Should I Do Calf Raises?

Of all of the waste of time exercises that people do in the gym, calf raises and all of its iterations, are probably the worst of all of these exercises. And of all the machine-based exercises, no other machines are as much of a waste of space, iron and cable as the various calf raise machines.

Stop doing calf raises.

Just don’t do them.

In the abstract, in isolation, the calf muscle may be getting stronger. But this strength gain is meaningless because it there is little, if any, transfer to improving movement or actual function. The goal should be to train movements, not muscles. The calf doesn’t work in isolation to produce any movement that we make, so there is no reason to perform an exercise that isolates the calf muscle, insulates it from the other muscles that it works with to produce functional movement. There is no reason to train any muscle in isolation.

The calf raise is the biceps curl for the legs. There’s an old saying they use in golf that says, “Drive for show, putt for dough.” When it comes to leg training we can adapt it to, “Calf raises for show, squat and lunge for dough.”

Walk into any gym, anywhere and you will see plenty of people doing all kinds of leg raises, but you rarely see the squat and lunge being performed, let alone performed correctly. And for goodness sake, do not superset calf raises with other purposeful exercises like plyometric jumps or squats and lunges.

The calf raise is an less-than-ordinary exercise that should be consigned to the scrap heap of exercises, exercises from a by-gone era when we just didn’t know any better.

What is Vertical Stability and Why is it Necessary?

Anybody who has spent any time in a gym has most likely seen people performing exercises while in a horizonal position. You know, lying down. There are a variety of exercises that can be referred to as “planks” that are very popular that have been touted as developing core strength. Ah, core strength, one of the great fitness buzz terms of the past half century…

But these exercises, which can develop horizontal stability, have little purpose and contribute even less to function. We need vertical stability because we operate vertically, standing upright on two feet, not horizontally on all fours or lying down. Gravity exerts a precise force on our bodies while we are standing – differently than when we are horizontal – so we should perform the vast majority of our exercises while standing. Your hip works in a different manner when you are on all fours than it does when you are standing, so this “all-fours” exercise will only make you “better” when you are in this all-fours position. Unless you walk around on your hands and knees you are wasting your time, and you also have some other problems.

Planks have their place in an exercise program as long as the place is somewhere in the first three to six months (and I am being generous) of a newbie’s workout program. When a formerly inactive person makes the transition to active, their overall strength (including core strength), balance, coordination, agility, etc is quite bad.

This is where the plank family of exercises comes in. Despite what you may think, these exercises are quite easy, which is why they are suitable for beginners. These basic planks can help prepare the body for the (hopefully) rapid transition to standing, two-footed exercises. So do your basic forearms and toes plank, get good at it, and move on up to standing on your feet. And don’t look back.

Now I know what some of you are thinking; “But Sal, some of those planks are really hard and some of them I cannot even do!” To which I reply in a number of ways.

1. Just because an exercise is hard to do doesn’t make it a good exercise to do.
2. The horizontal exercise is hard to do because we have evolved away from performing in this posture and we are not built to work this way.
3. You can train a muscle to do anything, but doesn’t make it the right thing.

Four-legged animals are efficient at performing certain tasks, but put them in a two-legged stance and not so much. For humans a four-legged, horizontal posture is beneath our capability level. It is kind of like putting a snow plow on a Porsche; not a good use of the machine.

We have evolved to be able to perform high functioning tasks precisely because we do not use – do not need – our upper limbs for balance and locomotion. Walking upright has allowed the human brain to pursue more complex functions like manipulating objects (throwing and catching) and a wide-range of intellectual pursuits like art, philosophy and developing reality TV shows.

The benefits of working while horizontal are limited to operating in the horizontal position and quite frankly this work is counter-productive. Vertical stability, not horizontal, should be worked on in every exercise session.

The Ramble: More Things You Should Stop Doing in the Gym, Immediately

There is an epidemic sweeping the country these days. No, it’s not the obesity epidemic, or the drug abuse epidemic, or the Glee epidemic. The “Doing Stupid, Waste of Time Stuff in the Gym Epidemic,”is a real problem. Earlier this summer I posted a piece about some of the things that people need to stop doing, and this is a follow-up piece that follows the same theme.

Take the weight belt off and wrist wraps, too. Wearing a weight belt for anything, but especially when doing exercises like triceps push-downs, and doing them poorly, to boot, just makes you look ridiculous. Thirty years ago before people knew any better, you had an excuse for wearing a weight belt while squatting or dead lifting, but today, no. If your back hurts, no belt or brace will “fix” it, and if you aren’t strong enough, you aren’t strong enough; the belt doesn’t make you stronger. Wrist straps make you weaker, not stronger. If you can’t lift the weight, make it lighter. Try developing the strength in your hands, wrists and forearms rather than ignoring these incredibly important muscles by using wrist straps. The person who can dead lift 200 pounds without straps is stronger than the person who needs straps to lift 225 or more.

