Random Fall Type Blog Post Plus Free Stuff

So now that October is within inches of having us in its’ perma-dark and windchill-induced grasps, we decided to crank up the furnace, throw an extra blanket on the bed, and up our vitamin D intake in casa de Somerset. Once the sunlight gets less than 12 hours a day, I start to supplement with D3, and find that it does wonders for my energy, mood, and overall physical capacity.

Notwithstanding the fact that I work indoors in a facility that’s version of natural lighting is having flourescent lights that aren’t retina-splitting white, sunlight comes at a premium in Edmonton over the winter, so getting natural source vitamin D isn’t very common and I’m not going to be one of those guys who looks like he just got back from Jersey in the dead of December through fake and bake, so supplementation is the answer. I’m not huge on taking supplements, but D3 is one of those that I will gladly take since it’s something that isn’t in high supply in the winter.

This story just cracks me up.

Reebok to Pay $25 million in Fraudulent Toning Shoes Settlement

Essentially, the FTC is calling out BS when it sees it, citing evidence that the claims made by Reebok that wearing their thick-foam soled shoes will increase the tone of hamstrings, calves, and glutes, resulting in supermodel legs just from wearing shoes. I have news for you, the best way to create tone in those muscles involved doing heavy lifting, specifically with an exercise that starts with a “D” and ends in “I just shit my spleen across the room.”

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Increasing “tone,” if meaning the definition and shape of a muscle without looking bulky, can only be reached with a lower body fat percentage and muscles that aren’t flat. This means the shoes would be best used to walk your ass away from the cookie jar, and as floor pads to help you load and unload plates off the barbell. Weight lifting increases the neural signalling sent to the muscle, which increases the latent tone of the muscle, changing its’ appearance. By stripping off a layer of body fat through good dietary practices and tossing around more plates in the gym than a dishwasher at Dennys’ you can increase the look of that toned muscle, and it won’t be through some crap-tastic shoes. And ladies, don’t worry about getting bulky lifting heavy things either.

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A few weeks ago my friends Bret Contreras and Brad Schoenfeld came out with an article in the Strength and Conditioning Journal called To Crunch or Not to Crunch: An Evidence-Based examination of spinal flexion exercises, their potential risks and applicability to program design. This caught a lot of attention from the press, and was quickly shot across the internet. The article essentially outlined a lot of the research on spinal flexion movements and how likely they were to create an issue with the spine. Their overall conclusion (simplified here) was that spinal flexion was not going to make your discs instantly liquefy and cause you to become paralysed. I chatted with Brad in Toronto shortly after the article came out, and said that while the literature showed some deleterious changes with flexion, they were mostly with cadavers, pigs, and non-living tissue.

Dr. Philip Snell did an audio interview with Dr. Stuart McGill this week, the guy who has done the vast majority of the research on spinal mechanics and what works and what doesn’t. Check it out HERE, just scroll to the bottom of the article to find the audio link. It the interview, McGill says that the question isn’t whether the exercise is inherently evil or not, but whether the person is capable of performing the exercise without problem. In most cases the answer is no, or that the risks of injury far outweigh the benefits of doing the exercise. In a risk reward scenario, there’s a lot of way better ways to get bigger bang for your buck without risking the spine.

To add to it, Mike Robertson asked some big names in MMA coaching to weigh in on it HERE, including Dr. McGill, Joe Dowdell and Dewey Nielsen. All three had some different takes on the question of crunches or flexion based movements in general, but all seemed to agree that the exercise has to be matched to the person, and that in most cases there are better ways of approaching the problem of abdominal conditioning. One point Joe made was that if you don’t use it you lose it, and if you don’t train the spine’s ability to flex and produce force and stability in all positions, it will lose them.

Personally, I don’t know why we’re all still kicking the crap out of this dead horse. The basis of the argument keeps coming back to the exercise itself, not to the merits of the individual to complete the exercise safely, which everyone being asked to comment on as an expert is repeatedly saying. Should we continue to ask whether we should crunch or not, or start asking if there are better ways to assess our clients or ourselves to find out what our core function and spinal mobility are like and whether we’re a walking time bomb waiting to go off?

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To finish off the day, I want to throw something out there for everyone. I’m working on a new website for a future project, and need some help building and designing it. I want something that looks slick and awesome, but still has some specific functionality to it. Now I’m going to admit, as anyone viewing this site can attest to, my mad skillz on the interwebz is pretty limited. Seriously, I’ll bet a 12 year old with an iPad could crash my site and make me their bitch if they wanted to. I’ll be the first to admit I need some help.

So here’s the deal. I want to find someone who knows a thing or two about web design and would be willing to trade services, website set-up for me and distance training for you. Nothing crazy or over the top (maybe a little), but if you have experience designing websites to take payments and deliver digital products drop me a line in the comment section below and we can work out an arrangement. I may not be able to work a computer, but I can get you crazy dieseled out and slap some muscle on your build, or fix your back/shoulder/knee/life from the comfort of my living room. Sounds good? Cool.