Fit for Dragon*Con

by Jonathon Cabot:

“I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.”
–Bruce Lee

We can learn a lot from children. One lesson we can definitely afford to learn, or rather relearn, is natural mobility. Have you ever watched the way a toddler moves, one who has just mastered getting around on his own two feet? The next time you have the chance to observe children at this early stage, pay particular attention to the way in which they squat down. Without any coaching, they know instinctively to keep the knees lined up correctly, back straight, and go hamstrings all the way down to the calves deep. They can pretty much do this all day, even comfortably remaining in that seated position for quite a while, and then they just stand back up whenever the spirit moves.

Quick quiz, and it doesn’t even require a #2 pencil. Go ahead and stand up. Now, while keeping your legs straight, bend at the waist, and lower yourself down until you touch your toes. Stand up straight again, spread your feet a little wider than shoulder width, and squat down as low as you can, until the back of your upper legs come to rest on your calves.

There is no reason that any of us should be unable to do either of these tasks, barring serious crippling disability. Yet so many of us in the free world can’t. Why is this? What happened to us between infancy and our present state that caused us to lose this capability? This is a much bigger deal than we might think. Maintaining our basic mobility and full range of motion as we age is probably the best insurance policy we’ve got when it comes to preventing injury and strain, and to echo the main theme of the last week’s article, it’s one of those fundamentals that might just make us less of a liability when the world comes crashing down.

Now then, how are we going to incorporate some good leg-specific training into our lives, and what sort of equipment are we going to need to get started? If we were to return to that standard commercial gym at a peak hours, what would we see our fitness contemporaries doing in order to work their lower limbs? It’s entirely possible there would only be a handful of them hitting up the legs, if there were any at all (this tends to ring especially true for the male of the species, as the lower body takes a distant backseat to the pursuit of pumped up biceps and a big bench press). There might be one or two gym members hitting their quads on the leg extension machine, and maybe one other performing hamstring curls on another rig in the vicinity. If we’re really in luck, there might be a Spandex-clad gym bunny seated on the overgrown Thigh Master, repeatedly bringing her knees together and opening them up, often to the discreet approval of any of her fellow gym-goers with a direct line of sight. There’s a veritable smorgasbord of these contraptions to choose from. Curiously, the simple and sinister looking squat rack stands alone and vacant, with the possible exception of the occasional doofus standing inside of it, performing bicep curls with a barbell.

Here’s what it pretty much boils down to. We can go the machine route, and attempt to “isolate” each muscle group in our lower body (once more, the notion of “muscle isolation” is neither possible nor desirable), or we can do the efficient thing–working all of these big muscles at once and developing their coordination as a unit rather than a collection of unrelated hunks of meat by learning to squat properly.

Once again, I’m not going to attempt to reinvent the wheel here. This gent does a pretty good job of demonstrating what we’re after.

As for any additional commentary from me on this video, I would encourage trainees to follow a slower cadence than this particular demonstrator. As suggested previously with pushups, I’d recommend the two seconds down/one second pause on the bottom/two seconds back up pace. Slow and smooth is the name of the game for this kind of strength building. Also, I would ask that the trainee either wears a very thin soled, non-giving pair of shoes (wrestling shoes, Chuck Taylors or similar styles, or even some of those trendy “5-Finger” thingees that are so en vogue these days), or else works the squat barefooted. As a guideline, “the smarter the shoe = the dumber the foot.” Our fancy sneakers have a tendency to cause injuries during strength training sessions that would likely not have happened without them. As simply as I can put it, the extensor reflex interacts with our legs muscles in a specific way, and this depends on the feedback pressure we get from the floor. Thick soles tend to redirect this pressure to the wrong places, and it messes with the way the system should be firing.

How far can we take the bodyweight squat? Pretty far. Seems that back in the early days of mixed martial arts competition, 500 consecutive reps was a standard expectation from the fighters. For our purposes, I’d suggest building ourselves up to the point where we can nail 50 good squats at that 2-1-2 cadence. Once this is doable for a couple sets, it’s time to up our game and move on to a harder variation of the drill. From thighs parallel to the deck, progress lower, ultimately hamstrings to calves at the point where we can no longer descend. While some folks may shy away from doing so, unless there is some sort of pre-existing condition in the trainee, the harsh truth is that if we are afraid to train our joints through their full range of natural motion, they’re going to stay weak.

