It’s no secret that I’m a verbose writer. I try to keep my articles under a 4000 word cut-off, but that’s still a chunk of text to digest on a computer screen. As much as I love to read, even I don’t have the patience to sit staring at the window for 10-20 minutes to process an article of that length.

Recently I jumped on the Future Train and got myself an Android mini-tablet. This is a handy little device, as I’m sure those of you with iPhones and Android phones will attest, and I’ve found it surprisingly useful for organizing all the reading material that floats around me like the cloud following that dirty kid in the Peanuts cartoons.

For the purpose of organizing the web articles I come across, I’ve found Read It Later indispensable. Find a long-ish piece that looks awesome but you just don’t have time right now? Click “read it later” and it’s stored in your account and synced across platforms. Set it up in your browser and on the mobile device and you’re set.

It’s such a cool idea, and with my long articles likely being more the norm than the exception, I decided to add a button down at the bottom just in case anybody wants to make use of it.

Original Article

This article began to take shape after reading another well-intended internet complaint about how mock-quote “science” has no relevance to practical get-in-the-gym exercise.

As pro-science as I am, I have to admit there’s a lot of truth to that point of view. You don’t have to look much further than the papers passed around the strength and fitness blogs and Facebook updates to see why. While there’s occasionally interesting stuff turning up, there’s also a lot of crap. By crap I mean papers looking at how Molecular Signal X jiggled in hungover college students when exposed to a lab trial resembling no workout you will ever do.

While I personally find a lot of the biochem research interesting, there’s no shame in admitting that it’s exactly that: a personal interest. I don’t think that material has any relevance at all to doing things at the gym, at least not in the way most folks seem to expect.

Still, there’s something not quite right about the blanket anti-science, anti-intellectual perspective that characterizes some corners of the strength and fitness field. The stereotypical Bro, the musclehead who believes the pseudo-science in supplement ads but turns hostile toward any attempt at debunking it, isn’t our ideal role model. There’s rejecting the irrelevant, on the one hand, and then there’s needless hostility towards intellectual curiosity.

The former I can get behind. The latter, that’s just typical internet posturing — or, at best, an over-reaction to bad science — and in either case an attitude best ignored. The problem is, it’s not always clear which is which, or why there’s a difference at all.

Starting From The Wrong Place

The more I’ve thought about it, the more it’s occurred to me that confusion about what science is, and what it implies for exercise and nutrition, comes down to perspective. There’s a tremendous gulf between the public perception of science, created by bad science reporting and unrealistic expectations and plain old stupid, and the reality of science.

Many of the apparent disagreements we encounter between mock-quote “science” and the equally inane “common sense” aren’t actually disagreements at all.

Most of what you see paraded out on the internet, in blogs and science-journalism built on press releases, is mock-quote “science”, the Justin Bieber to the Mozart of actual research done by real scientists. That research, which is what scientists in labs, clinics, and research programs do and which is published in journals after a process of peer review, forms the foundation of our knowledge about the natural world.

The public perception of science and the real thing are often two different species, and both of those are removed again from the philosophy of science. That way of thinking about the natural world, influenced by luminaries like Francis Bacon and Karl Popper, doesn’t always come into the picture in most scientific back-and-forth, though, and there’s our first glimpse of the real issue.

If you don’t think about the world in the same way as I do, or the biologist writing the paper you’re citing, then you miss crucial parts of the message. It’s like two people standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon but ten miles apart. They’re looking at the same “thing”, but they’ll have very different glimpses of it and, once back at the hotel, two different stories to tell about it.

Everything I say and think comes from my perspective on the world. I’m standing on top of a mountain made out of all the life-experiences and books and research papers that have shaped my thinking, and it’s from that vantage point that I look at the world. You stand on your own, and a third person stands on still another.

We share much of that background thanks to common culture (and common biology, to go a level deeper). Still, it’s not hard to find spots where the overlap isn’t seamless and we find it harder to agree. It’s easy to agree that gravity points down or that we need food to live. More abstract ideas aren’t always so clear.

You look at the world with one viewpoint, and I look at it with another. Throwing more facts around within our personal sandbox gets us nowhere when we each play by our own set of rules. If you don’t look at the problem in the same way as I’m looking at it, then we may never agree.

It isn’t what you think, but why you think it.

Right and Wrong

One of my favorite essays from Isaac Asimov is The Relativity of Wrong. In it, Asimov, by way of addressing the letter of an angry student, dismantles a common complaint about the scientific process. Just look at how scientists used to think the world was flat, the student writes. Clearly scientists don’t know anything. Asimov goes on to politely eviscerate that suggestion.

To ancient peoples with limited powers of observation — you can’t see far if you’re a hunter-gatherer with no tools or transportation besides your own feet — the idea of a Flat Earth was very nearly right. The Earth’s curvature per mile is so low that a Flat Earth is “right enough” to Paleo Man.

