L.I.F.T.

Just finished reading the book Lifting Depression, by Kelly Lambert, Ph.D., and it was great!

The book is an overview of depression from the perspective of what Dr. Lambert calls the “effort-driven rewards circuit.” This circuit (comprised of the nucleus accumbens, striatum, and prefrontal cortex) has been shown to be highly active in animals engaged in activities with specific rewards, and has been shown to be under-active in people suffering from depression.

Dr. Lambert provides a wonderful overview of the current research in depression, along with some helpful suggestions for people suffering from depression. And it might surprise you to find, that medication is not at the top of her list.

In fact, Dr. Lambert starts the book by describing the positive affect common cleaning chores had on her own battle with depression. She shows many ways how exercise, and particularly exercise demanding fine motor and tactile skills with the hands, can activate the rewards-driven circuit.

Among the most interesting notes I have from this book are:

• Exercise in general can battle depression
• Fine-motor skills, especially with the hands, aimed at specific outcomes, can be even more effective
• Our current society values making the most money in the least time, which sets up a “work less=get more” equation in people’s heads, which is not only incorrect, but is slowly killing us (through inactivity…or depression)
• Getting people actively involved in creating the solutions to their problems activates the circuit. For more about this, see Christopher Martell’s site, with information on his Behavioral Activation Therapy.
• Support and active interest in one another by parents and family, significant others, and friends, and our community, increases the rewards we experience when we achieve our goals.

The only flaw I have with the book is that it’s a little too narrow in its focus on the circuit. In fact, I often have trouble with science for this reason. Dr. Lambert includes two wonderful quotes in her book that sum this idea up well:

How necessary health is to our business and happiness, and how necessary a strong constitution, able to endure hardships and fatigue, is to one that will make any figure be anything considerable in the world, is too obvious to need any proof.

Attributed to a letter written by John Locke, pg. 148 in the book.

and the next…

if you spent the rest of your career researching just one component of a larger complex circuit, you wouldn’t accomplish very much…Brain areas are located in proximity for a reason. It’s not a random organization. You shouldn’t waste your time researching such a limited area.

From a conversation between Dr. Lambert and Dr. Paul MacLean, pp. 48-49 of the book

Regardless, the book is informative and well-written! I highly recommend it.

I just wrote this response to an entry on the Define Fitness weblog, and thought it was worthwhile to continue the conversation on my own page. Here it is:

As for this topic, it’s one I’ve been grappling with for at least a couple of years now. However, I don’t think the real answer is related to any of the things on the list. I learned those things as “obstacles” in my old Gold’s Gym days – Gold’s taught us that those were the real reasons people didn’t work out.
Having given it some thought, I now believe that it’s something more personal than those things. Something that a person couldn’t click a check-box next to, even if you could figure out how to word it. It’s something so personal they might not even understand the situation if it was explained in detail.
In short, I think it’s a result of our civilization.

Convenience, and everything it brings, kills the desire in the human soul to test itself. The ability to get whatever you want, whenever you want it, takes the drive out of the animal. We don’t have to fight to survive. We don’t have to work hard to enjoy the fruits of our labor. And one law that stands the test of time in nature is the law of least resistance. If we don’t have to, we won’t.

Of course, then, there are the exceptions…who feel compelled within their souls to move, to lift heavy things to push the envelope. If you could bottle their motivation, you’d pass Bill Gates in seconds.

A friend of mine texted me a few weeks ago. He was watching an international weightlifting competition, and he asked “Why is it always the Eastern Bloc up for Gold in these contests, never the USA?” I wrote back “Because they have to.”

Until it’s necessary, people won’t do it. And even then, many will still find any way possible to get around it. Physical activity. Sounds crazy, but I think it’s true.

When I was a younger trainer, a lot of time and energy was spent among me and my peers trying to “get strong” or “get big.” We all wanted to cross the incredible 300 pound mark in the bench press. We all wanted washboard abs. We wanted to look like Arnold.

Then there was a stage where we all suddenly wanted to do squats on swiss balls. We wanted to hold a 1-arm plank with perfect form for 5 minutes. We wanted total stability. We wanted to be like Paul Chek.

Slowly but surely, we dropped off, one by one, each going their own way. Some left training entirely, pursuing other careers. Others stayed in the Arnold phase, where they remain to this day, seeking a perfect peak on their biceps. While the ones who made it through the Arnold stage either hung out in the Chek stage, or moved on to things like Crossfit, or Gym Jones type approaches.

I personally use all of these methods in my training, as the state of the client demands them. I found that there’s a better way than sticking to any single method exclusively, even if only for a certain phase of training here or there. Knowing the methods of these folks (and many more) constitutes the toolbox that I use at work every day.