Our daily TV viewing would be an ideal time to get our numbers in. We could start by repping out during the commercial breaks. Each time, aspire to keep squatting at the slow proscribed cadence until the show returns (or 50 good ones have been reached, whichever comes first–no idea how long commercials run for these days…..). When we reach the point where we can knock off three sets of 50 during a half hour show, resting during the commercial breaks, we’re ready to move on up.

For those who may be worrying about bulking up, fear not–this plan isn’t going to do much, if anything at all, for hypertrophy (increasing the size of a muscle). To the handful of folks who may be aspiring hugeness and are willing to hear me out on the matter, I wouldn’t recommend this pursuit in the case of our legs. The upper and lower body just don’t play by the same rules on this one. There comes a point when we can still add mass to our leg muscles, but we won’t really be gaining in the actual strength or speed departments any longer. Granted, some of us might be totally okay with that, if our primary motivation is purely aesthetics. But for the majority of us, unless each additional ounce on our frames is making us faster or stronger, it ain’t quality weight. Superfluous mass with no benefit can not only be a hinderance to us (think of our pullup numbers for one thing, and for individuals that need to do a lot of hiking, chafing thighs are absolutely no fun), but it’s also liable to make things even tougher for our would-be rescuer if we ended up being the one in need of saving. You can ask any soldier that found himself having to fireman’s carry one of his bodybuilder comrades plus all of his gear from A to B.

After mastering the full range of motion squat, where do we go from there? How do we keep improving our lower body strength and resiliency while adhering to the conceit of having nothing to play with but our own weight? At this stage, we’ve developed the strength base to start mastering single leg squatting.

When you achieve this strength feat (and keep at it), you will never lose the spring in your step. When even single leg squats become easy, maybe once you’re busting out 20+ good reps each leg, the motion can be made challenging once again with the addition of holding a weight in your hands, if you feel so inclined. Still, I would suggest working up to a long set of 50 per leg (it’s achievable–dedicated men have been known to break into tripe digits), and putting those newly earned hot wheels of yours to use in events like sprinting, jumping, or kickboxing rather than chasing a certain external poundage. Once more, the upper and lower bodies just don’t play by the same rules here. Nearly all competitive powerlifters are plagued with chronic aching sooner or later. I’d much prefer my charges not have to learn to live with constant pain.

Need to run faster? Jump higher? Kick harder? Contrary to the implications of the sneaker commercials of my day, it’s not “da shoes.” For across the board strength and quickness, get squatting already. If you’re hesitant to start, due to some type of old injury, get yourself fixed up already. In a lot of cases, it can be as simple as a same day, in and out surgical procedure or a few days/weeks of physical therapy. GET IT DONE. Someone is counting on you.

Let’s be careful out there.

(Editor’s Note: A giant welcome back to weekly columnist Jonathon Cabot is in order. WELCOME BACK! Especially considering how much of a slacker I’ve been this past week, a great post from a great fitness writer such as J.C. is just what FFDC needed!)

by Jonathon Cabot:

“Nations have passed away and left no traces, and history gives the naked cause of it. One single, simple reason in all cases: they fell because their people were not fit.”
–Rudyard Kipling

To kick this one off with my trademark good humor, the average human body in the developed world is a pretty sad state of affairs. It’s both bemusing and worrisome to me. Perhaps at some other point in our history, I could regard this as some sort of grotesque comedy–the irony of the “corporate granola” types lecturing on the threat of global warming, yet proceeding to drive the three blocks to Starbucks when they think no one’s watching. Or the prematurely senior-ized citizens who likely never really needed such a device in the first place, yet now find themselves utterly dependent on some electric scooter for all of their mobility. There’s the disturbing trivia of just how much it’s cost the American emergency services and medical industry to somehow transport and otherwise accommodate the ever increasing girth of the infirm, and the morbidly fascinating data of how this same dilemma has been affecting the funerary industry–seems that in addition to the plus-sized caskets, vaults, and upgraded payloads for hearses, most crematoriums have had no choice but to declare a 500-pound limit for their clients. Makes me wonder if dear old Mark Twain, who famously declared that he ironically got all the exercise he needed from acting as a pallbearer for friends who exercised would reconsider this witticism if he could see us now. But perhaps most exasperating, the ever increasing number of twenty-somethings who appear more capable of rolling at a faster speed than they could walk. Yeah, this might have been nothing more than a bountiful source of dark humor in days past, but if there ever was a time for this mirth, it’s long gone now. And it ain’t coming back.

As you read this, somewhere, someone is training to kill you. Humor me and let that happy thought sink in for just a moment.

