Baker, an information technology executive, reluctantly joined in May when the company’s president, Uli Becker – also out of shape – spotted her buying a soda in the company cafeteria and pressured her to give CrossFit a try.
Needless to say, it’s very impressive that as a group, the Canton-based Reebok employees lost 4,000 pounds last year.
Dallas and Melissa from Whole9 have been busy working on their book. Tomorrow starts a new year, and, for many people, a new round of Whole 30. If you aren’t familiar with Whole 9, you can check out the interview I did with them for the UNRX podcast.
Going forward my training logs will cover shorter periods of time, say a week or so, or maybe a couple of days, but for this initial entry I wanted to make more of a foundational post. Luckily for me I have kept some workout logs on the bodybuilding.com forums, so I am able to look back and copy from their. Just another reason why logs are important. You can’t improve upon what you don’t know needs improving. This includes workouts, food, and sleep.
Back in early February I attended a Crossfit Football seminar with John Welbourn and Raph Ruiz. I really took to their approach to things, focusing on ways to improve on the field. To paraphrase, if it’s not going to make you stronger, run faster, or jump higher, then it doesn’t go in the training. Depending on your goals, this philosophy may not work for you.
GOALS
This brings me to my goals. When it comes to goal setting, I am a big believer in the SMART system. Making sure that your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound will ensure that you have efficient goals in place that you can reach. I have one main current goal.
I want to perform a 2x bodyweight back squat by the end of 2011.
Does it meet the SMART criteria? It’s very specific. It’s 100% measurable. Is it attainable? That’s a good question. My current 1RM back squat is 305. So if I weighed 150 pounds, I’d be all set. The issue is that I weigh 185, so I am still a way off. There are only four months left in 2011 to add 65 pounds to my squat. That might be too much too soon, but there are two variables at play in this goal. My max squat and also my body weight. Any combination of weight and squat that equals 2x could work. Is the goal relevant? I want to get stronger, so using the squat as a proxy for overall strength, this seems highly relevant. Lastly, the goal is time-bound because I am trying to do this by the end of 2011.
The importance of a timeframe for your goals isn’t because it is a drop dead deadline, but rather to make sure you are making progress towards the goal. A goal might meet all the SMART criteria when it is created, but if you wait 6 months before you make any progress, it may no longer be attainable. If I don’t reach my goal by the end of the year, I will evaluate the goal, and set it again with an updated timeframe, so long as it remains relevant.
Back to the log
Following the CF Football seminar, I began following their programming. They have multiple tiers of programming and I chose the “amateur” level for a few reasons. 1) It was the simplest program to fit on a weekly schedule, 2) it offered the fastest gains so long as you didn’t plateau, 3) it is designed to feed into the “collegiate” level if and when you do plateau.
The programming is basically a 50/50 split between strength work and conditioning work. The strength work closely resembles Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength program with all of the big lifts, 3 sets of 5 reps. The conditioning workouts are short and intense. Sprints, box jumps, kettle bell swings are frequently present. There is lots of focus on explosive hip drive.
I made great strength progress on the CFFB programming. I added 50 pounds to my 5RM back squat in one month. I had planned on continuing this programming, but I developed some shoulder impingement in both shoulders, although mostly in my right. I decided to ease up a bit on things as I was training about 6 days a week, and began some basic PT/rehab work on my shoulders.
I continued to squat multiple times per week during the spring and summer, and was able to hit a full depth 1RM of 305 pounds. I decided I wanted to really focus on squats for the rest of the year and it was around this time that I set my goal of the 2x bodyweight squat. This goal also ties back to the CFFB seminar, where John told us that a 2x bodyweight squat is the beginning of what he considers strong.
Enter Smolov
Sometime around the month of June I was put onto a squat routine known as Smolov. After reading about it for a few weeks, I felt like I was properly mentally prepared for it. Everything that I read was that it was the hardest program to get through. It will make you hate squatting. I got through the first week of the program when we got the news that it was time for Baby Addie to come into this world.
I don’t want to over simplify the program, but it’s a kind of ladder type program starting each week with 4 sets of 9, and sliding down towards 10 sets of 3 at the end of the week with stops of 5×7 and 7×5 along the way. Physically it’s a tough program, mentally it may be even harder, but i barely hit the tip of the iceberg since I only did a week of it.
