Body Image – A Huge Thorn in Many People’s Sides

By | Published August 10, 2012

 

We are Responsible for Many Body Image Problems

As I write this, we are closing in on the last few days of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.  I really enjoy the Olympics.  To me it is a celebration of what athletes from all around the world have accomplished.  These competitors have worked their butts off for YEARS to get to where they are, and now it is all on display for the world to see.  Talk about all things that are great in sport distilled into one big extravaganza of competition!

Yet, in some cases, this celebration has descended into the cesspool of actually having primetime television and magazine taking heads discussing who looked the best, who was the sexiest, who is the latest heartthrob.  You have to be kidding me!  What in the heck does that have to do with sport?  NBC even went so far as to denigrate these games by having Ryan Seacrest reporting on what the nietzens of “Social Media” are saying about the way the athletes looked.  Not how they preformed, or where they came from to get there, but what they actually looked like, and how attractive they are or are not.  One word.  Disgraceful.  I can’t believe that someone like Bob Costas would even share the same production set with that kind of garbage reporting.

In my training and coaching world, I am amazed how much body image issues have found their way into every nook and cranny of what I do.  Several years ago, I had the privilege of training an up and coming female powerlifter.  She was in high school, and had significant potential.  In just that first year of real training, she was a force to be reckoned with, even earning 5th place at High School Nationals.  She had drive and passion for being the best she could be.  Everyone was very exited to see where she would go the next season – making the World Team was not out of the question.  But when that next season came around, she was no where to be found.  I caught up with her and tried to talk with her about what was going on, and why she wasn’t with her old team.  This girl was polite beyond measure, and gracefully dodged my many questions.  Eventually, I had to let it go, but it still ate at me.  What went wrong?  Was I bad coach?  Did she not have the “fire” that we thought she had?  Did she just want to do something else?  It wasn’t until some time later that I found out the truth.  She was relentlessly bullied by others about being a strong girl that didn’t fit the mold of the size 2 prom queen, and that she was excelling at a sport “for men” so something must me wrong with her.  She was not obese or even close.  She had the body of a strong woman.  But that didn’t matter to those that chose to humiliate her.  It didn’t matter to these people that she was great at what she did.  All that mattered to them was to ridicule her about what she looked like and the sport she chose until she chose it no more.  Congratulations everyone, you did what you set out to do.  You made someone feel bad enough about how they looked that they quit something that they were very good at, and could very possibly given her something that she could have made part of her life. To all those people, here is your gold star for being complete jerks.  You earned it.

Athletes come in all shapes and sizes

A few months ago, a good friend sent me a link to a blog post targeted at artists who were interested in the athletic form.  To quote from the post, “This is a photoshoot of various Olympic-level athletes by Howard Schartz and Beverly Ornstein titled “The Athlete”.”  In the post are many pictures of some of the best known athletes in the world showing what they look like.  The divergence in body shapes and sizes is amazing.  You can see for yourself here.  Everyone in those pictures is at the top of their game.  They have spent huge portions of their life fine tuning their bodies into machines of excellence.  And, isn’t that the point of all this?  To train your body to be great?  Yet, there are many, many people out there that would do nothing but stand back and say “Well she may be a great weightlifter, but she sure is fat”, or “That guy is a great equestrian, but he is as tiny as a prepubescent girl.”  What?  Seriously?  These are the best of the best in athletics, and there are those that are willing to toss that out the window and focus on their body type and dismiss the rest?  If we do this to the best out there, is it really a surprise that we have girls and women suffering from eating disorders, and boys and men dealing with dysmorphia?

Some are finally speaking out

During the Olympics, even Conan O’Brien couldn’t keep his mouth shut.  He just had to take a shot at one of our American athletes, in what I think is incredibly tasteless and indicative of the body image issues that are plaguing our society.  I won’t give the joke any space here.  That said, you can read the reaction from another Olympian, Zoe Smith, in this Salon.com article.  Zoe took most of the words out of my mouth, so I will only say that I agree completely with her.  I just wish more like her would stand up and call out those that peddle in these disgusting and pejorative sound bites.

While it does not step very close to the athletic world, even Vogue magazine has now taken steps to change the types of models that appear within its covers.  I don’t read Vogue, but good on them.  At the same time, these same magazines, the media and the fitness industry has redefined the perfect body type as devoid of any body hair, single digit body fat percentages and clothing that now comes in “vanity sizing.”  Tom Sellek never seemed to have a problem attracting people.

