Physical Culture as an Entrepreneurship?

“Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.”

– Voltaire

Physical Culture as an Entrepreneurship?  Yes, you bet.  Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be all about making money, though that is the commonly accepted meaning of the term.  I rather like to think of it as guiding an emerging idea into being, irrespective of profit margin.  Check out this take on the Entrepreneurial mindset.

And take a look at the list of presenters scheduled for this summer’s Ancestral Health Symposium in Los Angeles; that, my friends, is a distinguished who’s who of Physical Culture’s current entrepreneurial luminaries.  And of the event’s masterminds, Brent Pottenger, and Aaron Blaisdale?  Think of them as the Bill Gates’ of the Ancestral Health movement; entrepreneurs extraordinaire.

You can check-out a great interview with Brent and Aaron about the Symposium on the Whole9 blog.

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No dogma, only results.  One of the best training articles I’ve read recently comes from the crowd over at Elite Fitness. Titled Methods of Muscle (by Rick Danison), this article discusses the positive benefits of the integration of various tools and methods.  Listen, folks, there are no bad tools, and there are no bad methods —  poorly thought-out combinations of these, to be sure — but the underlying tools and methods in and of themselves simply “are”.  Would anyone think to tell a chef that basil is “bad”, or that braising is a deficient method, without first qualifying that statement?  Yet we do, in essence, the very same thing in the S&C community when we dogmatize (is that a word??  Well, it is now…) any one training method/modality at the expense of another.

Again, I had another week stock-full of extreme high-intensity “mini” workouts, utilizing a full spectrum of methods and modalities.  I seem to thrive on this type of workout scheme — but is it necessarily an Evolutionary/Ancestral Fitness approach?  Well, maybe.  Just as there was a wide range in the macronutrient content of various HG populations (based, in most part, on their relative proximity to the equator), so too, I believe, there must have been wide variance in HG energy expenditure profiles; amplitude and frequency of intensity bursts must have varied wildly.  The mainstream currently has a puppy-love thing going on with the “human as an endurance athlete” template.  And, indeed, many exhibit this phenotype today in a very natural and healthy way.  More power to ’em.  These mainstream “endurance apologists”, though, seem to ignore the vast array of purely power-leaning phenotypical examples on display all around them.  Have they never observed the sprint/throws portion of the Olympic games?  Gymnastics?  Rugby or American football?  Certain human genetic lines were obviously wired for power expression as well, but for some reason we’re lead to believe that we modern humans all stem from a persistence-hunting only “Adam and Eve”.  Now maybe I don’t have current science on my side, but I do believe it is a serious mistake to use “current science” to blinker one’s self against simple observation.

Chris Johnson as a persistence hunter??  Yeah, Okay…

Ideally, science and observation/accumulated wisdom should work in unison; too many times, though, these camps are at odds.  A mighty fine edge can be put on the blade of accumulated wisdom by using current and applicable science as a sharpening stone (Tabata-like protocols, anyone?).   But science — or more precisely, those who argue from a scientific point of view, and to the exclusion of “accumulated wisdom” — would do well to acknowledge that science, at least in the realm of Physical Culture (and exercise science in particular), hits up against some serious, serious limitations.  For example, the single-set-to-failure crowd would have me to believe that the Bill Pearl types of this world are…an aberration?  Or that Bill Pearl would have been the same “Bill Pearl” if he’d trained under the one-set-to-failure tenants.  Becoming mired in a premise while ignoring real-world results is no place to be, and this argument simply does not hold-up to my 30+ years of observation; that I have no published “science” to back my claim does not (and should not) blind me to my observations and accumulated wisdom.  Of course it does make me question, and relentlessly so, the “whys” and “hows” — but it certainly does not make me deny “what is”.  The Zen masters put it this way: do not plunder the Mystery with concepts.  That something works by way of some scientifically-yet-to-be-determined mechanism does not obviate the fact that it does, in fact, work.  The best that science can do at that point is to “hone the blade”.  No doubt a welcome and anticipated service, but no reason for me not to employ the particular tool in question now.  We’ve gone from the strop and straight blade to the quad-blade razor cartridge, and at no point has the ol’ straight blade in an experienced hand been made obsolete.  Something tells me the ol’ repetition method, properly applied, is here to stay.

Let’s look at some workouts –

Sunday, 2/6/11 –

The six-minute-and-15-second leg dust-up:

Mark Alexander, president of Efficient Exercise, called this the 19th, 20th, and 21st-century workout.  And it truly was, as I utilized CZT technology, Nautilus know-how, and plain ol’ low-tech, grunt-it-out, farmers walks.   Brief, brutal and basic?  Hell yeah.  And we’re beginning to phase-in a few of our Project Transformation participants to this type of more integrated approach as well.  This is the beauty of n=1 integration; finding the right mix for each individual, letting the story reveal itself as each participant travels down his own Physical Culture path.  For some, a CZT-based workout is all they’ll ever need and indeed, want — for others, the CZT is just another (though fantastic!) tool in the Physical Culture toolbox.