5/3/1 BBB
After a few weeks off of training to spend time with Addie, I finally made my way back to the gym towards the end of August. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to jump back into Smolov because of my schedule with work and life, so I decided to go with an old reliable, Wendler’s 5/3/1. There are a few variations on Wendler’s and I chose to go with “boring but big” (BBB) program. The variations mostly differ by what they prescribe IN ADDITION to the core 5/3/1 exercises. You can see a few of the options here at this 5/3/1 program generator. In the BBB program, after you do your 5/3/1 work of the 4 major lifts, you do 5 sets of 10 at 50% of your 1RM. Then you do 5 sets of 10 of 1 specific assistance exercise such as chin ups, or dumbbell rows.
The nice thing about 5/3/1 programs is that if you entered your 1RM properly into your spreadsheet, you should never fail on any of your sets, and the only set you need to write down your results on is your plus set when you go until failure. So I can sum up three weeks of training in a nice little color coded box below.
You can see at a quick glance that the deadlift has cause for concern. The biggest issue I had during this training period was lack of grip strength. I was surprised how much it deteriorated during my time of non-training, and/or lack of chalk in the gym had on my deadlifts. In the meantime I ordered a captain crush grip trainer to work on this.
I think this update has gone long enough. Coming in the next update, a return to kettlebell training, and some nutrition updates as well. (hint: intermittent fasting)
After publishing my review of The Four-Hour Body the other day, I realized that I hadn’t included a few unanswered questions that I had during my reading, or post-reading during implementation. Do you have questions too? Submit them in the comments section below.
Without further ado, I am just going to dive right in.
Does PAGG stack make your pee smell?
I’ve been taking the PAGG stack for about four weeks now, and purchased the supplements directly from the suggested links in in book. After about 10 days I noticed that my urine was smelling like I had recently eaten asparagus. It’s possible that something else would cause the smell, but I removed the stack while I was out of town for 48 hours, and the smell went away. Once I started taking it again, the smell returned. I’m not concerned with the odor, but I was curious if others had experienced this. If I had to guess, I would investigate the garlic first. I haven’t tried removing it from the stack yet, because I am in the process of reviewing the stack as a whole.
Can you recommend a good cinnamon grinder?
I have a small-ish grater that doesn’t seem to do a good job grinding my cinnamon sticks. I can’t seem to get good leverage while trying to press the stick down and across the metal. I wind up with very little cinnamon in the coffee mug and have resorted to using pre-ground cinnamon.
Can you eat bread on the slow-carb diet?
This one is a joke, but I’ve seen it asked so many times that I have to laugh. It couldn’t be any more clear that bread can’t be eaten on the diet, yet so many people claim “they can’t live without bread.” Sad really.
Tim, I hear you are very interested in Crossfit lately? Is there any truth to this rumor?
I’ve been hearing that Tim is interested in Crossfit, possibly due to it’s data driven aspect and ability to measure work capacity across broad time and modal domains. Tim also appeared in a recent Mobility WOD video. I’d love to get Tim’s thoughts on what he thinks.
What else?
I feel like I had more questions when I set out to write this and now I am drawing a blank. So please readers, feel free to submit questions in the comments and I will elevate them up, and hopefully Tim will respond with some answers and suggestions.
Thanks!
If you’ve read this blog for an extended period of time, or if you know me personally, you know that I’ve followed Tim Ferriss for a few years. I read his first book, The Four-Hour Work Week, and regularly read his blog which contains excerpts from his books, as well as dialogues between Tim and his readers in the comment sections. You may also know then that I have somewhat of a love-hate relationship with him. Mostly due to the cycle of reading something, wanting it to work and getting all hyped up for it, and then when I am just tired of hearing him talk about his success, it turns to hate.
Given all this history, there was no way I wouldn’t pre-order his new book The Four-Hour Body and read it immediately. The book came out just before the holidays so it made for good timing with my travel plans to read on the plane.
I’m going to review this book from a few different perspectives. Despite the fact that Tim has a loyal following already, this book is clearly targeted at all Americans, most of which fail at diets, fail at exercising, and are usually the ones suckered into the next infomercial that promises them results without effort. I think that is one of the reasons why Tim went with this title of the book. After I tell someone the name of the book, the next thing I have to do is explain the title. Obviously the main reason the title was chosen is because of the familiarity with The Four-Hour Work Week, which was a New York Times best seller, but mass appeal isn’t a bad secondary reason. I’d actually be curious to know what Tim would have named the book if he hadn’t had the success of his first book already. We may never know.
For most of this review I will be coming from the position of an “average guy.” If I wasn’t already doing Crossfit and following a mostly Paleo diet already, would I be jumping to follow this books protocols to a “T”? Then I will also come at things from the perspective of a Crossfitter. There will be things I agree with, and disagree with, but they are interesting for sure. The same goes with the Paleo perspective. There are many diet suggestions that Tim makes that fly in the face of Paleo, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some things we can’t extract from it. An example of this is adding cinnamon to your coffee. I’ll go more into that later.
