What I have learned (in the last two weeks).

Since this is what I consider an educational community, I am going to post what I have discovered recently. Please pardon me if it is long. You don't have to read it all if it doesn't interest you. As you already know, I spent the last two weeks in Ireland and the Netherlands. While there, I read two books, The New Rules of Lifting, by Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove, and Freakonomics. I won't discuss Freakonomics here, though it was rather entertaining, and very helpful from my perspective as a grad student. I will discuss what the Lifting guys say we should do with strength training, and what I learned simply by spending time in Europe.

First, Europe. Upon weighing myself today, I have found that I have lost another 5 pounds since the Tango, putting me at least at a 7 year low of 255. I mostly have you and our goals to thank for this, but the last five pounds was all Europe's fault. There are many reasons combining to assist in this, and to explain why Americans are so dang fat (including me). As I mentioned in a recent post, everything is smaller. There are no huge drinks (much to my dismay), no refills, very few fast food restaurants, and gas is freaking expensive. How does the price of gas effect our fatness? You have to bike or walk everywhere! Craig, the Netherlands is your dream world. Here is a picture of the local train station parking lot:



There is a small bike store on every street in the Netherlands and bike repair shops are booming.

We also ate significantly fewer calories than usual, obviously, as we lost weight, but we didn't really notice. All the food was good, and I rarely felt like I was starving. I carried around a few Clif and GoLean bars just in case but didn't eat half of them. We usually ate one "big" meal a day, with the others being smaller, and then we had a bagel or scone or something in between. I am going to try to really continue these eating habits this fall and plan around my workouts so I get the most bang for my buck with nutrition. I felt totally at home in Ireland, as if I returned after a long journey. I had no trouble understanding people, though Amy sometimes did, and I love the landscapes and music. It is actually quite reminiscent of Warren, naturally speaking. Everything is green and hilly, with many of the same plant species. It rained every day that we were there, almost all day. Never got above 65 degrees, in the middle of August, which also kept the metabolism up.

On the lifting front, these guys propose a few things that I have been promoting for years. I liked the book, partially because I agree with it, I admit, but they do back a lot of it up with research and reasonable explanations. They say there are six movements you need to be able to do as a human. They are Squat, Bend Forward, Lunge, Push, Pull, and Twist. They add walking and running too, but don't cover it, because it's not lifting. They base these six movements on practical use. I'm not gonna justify them, but they do. So concisely, the exercises that most effectively replicate these movements are Squats, Deadlifts (Bending), Lunges, Push-ups and Presses (pushing), Rows and Pull-ups (pulling), and Twisting exercises, which are a little less well-known, but involve things like the Russian Twist, lying on your back with your knees bent and swinging your legs back and forth, and others such as that. They don't like isolating your muscles, as the machines do, because in real life, that never happens. They prefer dumbbells, which tend to balance you better, and require all the surrounding muscles to stabilize the ones you are trying to work. They also say that doing these exercises will work almost all of your muscles, and put them in better harmony than isolating. For example, deadlifting uses your quads, hamstrings, glutes, shoulders and back, but also requires your arms, gripping muscles, core muscles for stabilization and so on, so you tend to be rock solid when you do these kinds of things. This provides a usable, highly functional strength, instead of large muscles that don't do much else. Another admonition that has been a pet peeve of mine for years is not lifting more than you can hold on to. Why on earth would you want to be able to lift something that you can't pick up? I've never understood that. Improve your grip if you can't pick it up. Speaking of that, they said that grip strength has been shown to be highly correlated with long life, as has abdominal strength. This was nice to hear, as they used to call me gorilla grip in the stagehanding world.

Using these six movements, they offer many different ways to perform them so you get variety, which they constantly recommend, such as step-ups, many different kinds of presses, both chest and overhead, all kinds of lunging exercises which are just killers, and lots more, and the great part of it is that almost everything can be done at home which just a couple sets of dumbbells (or one set in my case, so far), and maybe a kettlebell or two, a wooden box and maybe an exercise ball. That's it, and you can be strong like bull, hard as iron, look like Adonis, and run like a Cheetah with irritable bowl syndrome.

I'm joining the Y this fall, any day now, and I will begin trying to add these kinds of things in 2-3 times a week, along with regular swimming and aerobic stuff, and hopefully it will all pay off without a huge time commitment. I'm hoping school won't be quite so sucky this semester, but I can't say yet. It certainly won't be easy.

If anyone wants more details on the lifting plans in this book, just let me know, and I can fill you in. This is a library book, though, so I will be returning it. I'll be recording the stuff that I plan to do, then sending it on the next lucky patron.