Mark Rippetoe: Starting Strength

Yesterday I stated I was going to try StrongLifts 5×5 strength training regimen for a while and I still think it looks like a pretty good one to use if you are just starting out. After further reading I have chosen to follow Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength program instead. It seems like he just has more experience and knowledge overall and he is attributed quite a bit on StrongLifts. With that in mind I don’t see any reason to use a modified version of Rippetoe’s program when his is nearly identical and has been implemented by a larger number of people to greater success.

The basic outline is a to alternate two workouts 3 non-consecutive days each week. For me this will be a Mon-Wed-Fri schedule. The alternating WOD’s are:

Workout A
3×5 Squat
3×5 Bench Press
1×5 Deadlift

Workout B
3×5 Squat
3×5 Press
5×3 Power cleans

I will also be adding a sprint/run day on Saturdays for a total of 4 WOD’s a week with 3 full rest days. I’m hoping this will improve my strength without substantial hits to my met-con ability. Although I feel as though I’m in the best shape of my life so far, the 5 day on- 2 day off schedule has been pretty grueling and I’m not seeing a huge added benefit in continuing this way.

Metabolic Pathways and Creatine

The bodies metabolic pathways are what provide energy for any of your physical exertion. There are three of these pathways and they are the phosphagen, glycolytic, and oxidative. Each one is used for a different amount of time to provide energy. The phosphagen pathway provides energy for extremely short intense energy without the use of oxygen. This involves any sort of maximal effort weight lifting or a 100 meter sprint. The glycolytic pathway comes into play after the phosphagen and is still considered an anaerobic system as it does not need oxygen either. This can be used up to several minutes and is considered moderate power exercises. As you could guess the oxidative is aerobic activity, using oxygen, and is for low powered exercises lasting over several minutes. As a reference your body is most likely switching from the glycolytic to oxidative between an 800 meter sprint and a 1 mile run. Below is a graph representing the three systems and their duration.

Understanding these energy systems can provide a lot of insight as to what your body is doing while you perform different actions. All of these systems rely on ATP for energy. The phosphagen system uses stored ATP in your muscles for a couple of seconds before needing to use creatine-phosphate in your muscles. Breaking this molecule provides a phosphate that can be used for more ATP generation.

This is essentially why people supplement with creatine (originally called Phosphagen by the first company to put it out). Creatine is depleted in your muscles where it is stored through high intensity weight lifting and ingesting 2-4 grams a day can provide replenishment. This basically means you refill your reserves for the phosphagen system and you will have more energy providing greater muscle contraction.

Creatine is by far the most widely studied supplement and is also the highest selling supplement today. There have not been any studies showing it to be dangerous and reading on it shows why it would not be. It is naturally occurring in your body and you get it in your diet from different meats, although probably not as much as you use if your a serious athlete. It is definitely NOT a hormone and nothing like anabolic steroids. People that say otherwise simply have no idea about the biochemical reactions that go on in your body through exercise.

My advice is to read as much information as you can about it. Look up different dosages, cycling, effects, possible side effects and if you still think it is dangerous don’t use it. But please stop rambling on about how it is cheating or a steroid. It is no different than supplementing with extra protein that so many people do unquestioned.

I personally use a small 5 grams or less after each workout of the original and straight forward creatine monohydrate and have never had any problems. It’s also good to keep in mind that this is a supplement and not anything that makes you stronger on it’s own. As stated it can provide more fuel for intense exercise, but without the exercise it is of little to no good in muscle development.

Further reading:
Pretty in depth on creatine
Overview of Metabolic Pathways in a Crossfit Journal
Creatine Information Center

Glycemic Index

I mentioned in the Diseases of Civilization post that avoiding insulin resistance can go a long way in preventing a great many chronic illnesses. The best way to do this is by controlling blood glucose levels through diet, as insulin is released to clear glucose from your blood. The glycemic index has been created to do just that. It is an index that measures the effects of your carbohydrate consumption on your blood glucose levels.

It is on a scale of 0-100 with the higher the number being, the higher your blood glucose levels rise after eating. This means that you want to try to eat low glycemic foods rather than high glycemic foods. Anything under 50 is considered low by researchers and anything over 70 is considered high. As a reference point white bread is given perfect 100 score. You can checkout out glycemicindex.com to figure out the GI of most foods.

As with anything, the GI of a food is not the total picture and focusing only on a food’s GI will not give you perfect health. Like I said before, the main point is controlling insulin sensitivity and some foods may have a low GI but still produce a powerful insulin response. The main culprit of this are dairy products which have low GI scores but an insulin response on par with white bread. Simply avoiding most processed foods and starchy vegetables like potatoes is the best way to do this without trying to remember the exact number of anything (GI, calories, insulin response).

1st Muscle-Up!

So last night I was able to find a good tree with a high enough branch to hang up some gymnastic rings. It would be my first attempt at a muscle-up on rings as I normally just do them on a straight bar. Well it took three tries, which was not bad at all, and up I went.