I have no doubt that there are at least a few folks reading along who would emphatically declare that I’m full of it. That’s their call, and they’re free to do so. I also have no desire to engage anyone here in any debates dealing with moral relativism–that’s not the intention of this blog. However, and regardless of how we’re supposed to feel about it all, the proverbial elephant in the room we’re supposed to be ignoring remains that there are appreciably sized groups of our fellow carbon based lifeforms that seek to violently bend us to their will, and they do so by exploiting the weakness of human superstition to build up their own power base; harnessing the power of imagination to create subjugation and to destroy individual liberty. Their strategies cost pennies to put into effect, and cost us trillions to respond to. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is not a part of their agenda, unless you happen to fully agree with their exceedingly narrow definitions of these terms. To disagree would mean finding yourself marked for death on their deity’s behalf. While we can try to dismiss all of this with the withering argument that it’s nothing more than the actions of “a tiny minority of extremists (TM),” I never really understood how that was supposed to make us collectively feel better. It only takes one, after all, to really ruin your day. And unfortunately for us, I have a bad feeling that we’re about to start seeing a whole lot more of these “isolated incidents” (“manmade tragedies”) right here on the homefront. I don’t want to be right about this. You’ve got no idea how much I want to be proven wrong.

The majority of this nation’s citizens may not realize just how many close calls America has had over the past two years alone. I suppose that this can partly be attributed to the soccer fan mentality, in the sense that our goaltenders can make a thousand saves, but the only ones that anyone ever remembers are the ones that got by. Or maybe it’s simply the unspoken rule that no body count equals no media interest, so we won’t have to be distracted from keeping up with the antics of our favorite celebrities and similar pressing news items.

Alright. Now that I’ve likely either bummed us all out (which is understandable, and I promise it wasn’t exactly a lot of fun coalescing all of this to begin with) or possibly even offended a few (which is okay, I’m on scarier poopy lists than yours), what is it we can do about our deteriorating physical state, and simultaneously perhaps make us less of a liability and maybe even an asset when we find ourselves the lucky recipients of front row tickets when the world suddenly goes to hell? We can start by building up our legs.

It’s been said that an athlete is only as young as his legs, and that’s not an unfair assessment. When we think of the term “sports,” our minds tend to conjure images of competitors running, jumping, kicking, and any number of activities generally requiring two good gams under us. Just to clarify, I’m referring to athletics here, since I’m fully aware that the definition of sports somehow loosened up enough to include poker and billiards under that heading (oy). Sprinting for the end zone, or sprinting after the guy trying to get there. Hustling down the court over and over again as that ball keeps changing hands. Rounding first base and making a beeline for second (possibly even for third, if the throw was a little too high or the baseman couldn’t catch, and the biggest kid on the sandlot proclaimed that ‘only-one-base-on-an-overthrow’ shall now be deemed “girl’s rules.” He was also likely the captain of your team). All the obvious examples.

Less obvious would be the role of the legs in the expression of total body power. You may have heard the quote that you can’t fire a cannon from a rowboat (well. maybe you can. Once, anyway. And your results may vary, but I’m digressing). To use boxing as the example again, try to imagine yourself suspended with your feet off the ground, but otherwise in full control of your movement. How much power do you think you’re going to generate in a punch without that solid base? Not very much at all. While it might seem counterintuitive, genuine knockout power comes from the legs, in particular the hips (we might talk about that one some more at another time). And despite what we’ve been seeing in any number of martial arts flicks, the same rule holds true for kicking. While the legend is that jumping kicks were intended to bring down opponents on horseback, trying to pull off one of those in an actual scuffle will probably only ensure that you go out looking like a cheerleader.

So an athlete is only as good as his legs, but I’d go so far as to say that rings true for us all–doubly so these days. With or without living under threat of attack, we just never can tell when bad stuff is going to go down in this world, and there might not be anyone around more qualified than us to save the day. While I’m not necessarily expecting all of us to overcome our deep-seated instinct for self-preservation and go the John Wayne route each time disaster strikes, I have no doubt that you have someone counting on you. Doesn’t matter who you are. And it would not do our souls any favors if we weren’t fast, strong, or capable enough to save them from ending up a statistic. So before that moment comes, let’s start building some strong, quick legs that won’t quit when we need them most. A good pair of the resilient, car pushing, door kicking, casualty carrying and dragging kind. And once again, we can make that happen with minimal gear.

Stay tuned.

Let’s be careful out there.