I changed my mind. What I wrote above was my plan, but as I started writing I realized that there was just too much content in the book to keep going over back and forth from multiple angles. Instead I am going to extract a lot of what I feel are the relevant highlights of the book. Then I will probably make an additional post in the next few days that is more along the lines of “cliff notes for crossfitters,” which will serve the purpose of saving time for those who don’t want to read this entire review.
I mentioned that I wondered what Tim would have called this book if he hadn’t had the success of his first book. My next question to him in an interview would be if he would have taken the time to write this book if he hadn’t already had so much of the research done? The foundation of the book is Tim’s extensive data collection that he began at age 18, documenting every workout he did ever since.
The next step up the pyramid is the expertise of his sources, some of the leading weightlifting and athletic coaches in the world. As a data fiend myself, I have an appreciation for the methods used in this book to not only test, but also measure the results. What may be one of the most interesting thing about this book, is that Tim shares his methods with the reader, allowing them to execute the same methods themselves. Whether its a decision of how to measure body fat, or what to look for in blood tests, the book covers it.
I think the most popular take away from the book will be the concept of Minimum Effective Dose (MED). The reason? People hate to waste time/effort/energy and MED is all about doing the least amount of work will still achieving the desired result. The example in the book makes this easy to understand. In order to boil water, you have to heat it to 212 degrees fahrenheit. If you tried to heat it to 250, it wouldn’t be any “more boiled”, it would just be wasted heat energy. That’s the concept in a nutshell, now how do you convert that to a) losing fat, b) gaining muscle, c) both. Throughout the book, instructions are delivered in a MED format which takes a lot of the guess work or individualization out of the equation. Whether your goals are general, like losing fat, or specfic, like adding 100 pounds to your bench press, a MED exists and can be determined for you. Any work you do above and beyond the MED, is wasted and in most cases will hurt your recovery times, which in turn slows your progress towards your goal.
The PAGG stack was an interesting “bonus” that came out of this book for me. It’s not something that I was expecting to be in the book, but I am really happy to have discovered it. I’ll write more on this in detail in late February or March because I’d like to incorporate the results of my using the stack in a detailed post. First off, what is a stack? A stack is simply a group of supplements that are taken together with the idea that the combination of them have greater effects than taking them individually and separately. When it comes to stacks there is one that has been around forever and by far the most popular, ECA. ECA stands for ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin. The reason ECA is successful has to do with a lot of chemistry, but can be summed up by saying 1 ingredient increases fat burning at a chemical level, the second one prolongs the fat burning, and the 3rd one tells your body to allow this to happen. Sadly, this stack consists of mostly stimulants, that taken over time can have adverse effects on the body. There have been reports that link it to heart attacks and stroke. Tim experienced extreme sinus infections and blockage when he was researching the stack for the book. He set out to find a stack that was completely stimulant free, enter PAGG.
I don’t think I want to go line by line with the details of each of the four ingredients of the PAGG stack, because I think it would be fairly boring for most readers, but rest assured, the details are all in the book. The ingredients, which you can all of at whole foods, gnc, etc, are Policosanol, Alpha-lipoic acid, Green tea extract, Garlic extract. The stack is taken four times a day, with breakfast, lunch, dinner and before bed. Like I said, I want to hold off on writing more about this until I am done with my 30 days, but things seem pretty good so far.
Possibly more popular than MED, for those that don’t exercise, will be the diet that Tim suggests as a means of losing 20 pounds in 30 days without exercise. This probably won’t seem that relevant for Crossfitters who exercise regularly, but for those on the Zone diet, I think what Tim suggests would be fairly compatible. The diet is based on a few simple principles:
#1 Avoid “White” carbs (sounds like little starch and no sugar)
#2 Eat the same few meals over and over again (sounds like weigh and measure your foods / spoiler: it isn’t)
#3 Don’t drink your calories (duh)
#4 Don’t eat fruit (some fruit)
#5 Take one day off per week (hmmm)
The big difference between this and the Zone is that Tim is anti-measurement. The big difference between this and Paleo diets is that Tim is very pro-legume. That said, there are enough similarities in the diets that they could work in conjunction with each other. You can replace the legumes with more vegetables for a more paleo-style approach. You could measure all the meals and avoid the cheat day for a more Zone-style approach. However, Tim is fairly adamant both in the book and on his blog, that the diet is successful AS IS, and that changing it around can lead to less than optimum results.