It was only with the advent of new tools that a different picture began to emerge. The Greeks learned to measure the curvature of the Earth’s surface. Ships circumnavigated the globe, mapping it along the way. Finally we launched airplanes and satellites to take pictures and measure the Earth’s shape with unprecedented accuracy. Each step added a little more to our model of Earth, refining the observations and etching in ever-greater levels of detail.

“It might be that to describe the universe, we have to employ different theories in different situations. Each theory may have its own version of reality, but according to model-dependent realism, that is acceptable so long as the theories agree in their predictions whenever they overlap, that is, whenever they can both be applied.”
Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow

In their book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow introduced an idea they call model-dependent realism. Phenomena, they say, can be described equally well by many different models and, like the hunter-gatherer on the Flat Earth, we don’t have enough data (or the tools to gather the data) to say which is right or wrong. Thanks to that uncertainty different models, even models that seem to contradict themselves, can explain observations equally well.

A model, in this meaning, is meant to describe some aspect of the world around us. Aristotle’s Earth-centric model of the solar system, and the Copernican model that replaced it by sticking the Sun at the center, are both well-known examples. Observations are taken, guesses are made, and we create a picture that explains what we’ve seen.

A model is a representation of some part of the world. Models exist for everything in science, and exercise physiology is no exception. I’m using model instead of “theory” as theory comes with its own baggage, but they’re more or less interchangeable for these purposes.

Instead of throwing out competing models as nonsense, as they can’t all be right, Hawking and Mlodonow argue that we should look for meaning according to the usefulness of each one, rather than how well it reflects absolute correctness. As long as any particular model of reality works where it’s intended, then it works.

I want to clarify that I’m not (and Hawking and Mlodinow aren’t) arguing against the existence of objective facts. In the realms of fitness and strength & conditioning, the existing body of knowledge is good-enough for us to say some things with certainty. There are wealths of knowledge about muscle and nerve and connective tissue and how those tissues respond to exercise, and that does put some hard limits on the possibilities.

Not every last thing is true just because someone believes it or writes a blog about it. When an alternative theory doesn’t match reality, it’s no longer useful. This is genuine Bro-science, pseudo-science stemming from a worldview that simply doesn’t match reality.

At the same time, a good number of things treated as True Fact aren’t so much, and it’s easy to sacrifice the useful in chasing down the correct. That’s what we need to avoid.

Level Crossings

Rightness and wrongness — and usefulness — depend on scale. Does it matter to a hunter-gatherer with no airplanes, no satellites, not even a telescope, that the world isn’t flat? Besides intellectual curiosity, not really. The wrongness is irrelevant to any conceivable situation Paleo Man would ever encounter. It just doesn’t matter.

But there are other situations where the correctness does matter. The lady avoiding any kind of conditioning exercise because she heard that cardio raises cortisol and makes her fatter has crossed into the territory where the model’s correctness is important. Her behaviors — the exercise she does or doesn’t do — are directly affected by that model of exercise.

There are “right wrongs”, in which you may be wrong but it doesn’t matter, and then there are “wrong wrongs” where you’re wrong in a way that causes you grief. Anyone discouraged from exercising “because cortisol” has encountered one of the many wrong-wrongs in the fitness industry.

Leaps from one scale to another happen all the time in the on-going argument between Science^TM and Get It Done lifting experience. One camp expects direct and immediate application from research. They expect to read an abstract or two off Pubmed and have an awesome “scientific” program. The other side notices that these nerds are fooling themselves and aren’t saying anything interesting about training or eating. The real info, they believe, comes from hard work and getting it done.

I don’t see why that argument needs to exist at all. We should, ideally, draw useful knowledge from any and every possible resource. Not all knowledge learned through experience can be written off as “Bro-science”, just as not all science is useless ivory-tower academia. By keeping scale in mind, we can avoid nonsense statements like “aerobic exercise makes you fatter”.

It’s all down to perspective. If you stand on your mountain and look down on a world where Science and Experience are two competing camps with irreconcilable differences, of course you’re going to see conflict.

Imagine there are three levels of possible knowledge, one right above the other and ranked according to how zoomed-in you are relative to the real life world we live in. The lowest level contains living tissues, individual cells, and the molecular biochemistry that makes up the inside of living cells. This is the raw biology, and it explains how muscle fibers and fat cells respond to exercise or protein intake or fasting. It explains the various signaling networks and genes that switch on or off when we lift weights. You know all this stuff is there but unless you’re a biologist you probably don’t think about it much (or at all).

A step above that, we’ve got a roughed-in sketch of the whole body but, like an anatomical drawing in a textbook, we’re still not quite at real life. Experiments at this level include all those papers in the Journal of Applied Physiology or the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, the ones that involve real people doing exercise (or exercise-like things) but always with those strange protocols that never look like a real workout. You’ll see the machine biceps curl or isokinetic leg extension where one side is tested with 10 sets of the eccentric 1RM and the other limb is left untrained as a control.