Pride

I am proud that I wear XXL clothing, and have to have suits sport coats and shirts custom made because nothing on the rack will even come close to fitting me.  For me that means I am carrying enough muscle on my frame that I can’t get my arms into the sleeves of a coat, and that my legs don’t fit many jeans so I have to wear a lot of cargo shorts.  My 36″ waist may have a little extra junk in it, but I can deadlift a car for reps and run around with a 200 lb sandbag.  Not bad for a guy well into his 40′s.  When I helped move my daughter into her new apartment this past weekend, I was handling stuff that others half my age couldn’t move.  I’m also healthy.  My Doc told me once not long ago that he wished that many of his other patients had bloodwork as good as mine.

I say this to help you understand that you too should have pride in what you can do, not vanity in what you look like.  One of the sayings I use with the kids on my powerlifting team is “Stop training what  you see in the mirror.”  We have become a society that values looks over performance, and promotes a training philosophy that then end goal is to look like what is on the cover of Cosmopolitan or Men’s Health.  We embrace aesthetics over function.  When Conan O’Brien can preform a clean and jerk and a snatch on stage for the world to see, I bet what he thinks is funny will change.

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Why I Think CrossFit Needs to go Away

By | Published June 26, 2012

I Know this is Going to Upset a lot of People

I have to stand up and say something.  I think CrossFit is dangerous, is poorly instructed, and steals people’s money.  To me the risks of CrossFit training significantly outweigh the benefits.  I know I am going to catch hell for writing this piece, and even some of my friends will vehemently disagree with me, but I need to say my piece.  I suggest you read what I have to say, then do something completely wild – do more research and come up with your own conclusion.

DISCLAIMER: I know that there are going to be exceptions to everything I am going to say here.  There are good CrossFit instructors out there.  They all don’t fleece their trainees, and most of all, at least those trainees are doing something to get off the couch and take responsibility for their health and well being.

What is this CrossFit thing you are Talking About?

I think its important to at least give a quick definition of what CrossFit is.  From their own website…

“Our program delivers a fitness that is, by design, broad, general, and inclusive. Our specialty is not specializing. Combat, survival, many sports, and life reward this kind of fitness and, on average, punish the specialist.”

Wow.  Sounds pretty cool doesn’t it?  Read it again and look for the marketing hype.  Buzzwords like “combat”, “survival” and “life” really tap into what lots of people want to hear.  Heck, even Reebok is sponsoring the CrossFit Games and has a whole marketing campaign devoted to their line of CrossFit approved workout gear.  Slick.

Further reading of their website and listening to its practitioners and you will come away convinced that this is THE program for you.  Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.  Read on, and like I said, do some research of your own (yes, I am asking you to think for yourself) and decide what’s best for you.  I’m going to give you my take on it.

Pros:

CrossFit isn’t all bad.  There are a few redeeming qualities.

  • It gets you off the couch
  • It gets your heart pumping and your lungs burning
  • It exposes your body to lots of different movements
  • There is an avenue for competition if you so desire to pursue it
  • High intensity interval training can help promote fat loss
  • Sweaty girls training in yoga pants (this can be a pro or con)

Many of these things I preach myself.  I am all for fitness and good health.  I love it when the sedentary get moving and take some responsibility for their bodies.  For some people, this may be their calling to a higher level of fitness.  I just happen to disagree with much of what the CrossFit industry teaches, how it is taught, and what the goals really are.

Where I Stand:

I’m sure that it is pretty clear by now that I am not a fan of CrossFit.  Personally, I think I have very valid reasons why I think it should go away.

One of my big complaints with CrossFit is the high repetition Olympic lifting.  FOrm is sacrificed to get as many reps in during an allotted period of time.  First of all to quote Mark Rippetoe “Olympic lifts are like gymnastics with a bar.”  The Oly lifts (snatch and Clean and Jerk) are very technical lifts.  Many, many trainees work for long periods of time with just a broomstick or very low weight just to get the form correct before actual heavy weight is used.  Further, there is a reason that Oly lifters limit their sessions to only 6-10 repetitions – they are very taxing exercises with a high degree of complication that if done incorrectly or when overtired lead to significant injuries.

This leads to what the CrossFit industry calls “Twenty Percent Slop.” Translated, this means that during a CrossFit workout, there is an allowable 20% form degradation while performing any given exercise or movement.  This is some very significant latitude that will (not possibly) cause injury.  What type of injury dempends of the exercise being done, but the majority are SLAP injuries to the shoulder or bicep tears.

Because CrossFit, by its very nature, is meant to put the trainee into a different workout every time, basic strength training concepts like periodization are completely ignored.  Essentially what this means is that at no point do you every really master any part of the workout or exercise.  On top of that, I will go right out on the thinnest limb and say that I have never met any CrossFit instructor that has ever competed in any of the sports that CrossFit takes their programs from, nor do I know of any instructors that hold certifications in even the most basic training that you would think would be appropriate like from USA Weightlifting or even CSCS. So, in the end you have an exercise routine with no programming, and with undertrained instructors. Great combination for disaster.