These things don’t really fall into one particular category, but I found them all interesting and, more importantly, compatible with my current diet and lifestyle. Most of these are fairly easy to try and relatively low risk. You can try them, if you get results, great, if not, it didn’t cost you much. There are many more in the book than I have listed here. These are just a few.
#1 Add cinnamon to your coffee. The science behind this is that it can reduce the glycemic index of meals. I’ve added a teaspoon (the print version says tablespoon, but Tim corrected on his blog that it’s a teaspoon) to my morning coffee. Since I drink it black with no sugar, adding cinnamon to it wasn’t challenging, and I would think that is the case for most people reading this.
#2 Have some grapefruit juice with your coffee. Grapefruit contains naringin which can extend the effects of caffeine in your system. I have a small glass, or sometimes just take a swig from the bottle. I’d be careful not to over do it, and make sure you don’t get some kind with extra sugar or corn syrup added.
#3 Fat burning fat. For years there have been rumors of brown adipose tissue, one of the two types of fat cells, of being able to burn fat. A lot of them turn out to be red herrings, and adults don’t have a large amount of BAT anyway. What Tim has discovered, or claims to, is that cold temperature stimulates our BAT tissue (think goose bumps). I’m skipping over the details, but he went through some painful ice bath experiments to discover, that just icing your upper back for 30 minutes in the evening can have similar (not quite as effective) results.
There is A LOT of information in this book. There is a lot of data behind it all, either from Tim’s own research, or from experts in their fields. One thing I can tell you is that the book is not designed to be read from front to back. As Tim suggests, and I agree, after reading the first few sections, you should then jump to the sections that is of most interest or relevant to you and your goals. There are seven different chapters on losing weight and/or fat. There are 14 chapters on getting stronger and/or performing better athletically.
I’d recommend this book for a few different types of people. Are you someone who is over weight and/or out of shape? I’d recommend this book for you. You are probably more overweight and out of shape than you give yourself credit for, and this book could really jump start your way back to health. Are you someone who works out, but has stopped making progress or hit a plateau with your strength or speed? I would definitely recommend this book for you. There are a lot of very specific protocols and routines from some of the world’s most highly-respected coaches. Try following some of them and see if it works for you. Are you somewhere in between these two types of people? There is so much information in this book, that there is a good chance it would be useful to you.
I probably wouldn’t recommend it as much to someone who is already on their own routine. If you are getting results with what you are doing, I wouldn’t want to divert you away from that. If you are following a program like Wendler’s 5-3-1, or Louie Simmon’s conjugate method, then you are probably above the learnings in this book. That said, you still may get some entertainment out of the chapters on how to give a woman a 15 minute orgasm or how to improve your sleep.
The Four-Hour Body is available at Amazon, and in all major book stores around the country.
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I know that I’m not the first person to write a blog post about this topic, and I also won’t be the last, but I feel as though I at least have something worthwhile to share on the topic. A lot of the articles that I’ve read online are from one side of the argument. Albeit from qualified fitness professionals, their bias shows through in the article. I come from a (somewhat) unbiased position as I have had degrees of success with both programs. So without further ado…
Over the past few years, P90X has been all over television with their infomercials. If you haven’t seen one of them, you are highly skilled at avoiding television during off hours. P90X is a 90 day working program delivered via DVDs by a trainer named Tony Horton and a company called BeachBody. If you are to believe their marketing, the success of P90X is due in major part to something known as “muscle confusion.” The concept is based on changing the workout routines every 30 days, so that your body does not suffer from any plateaus in weight loss, strength, or conditioning. These changes occur twice to complete the 90 day cycle.
In early 2009, I was faced with a dilemma. I was a fat slob and I was about to get married. Knowing that I would be looking at my wedding pictures for the rest of my life, I started going to the gym after work and spending about an hour on the elliptical machines. With a string desire to not be photographed as a slob in a tuxedo, I realized the elliptical machine wasn’t going to cut it, so I acquired a set of the P90X videos, and I got started. It was obvious right away how out of shape I was. Being unable to do ten push ups in a row, or 2 pull ups is very eye opening.
The program is very easy to follow. You press play on the video and you write down your reps on the worksheets that come with the videos. Each time you repeat an exercise, you try and beat your last attempt. This is very straightforward stuff, but it works, mainly because it isn’t easy. The Chest and Back workout is an intense (although self-paced) amount of various pushup and pull ups. The Legs and Back workout, which comes up later in the week, works squats, lunges and more pull ups. The last of the “strength” workouts is shoulders and arms, and just like Tony Horton calls it, is a “glamour” workout chock full of bicep curls and tricep extensions. Fans of functional movements are probably having a good laugh right about now.
