Don’t be surprised if this is a little bit all over the map as I’m jumping back and forth across topics. I wasn’t able to find any good flow for this part of the story; also my system ate what I had initially written so I had to start from scratch (because computers are evil).

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Back to Me
As I mentioned in Part 6, I had moved up to full blue BRATT in 2011 and never lacked for anything to do. I forget how many shifts I was doing at the time (currently I am at the shelter without fail three days per week and often do a fourth special event or 1:1 training or something). During the majority of the summer, I had just ground along day to day to day. Like I said earlier, I was a full blue BRATT and that meant focusing my time on the BB dogs which we had plenty and plenty of. Between that and other things to do, I was plenty busy. I was still training and racing (as detailed in other article series), it was pretty standard business.

Then the shit hit the fan starting with the Bastrop Hoarding event. I talked about showing up that Saturday not knowing what to expect and being overwhelmed by the sheer number of dogs and the fact that the shelter looked like a dog shanty town. But after that initial reaction, there was nothing to do but to just get it done. Honestly, I kind of like crisis situations, I have a bit of that ‘save the world’ mentality (common to many who pursue health related field or volunteering) and this triggered that.

And for all of the events that would occur where we would be fairly overwhelmed with dogs (and understaffed on volunteers), I was just a dog walking machine throughout the entire time. I was efficient and psychotically driven, I would do everything I could to get as many dogs as possible out during the situations where we were overfull. If there is one drawback it’s that I’ve had some trouble moving back to a more normal dog walking rhythm since the disasters have cleared up.

I still tend to just want to make sure everyone gets out to potty and get at least some time; putting in extra to socialize with them or do much in the way of training is just out of the question. At most, I tend to focus these days on basic leash walking; I’m of the opinion that this is one of the most important ones and it’s one I can do while I take the dogs out. I just haven’t had time to work on other stuff to any great degree. If I know that we will get everyone out in time, I’ll force myself to slow down and work on some basic training like attention or eye contact or whatever. Lately it seems like there just hasn’t been the time.

Anyhow, as a full blue BRATT, I could pull dogs for lower level volunteers (this was an immense help as it allowed us to take care of more than one dog or set of dogs at a time; the lower level BRATT’s can watch them in the runs while we walk) and I’d often be juggling 2-3 dogs in my head: the one I was walking, the first dog I’d left in the runs with one volunteer and the second dog I’d left with another volunteer. Just keeping track of who needed to go back, who I needed to bring a dog, who was going out next, what I needed to mark on the board for each dog to keep track.

I’ve got a good memory and organizational skills which helped and I’d just keep up this relentless pace getting dogs out all summer. My ethnic background lets me handle the heat pretty well, I don’t need a lot of fluid and I don’t dehydrate so I’d just hammer for 3 straight hours in the brutal Austin heat.

The only other parts of my life for the first half of the year were working with ALFIE at home and training so it was all good. Walk ALFIE, train, shelter, train, walk ALFIE. It was hot and it was tiring but I was still having fun and still helping the dogs.

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NORMAN: Part 1
Mind you, towards the end of this was when NORMAN would enter my life but I already told that story in detail elsewhere and won’t repeat it here. I had taken him home to foster in July, after the real craziness of the hoarding event had occurred but at least during the time that some of the other disasters I described were occurring.

He was a headache. He was still very much a puppy, his breed (a pitbull mix) gave him high energy, and he was wound a bit tight. He also wasn’t well socialized, they had found him up on Jollyville road with an injured back leg as a puppy and he’d probably been a stray prior to that.  He wasn’t potty trained and there were a lot of accidents (all my fault, make no mistake).

More seriously, he had some separation anxiety and would tear stuff up if I left the house for extended periods (he went through a lot of my socks, a couple of dog beds, killed a Playstation3 controller and TV remote and I’m probably forgetting some stuff).  He even dog a 6″ square hole in the carpet by the front door at one point, dogs apparently do this when they lose their shit, trying to dig their way out to find their human.   But I had taken him into the house understanding the responsibility so that’s what it was. And, mind you, he wasn’t always a monster and did have periods of calm.  Like when he was sleeping.

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Those ears are ridiculous

So in the same way that I’d adopted ALFIE when he was a color level above what I was trained to handle (he was BB when I was blue dog) I had managed to do the same with NORMAN (who would have been yellow when I was only BB).   Which also meant that, at a fundamental level, I didn’t have the training skills to really deal with him.  But that would soon change.

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Yer Yellow: Part 1
Because about two months into having NORMAN at home (so about September, while much of the mess at the shelter was still going on), I was approached by one of the Orange BRATTs about taking the Yellow class. Because while you can voluntarily take the blue dot or full blue classes, you have to be selected to move up further than that. 

Presumably this is based on reliability and consistency (which I had in spades) as well as having shown some ability to work with them (that I liked to think I had).  At the higher levels, not everybody is equipped or able to handle those dogs and that puts both the dogs and the handler at risk.  So not everyone is given the option to move up.

Of course, not everyone wants to move up in the first place. I’m not saying this as a negative or a criticism at all. The shelter needs volunteers at every color level and better to have someone stay at the level they are comfortable up than to move up and quit because they don’t like it.  I know of volunteers who have stayed at, for example, blue dot or full blue for extended periods. That’s simply where they are happy and that means they are there consistently and that’s what matters. Moving up isn’t expected or an obligation and I don’t want to make it sound like it is (or that not moving up is somehow bad).

In any case, I had apparently made the cut and been given the opportunity to move up to yellow level. On the one hand, it was quite the honor since it told me that I was doing a good job (which, my current laziness with this site notwithstanding, is important to me). On the other hand, I wasn’t sure, especially given what I was dealing with at home with NORMAN, if I wanted or could handle the extra stress and responsibility.

I had, at this point, had some exposure to Yellow dogs.  Often I had worked with dogs who were BB who were then moved up to Yellow so I had some idea of what to expect, or had gotten to walk a yellow dog when there wasn’t a high level volunteer and I was given permission.  And I wasn’t sure if I was ready for it.

So I sat on the fence for a couple of weeks. I was getting some pressure from higher level volunteers (in the sense that they just kept asking me if I was going to take the class which at least suggested that they really wanted me to) and I went back and forth on it. I could always take the next class a few months later but I balanced that against wanting to help more dogs (and learn more about dog training and maybe get NORMAN under control) which I balanced against not being sure I wanted the responsibility…you get the idea.  

And to break up this dense block of text here’s a picture of NORMAN and ALFIE after they took over my couch.

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Occupy Lyle's Couch

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Of course, I finally decided to take it as I knew I would.  It’s weird, I do this sometimes, I know exactly what I’m going to do but play this game with myself where I pretend to debate it in my own head weighing the pros and cons. Then I do it anyhow. I know at the outset what I’m going to do but have to at least pretend to deliberate. So I decided to take the class.

Like the full blue class it was 5 weeks of classes over 6 weeks, they give you one week in the middle to practice and absorb the information. And it was almost overwhelming. We had weekly readings and copious notes and handouts along with being taught a huge number of new games and techniques to train the dogs.

Week 2, where we dealt with leash walking, nearly buried me.  It was just so many different techniques and so much information.   Of course we were also working hands on with the yellow dogs now to start getting experience with them.  So now I was walking a select set of yellow dogs (they usually assign the classes the relatively easier dogs of the new color level) along with my normal BB, etc. duties.

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Yer Yellow: Part 2
A big shift with the yellow class was moving into clicker training.  Prior classes had used a mark work (in this case a high-pitched ‘YES!) to mark behavior but now we were getting more technical and that meant clickers. The reason they wait is that there is a timing issue along with being able to wrangle your leash, the dog, treats and a clicker all at the same time.  It’s not that it’s that hard, but it does take some practice.  So they don’t teach it in the lower level classes.