Recently I had the honor of attending the Exuberant Animal Summit in Leavenworth, WA. And there, I added yet another set of tools to my work-set – those related to Play. While nothing is technically less scientific than play, science has spent a lot of time trying to define it, and figure out why its so good for us (like anything else science “discovers” the good qualities of).

To the subject header of this post, though, I want to make a point about all of these techniques, tricks, tools, or whatever you want to call them. My goal, as a trainer, is to get people into the best physical state they can achieve. And to that end, I employ all of the methods I can. But I’m also concerned with time.

Time is the one resource we can trade, but can’t get back. Once we’ve spent our time on something, that time is gone for good. While it shouldn’t be a deterrent to doing or trying new things, I think that an understanding of this idea should guide us in our decision-making.

Trainers – find the exercises, techniques, and tools, that allow your clients to achieve as many of their goals as possible in the shortest amount of time. Your exercise selection, timing, loading, etc., should all point to one common goal, and not be a mere collection of isolation exercises designed to fix their flaws…

Clients of trainers – find a trainer who does the above.

Ok, one more post today. This is related to the last…

The methods used to sell things in the USA typically fall under the banner of “scarcity thinking.” If you don’t know what that means, think about the five TV commercials you saw most recently. How many of them were aimed at making you feel like you were lacking something (whether it be social standing, health, beauty, etc.) without their product? My guess is going to be in the 4-5 range.

It’s a classic technique, summed up by the good folks at IBM back in the 60’s by the acronym FUD – Fear, Uncertainty, Death. Those are the things to play on if you want to sell things to people.

In recent years, it seems like even the wonderful world of personal training and alternative medicine has fallen under the evil spell of this marketing tactic. You’re told that you lack fitness, you’re going to die, you’re overweight, you don’t fit in, you don’t look like the ‘Hoff, you need a six-pack, etc. Meanwhile, the personal trainers are being told that they’re not scientific enough, they’re not training right, they’re hurting their clients, etc. Behind it all, the big corporate gyms, and the makers of all manner of equipment rake in the cash.

But wait…our forefathers had no wobble boards…they just walked barefoot on the creekbed to get their fish. They didn’t use the ab-blaster to condition their six-pack, or worse, a blood-pressure cuff to activate their TrA…no, they had to pick up heavy shit all the time and move it around – rocks, logs, dinner.

So what are we doing here?

What we’re doing is succumbing to scarcity thinking. Don’t do it! The next time you hear someone say “you need to do xyz because if you don’t you aren’t ’something’ enough,” smile kindly and tell them to take a long walk off a short pier.  You can get into plenty-fine physical shape by playing for an hour every day.  Ask any kid on any playground in the country.

I see trainers every day treating clients like they’re inherently sick, inherently prone to disaster, inherently broken, inherently needing to be “fixed.” And who will fix them?

Why, the trainer, of course, trained in all manner of scarcity thinking. They bring in a client who wants to lose 20 lbs and then proceed to tell them they’re not “stable” enough to lose that weight yet. First, they need to learn to activate their TrA while doing half-squats on a Bosu ball with a Bodyblade in one hand and a 3 pound medicine ball in the other.

I’m sick of it.

While there are people with pre-existing conditions who need special attention to particular muscle groups, and while most folks in America are terribly under-conditioned, I’m still not convinced that the isolationist/reductionist approach to training is best or most effective.

My clients are healthy, happy individuals. All of them. The ones who come in injured. The ones who can’t activate their core musculature. The ones who breath with their cervical stabilizers. One and all. What they want is to feel good again. They want their bodies to reflect their minds, what they know they are inside. And I want that too – because inside, they are luminous, radiant beings.

And there’s no way I’m going to treat them as anything other than that.

Not only that, but they’re all capable of moving as human beings do, and achieving that weight loss while building muscle. I’m not going to put someone with LBP on a deadlift right off the bat, but eventually I will. I guarantee it. And you know what, they’ll be outperforming your circus-monkeys in no time.

Hiya!

Just wanted to blog briefly about something I’ve noticed in the “elite” personal training world. Within the past ten years or so, thanks to a few advocates (who will remain unnamed), Physical Therapy methods have flooded the Personal Training arena.

To name a few tools – Swiss balls, Airex pads, Bands and Tubing, Blood Pressure Cuffs, etc.

To list a couple of “techniques” specific to Physical Therapy that have invaded the Personal Training realm – Transverse Abdominus (TrA) Activation, Rotator Cuff exercises, “stabilization” exercises, etc.

Why does it make me cringe when I see some trainers take, week after week, someone obviously extremely overweight, and put them through a contingent of Physical Therapy-based exercises? Why? I’ll tell you why.