The strength workouts are scheduled every-other day with “cardio” or stretching workouts in between them. There are two main cardio workouts with P90X, a plyometrics workout and “Kenpo X“ which is basically a cardio-kickboxing hybrid. The remaining videos on the program are Yoga X, Core synergistics and Stretch X. After completing the first week, congratulations, you get to repeat the exact same routines for 3 more weeks. The “muscle confusion” of P90X does’t begin until the 5th week, when the workouts are shuffled around, and instead of a workout of Chest and Bank, you do Chest and Arms. These are the types of changes that I always came across in my time in and out of gyms since high school. Some people would workout different body parts together, and it seemed to come down to preference, but I would always hear that you should “change things up.”
I had about two months to get in shape for my wedding, so I didn’t even have the full 90 days to dedicate to my “transformation.” In that time I lost twenty pounds, a couple of inches pretty much everywhere, and when it came time for my wedding photos, I was happy with the way they came out. I’m not surprised that P90X has had a lot of success for two main reasons, first it isn’t easy and secondly there is an expectation that results take 90 days. But what the program lacks most is motivation. I brought my own motivation to the table. My proof is in my post-wedding results. By results I mean the slow nine month return to slobhood. All of the weight and inches I lost before my wedding was back on by my one year anniversary. Despite trying to connect with other people doing P90X in the beachbody.com online community, I know longer had any interest to put on the videos, listen to the corny jokes, and workout in my livingroom.
So what about Crossfit? I started doing Crossfit five months ago, and one thing it doesn’t lack is motivation. I took the plunge on a Saturday morning because Crossfit Santa Clara offers a free class that anyone can attend to give Crossfit a try. I don’t remember the exact workout that we did, but I know it involved a lot of box jumps. A lot of box jumps. But I realized right away that this wasn’t like any other gym I had been to, because it felt like a community, not just strangers working out. And it was also hard, but not like P90X was hard. P90X is hard because you are doing pushups alone on your livingroom floor that you struggle with. Crossfit is hard because you are working your body past points where your brain may have previously told you was the limit.
Why have I stuck with Crossfit so much longer than P90X? I don’t have a wedding to motivate me anymore. I don’t have any particular event in the future to be in shape for, yet I continue week after week to get in better shape than the week before. I think a big piece of this puzzle is one of the biggest differences between P90X and Crossfit, and it comes from the first two words of Crossfit’s “definition,” CONSTANTLY VARIED. Constantly varied, functional movements executed at high intensity. When I show up at my Crossfit box, the chances are good that I will be doing a workout that I have never done before. I now look forward to checking the web site before bed so that I know what tomorrow’s workout will be, and possibly dream about it. I know for a fact I never dreamed about any P90X workouts.
I’m not trying to knock P90X here, because as the title infers, I consider my experience with P90X to be a success. I had a goal and it assisted me in reaching the goal. But if my goal had involved staying in shape for the rest of my life, it would have failed. P90X has people that it appeals to, that prefer to workout at home, without heavy weights, etc
But too me Crossfit appeals to me on too many levels. I already touched on constantly varied and how it is a motivating factor for me. Another reason is the scientific look at “work.” You are more likely to hear “force times distance divided by time” in a high school physics class than in most weight rooms, but it is right at home in a Crossfit box. This, along with the idea of GPP or General Physical Preparedness, and “increased work capacity over broad time and modal domains” and you have completely won me over. I’m a data guy. I’m a statistics guy. Getting in shape and allowing me to get nerdy with it, and I’ve died and gone to heaven. I’ve probably lost a lot of readers at this point, so I will move on.
Another thing I prefer about Crossfit is the olympic lifting element. In the short time that I have been doing crossfit, I have really enjoyed practicing my clean and jerks and snatches. As well as all of the individual components of these like the front squat and overhead squat. This kind of heavy weightlifting is entirely lacking from P90X, albeit by design, I still think this is a flaw of the program. Though I wouldn’t recommend learning Oly lifts on a DVD either.
In summary, there are reasons for choosing P90X and there are reasons for choosing Crossfit. If price is important to you, then P90X may be your choice. In this digital age we live in, any product can be stolen, but even if you purchase it from Beachbody, the costs aren’t that high. On the other hand, Crossfit can also be free by just following the workouts posted on the main crossfit.com site. Although you would need to provide any equipment necessary for the workouts. On that note, here is a list of Crossfit workouts that don’t need equipment! To me the choice is very easy. I can’t see myself ever following video workouts again. P90X, Insanity Workout, etc. They just can not replace the expertise of on site trainers who specialize in functional movements, and develop programing for their community based on their proven results.