And while there isn’t much of a fundamental difference between a mark word and a clicker, those in the know feel that the clicker is more consistent (always the same sound), may activate different neural pathways (noise vs. word) and simply works better; if nothing else it lets you pinpoint the behavior a lot more accurately when you get the timing down.  This isn’t as critical with the BB and blue dot dogs but, as I’d soon learn, can be with yellow level dogs (which I’ll discuss in more detail on Friday).

All of this would end up triggering my normal obsessive behavior patterns shortly thereafter as I’d throw myself into the science and practice of clicker training and everything related. I’d scour the web, read everything I could get my hands on, I still maintain that you could clicker train a human (amusingly there is a group using what they call TAGteach, Teaching with Acoustical Guidance, to work with gymnasts, using the clicker to mark body positions).  Mind you, that all of this happened to fit in with things I was researching (basically looking addiction, reward physiology, behavioral reinforcement and habit establishment/change) didn’t hurt.

So far as actual techniques, there was a lot of advanced leash walking, how to deal with leash biting, build relationship and calmness and a host of other stuff.  Most of it was pretty easy to understand conceptually (if not always easy to implement) with one exception and that is counter-conditioning for reactivity.  This is a game called click to calm and it just took me weeks to wrap my head around it (I’d send endless irritating emails to one of the Orange BRATTs who was teaching the class).  Here’s another dog picture with no relation to what I’m talking about because big blocks of dense text are irritating.

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Please let us come to the park, we'll be good

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But I needed to understand it as much for the shelter as the fact that I needed to use it with both of my dogs. It was full on dog training at this point and, if I’m honest, taking the class was as much about the shelter as it was giving me the tools to work with my own dogs. Like I said, NORMAN would have been yellow and taking the class gave me the tools to really work with him. Of course, those techniques work just fine with lower level dogs so I used it with ALFIE as well (especially the click to calm game to work on his reactivity).

We also had to learn a bit about breed characteristics (I’m still very bad at breed identification) because another requirement was that we start helping with adoption counseling. That is, working with the public to make sure that the dog they are interested in is a good fit for them, counseling them on the dog they may be interested in, etc.

This is a place where volunteers have an advantage over staff; since we spend most of the time with the dogs we often know them better in terms of their real world behavior (rather than what’s written in the folder).  And when the public is interested in yellow or orange dogs (remember: often big time behavioral issues), you need them to be fully aware of what they are going into (some dogs actually require counseling with a higher level BRATT before adoption).  And the yellow and orange volunteers have that information.

It’s something I actually really enjoy doing, it’s a more direct way to help dogs find forever homes.  I get to interact with the potential adopters and there’s something nice about doing the counseling (or dog introduction) for a dog I’ve been working with and to see them go home.  As well, folks who have worked with the dogs often want to know about who adopted them, when a volunteer does the counseling, we can share that information.

Finally, we were supposed to have done a module on playgroups. Although it hasn’t happened often in the last year (due to time), when possible we try to play dogs with each other in our auditorium both to let them get some energy out as well as to help with dog-dog socializing (and to identify potential problems).  I had helped out with them previously but you can get qualified to do them as a yellow BRATT on your own (or at least with established play groups). Unfortunately, the outbreak prevented us doing that since we couldn’t safely let dogs play together during that time period.

But it was an exhausting, overwhelming 6 weeks (ultimately worth it, of course).  I was now working with yellow dogs consistently at the shelter, along with applying those techniques at home.   Which ended up taking a lot out of me for quite some time.  The shelter wasn’t quite as fun once I moved up to yellow, and my home situation wasn’t helping with my overall attitude.  And that’s where I’ll finish up on Friday.

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September: Bastrop Burns
Yup, Bastrop again. Because between the drought and the heat and everything else, Austin can become a tinderbox and shit sometimes burst into flames. And there was a really horrible fire out in Bastrop. Like weeks of land burning and people losing their houses kinds of fires.

And there’s a lot of farms and country out in Bastrop. Which means lots and lots of animals. I heard stories of people just letting their horses and cows out of the barns and pastures, just turning them free so they could have a chance to escape. And it happened so fast that people were evacuating their houses with no time to grab anything but the essentials before trying to get away. It was just one of those kinds of things.

A lot of them didn’t have time to get their companion animals (or couldn’t find them). Or those that did couldn’t keep them and dropped them off at the Bastrop shelter. Dogs were found wandering among the fires, burned or with various injuries. And, once again, we took them all in. Something like 155 total animals with 90 or so dogs and the rest cats were rescued and we took in the bulk of them. You can see pictures of some of them here and this video shows some of the animals.

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The dogs were in various states of injury with burns and other damage, they were all scared and confused. Many of them were country or farm dogs. Some weren’t fixed (which can mean aggression issues in older males) or just had basic behavioral issues. So once again we were in disaster mode; the difference here being that a lot of the dogs were at the higher color levels on top of being bigger. The hoarding incident had been ameliorated by the dogs being so well behaved and small but now we had kennels full of very large, very time and energy demanding dogs.

Normally we have, at most a handful of yellow and orange dogs but I remember seeing a whole ton of both during this time. And those dogs can be exhausting (as I’d be finding out soon enough) to begin with; the yellow and orange BRATT’s were stretched thin by this point to begin with and this was just another crisis event to exhaust them. There are far fewer of the higher level BRATT’s (especially orange level) and the dogs take a lot more time and energy.

Now, we did everything we could to let folks know that their dogs were at the shelter. Radio spots, print ads and a Facebook page were put up with pictures of all the animals in an attempt to reunite them with their owners. I’m guessing about half of them were. There was something special about being at the shelter when someone came in and was reunited with the dog that they had thought lost or claimed by the fire.

At the same time, I was shocked when nobody had even checked on some of the dogs. We gave them weeks (before assuming that they were now ours and we tried to rehome them) and I can’t imagine someone not taking the time to call every shelter in the area to see if their dog had shown up.

Then again, the situation was insane. I can only imagine that people were having to leave Austin, go stay in hotels, stay with friends, who knows what? Maybe it was unrealistic to expect them to come after their animals. I don’t know and I’m in no position to judge.

But we took care of all of them, cleared the kennels again and it was back to normal at long last. Except that right as the Bastrop fire issue was getting taken care of, the next disaster would strike.

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September: OUTBREAK!
Because right as we were getting things under control from the Bastrop fire, there was a disease outbreak at the shelter. Now make no mistake, the nature of the shelter environment is that stuff sometimes moves through the shelter. Usually it’s minor stuff like kennel cough or the occasional gastrointestinal bug. We do our best to contain it when it happens, the clinic stays right on top of things (and we have a health board to track who’s got what) but that’s what happens with dozens of animals in a closed space. But previously it had always been minor stuff.

But this was different. I won’t specify what it was; sufficed to say we were hit with a disease that is contagious, virulent and ultimate fatal to dogs if they catch it. So now we were in super duper disaster mode trying to limit exposure and do damage control.

This was also the situation I mentioned on Friday when I talked about our dog euthanasia rate; this single event probably led to the most dogs being put down but only because there is zero chance of recovery for the dog. But since almost nobody had spent time or worked with these dogs (i.e. they hadn’t had time to get attached as with Alan or other dogs we’d lost), it just didn’t carry the same emotional weight.

Now, our normal setup is that we have the main kennel (called K-9) and the pre-adopt kennel (where dogs not ready for prime time go until they are temp and medical tested). That way any dogs that the public can get to are available for adoption and the ones not yet ready can’t be seen by anybody but staff and volunteers. It’s just less of a headache when the public can’t even get a glimpse of a dog that’s not available yet. So far as the general public is concerned, those dogs don’t exist.

