Maxifesto

Common-sense Training for Young, Athletic Men

Let’s face it. We live in a society where every problem is assumed to have a quick-fix solution. If a given common problem doesn’t have a commercially available quick-fix, a niche opens up for an entrepreneur to fill. And in a short period of time, that niche will inevitably be filled (often, to saturation). Currently, one of the most pressing problems in the lives of otherwise healthy, Maslov-satisfied young men is that of dissatisfaction with their bodies. Maybe dissatisfaction isn’t even the proper term, but the fact is that many visible males, from actors to athletes to magazine advertisement models, appear more athletic and stronger than the average young man is.

And behold, a niche appeared. It has long since been filled, and decidedly so, but the exercise market will always have room for a new machine that promises quick results and minimal effort. Currently, conventional wisdom in that market seems to hold that a giant, complicated machine of pulleys and chains on which the prospective athlete sits down and pushes every which way against resistance is an effective way to whip one’s body into fightin’ shape. Or maybe a folding hammock-lookalike will produce the six-pack abdominals every guy craves. Perhaps all it takes is a couple of handles and the willingness to do a few pushups!

Unfortunately, none of those quick-fixes will take a prospective athlete from Point A (potential athlete) to Point C (efficient, maximal-realization-of-potential athlete). They will, however, definitely take an athlete to Point B (slightly stronger than Point A, but desperately confused about why their athletic performance hasn’t changed much [and maybe has even declined from sitting down so much]).

Fortunately, there is a simpler solution to the problem of the athlete who wants to look good and perform at maximum capacity.

Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done.

The key to all training for young male athletes, whether it be in terms of strength, speed, or skill, is total mental engagement (TME) with the task at hand.

I won’t touch skill in this essay; that topic is best left to coaches who know more about the specific skills and techniques necessary for sports than I ever will. But the principles of TME that I will expound upon herein should nevertheless be entirely applicable to skill training.

Let’s start with strength. Strength training is beneficial for athletes in all sports, because, among other things, a strong body is a coordinated body. The most important thing to remember in strength training, though, is to always keep one’s sport-specific needs in mind. Football players need explosive strength all over. Wrestlers need total control of their bodies, maximizing the output that the limited mass of their body can produce. Track athletes need explosive strength, especially in their legs and posterior chain. Golfers and tennis players need strength, but not at the expense of flexibility. The ultimate sport-specific goal should direct all actions taken in strength training.

What about the young man who is out of competitive athletics and now only wishes to achieve their athletic potential in the context of general fitness? Well, as a 100m sprinter I may be a bit biased, but I believe such an athlete should weight train much like a track athlete, specifically a sprinter, would. Such an athlete is weight training explosively, which requires TME and will consequently produce great gains in the strength department. With the right diet, the weight training program of a 100-400m runner will produce significant gains in body mass in the form of increased muscle mass and decreased fat mass. Also, such a program could undergo slight or even no modification and evenly, efficiently train a whole body without producing a disproportionate figure. Want to look like a magazine model? Start weight training like a sprinter.

