shoulder impingement,” and nothing could be further from the truth. The correctly performed press (incorrectly-performed exercises do not count) is not only perfectly safe for the shoulders — more importantly, the press is the best exercise for keeping shoulders strong and injury-free.

There's another pattern.  Ignorance of technique leads people to blame injuries on a movement that actually prevents injuries by strengthening the muscles around a joint.  A devotee of kettlebell training once told me the human body isn't designed to lift heavy things overhead with both hands, which is hilarious.  But even educated people (doctors and physical therapists) make similar mistakes.

Source: PJ Media

...what is the normal daily role of a “rotator cuff” muscle, and does it perform this function all by itself? Does it make your shoulder externally rotate, and that’s all? Or does it primarily function as one of several muscle groups that stabilize the head of the humerus in the glenoid, while also externally rotating the arm when you’re in a physical therapy office, lying on your side with a two-pound chrome dumbbell in your hand? The rotator cuff muscles are just another muscle group that helps hold the shoulder together, and they are best trained — and rehabbed — while performing this function. 

The press is precisely the movement that uses all the shoulder muscles in this manner. Since they are functioning simultaneously with the other muscles that press the bar overhead, they are both strengthened with and protected by the rest of the muscles that operate the shoulder girdle. This is their normal function — synergy, not isolation, and the best way to make them strong and healthy. 

This training philosophy is diametrically opposed to that which is most popular today - sitting at enormously complex, expensive machines and isolating the smallest muscles possible.  But if you think about it, it makes a whole lot more sense.

CrossFit Athlete Wins Gold at 2014 USAW Junior Nationals

“I do a lot of Olympic lifting, but I don’t do as much as most of these lifters do.” ~ Lauren Fisher

CrossFit athlete, Lauren Fisher, took three gold medals in her weight class (63 kg = 139 lb) and won best female lifter at the 2014 USAW Junior Nationals.

• snatch (75 kg = 165 lb) 
• clean and jerk (102 kg = 225 lb) 
• total (177 kg = 390 lb)

When a generalist beats a bunch of specialists at their specialty, you know she's doing something right.

Source: Hook Grip

A little background on Ms Fisher.


UPDATE: Ms Fisher finished 10th at the 2014 Junior World Championship - amazing for an athlete that doesn't specialize in Olympic weightlifting, from a country that isn't very competitive in Olympic weightlifting.

The Link Between Health and Fitness

I'm very pleased to see that Mark Rippetoe, of "Starting Strength" fame, is writing for PJmedia.com.  That means I don't have to soil my computer by going to the Huffington Post to read his articles.  You can read his first two articles for PJ Media here and here.

In the first article, he made a statement that really caught my eye. 

As we grow older, one of the primary regrets is that we can’t do the things we used to be able to do. Staying strong solves many of these problems. 

Staying strong also prolongs life, which is a good thing if you’re strong enough to enjoy it. A 2008 British Medical Journal meta-analysis showed that strength levels correlated better with longevity than any other parameter. Better than BMI, and better than cardiorespiratory fitness. 

Stronger people live longer. Which is very interesting considering the fact that we are so often told how important it is to walk/jog/bike, and that we are almost never told to do our deadlifts and squats.

games.crossfit.com: click to enlarge

A quick Google search resulted in the BMJ link to the study.  The researchers conclude...

This review shows the value of objective measures of physical capability as predictors of subsequent mortality in older community dwelling populations. 

Rippetoe's comment and the researchers' conclusion remind me a lot of something Greg Glassman (CrossFit CEO) said.

Health can now be concisely and precisely defined as increased work capacity across broad time, modal, and age domains. Work capacity is the ability to perform real physical work as measured by force x distance / time (which is average power). Fitness is this ability in as many domains as possible. 

... 

Fitness can be graphed in two-dimensions with duration of effort on the x-axis and power on the y-axis. At each duration, we average your power capacity across a variety of modal domains (skills and drills). This creates a power curve, the area under which is your work capacity across broad time and modal domains (aka fitness). 

We can now add a third dimension to this graph, the z-axis, which is age. By reassessing your two-dimensional fitness at various times throughout your life, we graph the form of a solid. The power curve takes on the shape of a plateau or blanket. This three-dimensional graph is a defining measure of health. Health, therefore, is nothing other than sustained fitness. 

Both those statements coincide with a study published in Science Daily that fitness increases longevity by warding off frailty.

Most participants (7183) reported fairly high relative fitness at the start of the study compared with 1019 who were frail. These relatively fit people generally stayed healthy and those who were frail at the start were most likely to die. As participants aged, their frailty level increased.

As Coach Glassman said, "What puts people in nursing homes?  It's loss of functional capacity."

A Brazilian study published in 2012 concluded that...

...aerobic fitness is strongly related to survival, but our study also shows that maintaining high levels of body flexibility, muscle strength, power-to-body weight ratio and co-ordination are not only good for performing daily activities but have a favorable influence on life expectancy.

Aerobic endurance, flexibility, strength, power, coordination... where have I seen those terms used to define fitness before?  Oh, that's right, they're part of CrossFit's definition of fitness!  CrossFit claims that one can determine ones fitness by measuring competence in the ten components of fitness...