That changed as the pre-adopt kennel was made into a quarantine area for sick or potentially sick dogs which meant that all dogs who weren’t sick (adoptable or not) were up in the main kennel. Nobody was allowed back there for months (the final dog would be cleared in February of 2012); only staff could handle those dogs and they had to take major precautions (gloves/gowns) while doing so.

So now all of our available dogs were up in K-9, which also cut down how many dogs we could have by about 20 (since the pre-adopt kennels were being used for other things). While not a major deal this does lead to some headaches as the public can now see dogs who aren’t yet ready for adoption and there is a whole discussion/explanation that you have to have to explain why. Usually you just send them to the front desk and let them deal with it.

More importantly, everyone at the shelter was paranoid because of the danger of this disease and the very real possibility of carrying it home. Many, if not most, volunteers have their own dogs and some will have separate shelter clothes that they change in and out of so that they don’t take anything home with them to their own dogs.

And that’s just for minor stuff. But this outbreak meant that many, especially those with older dogs (who are apparently more susceptible) simply didn’t come in at all. They weren’t willing to risk the death of their own dogs while the outbreak was going on. And, as I noted above, this went on for months.

So not only were we still overwhelmed with dogs (and we still seemed to have an unusually large number of higher color dogs) but we were understaffed on volunteers (especially at higher color levels). Between having lost a lot to simple attrition, stress and everything else, now we had folks who couldn’t come in to keep their own dogs safe. That left everyone else to pick up the slack. And what that usually means is shorting time with the dogs. You just have to get them in and out of the door, leash them, potty them, short walk, back to the kennels. No time for training, no time for socializing.

As I noted, it would be months before the outbreak would be resolved but it was the last major disaster that would occur.

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The High Point of 2011: Rags to Wags
Finally things would start to return to normal and, at least we could end the year on a high-note. Our major fundraiser, Rags to Wags would hit in December. It’s super silly with a dog fashion show (volunteers got to walk the dogs down the runway this year), a silent auction and $150/plate dinners. As a dog volunteer, our job is to keep the dogs calm for 6 hours for their 5 minute walk down the runway. But we get fed and it’s totally worth it. Mainly because we get to wear jeans and tennis shoes while everyone else is in formal wear.

The theme this year was super heroes, shelter dogs wore capes and owner dogs wore some pretty elaborate costumes (one set of dogs were done up as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). I think this picture says it all.

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Errr....yeah

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But, silly as hell or not, after a long 2011 and everything that the shelter had survived, the event raised something stupid like $300k when all was said and done, got insane exposure for the Austin Humane Shelter, got some dogs adopted, etc. It was a much needed high point after a year of absolute craziness.

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Into 2012
Mind you, by comparison 2012 has been a breeze. Sure, the outbreak took until February or so to finally resolve but once we were in a rhythm with things, it was minor and it was only a small handful of dogs that had to be tested clear for things to return to normal. It kept the pre-adopt kennel tied up which was a bit problematic but overall the first of this year was no big deal.

We’ve had a couple of minor hoarding incidents (including a bunch of rabbits, of all things, a few months back) in the last couple of months but nothing to compare to the craziness of last year. For example, we took in 20+ something chiweenies (I still think they are some kind of daschunds mix) the other week; we also had 18 dogs come in off a farm when their owner got too sick or died and that’s left us with a lot of higher color dogs (all of whom are very scared) to contend with.

Still, compared to last year, this is nothing. We’d had lots of dogs coming and going, plenty of adoptions, only one or two long term residents who haven’t found the perfect home, did a Mega-adoption event with over 150 total adoptions (cats and dogs), etc.

But going into the end of 2012, things were as back to normal as they get, we were getting new volunteers and some of the higher level volunteers who had left were being replaced by those of us who were moving up in color level. Yes, I said us, meaning me. Which is the best segue to talk about what I was doing during this entire time other than not working on my book projects.

Read Volunteering at the Austin Humane Shelter: Part 9.

Early August: A Dog Gets Put Down
I mentioned in the original series that the Austin Humane Shelter is a no-kill shelter. That is, the shelter doesn’t put down dogs as a matter of course. In reality this means that dog euthanasia is kept to 10% or less; it’s also only done on a dog by dog basis. It’s never done for time (i.e. if a dog is at the shelter for too long) and it’s never done based on breed.

It generally only occurs when a dog is sick with no chance for recovery or has shown intractable behavior problems (usually aggression towards human) that make it unadoptable. If it can still be adopted, we will keep it until we find it a home. To put this in perspective, in the year and a half I’ve been at the Austin Humane Shelter, we’ve done several thousands of adoptions and in that time I can think of maybe a half dozen or so dogs that have been put down.

This number might be a bit higher due to something I’m going to talk about in the next part of this (bizarrely, as I write this, one of our long term residents, whose behavior had been worsening was put down) series. But it’s a rare enough event that I can remember most of them when they happen. Which probably puts the rate of euthanasia at around 1% or so. If that. I mean, a handful of dogs against thousands of adoptions.

But as part of the trauma of 2011 there was a specific situation worth mentioning. Earlier that year we had taken in three pit bulls rescued from a fighting ring. One was Xena who had been a breeding female. She was a beautiful dog who’s owners had botched her ear clipping and had ended up taking them off completely. Beyond that she was fairly well adjusted although the shelter wasn’t great for her. This is Xena and you can see the hatchet job her owners did with her ears.

Yes, I Can Hear You Now

She loved playing touch (where you teach the dog to target your hand and bop it with their nose to get a treat or a toy) and to cuddle in the field and get her tummy rubbed in the sun. She didn’t so much love going back to her kennel and had some issues with pottying in it (which made her feet sensitive since she walked around in the urine).

Between her ears and her pittbullness, finding an adopter for her was tough; finally, she ended up being saved by the wonderful folks at Love-A-Bull and eventually found her forever home through them. I have seen volunteers mention that they’ve seen her out walking with her family (she may actually just be in foster right now). She actually has her own Facebook page (and her name got changed a multitude of times which is why you’ll see her as Emma Rose, Xena, Tina and Peanut on her page) if you want to check her out.

But the other two pits, Alan and T-bird weren’t so lucky. They were males, bred for fighting and, when rescued, had lived their entire lives in a cage. This is Alan (left) and T-bird (right).

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'Sup

Bro!

They weren’t socialized at all and were, simply, behaviorally broken. Dogs, like humans, have a critical period in life (around weeks 4-8 of life) where their exposure (or not) to people and certain things can sort of ‘set them’ for life and these dogs had missed it.

It’s like when children have some huge experience early in life that just locks them into a certain behavior pattern. These dogs were like that. They were scared, didn’t relate to humans at all.  Their tails were constantly tucked and they didn’t even want to come out of their kennel or go outside; everything was just terrifying to them and it was really sad to see.

Yellow volunteers worked with them exhaustively to no avail, sitting with them for extended periods to try to get them used to people or to coax them out to the field. Behaviorists were called in and couldn’t make any progress. It was really frustrating to everyone involved. They were great dogs and everybody wanted to see them make progress but it just wasn’t happening.

This actually sort of tells you whether a dog’s behavior is just a function of being in the kennel or more ‘hardwired’. That is, dogs who come in to the shelter are often terrified, either in general or of people. But within the first week or two you start to see them making progress as they get used to the environment, interact with people who treat them nicely, etc. You can see it happening on a day to day basis as they get used to it and it means that, once in their forever home, they are likely to be completely wonderful once they settle in.

But with dogs who are more ‘hardwired’ in terms of their behavior things don’t improve in any reasonable time frame. That’s when there is a problem and while I’m not saying that no progress can be made, it can often be a multi-year process to make any headway at all. And the dog may never be truly ‘normal’ or ‘fixed’. And that’s a problem looking at adopting them as a companion animal.

