Minneapolis, Minnesota

Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.

~John Ray 

Hat tip to TTCF’er Matt Z. for showing me this funny article from a 1911 edition of the Ladies Home Journal.

The predictions about technological advancement seem quaintly modest. “Man will see round the world!” Uhhhh yeah. There’s a satellite watching you right now. Don’t look up!

However, Watkin’s predictions about the state of humanity have shot rather wide of the mark. “A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.” Hmmmm. There sure are a lot of weaklings out there.

Many people assume that technology will always advance human health. Technology is a godsend from the standpoint of a field doctor in the Congo. What wouldn’t I do for a clean syringe?

But technology is not you’re friend if you’re one of those people hooked up to the factory food trough. Technology is not your friend if you play tennis on the WII as a means of getting fit. Technology is certainly not your friend if you’re considering lap band surgery.

“Highest Expression of Self is remembered as a historical event of life. Coaches’ goal is to open opportunity for student to reach a high expression of self. Coaches must first try to reach it themselves.” ~ Nicholas Romanov, PhD

Whether you like it or not the paleo lifestyle is going mainstream. This without the marketing apparatus of Zone or Atkins and without the imprimatur of a celebrity spokesman like Oprah or Jennifer Hudson.

Paleo doesn’t need gimmicks because it actually works and once you try it you can’t go back.

So at some point your best friend, spouse, sister or son is going to go paleo. Will things be…different between you? Well yes, but there is a sun behind the clouds. Here are some pros and cons to consider when your BFF goes paleo.

The muscle-up is important because it teaches you how to move your center of gravity around your base of support along a vertical line of action. Why would you ever need to do this?

Imagine you have capsized in a canoe. You pull yourself up using the gunwale as your base of support. But you can’t push yourself back into the boat unless you can move your center of gravity over the gunwale.

In other words even if you can do hundreds of pullups and dips, if you can’t get your chest over your hands you can’t get yourself out from under things to on top of them.

There’s a metaphor rattling around in there.

I’ve never understood the appeal of spinning. I would rather drink hot dog water than ride on a stationary bike while staring at myself in a mirror.

I have to believe that I’m not alone. In fact, I suspect that inside of every spinner there is an erger screaming to get out.

Here are three reasons to liberate your inner rower.

1. Better Posture. Hunching over handlebars is an extremely unnatural position. If you close your eyes and flip the picture 90 degrees a spinner looks just like a little T-Rex scuttling around with tiny arms flailing. No wonder so many spinners report low back pain. Rowing is different. On an erg you sit upright with a neutral spine. There are no handlebars to rest on so you can’t relax your core.

2. Skill Transfer. When you’re off the saddle spinning doesn’t have very many real-world applications. How often in life do you push and pull your legs independently of each other…while seated? Rowing is much better preparation for real-world tasks because, rowing mechanics are identical to lifting mechanics. Visualize a rower. Now flip the picture 90 degrees. Pulling an oar to your chest is the same movement pattern as lifting a bag of groceries off the ground.

3. Full Body. You make your boat go by transmitting force through your feet, up your core, across your lats and to the tips of your fingers. Rowing requires full-body contraction with every stroke, and an intense erg session will absolutely smoke your glutes and hams, as well as your core, back and arms. This is why rowers are normally proportioned. If all you do is spin, you become extremely quad-dominant and you end up with huge legs and skinny arms which means you have to wear either zubas or daisy-dukes.

Have you ever wondered why soccer coaches even bother to show up to games? They don’t seem to do much. In fact, they can’t do much. A soccer pitch is enormous and the range of play is so great that you would need a megaphone to make yourself heard to your players.

The question is what would the coach say even if they could communicate to their players?

When you talk at someone, and in particular when you give instructions, you are engaging the left hemisphere of your subject’s brain because the left brain is responsible for language processing and linear reasoning. Left-dominant brain-patterning is okay in a classroom setting.

But in the real world you don’t have a script to follow, and you probably don’t have a coach following you around bellowing instructions. You need situational awareness which is a right-brain function. You develop situational awareness not by reasoning, but by feeling.

Is my shoulder packed? Are my glutes loaded? Can I pick that up again? Can I keep going?

A coach can’t tell you the answer. You have to feel it.

Once the timer starts the coach’s job is to stop talking because the more coach talks, the less you feel.

Part 1 of this series talked about the Hill Muscle Model. The Hill model has been around since the 1930′s. In those days, people didn’t know much about muscles at a molecular level. So researchers used system engineering concepts to mathematically predict muscle behavior. The Hill model is fundamentally a mechanical model.

By the 1970′s people knew a lot more about the internal composition of muscle and people were able to model muscle behavior at a molecular level. Probably the dominant molecular model is the sliding-filament theory proposed by Andrew Huxley.

If you’re interested in geeking out you can check out this video or this slide show. For you non-pointy-heads, here’s a very simple way to think about muscles at a molecular level. Your muscles are made up of myosin and actin. Myosin acts like a ratchet that binds to an actin filament. When you flex your guns in front of the mirror, a jillion little ratchets are paddling their way up actin filaments.

The molecular model is vexing. How are you supposed to make your ratchets work better? You can’t even see them.

This is what makes mechanical models of muscle behavior so attractive. If you think about muscles in terms of movement then you can reduce any element in CrossFit to a simple engineering problem.

But moving well is different than living well.

It doesn’t matter how well you are moving if you don’t sleep enough and then sit in a cubicle eating toaster pastries and beef sticks all day. If this is you then, you are messed up at the molecular level. Your ratchets aren’t working and no amount of grunting and heaving will help you.

So the mechanical model is really relevant to what you do while you’re in the gym. The molecular model is really about how you live your life outside of the gym.

The nice thing about CrossFit is that if you train at an affiliate you’ll have a trainer correcting your position.

Butt down! Knees back! On your heels!

Everyone knows these cues but it’s not readily apparent why they matter on a biomechanical level.

Here’s a very simple way of thinking about position:

1) contractile force increases as tension increases

2) tension is a derivative of muscle length

3) your position affects your ability to lengthen muscles

The important thing to note here is that you can lengthen your muscles past the point of optimal tension. Check out the picture above. When your muscle elongates beyond a certain point, tension decreases and you become weaker.

Being able to feel where you are on that curve is a very important intangible skill. Mastering that skill will make you instantly stronger.

Here is a very quick and easy example that will help you feel this skill. From a 3/4 squat position (thighs above parallel) let your knees drift in until they’re between your feet. Now push your knees out until they’re outside of the edges of your feet. You feel weaker in the first position because your hamstrings and glutes are slack.

P.S. For a fascinating glimpse into the history of biomechanics and exercise science check out A. V. Hill’s 1938 paper “The heat of shortening and the dynamic constants of muscle”