1. Cardiovascular/respiratory endurance
2. Stamina
3. Strength
4. Flexibility
5. Power
6. Speed
7. Coordination
8. Agility
9. Balance
10. Accuracy

I've heard and read many criticisms of CrossFit's definition of fitness, which - stated most succinctly - is work capacity over broad time and modal domains.  Critics often claim it's too narrow and doesn't account for health.  I always ask the critic to provide a better definition.  All but one have failed to provide any definition at all, and the one that did provide a definition proceeded to contradict himself by criticizing CrossFit's definition of fitness as too narrow while simultaneously claiming all definitions of fitness are equally valid.

Try to square that circle.

Fortunately, a growing body of scientific evidence demonstrates that fitness can be measured objectively, which is necessary if we want to move beyond the realm of mere opinion, and that objectively measured fitness is closely related to health and longevity.

To me, this is yet another case of science confirming the obvious.  It seems intuitively obvious to me that - as a general rule - fit people live longer, healthier, more active lives than people who are not fit.  There are exceptions, of course - the athlete that ruins his body by over-training, the lifelong health nut who dies of lung cancer, etc. - but exceptions do not prove a rule wrong.

So, keep up your fitness program, or start one if you haven't already.  I recommend CrossFit, of course, but whatever you do, make sure it includes basic strength training - squats, deadlifts and presses.  In the mean time, here's a video of people in their 60s doing things one normally wouldn't associate with that age... to inspire, of course!

Keeping Men Weak

Tracy Anderson is a celebrity "fitness" (one must use that term loosely in this case) trainer who gained infamy among strength training enthusiasts by stating that "no woman should lift more than three pounds".

Though there is some push-back against it, this kind of thinking is unfortunately common among women.  So many of them seem to equate weakness with femininity, that we're used to seeing that kind of drivel aimed at women.  Not being content with keeping women weak, however, Ms Anderson now wants to expand her weakness regimen to men.

This month, she'll launch a treadmill-like contraption with a built-in obstacle course called the Men's High-Intensity Machine at two of her four gyms (in California and New York), and she'll follow up in early 2014 with a manly fitness DVD. 

Define "manly"...

To a retrograde gym rat, Anderson's made-for-guys routines look girly—you won't lift a free

weight over 10 pounds and many of the motions appear negligible.

So, women should never lift more than three pounds, and men shouldn't lift more than 10 lb.  Oh, boy.

However, the high reps will leave you hurting. In a typical session, you might throw punches with light dumbbells before lifting that same weight in a floor-to-ceiling row, as if yank-starting a lawn mower. (Her masculine workouts pay special attention to the pecs, biceps, triceps, and delts.) Next, you're doing push-ups with oblique crunches. Six or so floor exercises, and it's on to cardio, grabbing overhead elastic bands and incorporating them into jumps and squats. Every move engages a multitude of muscles, especially around the core. The result: none of the "compartmentalized" bulk seen on dudes waddling from weight room to smoothie bar.

Maybe that weight vest she's wearing makes up for the lack of free weights.

What's the logic behind the Tracy Anderson Method (TAM)? "The body has more than 600 muscles," she says. "Most fitness regimens only tap into 200. I get to 400."

How does she know that?

TAM is designed to confuse muscles, making them—and your heart and lungs—work harder.

Muscles don't get confused.  Please, everyone stop using that ridiculous phrase!

Moves are contrived to tire out the big groups so that lesser-known "accessory muscles" (i.e., the ones deep in your doughy middle or beneath fleshy arms) activate. In other words, wear down the starting lineup so your benchwarmers can show the crowd what they're capable of.

What does that even mean?  Here's my favorite quote.

"You are how you move," says Tracy Anderson, crossing her sinewy legs. "You don't want to be strong and clumsy, like a bison; you want to be strong and agile, like a jaguar."

It's ironic that she chose that comparison, because, while jaguars are undeniably strong and agile, bison are no slouches in either department. 

The bison, shaggy behemoth of the Great Plains, despite weighing as much as a ton, can race up to 40 mph, jump up to 6 feet vertically and can quickly pivot to combat predators. 

Sounds pretty damned agile to me.  Obviously, animals can be both strong and agile, but what about humans?

First, we must define both terms.

Strength - The ability of a muscular unit, or combination of muscular units, to apply force.

The simplest way to test strength is to measure how much weight a person can lift.

Agility - The ability to minimize transition time from one movement pattern to another.

To test agility, we measure how quickly a person changes directions in multiple dimensions (front to back, side to side, up and down).

Is there a sporting event that tests both strength and agility?  Why, I'm glad you asked, because there is!  It's called the CrossFit Games!  First, lets look at an event that tested strength.



Lucas Parker and Aja Barto both clean and jerked 345 lb and cleaned 355 lb.  Rich Froning clean and jerked 345 lb.  They did all that on the second event of the third day of a grueling four day competition, which means they were no where near fresh or rested.  Clearly, these dudes are strong, but are they agile?  Let's look at two events that tested agility.

The "Zigzag sprint" tested their ability to change directions forwards and sideways.  Note that Aja Barto took 3rd in this event.



The "Sprint Chipper" tested - among other things - their ability to change directions front to back and vertically.  Note that Rich Froning took 1st in this event, and Lucas Parker took 8th.



Though some are stronger than others, and some are more agile than others, clearly these men are both strong and agile.  And all of them lift a hell of a lot more than 10 lb.

Only time will tell if Tracy Anderson's ridiculous method will ever catch on with men, but it's clear from events like the CrossFit Games that one need not be slow in order to be strong.  Nor does one need to be weak in order to be agile.  One can improve all 10 components of fitness if one trains intelligently.  It's bad enough that so many women insist on being weak.  Let's hope Tracy Anderson's weakness regimen doesn't catch on with men.