Minneapolis, Minnesota

The muscle-up is important because it teaches you how to move your center of gravity around your base of support along a vertical line of action. Why would you ever need to do this?

Imagine you have capsized in a canoe. You pull yourself up using the gunwale as your base of support. But you can’t push yourself back into the boat unless you can move your center of gravity over the gunwale.

In other words even if you can do hundreds of pullups and dips, if you can’t get your chest over your hands you can’t get yourself out from under things to on top of them.

There’s a metaphor rattling around in there.

I’ve never understood the appeal of spinning. I would rather drink hot dog water than ride on a stationary bike while staring at myself in a mirror.

I have to believe that I’m not alone. In fact, I suspect that inside of every spinner there is an erger screaming to get out.

Here are three reasons to liberate your inner rower.

1. Better Posture. Hunching over handlebars is an extremely unnatural position. If you close your eyes and flip the picture 90 degrees a spinner looks just like a little T-Rex scuttling around with tiny arms flailing. No wonder so many spinners report low back pain. Rowing is different. On an erg you sit upright with a neutral spine. There are no handlebars to rest on so you can’t relax your core.

2. Skill Transfer. When you’re off the saddle spinning doesn’t have very many real-world applications. How often in life do you push and pull your legs independently of each other…while seated? Rowing is much better preparation for real-world tasks because, rowing mechanics are identical to lifting mechanics. Visualize a rower. Now flip the picture 90 degrees. Pulling an oar to your chest is the same movement pattern as lifting a bag of groceries off the ground.

3. Full Body. You make your boat go by transmitting force through your feet, up your core, across your lats and to the tips of your fingers. Rowing requires full-body contraction with every stroke, and an intense erg session will absolutely smoke your glutes and hams, as well as your core, back and arms. This is why rowers are normally proportioned. If all you do is spin, you become extremely quad-dominant and you end up with huge legs and skinny arms which means you have to wear either zubas or daisy-dukes.

Have you ever wondered why soccer coaches even bother to show up to games? They don’t seem to do much. In fact, they can’t do much. A soccer pitch is enormous and the range of play is so great that you would need a megaphone to make yourself heard to your players.

The question is what would the coach say even if they could communicate to their players?

When you talk at someone, and in particular when you give instructions, you are engaging the left hemisphere of your subject’s brain because the left brain is responsible for language processing and linear reasoning. Left-dominant brain-patterning is okay in a classroom setting.

But in the real world you don’t have a script to follow, and you probably don’t have a coach following you around bellowing instructions. You need situational awareness which is a right-brain function. You develop situational awareness not by reasoning, but by feeling.

Is my shoulder packed? Are my glutes loaded? Can I pick that up again? Can I keep going?

A coach can’t tell you the answer. You have to feel it.

Once the timer starts the coach’s job is to stop talking because the more coach talks, the less you feel.

Part 1 of this series talked about the Hill Muscle Model. The Hill model has been around since the 1930′s. In those days, people didn’t know much about muscles at a molecular level. So researchers used system engineering concepts to mathematically predict muscle behavior. The Hill model is fundamentally a mechanical model.

By the 1970′s people knew a lot more about the internal composition of muscle and people were able to model muscle behavior at a molecular level. Probably the dominant molecular model is the sliding-filament theory proposed by Andrew Huxley.

If you’re interested in geeking out you can check out this video or this slide show. For you non-pointy-heads, here’s a very simple way to think about muscles at a molecular level. Your muscles are made up of myosin and actin. Myosin acts like a ratchet that binds to an actin filament. When you flex your guns in front of the mirror, a jillion little ratchets are paddling their way up actin filaments.

The molecular model is vexing. How are you supposed to make your ratchets work better? You can’t even see them.

This is what makes mechanical models of muscle behavior so attractive. If you think about muscles in terms of movement then you can reduce any element in CrossFit to a simple engineering problem.

But moving well is different than living well.

It doesn’t matter how well you are moving if you don’t sleep enough and then sit in a cubicle eating toaster pastries and beef sticks all day. If this is you then, you are messed up at the molecular level. Your ratchets aren’t working and no amount of grunting and heaving will help you.

So the mechanical model is really relevant to what you do while you’re in the gym. The molecular model is really about how you live your life outside of the gym.

The nice thing about CrossFit is that if you train at an affiliate you’ll have a trainer correcting your position.

Butt down! Knees back! On your heels!

Everyone knows these cues but it’s not readily apparent why they matter on a biomechanical level.

Here’s a very simple way of thinking about position:

1) contractile force increases as tension increases

2) tension is a derivative of muscle length

3) your position affects your ability to lengthen muscles

The important thing to note here is that you can lengthen your muscles past the point of optimal tension. Check out the picture above. When your muscle elongates beyond a certain point, tension decreases and you become weaker.