Stop doing curls in the squat rack. The squat rack is really for doing squats. No, really. The rack is not for barbell curls or upright rows. I actually saw some guy doing a barbell curl, dumbbell curl superset in the squat rack last week. I almost said something to the guy, but I figured he really was misguided and was better off left alone. Just because you can curl with 100-pounds on a barbell doesn’t mean you need a heavy duty piece of equipment like a squat rack. Actually, the less time you spend time doing curls the better.

Don’t do the Sleep Walk on the treadmill. Walking on the treadmill is okay for an occasional warm-up. All of this low-intensity (slow) walking is a tremendous waste of time and, no matter what the computer read-out says, does not require a lot of energy. Think of it as 30-45 minutes of your life that you will never get back. And walking on an incline and hanging onto the top of the treadmill, or the side-rails, is plain silly. If you can’t keep up the pace slow it down, don’t hold on. Do you hold when walk down the street? Treadmill; it’s what’s for warm-up on. Occasionally.

Using the Step Mill really doesn’t get you in shape. Disabuse yourself of the notion that doing work on the Step Mill, or other similar “stair climbing” machine, is truly improving your fitness level. Disabuse, I say. Using these machines will only improve your performance with regard to using these machines and will not improve your performance in any meaningful, purposeful way. As a matter of fact, these “steppers” are really a waste of time, as they require a minimal range of motion, allow the user to hold or lean, and bear no semblance to any real function. And contorting your body so you can lean into the machine not only stresses the body in a way it really shouldn’t be stressed, it makes an inefficient exercise even worse.

Get off of the mat and onto your feet. There is very little that we do in our day-to-day lives, aside from sleeping, lying down. So stop exercising this way. Gravity is the single, most-important factor to take into account when designing an exercise or exercise program, so to lie down while exercising ignores the physics-based reality of our existence. And if you participate in sports at any level, doing prone or supine exercises (fancy talk for lying down), you are really doing yourself a disservice. We need strength, stability and balance in the vertical plane (standing up) not the horizontal plane, and the only way you develop skills in the vertical plane is to exercise in it. Think about it, do you know of anyone who practices the golf swing lying down?

Get more efficient with your workouts and stop wasting your time and energy.

“Exerecise Must Be Recreation, Mental as Well as Physical”

I’m reading a book about health and fitness – shocker! – and came across this passage.

“Man is made with a body containing certain separate parts, each of which must be kept in proper use or the others will suffer. This becomes a troublesome question in complex modern life…Exercise, to produce it’s best effect, must be recreation, mental as well as physical. We cannot separate any one part of our economy and produce the best results. There must be well-rounded development…What most of us want is to have our bodies harmoniously developed on the general plan on which they were built.”

The author also bemoans the fact that the modern man gets too little exercise, both city-dweller and farmer alike, even going as far as to write that thanks to modern equipment the farmer now “may be (physically) inferior” to the average citizen.

The book was written by Theo Knauff and is titled, “Athletics for Physical Culture.” It was published in 1894. One-hundred and seventeen years ago.

So nothing has changed since the advent/awareness of the concept of “physical culture” two centuries ago. Physical culture is what we now call health and fitness, and physical culturists from the day of our great-great-grandparents were singing a song that is still being sung today.

You really can learn alot from reading these old fitness books. I like the perspective they provide. In this case I find it incredibly interesting that the affects of the advances of the Industrial Revolution were obvious 120-years ago and the concerns and observations are just as relevant today. Think about the life of a late 19th century farmer as it compares to the routine of people today; wouldn’t you think it was physically demanding, if not brutal? By the standards of 1894, guess not.

Another great observation made by Knauff is the need for recreative exercise and well-rounded development in the pursuit of fitness. This is a point that is still missed today by way too many so-called fitness experts. Knauff mentions that it was (is) a mistake for people to treat exercise as “a business and necessary work.” Whether it’s 1894 or 2011 this condition hasn’t changed, as there are fitness folks who promote this kind of thinking up to this very second. Walking on a treadmill, exercise while sitting down in a machine, mimicking mindlessly in an exercise class, following an externally developed diet that tells you what to eat and drink and when to eat and drink it.

That, my friends, is work. And it’s a big business getting people to work for their health and fitness. So take a step back and look at the elements of your routine, heed Theo Knauff’s advice and make sure you are doing everything possible to work your body harmoniously.