Eric Brown also speaks to another point about CrossFit that often gets swept under the rug.  Allow me to quote him…

“Contrary to the claims of Crossfit founder Greg Glassman, your resting heart rate has no bearing on your ability to pull a limit deadlift, and despite his claims, no one the history of Crossfit has pulled a 750 lbs. deadlift using Crossfit methods. Limit strength requires conditioning of the central nervous system, including improvements in inter- and intra-motor coordination as well as motor unit recruitment that do not occur unless they are trained regularly, and regularity is nothing that occurs in CrossFit.”

I’m not saying that to be strong you need to pull 750 (although that is pretty darn good), but Glassman makes many claims about this, and yet has shown any proof.  So, if you are a CrossFit trainee, my recommendation would be to never attempt a maximal or 1RM lift.  You are setting yourself up for failure at the least and injury at the worst.  Your body is not being trained for that.

If you are looking for a multi-disciplinary approach to strength training and GPP training would be to investigate Strongman training.  It is highly functional, has anaerobic and aerobic properties, and teaches you to use your whole body ans a machine to produce muscular strength and force.  Leave CrossFit to the lemmings.

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What is Strength?

By | Published June 8, 2012

Defining strength or giving it a metric is tricky.  Ask 10 strength coaches or athletes what strength is and you are probably going to get 10 different answers.  From a bit of a scientific perpective it can be defined as:

Strength = the ability of the neuromuscular system to produce force

That sounds great in a nutshell, but I think that it needs to be broken down a bit further.  It is a good definition of what strength is, but what is strong, and how do we define that?  If you just sit back for a moment and think about that, it becomes a bit more difficult to define.  Age, gender, training, and many other factors all can come into play to define what is strong.  What defines being strong for a 60 year old woman and what defines strong for a 22 year old male powerlifter is obviously miles apart.

Before I go any further I want to make something perfectly clear.  Get ready for it.  Here it comes…

Size doesn’t matter.

There I said it.  Its true.  Period.  End of story.  Don’t believe me?  Fine.  Tell me why I’m full of it.  I plan of having an article devoted to the subject later.  But for now trust me when I say that I’m right.

Now, back to the topic at hand – being strong.  There are many metrics that I think do an OK job of defining it.  I say “OK” because they are general and don’t take into account the individual as much as I would like.  But from a 30,000′ view they work.  At the end of the article, I’ll give you one to digest.

In the meantime, I want you to think about what it means to you to be strong.  What is your definition? How much easier would life be?  Heck, you might even be giving your neighbor a break from you asking him to come over and help every time your  wife wants to rearrange the furniture!  Happy neighbor + happy wife = happy you!

Now that everyone is all happy, warm and fuzzy, I want you to think about what having this kind of strength would do for your health.  Fat doesn’t lift weight.  Lean muscle does.  The more lean muscle you have, the higher your metabolism and energy levels.  The higher your metabolism rate the more calories your burn.  The more calories you burn, the more fat you lose, and the harder it is for fat develop.  Also, moving weight around makes your bones denser, and your tendons and ligaments stronger.  See where I’m going with this?

All that said, there is still one big elephant in the room.  That is, that there are many different types of strength.  What about explosive strength, or speed, or endurance?  How do we measure these?  And that isn’t even a completely inclusive list.  So we need to distill this down even further and make it really simple.  Try this on for size:

Strength = ability

Here I am saying that a person should have the strength and the right kind of strength to have the ability to do what they want to do.  I think this fits pretty well.  Some people may really wish that they had the ability to get out of their chair without assistance, while others may want the ability to load bales of hay all day, while someone else may want the ability to do a Mudder’s Run.

Now all you have to do is train.  No matter what your personal ability goals are, if you train smart, hard, and regularly, you will get there.  You may not be the next Brian Shaw, but you will be strong, and you’ll keep getting stronger. Now, if you want something that you can shoot for in the gym, or you need to have a way to gauge yourself, I offer this as the higher end of a functional strength defition:

From a weight room perspective, I think you can call yourself functionally strong if you can…

  • Squat 2x your bodyweight
  • Bench press your bodyweight
  • Deadlift 2.5x your bodyweight
  • Overhead press your bodyweight

A good friend of mine once said “There is no substitute for strength, and no excuse for a lack of it.”  Ask yourself if you are strong.  Answer honestly.  If you aren’t ask why.  The answers may surprise you.

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