In any case, due to the total inability to make any progress with them, a decision was made to have at least one of them (Alan) put down. And this caused a tremendous amount of outcry. This is a place where the volunteers and the staff are often at odds; we spend most of the time with the dogs (and get attached) but, at the end of the day, have no say in what ultimately happens to individual dogs or with the shelter as a whole.

And the staff decision to put Alan down was met by a lot of volunteer resentment (I’m honestly not sure what happened to T-bird). A few volunteers left the program because of it, they were so hurt by either the decision to put Alan down or how it was handled that they left (in a related vein, two volunteers would be asked to leave the program a few months later when another dog was put down, their emotions got the best of them, and they got nasty with some people on the mailing list).

Things got so heated on the mailing list that it was shut down briefly; emotions were running high and it was getting ugly. The year had been rough on everybody already and this was just a final kick in the pants that nobody needed. After it was all said and done, a number of BRATT’s held a tribute for Alan after things had cooled down. That’s what he meant to them. So far as I can tell, some of the folks who left still haven’t returned and they might not ever.

If you’re wondering how I felt about it, I’m not sure I had an opinion. I hadn’t worked with either dog to any great degree (if at all) so I didn’t have the emotional attachment that the others had. And, honestly, I can see both sides of the issue. Do I love the dogs? Yes. Do I wish they could all be saved? Yes. Do I recognize rationally/unemotionally that some can’t be? Yes. Would it have been different if it had been a dog I had been attached to or had worked with extensively? I just don’t know and hope I never have to find out.

It’s just one of those places where there probably isn’t a right answer. To be sure, Alan could have lived his life out as a dog but he probably wasn’t ever going to be functional or bond with a human family (and ultimately our goal is finding companion dogs loving homes). So I’m not sure what kind of life it would have been. I don’t know that he ever would have recovered or would have been adoptable; he was just too fundamentally broken. At the end of the day, the decision was made (and I know it’s never easy for the staff to make that call but that’s why they get the big bucks) and so it goes.

And while you’d have thought that the above was enough to fill out 2011, you’d be wrong. Because we were only halfway through the year and the shit was still hitting the fan.

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Late August: Austin Gets Hot
If there is a single thing I dislike about Austin (other than the hippies and the traffic) it’s that the summers are just brutal. And 2011 was no different. It didn’t help that the shift I usually covered was from 2-5pm, the hottest part of the day. I mean it was so hot that you’d take dogs to the doors and they would just stop.

These dogs live their lives in kennels and they would rather go back there then go out into the heat. That’s when it’s hot. And 2012 was nasty, we had a record number of triple digit days and the heat was just overwhelming. The drought was not helping.

And one Monday I rolled in for my shift to find the entire parking lot full and a line out the door. I’m usually pretty good at keeping up with adoption events and hadn’t seen anything about this. And once I got inside I found out why. Over that weekend our air conditioning had gone out. And the kennel areas are not well ventilated which meant that it was going to get deadly for the animals. And there’s nowhere else to house them.

And in order to clear the kennels until it could be fixed they had organized a free adoption day just to get the dogs out of the building. And, as the words ‘free’ tend to do, people turned out in droves but the day can be exhausting as a ton of people hit the shelter and we’re all running around trying to get everyone and everything taken care of.

And, once again we cleared the kennels completely and got the AC system fixed by some good folks here in Austin. So the next disaster had been handled, things settled back in for a few more weeks before the next hammer came down.

Read Volunteering at the Austin Humane Shelter: Part 8.

I’ll be mainly focusing on 2011 since, frankly, last year was crazy almost from start to finish.  Actually, it wasn’t crazy, it was pretty much a disaster.  Things started off quietly enough, the first couple of months were just normal times at the shelter.  I was deep into my winter training grind and volunteering regularly.  We pick up in Februrary, 2011.

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Working Blue
By the time I had been at the shelter for four months, I have moved from a newbie Green BRATT through Blue Dot and then had taken a special full blue BRATT class (that was put together for 5 of us who had forgotten to get into the main class).   It was five classes across 6 weeks and, at this point, we were into full on dog training. As a reminder (or for folks who didn’t or don’t want to read the original series), the Austin Humane Shelter dog volunteer program uses a color system to ‘rank’ the dogs. 

Similarly, dog walkers (called BRATT’s which stands for Behavioral Rehoming Assessment Training Team; a description of what we do) are ranked by color and you can only walk dogs at your color level and below.  There are are a number of reasons for this (ranging from safety to consistent training) but the color levels mainly rank the dogs on what type of general behaviors you can expect.  In order from easiest to hardest:

• Green dogs are the easiest, with zero behavioral problems; they can be walked by anyone.
• Blue dot dogs may have a single minor behavioral issue.  It may something as simple as they are difficult to get in or out of their kennel or something else.  Basically if they can’t be walked by anyone at the shelter but have no major issues, they will be blue dot.
• BB dogs (think of it as blue extreme) may have multiple minor behavioral issues or one or two larger issues.  This can be persistent pulling, dog reactivity, a lack of attention to handlers or a few others.     By the time you take the full blue class, you have undergone a good bit of basic dog training so that you can not only handle such dogs but are able to start training them (which makes them more adoptable).
• Yellow dogs can vary quite a bit, some may be shy as hell, others can get easily overaroused, leash bite, engage in a variety of dominance behaviors (such as height seeking), etc.  They are more unpredictable, running the gamut from perfect and easy to handle to just going nuts at the flip of a switch.
• Orange dogs are the most extreme in terms of behavior and may show a multitude of behavioral issues or one or two at an extreme level. Orange volunteers have undergone extensive training (including a full one year internship to move to Orange level) to be able to work with those dogs.
• I’d note that there are two other color markings which are purple (for puppies) and red (for sick or staff only dogs) but this has little to do with behavior.

So as a full blue BRATT, I was now working with the BB and lower dogs.  That generally meant focusing my time and energy on the BB dogs and only walking blue dot or green dogs when I had gotten all of the higher levels dogs taken care of or there were no lower level volunteers (as much as possible you try to leave lower level dogs for lower level volunteers so that they have something to do and can get experience with the animals).  I was also being exposed to other things such as doing walks around the block with a Yellow BRATT, or helping with the occasional playgroup. 

This was also when I started helping with 1:1 training for new volunteers.  This is expected of blue BRATTs and I was happy to do it.  My schedule is flexible as hell so I was always able to cover times that nobody else could when new volunteers had limited times or whatever to get trained.  And given what the shelter had given (and was still giving) to me, it was important to me that I pass it on to new volunteers to get them involved in our program.  The volunteer who originally trained me is still at the shelter; she can either be thanked or blamed for my nearly chronic presence at the shelter.

Frankly, I had tons to do since the majority of the dogs at the shelter tend to be blue dot or BB.  It was a rare day indeed that I wasn’t able to fill three full hours walking and training nothing but BB dogs with the normal shelter population.   I was also using what I had learned in class to train ALFIE (who had been a BB dog when I adopted him) so it was all good.  And this would go on for the first few months of the year; sadly, it was the quiet before the storm and shit was about to go nuts.

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May: Hoarders Dog Edition
As I mentioned in the original series, the Austin Humane Shelter volunteer program has it’s own Yahoo group and mailing list that sends out announcements about all kinds of stuff.  It keeps everyone in the loop, let’s us communicate about dog behavior, see special announcements, know when shifts need extra coverage, etc. 