First, because these guys are Personal Trainers, not Physical Therapists. It’s like going to your family physician for surgery on your knee. You go to an orthopaedic surgeon, not a GP. I hope…

Second, because those techniques they’re using aren’t entirely evidence-based. I hate to tell you, but you can’t activate your TrA in isolation.  There’s little evidence that using a Swiss/stability ball for exercise is any better than doing the exercise on a bench, the floor, or a stable surface.  Sucking in your stomach before you lift something heavy can be disastrous for your spine.  Core training is not the end-all be-all of conditioning.

While people with a history of lower-back pain, or dysfunction/disease/disuse of muscular conditioning in the abdomen may need some prone work to “wake up” their TrA, continued isolation work is just wasting time. For one thing, the body just don’t work like that. Better to focus on the hoop created by the TrA, Internal and External Obliques, and the Thoracolumbar Fascia. Here’s a great article with some ideas about abdominal training, most of which has been borrowed from the pioneering work of Stuart McGill.

Training on unstable surfaces for general conditioning (i.e., not for a specific therapeutic purpose) doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in most cases. Several recent studies have shown the same levels of activation of main and supporting musculature in exercises performed on stable surfaces versus the same exercise performed on labile surfaces (swiss balls, airex pads, etc.). The biggest thing it does is decrease the amount of force you can create with your prime movers (the muscles doing the bulk of the work), and increase the work of the trunk, or stabilizing muscles.  While that might be fine after you’ve given those prime movers some serious work to do, relying on it as your main stimulus is counterproductive, and boring.

The point of these tools is to increase proprioceptive demand in certain circumstances, with certain needs. If you want to improve your or your clients’ balance, use the Indo Board. Or just close have them close their eyes while doing their regular routine. (BE CAREFUL! I’m not taking responsibility for your actions here!)

Okay guys, just had to vent. Sorry…more later! But if your trainer is having you do a split-squat with one foot on a stability ball and one foot on a balance board with a Bodyblade in your hands, and you aren’t joining Cirque du Soleil or Ringling Bro’s anytime in the near future, start asking them WHY?!!

Mick, the Barefoot Sensei, taught us a lot about our feet at the EA Summit. Particularly striking, was the fact that the feet have over 200,000 nerves. While the hands and mouth take the cake for the total level of innervation (check out the sensory and motor homunculi), the feet have a seemingly inordinately high number of nerves.

However, if you consider how much information you can gain from your only contact with the earth, it shouldn’t be so surprising. Ground quality (soft, hard, squishy, wet), temperature, tactile information (rocky, smooth, prickly), pressure sensitivity (tremors, proprioceptive feedback, etc) – it all adds up to an entire language from which we’ve cut ourselves off.

Here’s a fantastic website that covers a lot of great information about the things we lose for the sake of our shoes – http://www.shoebusters.com/thesis.html

If being barefoot scares you, try to find a middle ground – Vivo Barefoot shoes are great (I’ve had mine for about three years now), and have a huge toebox, that allows for a good toe spread, and pretty good tactile response.

I’m really interested in the Vibram Fivefingers “shoes.” Though they look pretty funny, and my fiancee will probably disown me when I get a pair, I can’t resist the thought of feeling barefoot all day!

Otherwise, try to be barefoot as much as you can – at the park, at home, at the beach, wherever, and relearn the forgotten language – your connection with the earth.

After the EA Summit, I’ve been giving a lot more thought to why we do what we do. In particular, I’m interested in why we continue to do what we know or believe is wrong. For example, cardiac patients who continue to eat unhealthy diets and live sedentary lives after their surgeries. It extends to very simple things as well, though. For example, the consumption choices we make on a daily basis. If I know that plastics are a threat to the global ecosystem, how could I continue to buy things that contain or are contained by plastics? If I know that shoes are detrimental to our health, why would I continue to wear them?

I’ll continue this inquiry on my own, and let you in on what I find out as any revelations present themselves to me…if you know the answer, let me in on it!

I just got back from the Exuberant Animal summit in lovely Leavenworth WA at the Sleeping Lady retreat center.

All I can say is WOW! It was a truly transformative experience. There were about forty of us at the summit – trainers, physical and cognitive therapists, bodyworkers, scientists, corporate professionals – and it felt like one big family reunion.

We got to spend a lot of time playing. We also got to hear from some great teachers. I highly recommend the work of these folks, put them on your to-read/see/meet list!

Gary Avischious, from the Coaching School

Dr. Stuart Brown from the National Institute for Play

Dr. Kwame Brown of the International Youth Conditioning Association

Deborah Forster, cognitive scientist from the University of California San Diego

Dr. Peter Hercules, author of Liberating the Caged Human Animal

Scott McCredie, author of Balance – In Search of Your Lost Sense

Mick, the Barefoot Sensei, from the Land Itself – http://walkingmountain.org/

And of course, plenty from the man himself – Frank Forencich.

The weekend was so full of life, I’ll be processing everything we learned for the rest of my life! LIFT has changed as a result as well…particularly in the form of: MORE PLAY