Month: January 2009

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Warming Up for the Weight Room

Warming up is a critical aspect of training that, because it’s really not very sexy, often isn’t discussed nearly enough.  Watching people in the weight room, people seem to fall into one of two categories when it comes to warm ups, either they warm up for ever and ever (exhausting themselves in the process) or come in and try to lift near maximum weights without any warm up at all.  Neither is ideal.  In this article, I want to look specifically at warming up for the weight room.

What is the Purpose of Warming Up?

As with most aspects of training, warming up is done to achieve a certain set of goals and looking at them is a good first step to determining what an optimal warmup should be.

The first purpose of warming up is exactly what the name suggests: warming the body and/or tissues that are going to be trained.… Keep Reading

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3 Reasons Diets Don’t Cause More Weight Loss in the Obese

It’s been known for years the actual weight losses from low calorie diets are always less than predicted in both lean and overweight individuals.   This is often used by the clueless to argue against calorie based models of weight loss or energy balance.    They’re wrong, mind you.  But it still raises the question of why this happens: why don’t the obese (people with obesity) lose more weight on low-calorie diets.

Weight Loss from Low-Calorie Diets

As I mentioned above, it’s been long observed that the predicted weight loss from low-calorie diets and the actual weight loss are often significantly different.   Quite in fact, they are often one half as much as would be predicted.  The question is why.

To address the issue, I will be examining a 2007 paper titled Why do obese patients not lose more weight when treated with low-calorie diets? A mechanistic perspective.

As of the writing of the paper, there was a surprisingly limited amount of research on the topic in the sense of looking at the reasons why the weight loss is so much lower than predicted.… Keep Reading

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Cable Row Technique

The mid-back (and lats) make up a considerable amount of muscle mass in the body and training those muscles groups effectively should be a key part of any good training program. In terms of maintaining good shoulder health and posture, along with developing musculature that contributes significantly to overall mass; training the back properly is key. Unfortunately, many trainees either pay little attention to the back or train it so ineffectively as to make that training, well…ineffective.

Today I want to look at some common cable row variants noting that most of the comments I’m going to make can be equally applied to barbell or dumbbell rowing or even various rowing machines. So don’t get hung up on the fact that I took pictures of a cable using specific attachments, it’s the mechanics of the different movements that is the key.

Muscles Trained in the Cable Row

Cable rows can hit a variety of different muscles depending on the specific variant performed. … Keep Reading

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The Facts on High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)

It seems to be human nature to want to find ONE SOLUTION to complex problems.  Obesity is no different.  Every few years something new is blamed as THE CAUSE OF OBESITY.  At least one of those is high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).  Like others before, it has been blamed as the cause of obesity, diabetes/The Metabolic Syndrome, health problems and the breakdown of the nuclear family.

A lot of this idea started with research by Bray who CORRELATED an increase in the intake of high fructose corn syrup with increasing rates of obesity.   Much of this started with a 2004 paper by Bray where he correlated changes in HFCS intake with changes in obesity, suggesting that it was the increase in HFCS intake that was driving obesity.  This was taken, as usual, far out of context into the popular realm of magazines, newspapers and tv soundbites.

Suddenly high fructose corn syrup was THE enemy.… Keep Reading

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Facts About Rapid Fat Loss

It’s taken almost as a matter of faith in the fitness world that slower rates of weight loss are superior to faster rates and that rapid fat loss always cause faster rates of regain and poorer long-term results.   And while there is certainly data to support that, we might ask if it is always the case.  You can probably guess by the title of this article that it’s not.

Note: Most research studies still tend to focus on weight loss despite the fact that fat loss and changes in body composition is a far greater metric of change.  For that reason I will be switching back and forth from fat and weight loss throughout the article.

Slow vs. Rapid fat Loss

While it’s taken as axiomatic that rapid fat loss is always inferior, there is a far amount of data that actually suggests the opposite.  That it, studies routinely show that a FASTER or GREATER initial weight loss is associated with BETTER long-term weight maintenance rather than worse.… Keep Reading