Monday, 2/7/11 –

Dynamic trap bar deadlifts – (red and purple bands): 335 x 3 x 10 sets; 15-secs between “sets”

Tuesday, 2/8/11 –

Bodyweight dips: 200 total, in every conceivable rep scheme you can imagine.  The only constant here was the drive to spend as little time on the ground as possible between “sets”.

Thursday, 2/10/11 –

Max Effort bent-over row (Oly bar): 135 x 7; 225 x 6; 275 x 3; 295 x 3; 315 x 2; 325 x 2; 335 x 2; 345 x 1; 355 x 1; 360 x 1; 365 x 1

Followed, approximately 4 hours later by –

(A1) straight bar bicep curl: 95 x 12

(A2) EZ bar triceps extension: 105 x 12

four rounds, very little rest between sets.

Friday, 2/11/11 –

(A1) power cleans: 165 x 5; 190 x 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 (emphasis speed, crisp form)

(A2) blast strap planks & pikes: 15 each round

Saturday, 2/12/11

(A1) cable “lean-in” bicep curls: 155 x 12, 7; 170 x 4+  (hierarchical)

(B1) cable incline flye: 155 x 13; 170 x 7; 175 x 3+ (hierarchical)

(B2) CZT-Vertical chest press: 5 hyper-reps

In health,

Keith

Mindfulness, Pre-Conditioning, and the Psychology of Possibility

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.

– Rumi

What in the hell does a Franciscan Friar (Father Richard Rohr, author of The Naked Now) have in common with Physical Culture (writ large), and with the Paleo/EvFit/Ancestral movement specifically?  Plenty, my friend; plenty.  And that association has everything to do with the dissolution of preconceived biases, culturalization, mental conditioning/imprinting.  Now you’d think this topic would be as far removed from the wheelhouse of anyone with a stiff Catholic (or any religious) underpinning as could be; not so, however, in the case of Father Rohr — the Catholic equivalent to the Protestant emerging  church’s Rob Bell.

The interconnectedness of all things.  The fractal nature of life…and of lives.  The questioning of supposed “authority”, and the removal of blinders.  Again, not the kind of thing you expect to come from the religious community.  The times, though, they are a changn’…albeit slowly…but they are changin’, nonetheless.  All things — including, if this emerging Physical Culture renaissance movement has anything to say about it (and we most assuredly do!) — nothing less than the revamping of the entire thought process related to disease, healthcare, and the nature of health maintenance and the health delivery system.

Not convinced that any theologian — much less a Catholic theologian — can be so progressive?  Check-out this podcast interview of Father Rohr by Tapestry host Mary Hynes; fantastic stuff indeed.  Or, skim the pages of The Naked Now.  Learn to separate the teacher’s message from the teacher’s associations, and your preconceived notions of those associations.  If you can do that, you’ll avail yourself to a multitude of new learning opportunities, and avoid spiraling into that dreaded vortex of dogma .  Then take the added step by applying that openness to your exercise protocol selection.  The only question in your mind should be this: is this the best protocol for me, at this juncture in my life and given my goals.  Don’t allow yourself to be yoked to a tribe, protocol or guru just for the sake of belonging to a certain “community”.  Be a Physical Culture free agent, my friend, and prosper.

Theme of the week – Serendipity:

Funny how face-to-face conversations can, in ways not enabled otherwise, help drop the veil (or illusion) of separateness between entities.  Case in point: I had the pleasure of visiting (coffee at Austin’s own Epoch Coffee — one of my away-from-the-studio offices) and sharing a CZT-based workout with TTP reader Bill Fairchild.  During our conversation, I related how that, as a teen-ager growing up in San Antonio (and lucky enough to live in close proximity to the mecca of the San Antonio Physical Culture scene at the time, Powerhouse Gym), I was exposed first-hand to the dramatic effects of, what was an essentially a Paleo diet, could have on an athlete’s (and bodybuilder’s) physique.  Need to drop fat, really gain and maintain muscularity and athleticism?  Shift from eating crap to eating meat, eggs, and veggies — and lots of ’em.  Why didn’t I make the connection back in the 80s that this type diet was preferable, year-’round (not just for contest/competition prep) to all the high carb/low fat crap that was being perpetuated?  Simply this: I wasn’t ready yet to think on my own, still thought “authority” ascended to the position of authority by virtue of having the “right” answers — in short, my thinking was, for the most part, mainstream; I’d been blinkered, culturalized, imprinted…conditioned.  For as radical as I thought I was at that time, I was really no more than a chick that had just begun to emerge from the shell.  And what I know now is that the shell of self-disillusion is the toughest of all to crack.

Now, of course, I question my own assumptions and “knowledge” relentlessly; Every.  Fracking.  Thing.  What things do I feel as sure of now, at this stage in my life,  that may just be the result of conditioning?  Hopefully, my epistemocratic leanings can save me from that kind of tunnel vision now; constant vigilance, though, is key.

