Leverage your Body's Strength

Simple answers to nutrition and fitness questions are elusive, but here are some ideas that are likely to stand the test of time.

17Dec2023: Be the barbell!
Virtually every machine or free weight exercise has a body weight alternative. Even the shoulder press! It takes some practice, but this movement can provide an extremely wide range of resistance to the targeted muscles depending on how hard you pull with your legs. These types of modifications make progressive overload possible though years of training. See more body weight exercises here 🤸🏾‍♀️

27Oct2023: JAMA Open: Intermittent fasting helps diabetic patients lower weight and A1C
The largest clinical trial yet on type 2 diabetes showed that eating between noon and 8 p.m. can double the weight loss of counting calories, and help manage blood sugar levels, as well. Calorie counters and intermittent fasters both reduced their A1C levels by over 0.7%. While some safety questions for those taking insulin need to be addressed, these results show an ever-increasing preponderance of evidence in favor of extending your nightly fast as much as practical. NPR has the scoop here.

17Jul2023: Creative and expensive ways to hurt your back.
A sculptor can create art through addition, e.g. adding clay, or subtraction, like carving wood. The same options apply to your fitness pursuits. We can choose to focus on what works well or strive to whittle away what doesn’t. Before beginning any exercise plan, workout, or even individual movement, consider the following:

Do the benefits outweigh the risks?

Carve, chisel, shave, or scrape away the risky or ineffective exercises.

Here’s a variation on a uniquely risky technique I see over and over again, the straight leg seated row:

Let’s start with the obvious: wear safety glasses and edit your last will and testament before pointing what appears to be a budget hunting bow at your face.  To be fair, the above person is flexible and strong enough to perform the movement with good form: a neutral pelvis and the low back’s inward curve preserved.

For comparison, here’s how the average sedentary person or athlete with tight hamstrings or calves might perform this exercise. Keep in mind that, according to one study, 82% of college-age students had tight (overactive or physically shortened) hamstrings:

The hamstring crosses the hip and the knee so a straight leg position creates tremendous tension on the hip, pulling the pelvis back into a posterior tilt and the lumbar spine into flexion. Sooner or later, that spells trouble. If sitting on the floor is a must, bend the knees at least 45° or as much as necessary to maintain the lordotic curve of the low back:

Here are more alternatives:

Bent-over supported one-arm row*

Standing band row. The staggered leg stance* in the above
exercises helps the pelvis and spine remain neutral!

Supported bent over dumbbell row

Inverted Body Leverage Row

For more common exercises to avoid and some safer alternatives, see Do This Not That.

26Jun2023: Hurricanes. COVID-19. Drought. Heatwaves. Persistent wildfires. Reality seems set to test us to the limit. “Well, every toxic cloud of smoke has its silver lining,” you might protest. Alan Watts presents an alternative for the tortured optimists among us with his version of a famous parable from the Huainanzi, a Taoist text transcribed sometime before 139BC:

6May2023: Cyclic sighing one-ups mindfulness exercises and
other breathwork techniques for improvement in mood and anxiety. 🫁


Stanford University researchers (Cell) show that “…breathwork practices, particularly cyclic sighing, were more effective than mindful meditation in increasing positive affect, supporting our hypothesis that intentional control over breath with specific breathing patterns produces more benefit to mood than passive attention to one’s breath, as in mindfulness meditation practice.”

Just take a half-breath in through your nose, briefly hold, fully inhale through your mouth, and finish with a long sigh out through your mouth. Here’s a 15 second primer:

16Dec2022: Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the United States. At its root is untreated diabesity—prediabetes, diabetes, and obesity.

For decades, the standard advice from dieticians, personal trainers, and doctors alike has been to eat small meals and snacks throughout the day to avoid spiking blood sugar. A better approach is on the horizon.

In a recent study of 36 diabetic patients, 17 experienced complete remission, discontinued their diabetes medication, and maintained it for at least one year. The “cure”? Intermittent fasting. Read more in the most recent study from the The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

15Feb2022: There’s no exercise more fundamental to our health than breathing. The following exercise will help you activate your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS / “rest and digest”) to reign in stress caused by an overactive sympathetic nervous system (SNS / “fight or flight”).