And one weekend in the digest I saw a huge call for volunteers, something had happened and the shelter was about to take in a ton of dogs and they needed all hands on deck.  I had no idea but headed in that Saturday.  And the shelter looked like a disaster area. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So at some point, I’m guessing in 2009 or 2010, a woman in Bastrop (a boondock area outside of Austin), maybe it was earlier, had decided to start ‘saving’ dogs and cats.  And she just kept collecting them and collecting them.  Until the animals took over her house, started interbreeding and multiplying.  She had moved into the outside shed and just given them the run of it.  And while I’m a bit unclear on how this all went down, the Bastrop fire department went to her house, opened the door and this is what they saw.

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Heironymous Bosch Eat Your Heart Out

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Yeah, like the pit of hell.   There were one hundred some odd dogs and I don’t know how many cats, all living in their own food and filth in this woman’s house.  They had been inbreeding with one another (and a few of them were clearly mentally impaired or had physical defects) and, well…just look at the picture above.  And we took all of them in.  I mean every single dog and cat.  Now, normally the shelter dog population is maybe 50-60 dogs.  And when we are full it’s hard enough to get all the dogs taken care of in a single shift.

Now nearly quadruple that.  That’s what we were facing.  Every possible space was taken by dogs, dogs and more dogs.   Hell, rooms I’d never even been in before were being used to house animals.   We had makeshift kennels and crates everywhere and 2-3 dogs to each kennel.  It’s a really good thing that the grand majority of the dogs were small or I don’t see how we could have housed them.  But, it was simply nuts.

And none of these dogs had even been on a leash, or worn a collar.  Mind you, they were ridiculously well behaved given the circumstances but I guess when you have 170 dogs living in close quarters, that tends to breed politeness: any dog who acted out probably got his ass kicked.  I have to think, in hindsight, that if any had had behavioral issues we would have been totally overwhelmed.

And like I said they were all in just horrible condition.  Filthy matted fur, never groomed, covered in poop and piss.  Groomers were working overtime showering and cleaning and just shaving them down.  The transitions are shocking, here are two before and after pictures to give you some perspective on this; it doesn’t even look like the same dog.

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Rasta to preppie

Stoner to straightedge

And we had to take care of all of them.  But cleanup was just the start of the work.  Like I said, they had never been on collars or leashes and we had to teach them how to wear/walk on them and that took time.   That was on top of pottying them all and trying to socialize them somewhat.  So for weeks stretching into months, it was just this exhausting grind of taking 2-3 dogs (often just carrying an armful) to the runs to potty these dogs and try to get them used to being dogs.

Mind you, the volunteers came out in droves to help with grooming and cleaning and everything else.  So did the Austin population in general, a huge number of dogs were taken into foster just to clear up space in the kennels and get some of the dogs into a lower stress situation.

And this went on for months as we tried to deal with them, get them cleaned and basically trained, get them adopted.  It was exhausting, with little to no time to do anything but just run dogs to potty and back.  A lot of volunteers burned out and so far as I can tell a fair few left the program because they were just exhausted.  

This isn’t uncommon, folks who have that ‘caretaker’ type of personality profile often forget that their own health and well being is just as important.  They feel the need to save everyone and end up burning themselves out; then they are no good to anybody.

In any case, after the dogs had been cleaned and groomed and everything else we held a massive adoption event.  Apparently over 1000 people came out, standing in the hot Austin sun for up to 2 hours to get a chance at the dogs.  And we got most, if not all of them, adopted.  Snickers, a dog that had been clearly inbred (he was scruffy in just the right kind of way but wasn’t all there, if you get my drift) was one of the last to go.  I remember because I spent a lot of time with him for some reason.

Just the right amount of scruff

In any case, if you want to see more of what the whole mess looked like, here’s a four minute video.  You can see what the shelter looked like at about the 1 minute mark.

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And, finally, after what seemed like forever, things settled down.  And since the dogs never stop coming, it wasn’t as if everyone got to take a well deserved break after the months of craziness.  As soon as they are emptied, the kennels fill back up with dogs and it was back to a more or less ‘normal’ day to day volunteer existence.   And we had what I seem to recall was two to three weeks of relatively normalcy before the next disaster hit.

Read Volunteering at the Austin Humane Shelter: Part 7.

Abstract
Despite the vast public policy efforts to promote the consumption of healthy foods and the public’s growing concern with weight management, the proportion of overweight individuals continues to increase. An important factor contributing to this obesity trend is the misguided belief about the relationship between a meal’s healthiness and its impact on weight gain, whereby people erroneously believe that eating healthy foods in addition to unhealthy ones can decrease a meal’s calorie count. This research documents this misperception, showing that it is stronger among individuals most concerned with managing their weight—a striking result given that these individuals are more motivated to monitor their calorie intake. This finding has important public policy implications, suggesting that in addition to encouraging the adoption of a healthier lifestyle among overweight individuals, promoting the consumption of healthy foods might end up facilitating calorie overconsumption, leading to weight gain rather than weight loss.

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Background

In introducing today’s paper, I am reminded of an old joke/quip to the effect that “All that separates man from the animals is our ability to rationalize.”   I’d add “And accessorize” but that’s neither here nor there.  But the reality is that humans are able to do a wide variety of mental gymnastics in how they approach life.  Effectively, we appear to be slave to what psychologists call cognitive biases, ways in which we think about the present, past, future or ourselves that often lead us to make some fascinatingly bad choices.  This is a topic that many recent books has discussed in a variety of contexts.

And while I don’t know if I can say that it occurs to a greater degree in terms of eating and health behaviors, there is no doubt that people often engage in some exceedingly interesting mental gymnastics when it comes to those topics.  Some of this is conscious but much of it can be chalked up to either unconscious behaviors, misunderstandings (or a lack of information/education) or mishearing/misinterpreting the message.   And these types of things, as much as anything else, often derail many people’s attempts to eat healthy, lose weight or simply avoid weight gain.

In the realm of exercise for example, many people grossly overestimate the actual caloric expenditure from activity, as I discussed in Normal Weight Men and Women Overestimate Energy Expenditure – Research Review, and this leads them to either expect far more of an impact on weight loss than is realistic or to eat more calories than they actually need based on the assumption that they burned it off during activity.

In the arena of eating, this issue can show up in a myriad ways.  A classic example of a misunderstanding/garbling of the message occurred back in the 80′s during the low-fat eating craze.   While it’s hard to say where the blame lies, the general public sort of got the message that so long as they kept fat intake low, nothing else really mattered.  Caloric intake and portions went out the window. 

Food companies capitalized on this by rushing plenty of energy dense, high-calorie (but low-fat) foods to market and it all went wrong.  Studies routinely found that people ate more food when it was labelled ‘low-fat’ compared to one that was labelled as being higher in fat.  Either consciously or unconsciously, they gave themselves permission to eat more of it.  And often ended up consuming more calories than they would have otherwise.

Another example deals with artificial sweeteners where you often see a pattern where artificial sweetener (or diet soda) intake is associated with weight gain (or a lack of weight loss).  And while there is some speculation that artificial sweeteners do some odd things in the brain in terms of driving appetite, it’s probably more related to people rationalizing that they can eat more of something else because they are getting less calories by choosing diet soda or using artificial sweeteners.   That is, they figure that since they are ‘saving so many calories’ by making one choice, they end up compensating (or more than compensating) by choosing something unhealthy.  Call this the skim milk and chocolate cake or Diet Coke and cheeseburger approach to eating. 

I’d note before continuing that this much of the above rationalizing tends to be more for people who are only paying somewhat ‘superficial’ attention to ‘eating well’ (or some other fairly abstract goal).  That is, the type of thing I’m going to talk about doesn’t generally occur among folks who are diet obsessed and track macros or calories or what have you.  Rather it’s for folks who, while they may say that they are concerned with their diet or body weight or body fat, are focusing on the wrong things (a topic I addressed in more detail in Fundamental Principles vs. Minor Details).