Serendipity, part II:

I found out last week that the most knowledgeable man on the history of Physical Culture, Ken O’Neil, lives in Wimberley Texas, not 15 minutes from me.  Holy wealth-of-go-to-knowledge, batman.  The man is a walking encyclopedia of Physical Culture — past, present…and future!  More, much more, on Ken in the near future.  You’ll see his name here in TTP quite often from here on out I assure you.

In all things, Mindfulness:

Couple of great reads from Harvard magazine here.  Check out The Mindfulness Chronicles: On “the psychology of possibility”, and learn to tap into the possibility (the reality!) of you creating your own reality.  Dramatic changes begin in the mind.  Just as epigenetics can alter gene expression, so too can you significantly “alter” your reality.  There is no try, there is only do. 

And this is cool: Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and nutritionist Lilian Cheung, a lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health, apply ancient Buddhist mindfulness techniques to eating in the modern world. “It is not just what we consume, but how we eat, when we eat, why we eat, and whom we eat with that makes a difference,” says Cheung, who grew up in a Buddhist home in Hong Kong.  And I would add that the same mindfulness applies when lifting a weight, or otherwise engaged in an athletic effort.  Don’t just lift and/or mindlessly, but strive to make that mind-muscle connection.  This is the first step to becoming truly adept in the art of Physical Culture.  Other steps follow, of course — but not before mastery of this.  My own workouts, truthfully, are my meditations.

The workout front:

Monday, 12/27/10 –

A good deal of fixie huckin’ preceded this workout, so the old legs weren’t exactly fresh at the onset of the lifts.  Nothing to be worried over, though, within my grand scheme.  The key is Autoregulation and adequate intensity.

(A1) front squats (hierarchical): 135 x 15; 185 x 6; 235 x 3

(B1) high-catch power cleans: 135 x 10; 155 x 7; 175 x 5; 185 x 3; 195 x 2, 2, 2

(B2) Russian leg curl: x 5 each round (5010 tempo)

Wednesday, 12/29/10 –

(A1) Tru Squat: 160 # (no counter weight) x 7,  3, 3, 3, 3, 3 (rest pause, 30×0 tempo)

(A2) leg press: 400 x 15 (30×0 tempo)

(B1) Nautilus pec dec: 110 x 13, 2, 2, 2, 2 (rest-pause, 40×0 tempo)

(B2) Xccentric seated military: (no counter weight, no added weight) x 6 (at 30×0 tempo), then 12 rest-pause singles at an 80×1 tempo

I followed this up with a (painfully) long stretch in the full ROM flye position, utilizing blast-straps and bodyweight.

Thursday, 12/30/10 –

(A1) kettlebell swings: 45 lbs x 50, 50, 50, 50

(A2) single-arm bent-over row (Oly bar): 95 x 12; 115 x 12, 12, 12,

(A3) Oly bar “shovel”: bar x 15; 65 x 12, 10, 9

(A4) Oly bar bi curl: 95 x 12; 115 x 12, 10, 8

(B1) “ski jump” cable shrugs: 4 sets of 200 x15

The “shovel” is simply an underhand (think bicep curl grip) straight bar front raise.  This hits the front delts in a unique way, and has the added benefit of engaging the lats from a rather unique angle as well.  For “ski jump” shrugs, I load-up a cable pulley (or pair of pulleys, as I have access to a Nautilus Free Trainer cable system), position the hold (either a single bar, or, in my case dual handles) behind my back, take a step or two forward and really lean into the weight such that I’m now at a hard angle away from the machine — a “ski jumper in flight” angle.  Now you can really torch the traps with some higher-rep sets.  And why a single-arm bent-over row with an Oly bar?  Try it, and let me know what kind of core strength is required to pull it off.  That’s why  🙂

Announcements?  Oh Yeah, I got a couple:

Check out what we at Efficient Exercise have on tap beginning this month:

What happens to a relatively untrained body when we combine approximately 30-minutes worth of CZT-based workouts per week with the implementation of a Paleo diet?   Well, beginning later this month, we at Efficient Exercise are going to find out.  If you live in the Austin area, and want to take part in Project Transformation: the Efficient Exercise Solution, give me a shout and I’ll get you on the mailing list.  We’ll be choosing our 20 “subjects” soon, so don’t delay in getting in your request.  And once this “study” gets kicked-off, you’ll be able to follow along on our Facebook page, as our subjects and trainers will be journaling about their experience there.  This will be a fun — and hopefully, enlightening — project to follow.  So “like us up”, and follow along — we’re out to show that a properly designed minimal investment can produce some stunning and healthy results.

…oh, and anybody in the Austin area looking to sell a fixie?  A Bianchi, preferably, 56 -58 cms?  If so, hit me up; I’m looking to add to the quiver  🙂

In health,

Keith