Try this simple “box” breathing pattern for 6 repetitions, or less than 3 minutes. Use diaphragmatic breathing by allowing your belly to move in and out without lifting your chest. Feel free to shorten the duration of each side of the box to make it comfortable—even if that means eliminating the breath holds altogether.

We can go weeks without food, days without water, but only minutes without oxygen. So never forget life’s most important imperative: BREATHE!

20Jan2022: Avoid this very common mistake! I love every individual exercise in this routine (CNN), but together they form about two thirds of a complete strength workout. Can you see what’s missing?

No matter how you do it, every “push” (like the push-up in the red box above) needs an equally challenging, mirror opposite “pull.”

More specifically, this routine lacks a 45° row (AKA “middle back”—elbows halfway to shoulder height). Options include but are not limited to:
• Inverted rows on a
—suspension trainer
—a horizontal bar or even a sturdy narrow table
—your least favorite sheet thrown over the top of a locked door!
• a supported bent over row using a heavy duffel bag
• standing or kneeling resistance band rows
—handles and sleeves recommended

Here’s an option for the gym on a squat rack or Smith machine:

As an alternative, try the TRX mid-back row:

Another good option is the standing band row featured below. Check the band for damage (if it doesn’t have a nylon sheath) and take a staggered stance as bands always fail sooner or later!

Lastly, no single strength-building workout should be performed every day, as the trainer falsely asserts. Always take an “active rest” day between full-body workouts. This means restorative sleep, healthy nutrition, and no heavy stuff until 36-48 hours after lifting.

How does your workout shape up? Check out the Big Five of workout design!

28Dec2021: If you’ve trained with me since the pandemic started you’ll have noticed that my mask of choice is 3M’s 9205+ N95 respirator.

It meets all of my needs:

• 95% filtration (N95)
• breathable (low resistance to airflow)
• tight seal (a mask is only as good as its seal!)

These are no longer in short supply so I encourage clients, colleagues, friends and loved-ones alike to consider this option for themselves whenever they venture into unfamiliar or high-risk environments.

If you have no knowledge or control over the vaccination status or social distancing practices of those around you, an N95 mask is one of the simplest, most empowering tools in our arsenal. Protect yourself and don’t let anything prevent you from getting the exercise your body needs.

They’re single-use masks but limited reuse is an option given financial or environmental considerations.

If we have one, COVID-19 is surely our common enemy, and your personal health is *our* victory garden!

5May2021: Princeton University offers some fantastic continuing education options for students, faculty, and staff through their Employee Learning Center. While this year has presented many challenges, it has also expanded our options! See my recent classes on Body Maintenance 101 and the Big Five of Workout Design.

26Feb2021: “Diets don’t work.” We’ve all heard it, and it seems to check out epidemiologically. It’s also consistent with the vast majority of our personal experiences.

But absolutes are thin balloons–one counterexample bursts this bubble: in 1965, Angus Barbieri went on a diet of coffee, tea, sparkling water, multivitamins (with potassium and sodium), and yeast under medical supervision. Over 382 days he lost 275 pounds. Most impressively of all, he kept it off for at least five years after the experiment concluded.

Angus offers an extreme example, but others abound. In fact, for most of human history, obesity was the rare exception to the norm.

This, in spite of the fact that food scarcity has applied eons of selective pressure to our supple genetic makeup. Our genes exhort most of us to “EAT!” with nearly the same force as they command us to “BREATHE!”

This, in spite of our inherent proclivity for laziness, or more charitably, to conserve calories. The sloth instinct falls somewhere toward the end of the list, but is written in the same indelible ink.

We are thus forced to concede that the food our great grandparents ate–by definition their diets–did work. At least for them and at least at that time. The rub, of course, is that scarcity has been all but completely replaced by superabundance. Daily physical labor has been all but annihilated by the information age.

So what to do? From a public health perspective we must confront the totality of factors at play: psychological (addiction, desire, self-esteem), physiological (insulin and other hormones, circadian rhythms, metabolic disease), and political/economical (food deserts, unwalkable cities, marketing junk food to kids, corn syrup in everything).