Being able to feel where you are on that curve is a very important intangible skill. Mastering that skill will make you instantly stronger.

Here is a very quick and easy example that will help you feel this skill. From a 3/4 squat position (thighs above parallel) let your knees drift in until they’re between your feet. Now push your knees out until they’re outside of the edges of your feet. You feel weaker in the first position because your hamstrings and glutes are slack.

P.S. For a fascinating glimpse into the history of biomechanics and exercise science check out A. V. Hill’s 1938 paper “The heat of shortening and the dynamic constants of muscle”

What a bummer that so many amazing athletic feats are beclouded by steroid accusations.

What’s the point of setting a record if it’s followed by an asterisk?

What honor can there be in a victory you didn’t earn?

But you don’t need to juice to be a cheater.

Cheating comes in many forms.

Like say, shorting range-of-motion.

If you want to live in a world where the rules don’t apply to you then you really live in a world without rules.

So you can’t complain when a more adept cheater eats your lunch.

Very few people would ever admit to being prejudiced.

We recoil at the thought because our history has demonstrated in the most painful terms that prejudice is toxic to our souls.

Prejudice puts people in a box. It’s a form of slavery. Nobody wants to be a party to that.

The question is, are you prejudiced toward yourself?

I can’t lift that. That box is too high for me. I’m fat. I’m stupid. I’m not worth it.

You would never say these things about others but you say them to yourself.

Your thoughts about yourself can be shackles or wings.

Choose.

I was watching an infomercial for Yoga Booty Ballet when the following portmanteau jumped out at me:

Exercise + Entertainment = Exertainment.

Exertainment is the perfect commodity product for our culture. We’re like the Roman masses, herded together into the coliseum to gape at the daily spectacle. It almost doesn’t matter what the spectacle is. Why not a fitness model writhing in a leotard? If that’s what constitutes “hot product”.

And exertainment is everywhere:

• Mainstream fitness centers all have cable televisions hanging from the ceiling, and most have WIFI.

• Popular shows like The Biggest Loser, Too Fat for 15, etc.

• The WII and XBox

The common denominator in all of these different forms of exertainment is a video screen,which means a successful exertainment product has to have top-notch production value, on par with the very best that Sony studios can produce. If your only way to interface with a customer is through a display your product better look awesome or you’re not even in the game.

With so much emphasis on visual wow-factor is it possible to develop an exertainment product that actually advances human health in a consequential way? I don’t think so. The entertainment industry is all about eyeballs. The more the better. Asking for fitness from the entertainment industry is like asking Starbucks to make pizza. They could certainly do it, but you won’t want to eat it.

This is how the food chain worked pre-agriculture:

grass grows -> animal eats grass -> human eats animal -> human is healthy

Post-agriculture the food chain looks like so:

human cultivates grain -> human feeds grain to barn animal -> human eats animal -> human gets fat and sick

Most people can accept that human evolution is inextricable from the food chain. The leap we need to make is to accept that human health is enmeshed with our place in the food chain.

This is hard to do because certain reductive thinkers have turned the paleolithic nutrition plan into a “meat” diet, or a “caveman” diet. Paleo is bigger than that. We don’t want to replicate the lifestyle of cavemen. We want to be healthy and we know we can’t be outside of an ordered and natural food chain.

This is the new "old"

I’m so old that when I compete in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu tournaments I can’t even register as a “Master” anymore. I am in the “Senior 1″ age classification. For a long time I competed out of category, because I didn’t want to beat up on a bunch of crotchety old farts with brittle bones and hairy ears.

A few years ago I accidentally registered in my age category and ended up on the mat with some other old dudes. I’ve never worked so hard or been so scared in my life. It turns out that certain 40-somethings are stronger, faster, smarter, and meaner than most 20 year olds. Who knew?

There’s a difference between chronological age and physical age. The former is just a number. The latter expresses how you feel. The two rarely match. In fact, I would argue that most Americans feel older than they are. Raise your hand if you can’t touch your toes.

Sadly, premature decrepitude has become a cultural norm because in Western society, most people sit and eat all day. Hence, as a matter of sheer statistical necessity, most people are going to look and feel older than they are. But this cultural norm conflicts with a biological norm. If it were biologically optimal to take NSAID medication at forty years of age our species would have fizzled out millennia ago.

So what’s the secret to feeling and looking young? How do those old jiu-jitseros manage their physical age while most of the population creak and groan when they get out of bed? The answer is deceptively simple. Three days a week move around at a vigorous clip for no more than hour. That’s it.

You don’t need to find a BJJ Academy if ballroom dancing is more to your taste. The secret is to move. Period. Get off the couch. Get out from behind the steering wheel. Pry yourself away from the desk. Push yourself away from the table. Do it. Start today.