Basic Principles of Effective Weight Training

• Mix it up. Obviously, you want to be training your whole body, upper and lower. That means not benching every day. Typically, splitting the body in two is effective for non-advanced lifters. An upper-body focused lift MWF and a lower-body focused lift TTh is a good plan to start out with. Core training should be done daily.
• Set aside a scheduled time to lift. Don’t just go in when you feel like it. You’re only going to see real, significant results in a typical 12-week cycle if you go in 4-5 days per week. If that means waking up early to go lift, wake up early and go lift. The key, though, is to find a time at which you can achieve TME. If you’re not a morning person, you’re not going to be able to focus with the intensity necessary to lift effectively. If you can’t achieve TME, don’t bother picking up a weight. You’re just wasting time.
• Diet, diet, diet. 3 meals a day, 5 meals a day, whatever. The important thing is to eat foods that provide efficient fuel. This means saying no to soda, white bread, fried anything, added sugar, anything with high-fructose corn syrup, or anything processed. How far you’re willing to go with your diet dictates how successful your training will be and how good your body will look. For more information, read any of Michael Pollan’s recent books.
• Allow yourself to cheat. If you can eat three good meals a day according to the above rules, have a candy bar at night. Eat some cookies. People fail at diets because it’s unrealistic to ask people to succeed at abstinence-only programs. If everyone in the world knew this, the world would be a much-better run place. The policy implications are staggering. But I digress. Treat yourself, unless you have a very poor metabolism. You’ll work it off the next day.
• Supplements and protein shakes. A corollary of the quick-fix exercise program, much misunderstood. Protein powder is the king of them all. Pricey and tasty if mixed with milk, protein shakes allow a lifter to enjoy something delicious while claiming to be attempting “post-workout recovery.” Well, know what else has a ton of protein? Chicken, eggs, milk, cottage cheese, beef, and nuts, to name a few. If you’re eating right, and you’re not a competitive bodybuilder, you’ll get plenty of protein, and it’s unnecessary to waste money on a tub of isolate. On the topic of supplements, there are some good ones out there, and some snake oil capsules. I’ve tried a lot of them, and the most important thing to remember is that no one supplement is worth a side effect. If you notice a side effect from a given supplement, and it’s significant enough that you notice it, stop taking it. The benefits usually aren’t worth the negative aspects. That said, some good things for a training athlete to take include a multivitamin, fish oil, and vitamin C. That’s about it, except for the most important weapon in your arsenal:
• Creatine. It is the much-maligned wonder supplement that every serious athlete knows about (and takes, if they know what’s good for them). Creatine phosphate is the molecule used to transfer oxygen from the bloodstream to your muscles, and creatine supplementation serves to augment that process, just as eating protein powder purports to augment your body’s supply of amino acids with which to make proteins. Unlike protein supplementation, though, creatine supplementation combined with training has shown to be vastly more effective than training alone in strength, speed, and even mental acuity. Moreover, no study chronicling harmful effects of creatine has ever been published. Surprised? Show me one, I dare you. There are simply none to be found. Oh, and don’t waste money on creatine shakes or flavored creatine powders. Buy pure creatine monohydrate (it’s dirt cheap), dissolve 5 grams in a high sugar beverage (like grape drink), and gulp. This can be done any time of the day, since you’re just augmenting your body’s already sufficient stores of the stuff. The sugar in the beverage will spike your body’s insulin levels, which provides a more efficient delivery system for the creatine in your bloodstream.
• Fix your posture. I’m guilty of still struggling with this one quite a bit, but it’s scary what our cubicle culture of people slouching over a computer desk has done to our postures. The most important feature of a correct, neutral posture is a spine curving naturally. The head should be back, above the shoulders. The natural curvature of the lower back should always be maintained. The shoulders should be kept back, which is not easy to do if you’ve been slouching your whole life like me. But slouched shoulders lead to busted shoulder joints, a weak upper back, and prevent your spine from maintaining its natural curvature. Your core should be tight – your abdominals are there to protect your vital organs, put them to work! Feet should face forward and each step should minimize sideways movement. Amazing how focusing on this has alerted me to the surprising presence of my hip flexors. Finally, sit up straight in chairs. We spend so much time sitting, and every minute you slouch is a minute towards eventually slipping a disk in your back (not something you want to have happen come middle age). Tilt your rearview mirror up a bit. Your posture will adjust for the better.
• Sleep seven or eight hours a night. It’s not just “one of the spokes on the wheel.” It’s a spoke on one of those BMX wheels with three wide plastic spokes.

The other two are diet and actually lifting the weights.

In the Weight Room

If you hadn’t guessed by now, effective weight training doesn’t happen sitting down on a machine. It doesn’t happen by doing isolation exercises with twenty-pound dumbbells. It does happen by doing compound lifts with heavy weights on barbells and dumbbells. This is common sense. The compound lifts allow you to use more weight than a tricep extension because they use just about every muscle in your body. Effectively using your whole body while at the same time utilizing proper form to stress specific muscle groups is taxing both physically and mentally. It requires TME. These kinds of lifts need to be focused on unceasingly throughout the set. They will exhaust you and humiliate you. They will also make you stronger, faster, more explosive, and more mentally acute. They should form the bulk of your work in the weight room. They are:

• Bench press
• Weighted wide-grip pullup
• Power clean
• Push press
• Deadlift
• Straight Leg Deadlift
• Back Squat
• Jump Squat

Take some time with each of these exercises. Learn the proper form (tnation.com is a great resource) and I suggest picking two of them to do in a given workout, and spending a good half hour doing them. Pick a weight at which you can barely complete 5 sets of 5 reps (2-3 minutes rest between sets), and work your way up.

When you do these lifts, you must be totally aware of every muscle in your body. Consciously control your form and the stressed muscles during the eccentric portion of the lift, and explode up during the concentric portion. Take a second to recover, and do it again. Never rush through an exercise. Control it and attack it with full focus.

But few athletes can do heavy compound lifting for an entire workout. At some point, there comes a point where there’s still something in the tank, but not enough to give a compound lift the TME required to get anything out of it. This is where isolation exercises come in. Dips, bicep curls, good mornings, glute-ham raises, military press, and rows are your best friends here.

Like the compound lifts, TME is necessary here. But the focus, more than anything, should be on using ONLY the muscle you want to use. Doing a bicep curl? Stop using your back to rock back and forth. Doing dips? Stop swinging your legs. Better yet, force them to stay in place by holding a dumbbell between your ankles.

An example. In high school, I made a run at the school record for situps in a minute. We’ve all done the test – a partner holds down your feet, you cross your arms across your chest and touch your forearms to your knees as many times as possible in sixty seconds. Well, I had little to no abdominal development back then, but I could kick the asses of every gymnast in my senior athletes’ PE class because I took advantage of conservation of momentum. I turned the system of me and my foot-holder into a swingset and found a rhythm that allowed me to recruit my abs as little as possible and my legs as much as possible. My best score was in the mid-eighties, I think.