On the individual level–and I speak here from personal and professional experience–there are hundreds of things we can do to make incremental changes in the right direction. In concert, they can and do produce weight loss of one to two pounds of fat per week.

The real challenge starts once we reach our target weight, when the body’s “fat thermostat” in the hypothalamic region of the brain pulls out all the stops to restore homeostasis. This is why the only “diet” that really matters is the one you can stick with for the long haul.

But remember, Angus Barbieri did it. He succeeded against all odds, because he was convinced that he could do it. Pop culture’s saline drip of pseudoscientific panaceas on one extreme and well-intended fatalism (learned helplessness) on the other is concentrated poison for any weight loss plan. Every single day, however you see fit, take just ten seconds to reassert your internal locus of control.

This is the simplest and yet most essential step.

And you can do it!

8Jan2021: Exercising outdoors can be challenging in the winter months but a little planning allows us to reap the benefits (Harvard Men’s Health Watch). Reasons to embrace the brisk air–just to name a few: more efficient exercise, white-to-brown fat transformation, and sunlight and movement to combat seasonal affective disorder.

According to Scott Carney, these benefits are just the tip of the iceberg. His book, What Doesn’t Kill Us… (2018) dives into the history of cold training and explores the scientific frontier at great length. It’s a both thorough and entertaining read.

9Dec2020:  [TRAINER PSA]: There are really only a handful of guidelines for building a great strength workout. Despite some fitness jargon, these are simple principles that anyone can learn and apply. Still, nine out of ten workouts you’ll see online lack one or more of these critical components:

1. Incorporate all basic compound movements:
   1. Push
   2. Pull
   3. Squat (or any multi-joint exercise for the legs like lunges, step-ups, deadlifts, kettlebell swings…)
2. Work within your active range of motion in all three planes of movement:
   1. Sagittal
   2. Frontal
   3. Transverse
3. Work muscles in opposing pairs. No anatomy knowledge required; just pick mirror opposite movements. For example:
   1. ✓ Pull-up • Shoulder Press
   2. ✓ Low One-arm Dumbbell Row • Low Dumbbell Press
   3. ✓ Thrusters • Pull-up with a knee tuck
   4. ✓ Wood Chop • Hay Baler (or “Golf Swing”)
   5. ✘ Push-up • Pull-up (Pecs = internal shoulder rotators • Lats = internal shoulder rotators)
4. Pick a resistance and volume that elicits fatigue (e.g. 3 sets x 10 reps leaving only 3 reps on reserve at the end of each set) but never pain. This may produce DOMS one day after, but you should feel fully recovered after 48 hours.
5. Take an active rest day between workouts (restorative sleep + nutrition + no heavy stuff 36-48 hours after lifting).

16Aug2020:  The most thoughtful documentary I’ve seen to date on fasting is Netflix’s Unwell: Fasting. It provides a thorough survey of the potential benefits and pitfalls. It’s only shortcoming: the featured registered dietitian is behind the times. Counterintuitively, intermittent fasting appears to increase–not decrease–metabolism according to recent research.

 

In fact, the small but sustained calorie deficit that many dietitians still recommend for weight loss may actually cause lowered metabolic output! This could be the most important factor when it comes to future weight gain and would go a long way toward explaining why the vast majority of dieters gain weight over the long haul. For more, check out Dr. Fung’s explanation of the benefits of intermittent fasting.

6Aug2020: Along with the surge in body weight based strength training has come a groundswell of interest in running. I’m a proponent of a minimalist running style as advocated by the book Born To Run–a fun, easy and informative read. Basically, you’ll want to take frequent short steps and try to land first on the mid- or forefoot and finish each foot strike with the heel just barely kissing the ground. Here’s Professor Daniel E. Lieberman on the stuff that isn’t controversial.

That said, a suitable goal for most people is to improve cardiovascular/pulmonary health and to burn a modest amount of calories. Trainees who are overweight or have musculoskeletal injuries might find a better risk-to-benefit ratio in lower impact activities like cycling, swimming, rowing, or walking on an incline. Try to phase in minimalist style running slowly by doing it no more than every other day. Switch to twice a week if that proves to be too much and limit the distance and time of each run to what you can do pain-free.

 

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