The muscle-up is great upper body exercise, using both the pulling and pushing muscles and is arguably one of the best exercises for generating huge amounts of strength relative to body weight.

Further Info from Crossfit:
Full pdf from Coach Glassman
Video Demonstration from BJ Penn
Greg Amundson doing a WOD involving muscle-ups: Just for the record this guy is 6′ and 200 lbs so saying that as you get bigger you get slower or that it is harder to do pull-ups is only a myth. It just gives people an excuse to not work hard in areas other than lifting weights. This guy is incredible with a 335 lb bench press (for those who care) and a sub 18 min 5k, he has scored the perfect score on the marines PFT mutliple times in a row.

Online Databases: Nutrition, Medicine, Books

They say things come in threes and over this last week I found three really good databases. One on nutritional information, one that publishes medical articles for free, and one that has entire books online for free.

Nutritiondata.com

From the about ND section of the website, “The information in Nutrition Data’s database comes from the USDA’s National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference and is supplemented by listings provided by restaurants and food manufacturers. The source for each individual food item is listed in the footnotes of that food’s analysis page. In addition to food composition data, Nutrition Data also provides a variety of proprietary tools to analyze and interpret that data.” Sign up for a free account to store foods in your pantry and combine them to store recipes with the full nutritional breakdown.

PubMed

“PubMed is a free search engine for accessing the MEDLINE database of citations and abstracts of biomedical research articles. The core subject is medicine, and PubMed covers fields related to medicine, such as nursing and other allied health disciplines. It also provides very full coverage of the related biomedical sciences, such as biochemistry and cell biology. It is offered by the United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health as part of the Entrez information retrieval system.” Wikipedia

As with nutritiondata.com you can sign up for a free account to store articles you find relevant for easy finding and reference later.

Project Gutenberg

This has thousands of public domain books available to read or download on the website. All of these are free and no longer under copyright so feel free to use them however you wish. It is also the host of LibriVox.org which offers public domain audio books for free download as well. Check it out if you want to download some Joyce to your Ipod for a road trip or cross country flight.

Diseases of Civilization

I have been really into understanding the so called diseases of civilization which include an array of degenerative diseases which includes but is not limited to Metabolic Syndrome, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Alzheimer’s disease, osteoporosis, acne, stroke, and depression. The reason they are given this name is from lack of evidence of these diseases existing before civilization sprang up and very few of these diseases are found in modern hunter-gatherer societies. The main causes of them seem to be lifestyle.

Metabolic Syndrome: What it is
I have been reading a lot on Metabolic Syndrome and for the most part this seems to be caused by insulin resistance. This is caused by chronically elevated levels of insulin which is released to clear glucose from the bloodstream after eating carbohydrates that break down into sugar. So what is included in Metabolic Syndrome? It is a list of chronic diseases including the number one killer in America, Cardiovascular Disease. The list looks like this:

-Cardiovascular Disease
-Insulin Resistance up through Type 2 Diabetes
-Polycystic Ovary Syndrome
-Hypertension
-Obesity
-Dyslipidemia

Preventions
All of these are very serious but cardiovascular disease killing more people each year than cancer is enough for me to be interested and want to avoid it. As noted earlier the main cause seems to be insulin resistance so having good insulin sensitivity (no resistance) should be the goal. This can be done by exercising and eating a healthy diet (Paleo diet) with real foods; fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, nuts and seeds, and avoiding anything that can spike your insulin. The vast majority of processed foods contain way more sugar than our bodies can handle. Grains and dairy are very good at spiking your insulin and should be avoided.

Try this and see how you feel after a couple weeks. Your digestion will probably go a lot smoother and you will most likely have more energy without the highs and lows of the modern Western diet.

Suggestions for more research:
Insulin (Resistance)
Paleo Diet
Calorie Restriction
Gary Taubes lecture at Berkeley on obesity

World-Class Fitness

“Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat. Practice and train major lifts: Deadlift, clean, squat, presses, C&J, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast. Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense. Regularly learn and play new sports.”

This short mantra was taken off of CrossFit.com, a site my cousin introduced to me a couple of weeks ago. I figured I could not sum up their principles in any more concise a manner than they could, so for this post I just took the statement from their site. When I first went to the site it seemed almost anti-climatic after what cousin my told me, “would change my life”. However, if you take your time and really look around the entirety of the site you will agree it is an amazing piece of work these guys have put together. The best part of this site is the WOD (workout of the day), which they put up each every day for free so that visitors to the site can continue to train with variation.

Admittedly I can not come anywhere near doing all of these routines on a daily basis, however, it gives me high goals and doing any of the exercises as supplements to your current workout should help with all sorts of strength gains. Not only do these workouts go after compound exercises that stress some of your largest muscle groups, there are videos of every exercise they do so that you can learn them from watching others perform the routine.