There’s a couple points to glean from that example. First and foremost, I want to point out that what I did wasn’t “cheating” per say. I followed all the given rules of the situp test, which luckily for me did not include the phrase “using only your abdominals.” Likewise, doing a bicep curl while rocking your whole body back and forth isn’t cheating because there’s no rule saying you can’t. You’re not competing against anyone or anything. So if you want to do bicep curls with your back because the increased weight you find yourself able to do makes you feel better, go ahead. This brings me to my second point from the situp test example. By using my legs (much stronger than my abdominals) to do the situps, I didn’t tax either muscle especially hard, permitting me to do more situps than those who chose to recruit primarily their abdominals to do the test. Likewise, by rocking back and forth during a biceps curl you’re cheating your biceps out of a good workout and wasting your back’s strength by recruiting it for movements that don’t begin to tap its potential for moving weight and thus are entirely unproductive. Instead, maintain perfectly neutral posture and focus on contracting your biceps and your biceps only throughout the movement. You’ll have to use less weight, but you’ll reap the benefits. The principles of this biceps curl example are easily transferable to all other isolation exercises and even most compound ones.

Newton’s second law is that force equals mass times acceleration. Speed is directly related to force generation, and weight training allows you to increase your ability to produce force. So if improving your speed, whether it be foot speed, arm speed, or even jumping ability, is a goal of yours, it is imperative to keep the simple, elegant equation F = ma in mind. What does it mean in practice? That moving heavy weights as fast as possible allows you to generate the most force. Of course, the variables of mass and acceleration are inversely related in lifting (the more mass you use, the less acceleration you’ll be able to achieve) but the relationship isn’t as balanced as you might think. Remember, acceleration and velocity are not the same thing. And the acceleration we’re interested in isn’t really the change in velocity of the weight you’re moving, but the acceleration of the muscle you’re taking from relaxation to contraction. For example, flex your bicep slowly and then quickly. That’s the difference we’re talking about. At a certain point, a load will become too heavy for that rapid-fire recruitment of motor units to occur and you won’t be able to achieve that muscular acceleration. But you can achieve that acceleration with a pretty damn heavy load, maybe 85% of your one rep max.

This is another aspect of lifting where TME comes in. It takes a certain level of mental focus and concentration to contract any muscle in your body as fast as possible, and to lift efficiently it is necessary to be able to call up that TME every single rep. I can’t stress enough how important this is. If you lift a weight slowly, you’re wasting an opportunity to produce maximal force and thus improve your body’s capacity to do so. If you can do a lift quickly while still doing it with the correct muscle groups, do so. Work equals force times distance, so as long as you do the same lift it doesn’t matter how long it takes you to get there.

The last item I want to talk about is ab training. Oh, abs. The holy grail of the Fight Club, magazine advertisement culture of male body image. There are a million different exercises that work abs, and everyone likes different ones, but if you want visible abs, you need to be doing exercises in all three classes of ab work. However, the most important factor in getting six-pack abs is diet. If your body fat isn’t low enough, you could have the strongest stomach in the world and nobody would know it at the pool (unless you started doing flagpole holds on the lifeguard’s stand). But assuming you’re eating a diet conducive to abdominal visibility, here are the three types of exercises to implement:

• Concentric: Everyone knows and loves these. Anything resembling a crunch falls into this category of exercises in which the goal is to contract your abdominals against a force (most often, gravity) and accomplish a movement (generally upward). The key here, as you might have guessed, is to employ TME and make sure the only muscles involved are in your core. Almost any abdominal exercise is far more easily performed by another muscle group, so intense focus is required to get the most out of concentric ab lifting. Consciously contract your abdominals on every rep, and consciously use them to lift your torso off the floor (or the analogous motion if you’re doing some other variation). It’s harder than it sounds.
• Eccentric: The goal of eccentric abdominal work is to hold a position of tension for as long as possible. Examples include planks and the “Rocky hold” of your legs high in the air while using your arms to hold your torso on a bench. Here the effort is almost totally mental. Especially after a little abdominal training, your will will give out before your abs. Focus on keeping perfect form and posture (if applicable) and your abs tight, and set an intentionally long time goal. If you tell yourself you can hold a position for 30 seconds, you’ll be exhausted after those 30 seconds and think there’s no way you could have held it ten seconds longer. If you tell yourself you’re going to hold it for a minute, you’ll hold it for a minute. Too often, people ignore eccentric work, but the action of just holding a flex mimics the abs’ real-life function of bracing your torso, so the effects are tangible.
• Other core: The abs are not the only muscle group holding your core together. Don’t ignore the obliques, lower back, or even the inner abdominals. You can train them by holding your breath and sucking your stomach in for 30 seconds or so, repeatedly.

Well, I’ve been writing nonstop for about two hours and I think I’ve covered the important bits of what I know about lifting for performance. The principles, especially that of TME, carry over to other parts of life, and I’ve utilized them with success on the track and off of it. Hope you enjoyed it and/or learned something. Writing this was something I dreamt up in the gym today, and my goal was mostly to clarify and organize my thoughts on the topic. You can be sure I’ll be continually revising and supplementing this document as my learning process continues.

Max Petersen

June 11, 2008