Take Time Off From Your Workouts

There is obviously a huge divide in our society between those people who exercise and those who do not. But from what I see, there are subgroups in the exercise group; those who exercise and those who exercise too much. Yes, exercise too much. Just like any other human endeavor, there can be too much of a good thing. Recovery from exercise takes many different forms – between sets, between exercises, between workouts – and can last seconds, minutes, hours, days, and even weeks. For the folks who overdo the exercise, their rest rarely goes beyond the hours stage.

There is so much information out there on exercise, that the advice to rest and recover gets drowned out. So while other coaches are constantly preaching the message of activity, I concentrate on the benefits – and necessity – of rest. Lack of rest and recovery can make a good workout bad. Sound elements, great program design and proper technique can all be undone when you don’t take enough time to rest. Too little rest can reduce, and in many cases, eliminate, the desired benefits of exercise. From exercise to exercise, workout to workout, not taking enough time to let your body recoup will have a detrimental effect.

I have written about Overtraining Syndrome (OTS) and how it can derail even the fittest, most athletic members of the population. Unlike the common cold, which everybody knows when they have it, many people don’t realize that they are in the throes of OTS. The complex series of symptoms presented by OTS are the result of training too hard, too often. Soreness, fatigue and a compromised immune system are just a few of the symptoms, and they can present themselves in a very short period of time. It doesn’t take long for someone who regularly trains, to overtrain.

Understand that any workout or activity that you can do everyday is of low-quality and unlikely to provide a stimulus to improve your fitness level beyond the lowest level. And after a few months no benefits accrue from this kind of exercise.

Take time off from the gym when you are healthy, feel good and are 100%. Don’t wait until you are sick or injured to take time away from the gym; this does not count as time off. The most beneficial type of recovery occurs when you are not sick or hurt.

Variety is the Spice of Workouts

You need to have variety in your workout routine. You shouldn’t perform the same workouts over and over again, and using a variety of different workouts over time can help keep you from getting bored and help you improve your fitness level. You can get this variety by using different exercises from workout to workout and by making slight variations to exercise during each workout.

I hope you squat during your workouts. You really should, as the squat is one of the great exercises. A great way to get variety in your workouts is to use many different stances/foot positions during your squat session. You should use the basic, shoulder-to-hip width “even stance’ foot position for squatting, but you should also use squat stances of different widths. Squat with your feet thisclose together, really wide, and all points in between.

But don’t limit the variety you use to the width of your squat stance, as you can also stagger your squat stance so that one foot is slightly in front of the other, using about a heel-to-toe relationship. Of course you should perform an equal amount of squats with each foot forward – balance is as important as variety in your workouts. You can also point your toes out, in, have one foot straight and the other foot pointed, either staggered or even. When you add the different width stances to the staggered stances and other varieties, you can experience a tremendous amount of variety in your workouts. You don’t have to do all of the varieties in each workout, but feel free to experiment and mix and match.

Another leg exercise, the lunge, can be altered in many ways. You can step forward, step on a variety of angles forward, laterally, and a variety of angles to the rear. Utilizing this kind of variety in your workouts can be a tremendous boost to your fitness level.

The push-up, another great exercise, can be modified with the pattern used with the squat. Changing your hand positions from set to set, changing the width, stagger and angles of the hands will make push-ups more challenging and effective than sticking with the traditional method, set-after-set, workout-after-workout. Experiment with having your hands at different heights, placing one hand on the floor the other hand on a Reebok Step or other similar piece of equipment. Be creative and your workouts will be more fun and effective.

Are You Getting Better or Just Getting Tired?

So, you workout. You’re serious about your workouts and you work hard. You never miss a workout. Rain or snow or shine, holiday or birthday, weekday or weekend, you are at the gym pushing yourself as hard as you can. Other people recognize your commitment and hard work and it makes you feel good, makes you push hard even on days when you don’t feel 100%.

But here’s a question for you. Are you getting better or just getting tired?

Make no mistake about it; just because you work hard doesn’t mean you are materially improving. Just because you have nothing in your tank at the end of a workout doesn’t mean you are experiencing development in any meaningful way. The human body is an amazing machine and is capable of performing a great deal of work, but being able to do this work is not always a positive thing, and does not mean you are getting yourself in shape. Your body doesn’t recognize intent, so if you’re beating up yourself in the gym or on a crab boat in the Bering Sea, it matters not. You can wear down and do harm to yourself despite your best intentions.