Finally type of behavior seems to occur more prevalently in people who tend to divide foods into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories (a category that many popular diets and dietary approaches tend to promote).  ‘Good’ foods become equated with healthy and, altogether too often, can be eaten without consequence (i.e. weight gain).  Researchers call this the ‘health halo’ by which supposed ‘healthy foods’ have a halo of invincibility around them  In the same vein ‘bad’ foods are equated with being unhealthy and this categories are not only absolute but cause us to do some of those strange mental gymnastics when it comes to how we approach our food intake.

You can find examples of this all over the place where people assume that ‘healthy/good’ foods can be eaten in uncontrolled amounts whereas the tiniest amount of ‘unhealthy/bad foods’ mean that the diet has failed, the dieter is immoral and weak, and health will simply be destroyed (this is seen at the greatest extreme in a psychological condition called orthorexia whereby people see food as a moral choice judging not only themselves but others by the foods that they choose to eat).  You can see some good examples of this in the comments section of Straight Talk About High-Fructose Corn Syrup: What it is and What it Ain’t. – Research Review. 

Which basically segues into today’s paper which examines a behavior pattern that is often seen whereby folks tend to get fixated (or perhaps ‘blinded’ is a better word) by the concept of ‘healthy’ foods and end up missing the forest for the trees when it comes to their food and caloric intake.   There is also evidence that people who are (or at least state that they are) more ‘weight conscious’ are even more prone to make these kinds of mis-estimations which was a secondary aim of the study.

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The Paper

The study recruited 934 people, of whom the majority (74.2%) were female aged anywhere from under 20 to over 50.  Subjects were then shown 4 meals which either consisted of ‘unhealthy’ foods or those same unhealthy foods coupled with a healthy option.  The four meals, with the healthy addition shown in parentheses, were a hamburger (three celery sticks), bacon and cheese waffle sandwich (small organic apple), chili with beef (small salad without dressing) and meatball pepperoni cheesesteak (celery/carrot side dish).   So, for example, subjects were either shown a bacon and cheese waffle sandwich (which sounds amazing in so many ways) either by itself or side by side with a small organic apple.

Half the subjects were shown the unhealthy choice alone and the other half were shown the combination of the unhealthy choice with it’s healthy add-on and they were asked to estimate the caloric value of the meals.  I’d mention that this design is problematic because it’s not comparing how a given individual might rank each of the two meals; rather it’s comparing the average estimate of the caloric value of the different meals between people.  All subjects were also asked to rate how concerned they were with managing their weight on a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being extremely concerned).

The study generated a total of 2750 total observations of the different meals and, on average, subjects estimated that the unhealthy meal alone contained 691 calories.  Now, logically it’s obvious that a food consisting of an unhealthy item PLUS a healthy item would have to have more calories than the unhealthy item alone.   Clearly two foods can’t have less calories than either food alone.

Yet, on average, subjects estimated the unhealthy plus healthy choice as having only 648 calories.  I’d mention that as a third part of the study, a separate group was asked if they believed that the healthy foods contained negative calories and this was not the case.  So it doesn’t appear to have been the case where subjects figured that the healthy addition was literally ‘reducing’ the caloric value of the food by containing negative calories.  Rather, the ‘health halo’ effect caused people to systematically underestimate the caloric value of the combination of an unhealthy and healthy food.

But it gets even odder.  When the estimates were ranked by how folks reported their concern with managing their weight, the values changed even more.  The most ‘weight conscious’ subjects estimated the unhealthy meal as containing 711 calories while the combination of the unhealthy and healthy choice was only 615 calories. In contrast, the non-weight conscious individuals estimates were only 684 for the unhealthy choice versus 658 for the combination and there was a direct relationship between how weight conscious the subjects were and their mis-estimate of the different meals.

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My Comments

I really don’t have a ton to add to the above, the paper goes into lot of discussion that I’ll spare you here since it’s a lot of detailed examination of the possible underlying mechanisms behind these types of odd cognitive biases.   One point that was made was that while one might expect more motivated/involved people to have less problems with these types of conceptual biases, this research found the opposite.  To whit:

The negative calorie bias is more pronounced for more involved/motivated individuals. Thus when evaluating vice/virtue combinations, greater motivation does not necessarily result in greater accuracy but instead can lead to more biased judgments.

I would add that I think really has more to do with what I mentioned in the background above, the issue isn’t with dietary motivation per se but rather with how people often conceptualize the process.  By focusing on things like good/bad foods, clean vs. unclean eating, meal frequency exclusively or organic vs. non, people lose sight of the issue of portions and calories which are what really matter when it comes down to it. They rely on estimates which are oh so often off.  And which appear to be colored heavily by the cognitive biases that many humans are so prone towards.

Make no mistake, certain types of eating patterns often automatically get people to reduce their intake, often by the outright removal of a so-called ‘bad’ food.  What is defined as good or bad depends on the diet in question and certainly these types of good/bad approaches to dieting can work in at least the short-term (and sometimes longer than that).  The problem is when people start focusing on the goodness/badness of the foods they are eating to the exclusion of everything else.  That’s when it often goes wrong; this is not helped by many dietary approaches telling folks that calories/portions don’t count and that focusing only on the aforementioned ‘good/healthy’ foods is all that matters.

In this vein, the paper’s author notes that:

In particular, the negative calorie illusion has been shown to be less pronounced when individuals pay attention to the quantity of the combined items, instead of focusing solely on the healthy/unhealthy aspects of the items.

In a related vein, the author points out that:

Another public issue raised by this research concerns the viability of promoting the very notion of stereotyping foods into vices and virtues.  Despite it’s intuitive appeal as a decision heuristic to simplify choice, vice/virtue categorizations focuses consumers’ attention only on one aspect of the meal [my note: whether the food is a 'vice' or a 'virtue'] and ignores other important aspects such as its overall quantity.

And I really think that that’s the big take home message of this rather odd paper: people often get so fixated and focused on the wrong things that they end up hamstringing their own attempts to reach their goals.  Because while it’s all well and good to focus on healthy/unhealthy, good/bad, clean/unclean or whatever, at the end of the day quantities always count.  When people lose sight of that and focus on the wrong aspects exclusively, they often end up hurting their own progress.  This paper just points out one way that this happens. 

I’ll finish by pointing interested readers to a book by the paper’s author titled  The Dieter’s Paradox: Why Dieting Makes Us Fat that addresses not only this research but a great deal of other research looking at similar issues.  How humans tend to categorize foods into good and bad and how it can lead them to make a lot of really weird assumptions about what they are actually eating.  It was a pretty fascinating read and shows how many different ways we can end up screwing our own progress by relying on our (often incorrect) intuition, primarily by focusing on the wrong factors that are relevant to what we are eating.

Answer: As always, the short answer is that it depends.  Mainly on how they are done and the person doing them.  Frankly, this is truly the only way to analyze if a given exercise is ‘safe’ or not, any exercise can be relatively more safe or unsafe for a given individual for a given set of circumstances.  That said, the upright row does tend to be surrounded by it’s share of ‘unsafe exercise’ beliefs so let’s look at why.

I think the first place I saw it asserted that upright rows were categorically unsafe was in the old 7-Minute Rotator Cuff Solution from Health for Life (a now defunct company that put out a variety of different manuals).  And this was based on the mechanics of the movement.  Specifically, upright rows put the shoulder in an internally rotated and horizontally abducted position.  And this is a potential problem because it puts the shoulder/rotator cuff at risk for impingement.  Hence, to avoid shoulder problems, upright rows became one of the big no-no exercises.

But is this strictly true?  In my opinion, no and much of it has to do with how the exercise is performed.  Certainly, the traditional bodybuilder method of performing the exercise is pretty high risk.  I’ve shown the typical form below.

High Ouchie Potential

As you can see, the elbows are being brought very high (often the goal is to get them to the ears) and certainly that tends to put the rotator cuff in a high risk position even with excellent shoulder control.  As well, you don’t really get a whole lot more involvement of the deltoids in the first place by pulling the bar this high.  So you increase the risk without really impacting on the movement’s benefit as a shoulder movement.

So for those reasons, I certainly wouldn’t recommend folks do upright rows using that technique.  The risk is high and the benefit relatively low.  This is especially true given that it’s easy to modify the movement into one that is not only safer for the shoulder but targets the deltoids just as effectively.  And that is to do the movement where you stop with the elbows only going as high as the shoulders themselves (this typically put the weight/bar/dumbbell about sternum level) as shown below.

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Less Ouchie Potential

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The above has far less potential for impingement issues, simply by limiting the range of motion.  Yet it still provides full stimulation for the medial deltoid. I’d mention that it does still require some ability to control the scapula (in terms of setting the shoulder down and not letting it elevate) so someone with a previous rotator cuff injury might still have problems with it.  But for someone with good scapular control and no other shoulder issues, I see no problem with doing upright rows in this fashion.

As a final note, I would suggest doing the movement either with a rope handle (off a cable stack) or with dumbbells.  The wrists tend to get a bit cocked using a barbell so even if the movement doesn’t bug your shoulder, it can jack up your wrists.  And, of course, if doing upright rows even in the above fashion still bugs your shoulders, drop the movement.  As I said up above, movements can only generally be rated as safe or unsafe for a given individual under a given set of circumstances.  If a movement causes pain, it’s not a good one for you.

Hope that clears things up.

So to remedy that problem, I always hear the advice to blast the failing body part with more volume, which doesn’t make sense to me because they already ‘burned out’ in that workout. I think it would make more sense to isolate the chest because it wasn’t worked to the point of exhaustion like the triceps were.

So I myself think lowering the triceps volume may be beneficial while others want to increase it. This scenario does lack context and I’m sorry for that, but I’d figure there are reasons to bump up volume and decrease volume to be able to progress.

Answer: There are a couple of different ways to look at this. On the one hand, it does make a certain logical sense that the failing muscle group is getting the largest training stimulus and that extra work would be overkill.   By that argument, your suggestion of doing more pec work seems logical at first glance since, in premise, it is your triceps limiting the training effect to the pecs during compound movements.  And certainly systems such as pre- or post-exhaustion have been used based on that logic.

At the same time, just hammering away at a compound movement doesn’t seem to really ‘catch-up’ the lagging muscle groups.  So the logic doesn’t seem to correspond to the training reality.  For whatever reason, the muscle group that is holding a compound lift doesn’t ever seem to catch up with the prime movers when it’s a big weak point.

And this seems to be especially true the worse that a person is built for a movement.  That is, consider someone with long arms, who will typically have problems benching in terms of triceps giving out (simply as a function of the long lever arm due to their mechanics).  In practice, these folks seem to benefit more from isolation work (or a combination of isolation and specific assistance work; see below) than folks built to bench. 

Just benching and benching and benching some more seems to work more poorly even if you’d expect it to work better (just as a function of the limiting muscle being trained more due to it being limiting).  I can’t honestly say why this is the case but, again, practically you tend to find that the people who often benefit most from assistance work (of whatever sort) are the ones who are least well built for it. 

And you see this approach in systems of training that, empirically at least, seem to work for the most varied groups of people.  In Olympic lifting for example, as I discussed in the dreadfully overwritten Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting Series, while many seem to think that the Bulgarian approach may be ideal, it works best when lifters have no weak points.  The Soviet approach, using more variety and specific assistance work, seems to work for a broader population, especially those lifters not ideally biomechanically suited to the movements. 

A similar idea would exist for something such as Westside powerlifting training (where a combination of both isolation work for individually lacking muscles along with specific assistance work for the competition lifts) is used to bring up weak points.  Louie Simmons has said something to the effect that “Movements don’t fail, muscles do” and much of the setup of Westside type approaches is using assistance work of varying types to bring up limiting muscle groups.

Finishing up, I’d also argue that there is often an efficiency aspect to using specific assistance work to shore up weak points and this can be especially true for the big compound movements.  Just benching and benching and benching some more (or squatting or deadlifting or what have you) can get old fast.  If plugging in specific isolation work for a lagging muscle group (or even specific assistant work that uses the limiting muscle group more in it’s limiting range; think board presses for a lifter having trouble at lockout) fixes the problem faster and/or with less grinding effort on more fatiguing movements, that can only be seen as a benefit.  So rather than just bench endlessly and hope that the triceps catch up, I’d see doing specific triceps work (and this might be a combination of both isolation work for muscles and carefully selected assistance work) is a more efficient way of fixing the problem.

I’d mention, in finishing, that I am in no way suggesting that you replace your compound work with isolation or even specific assistance work.  But adding in either direct work for lagging muscles, specific assistance work, or a combination of both along with the compound work is a time-tested way of bringing up weak points for folks who have major limiters.  But you’re unlikely to get any real transfer if you’re not still practicing the compound movement itself, effectively ‘integrating’ any gains in strength in the limiting muscle that you make with the assistance work.

In practice, the most typical approach might be to do some direct work for the lacking muscle group (i.e. direct triceps work of varying types) on one upper body day and something more specific (like board presses of varying heights depending on where the weak point was) on the other upper body day.  That would be in addition to any specific work on bench press and generally done after the bench press work.

Answer: It depends.  Simply there is no single proper way to squat despite what many will have you believe or vigorously contend.  At the very least most will define three primary ‘types’ of squats which are:

1. High-bar/Olympic squat
2. Generic Power Squat
3. Geared powerlifting squat

And I’d note that that only begins to scratch the surface of the different types of squats which have been done over the years.  But those general categories tend to encapsulate the three ‘primary’ types of back squats that are done by trainees.  I’ll describe each generally and try to look at some of their various pros and cons below.

The high-bar/Olympic squat is done with the bar held high on the traps and the goal is generally to keep the torso as vertical as possible; this is usually facilitated by wearing shoes with a slight ‘heel’ on them as this lets the lifter get the knees further forward.    The focus is generally more on squatting ‘down’ than ‘back’ in this style of squat and it’s critical to push the knees way out and squat ‘between the knees’ (as Dan John puts it so simply).   A slightly narrower stance is also usually used (as this tends to have more carryover to pulling and the jerk in Olympic lifting). 

Olympic lifters use this as a general leg strengthener as well as to strengthen the muscles used in the Olympic lifts.  Generally, lifters using this type of squat aim for maximum depth (often called ass to grass or ATG) although bodybuilders often use a high-bar style but stay above parallel.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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The second type of squat is what I call the generic power squat.   In this style of squat, the bar is held a bit lower on the back (but typically not as low as some powerlifters would do it) and the lifter sits more back although there is also a down component.  Generally, there will be more even involvement of the lower body and the low back tends to work harder since the torso will tend to be tipped further forward.  Depth is typically just below parallel and a wider stance is often used; this can be perfectly appropriate for raw powerlifting competition and the following video shows a fairly generic ‘power’ squat.

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Finally is the geared powerlifting squat.  Frankly, technique here can vary massively depending on the type of gear allowed, whether or not a monolift is being used and how strict the federation is about depth.  You will see anything from a squat that looks almost like a high-bar squat (in IPF competition) to insanely wide stance squats.  The focus is generally more on squatting back than down but, again, there is huge variance here. Unless you’re planning on competing in a geared powerlifting federation, this probably isn’t relevant to you.  You can go Youtube videos and you’ll see all kinds of different techniques, again depending on the gear and federation and what’s being passed as a ‘squat.