Make no mistake about it, wearing yourself down and beating yourself up is not getting in shape. Being able to spend hours and hours in the gym doesn’t prepare you to do anything – endure anything – but spending hours and hours in the gym. The body doesn’t grow – improve – as a result of constant work. It grows as a result of a combination of quality work and rest, and the older we get the more rest we need.

In many cases, it’s not more and more exercise, but less and better exercise, and more rest. Quality over quantity. High-volume/low-intensity work that can be done everyday isn’t worth much. If it gives you a sense of accomplishment to spend hours in the gym everyday, that’s about all it will do for you.

So evaluate your workouts. If you are always at the gym, spending hours to finish workouts, and constantly pushing to do more, it might be time to back off. You might be doing good stuff, but doing too much of it.

Seven Things You Should Stop Doing in the Gym, Immediately

There are so many people doing so many things wrong in the gym that I hardly know where to start when it comes to trying to get them to change their ways. The fitness field is unlike any other that I can think of, in that there has been little change in the mainstream public’s approach to exercise over the past 35 years. Every time I workout in a gym (not my own) I see an amazing array of ridiculousness.

So here is a list of seven things that people have to stop doing in the gym, in no particular order. Oh, and I’ll say “please,” because you really need to change.

1) Please stop doing all of the lateral, front and bent-over raises. You aren’t helping your shoulders, you aren’t building muscles or strength in any meaningful way, and you are wasting your time. As a matter of fact, you are hurting yourself. The deltoids are small muscles and do not need to be pounded with three different variations of high-volume training. If you want to build strong shoulders and give yourself the best chance to add muscle and improve function limit your shoulder training to military/overhead presses with dumbbells and barbells. Please.

2) For the love of Jack LaLanne please stop with all of the machine-based cardiovascular exercise. I understand the allure of the new fangled treadmills, stair climbers, elliptical trainers and all of their variations. But all that glitters isn’t gold, and won’t improve your fitness level either. Here’s a tidbit of info: Your hamstrings work in a completely opposite manner on the treadmill as they do on Terra Firma, so you really are teaching your body to move incorrectly if you do treadmill training. Try calisthenics, the rowing machine (the only good cardio machine), and movement-based exercises. And if you insist on doing the treadmill, stop holding on to the rails while leaning back, and don’t hold dumbbells, while walking. Pretty please…

3) Eliminate “Abs and Arm” days from your training regimen. Pretty please, with sugar on top. This kind of workout is probably the biggest waste of people’s time, along with “Number 2,” from above. Your biceps and triceps are tiny muscle groups and act as support to the larger muscle groups that are the prime movers in pushing and pulling. So if you are doing the right kind of training, your little biceps and triceps are getting more than enough stimulus to promote growth. Aside from those who are using steroids and other illegal muscle building drugs, doing a lot of arm training will actually keep your guns from growing. Show me someone who is awesome at doing push-ups and pull-ups and I’ll show you someone with great arms. And great abs, for that matter. If you spend a lot of time, actually any time, doing abs while lying down or seated in a machine you are wasting your time. Here is a homework assignment; research improving the strength of your abdominals and eliminate everything you find that has you horizontal or relies on a piece of equipment.

4) Don’t fall prey to the CrossFit/Boot Camp mentality, that says you can beat yourself into submission as a way to make you stronger, por favor. So not true. Every workout shouldn’t be about how much punishment you can take. If you ever watch the television show, “The Deadliest Catch” on the Discovery Channel you will see how putting the body in crushing physical situations only serves to break the body down over the long haul. 35-year old guys look like 55-year old guys and have a litany of permanent physical problems. The setting is different, but constantly beating yourself up in the gym is not a winning long-term strategy to improve performance or health and fitness.

5) Please stop sitting down during your workouts, both while exercising and while resting. You are in the gym to exercise and, except for rowing, there isn’t a physical activity worthwhile that is performed in the seated position. Staying on your feet during your training sessions one of the simplest ways to improve your workouts. And recent research shows that sitting can be as detrimental to your health as smoking. My sense is that this is a bit of hyperbole, but it has been shown that too much sitting has a negative effect on health and fitness even for people who get the recommended amount of exercise.

6) Use aerobics and spinning classes as the occasional change of pace to your routine, and not the backbone of it. Not to be too harsh, but next time you’re in a class, look around you and assess the state of your fellow class-goers. If these classes were so great, more people would be satisfied with the way they look and feel.

7) I’m begging you to stop working with any personal trainer who has you doing any of the following: using machines; has you exercising while lying down for more than 10% of your session; starts your workout by doing abs and/or arms; has you lunging or squatting with weights of any kind before you can properly perform these exercises while standing; watches while you are on a piece of cardio equipment (unless you are doing intervals during circuit training); pushes you to the point of nausea or exhaustion. There are more items I could add to the list, but I’ve gone on long enough.