And of course, there are endless other details to squatting which is what I suspect you are actually asking.  Debates over head position, how much torso lean, whether you break at the knees or hips first have been going on for years and aren’t going to end soon.  All techniques have their pros and cons and there are always trade-offs in techniques and you will see top competitors doing all kinds of different stuff along with differences in ‘style’ between two people doing the same ‘type’ of squat.  I doubt this really answers your question but short of writing a lot more, that’s the best answer I can give you.

So which is the ‘right’ way to squat?  That’s a question with no answer.  For most, either the high-bar style of squatting or generic power squat is going to be the better choice than the geared power squat (unless they are planning to compete in a geared federation).   

To really do a high-bar squat right usually requires Olympic shoes (especially if the goal is to hit depth without getting up on the toes); if a lifter doesn’t have those I’d tend to teach the generic power squat with the lifter sitting both back and down and aiming to hit parallel if they can do it without tucking their butt.

Which brings me to your second question, about the ‘butt-wink’. This is a term invented by, I believe, Mark Rippetoe, to describe the phenomenon whereby the butt tucks under (and the low back rounds) during a squat.  This video shows a pretty exaggerated version of tucking the butt under.

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Frankly, this can be related to a lot of different things often various aspects of flexibility or mobility in the lower body.  Tight hamstrings are often a culprit, tight glutes can be a problem too.  Often a lack of ankle mobility sort of ‘moves’ up the chain and causes problems higher up.  Sometimes it’s just an issue of the lifter not consciously trying to keep the back arched. 

I will note that with ATG squats, some amount of butt tucking is almost invariable. What I personally look for is what’s going on at the low back.  If the butt only tucks to the point that the back is flat, it doesn’t concern me; if the back actually rounds (as it does in the above video) then that has the potential to put a lot of stress on the spine due the combination of flexion and compression.

How you go about fixing it depends on the problem and I usually use a combination of static stretching, what’s usually called the squat stretch and focusing on keeping a hard arch.  The squat stretch probably has the most potential to do benefit here, since it’s about as specific as it gets. 

To do it, load up a bar with maybe 50% of your best squat.  Now holding a hard arch in the low back lower yourself to the point in the squat just above where your back would normally start to round.  Now trying to hold that arch (you may need a helper to let you know), let the weight push you down a little bit deeper; this is stretching all of the tissues that might be limiting in as specific a way as possible and over time you should be able to lower your depth without tucking.

If you want to get more information about squatting than you ever hoped for, I’d refer you to Boris Bachmann’s Squat RX blog and video series.  Excellent stuff and he’s got an entire video on correcting low back tuck somewhere on the blog.

Answer: There are actually two different issues that you’re bringing up here which are the general fatigue and the soreness and I want to address them separately.

First, the easier of the two which is soreness.  Simply, this doesn’t matter.  Soreness appears to mainly be an issue of connective tissue damage more than anything muscularly (despite still being called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS) and there is no problem training through it.  Most find that by the time they finish their warm-ups (see Warming Up for the Weight Room Part 1 and Warming Up for the Weight Room Part 2 for detailed information on this), the majority of the soreness is gone and even more find that as they get used to a higher training frequency soreness becomes much less anyhow.  They also usually start growing better.

The general fatigue issue is something else.  Mind you, without knowing more about your weekly setup, it’s a little hard to address this totally.   Because while it could be related to the previous workout it could also be related to lifestyle factors like sleep (or a lack thereof), nutrition, overall life stress, etc.  Making sure that those are in order often fixes any problems. 

As well, realize that many people find that they have some of their best workouts when they walk into the gym feeling a bit under.   They’ll be yawning and a bit apathetic and then just proceed to blow it out or have banner and PR days.  I suspect this is just an issue of not wasting a lot of mental energy ahead of time and relaxing during the workout and letting it happen instead of trying to force it.

But that’s far from universal.  My usual recommendation for folks when they get to the gym or training not feeling really up for it is to at least go through their warm-ups.  Often by the end of it they feel great and have a good workout.  If it’s still not happening, I’d either recommend calling it a day and going home or just going through a short active recovery workout (read Active Versus Passive Recovery for more), keeping volume and intensity dialed way back.  Ideally you should leave the gym feeling better than you walked in.  If not, you went too hard.

I’d mention that often the problem is related to the previous workout simply being overwhelmingly intense.  Many people who start to increase their training frequency don’t dial it back in their workouts and get themselves into trouble.  You may find that reducing the workload even slightly (not taking any sets to failure, reducing  volume a bit) at the previous workout (i.e. the Monday workout before a Friday workout) prevents the soreness and fatigue issues.

Finally, I’d mention that people who are using considerable poundages (i.e. who are very strong) often can’t pull off the higher training frequencies without adjusting their total work load majorly.  A heavy/light system (where only one workout is truly heavy and the second workout for that exercise or muscle group is much lighter) often allows the same higher training frequency while improving recovery.  Again, that’s usually for more advanced trainees who are handling very heavy weights and for whom two truly heavy workouts per week are simply too much.

Answer: With early morning training (and here I’m talking here about resistance training specifically) there are a few issues that need to be taken into account.  One of them is food intake and here there is a lot of variance.  Blood glucose is usually on the lower side in the morning and not everyone performs at their best under these conditions. 

In this situation, getting something (ideally with some carbohydrate and protein) before lifting is a good idea (I’d mention here that the studies which found that pre-workout carbs/protein were more anabolic were looking at morning fasted training so this is one place where getting something into the system is probably ideal from a training adaptation standpoint).  This isn’t universal and some people do just fine without eating.

But let’s say you’re one of those people who needs to have something in them to lift at their best.  Now we have another issue, some people don’t do well with food in their stomach during high-intensity activities.  At the same time, others can eat a big meal and go train and have no issues.  Some of this depends on the type of training as well: folks doing low repetition work with longer rest intervals don’t tend to have the same issues as those doing more ‘metabolic’ type work (with higher repetitions and shorter rest intervals).

Mind you, you don’t need a lot of food to get blood sugar into the normal range and I wouldn’t recommend a huge meal prior to training regardless.  A small amount of protein with some carbs is all that’s needed.  But what if you can’t handle any solid foods prior to a workout?  Then what.  In this case, liquids can be invaluable.  A simple glass of low- or non-fat milk or even a premade carb/protein drink will get carbs and amino acids into the system without sitting in your stomach during an intense workout.

So that’s issue one.  Another has to do with the training itself.  Research back in the day suggested that most people show optimal performance about 3 hours after they wake-up, it simply takes some time for the body to warm-up after you’ve been asleep.  And for folks who train first thing in the morning, this can be a real issue because odds are you’re not getting up at 4am for a 7am lifting session.  How to get the body warm?

A hot shower is one approach although it’s more of a passive warm-up.  Mainly realize that you may need to do a bit more extensive warm-up for early morning training than you did while training in the afternoon/evening (when you’d been up all day).  That may mean a bit more cardio to get the body fully warmed and you may need more warm-up sets prior to heavy lifting (read Warming Up for the Weight Room: Part 1 and Warming Up for the Weight Room: Part 2 for more details on optimizing your warm-up).  Of course, stimulants are usually part and parcel of early morning training as well.

Finally realize that there is likely to be an adaptation phase as your body gets used to training first thing in the morning.  You may have 2-3 weeks where your workouts just aren’t that great until you adjust.  But the body does eventually adjust (and there are plenty of folks who have gotten to their goals despite very early morning training).  The body’s circadian rhythms to adjust to training (and there is evidence that you perform best when you habitually train) but it can take a little while.  You may have to reduce your volume or intensity a bit initially but within a few weeks you should be back to your normal workouts without any issues.

Hope that helps and good luck.