So stop doing these things. Please.

Book Review: The Four-Hour Body,

Timothy Ferriss’ Book, “The Four-Hour Body” is an interesting, but inconsistent, read that could be subtitled, “Building an Army of Narcissists.” Ferriss covers a lot of well-documented ground, in a sprawling book that covers just about everything you need to know about the body, and engages in a healthy amount of outside-the-box thinking; a rarity for health and fitness books these days.

The book isn’t perfect, and I don’t agree with much of Ferriss’ exercise program, but “The Four-Hour Body” is a much better read than the vast majority of crap of the “Biggest Loser” and celebrity trainer variety. I do not provide a lot of details when I review a book that I recommend; Ferriss put a lot of work into producing this book and deserves to make as much money as he can from book sales; I don’t want to give away any info.

Hook: Tim Ferriss is going to show us how to “hack the body” and do amazing things to remake the body in the least amount of time.

Gimmick: Ferriss’ high-energy style and “I’ve tried it all” approach. It’s hard not to get enthusiastic about the subject matter thanks to Ferriss’ upbeat and positive tone. He backs up his claims with a fair amount of data, but better yet, he has tried all of the things that he talks about. Even the things that didn’t work.

Inconsistency: Ferriss relies way too much on body builders as a source of information regarding supplementation and exercise, and puts way too much emphasis on appearance, rather than performance. Also, despite taking the position that you don’t need to spend a lot of time working on your body, with “The Ferriss Method” you wind up spending almost all of your time thinking about working on your body.

Glaring Omission: None. Ferriss covers all the bases, and while I disagree with him on some points, he hasn’t left out anything major.

Annoying Feature: An unhealthy and counter-productive emphasis on appearance, rather than improved performance, is a recurring theme in the book. While I like what Ferriss has to say, this appearance-based approach detracts from his message and is incredibly annoying. To me.

Most Outrageous Claim: There are many. Polyphasic sleep – 6, 20-minute naps. Slow-carb/high-protein diet with a one-day-per-week binge day where you go hog wild and eat anything and everything you can, and lose weight and get lean. Better orgasms. And there are more than these. (FYI, I will be posting a more in-depth discussion of Ferriss’ diet recommendation very soon.)

Say Something Nice: One of the most interesting health and fitness books that I have ever read.

Bottom Line: Tim Ferriss has written a book that everyone interested in fitness and health should read. It is not perfect, but it is incredibly provocative and very readable. Buy it.

Sprint to Improve Fitness, Speed and Anaerobic Capacity

Sprinting is a very effective and efficient way to improve your fitness level. Over the past several years there there been several studies that support my feeling that sprinting is the only form of running the vast majority of people should do. In the May 2011 edition of the National Strength and Conditioning Association’s Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, results of a study done by a team of researchers from Australia provides the basis for a fantastic workout.

I read this stuff so you guys don’t have to. And rather than bore you with the details, I’ll just hit you with the key points.

The findings of the study are that 8 sessions of repeated sprint training over 4 weeks improved Intermittent Peak Running Speed (IPRS), above and beyond regular training. This breaks down to 10 maximal sprints of 80 meters (87 yards) every 25 seconds, twice a week for 4 weeks; a true 10-minute workout. The researchers also found that this kind of training can also develop maximum running speed and anaerobic capacity. This is good stuff. This means you are getting into great shape. This kind of workout puts a fraction of the impact on your body when compared to distance running.

These findings support the, “Quality over quantity,” approach, in that doing more than 10 sprints did not result in any measurable improvements. Ten minutes of high quality exercise is superior to 20- or 30-minutes of sub-maximal effort.

This is all good, no, great news. However, the bad news is that it is very tough for most people to perform a true maximal sprint of any distance, and even tougher to perform repeated 87-yard maximal sprints with only 25-seconds of rest in between. Anyone who has sprinted knows this. And when you realize that it will take most people around 15-seconds to finish this sprint, you can see that this is a butt-kicking workout.

You will derive a great deal of benefit if you start slow and work up to the full workout as used in the study. I recommend starting with 10, 40-yard sprints with 25-seconds rest in between and working up to the full, 87-yard distance. There are many ways that you can do this. You can stick with the 40s, you can mix and match sprints of various distances and keep to the 25-second rest periods, or even use slightly longer rest periods. A good rule of thumb to use is that for every second of sprint, take 4-6 seconds of rest, so if you sprint for 5 seconds rest for 20-30 seconds.

Give the sprint workout a try and improve your speed and fitness level.