Since we’re seeing real live human beings doing exercise-ish things, this gives us a lot of data about how human bodies respond to physical activity. Still, as critics rightly note, this kind of research is a step or two removed from the training most of us would do at the gym.

Relating personal opinions and experiences is easy to write off as Bro-science, but that’s not always the case. Bro-science happens when bad science is “proven” by 20” biceps and 500 lb benches and being hardcore. Sharing a workout that added 20kg to your bench isn’t Bro-science. Believing that your kooky ideas on insulin or cortisol — topics at a lower level on the ladder — are right because you won a pro card, that’s Bro-science.

Experience is just fine as long as it stays on the experience level. It’s when the levels cross, when big arms are used as support for bad 8th grade ideas on biology, then you’ve invoked the power of Bro.

We need real In The Gym knowledge. Even hard sciences can’t always stage controlled experiments. If that were the case, we’d have no field of astrophysics. Fortunately, we’ve got a whole universe full of stars and energetic objects zipping around and, with good instruments, astronomers only have to watch and take notes.

At the Real World level of stars, we have endless data to draw on. But astrophysicists aren’t working in a vacuum, either (so to speak). They rely on other domains — other levels of knowledge — to create the framework for their theories and models. They need to understand Newtonian gravity and relativity, chemistry, and even particle physics. The information of the lower levels provides support for the high-level real-world observations. There’s no conflict at all; the bottom-up data and top-down theory bounce off each other and reinforce the astrophysicist’s models.

Exercise is no different. Research gives us plenty of information on how biological systems, from whole bodies down to individual muscle fibers and their genes, respond to physical exercise. But that’s all at the bottom. To make it useful at the top, we need to treat that information as the groundwork it is.

I briefly discussed all this with Mike Tuchscherer a few weeks ago. As meticulous as Mike is about collecting data on his training and the lifters working with him, you’d have to be out of your mind to ignore all that just because it’s not a controlled double-blind trial with statistical analysis.

Russian coaches and scientists generated tremendous amounts of data on Olympic weightlifters with “natural pedagogical (coaching) experiments”. Prilepin’s Table, that chart we all like to use to figure out how to train, comes from Alexey Prilepin’s coaching of the national weightlifting team from the late 70s and early 80s. Prilepin had some ideas on strength and power development, which he implemented with real live weightlifters, and he eventually wrote that up into the famous table that tells us how many reps to do at a percentage of our 1RM.

The natural experiment, in which we see things happen in the wild and record what we saw — Getting It Done, in other words — is currently the only way to really understand what happens in a workout and what happens after months and years of training. No published research can quite compare to the playground of real life, provided you approach it with the scientific mindset.

Real live training is invaluable for generating ideas on how to train in real life. It doesn’t say anything about what insulin is doing, just as the phosphorylation of mTOR doesn’t give you any directly useful ideas for your next deadlift workout. And that’s alright. You shouldn’t expect that anyway.

It’s when the levels cross in ways they shouldn’t — like expecting useful deadlifting ideas from abstract biological data — that “science is useless!” gets a chance to show itself.

Keep everything on the level and you’re fine.

Hitpoints At Critical

Supercompensation. That word, even if you don’t know what it means, defines how you think about recovery from exercise.

You’ve seen the graph, the one in every exercise science textbook and website. You do a workout, depleting all the biochemicals in your body and leaving you in a state of fatigue. On the graph, the line showing your state of recovery takes a dip. While you recover over the next few days, the recovery line tracks back up to the original point, and then reaches up to a new peak.

That peak is supercompensation, an over-adaptation in which your body stores more of the magical biochemical stuff that makes you go. The result is a bigger muscle, a stronger deadlift, a faster sprint. Deplete, recover, supercompensate. Whether you know it or not, that’s the model of recovery that drives very nearly every program and training philosophy you’ve ever heard of. Train hard, get tired, recover.

There’s a history behind this model, having to do with Hans Selye’s original discovery of the universal stress-response back in the 1930s and how, for many years, it was believed that living bodies exhaust themselves when placed under chronically-stressful conditions. For now, it’s enough to know that this model of depletion and exhaustion has been challenged by contemporary stress research. The organs and nerves responsible for the adrenaline rush aren’t burned out or fatigued or anything like that.

What we’re seeing is actually an overactive stress-response. Living tissues aren’t depleted at all, but actually revved up into “stress mode” to cope with threats in the environment.

Threats, in this context, can be anything, physical or psychological. You can feel the adrenaline rush when you narrowly miss a snake-bite, or when you sprint away from the twig you mistook for a rattlesnake.

In the short term, to handle an immediate threat, the stress-response is good. Over longer spans of time, this is bad. When the stress systems stay on, they eat up resources that would otherwise go to essential life-processes. No depletion. No exhaustion. Only a gradual process of wear-and-tear, what stress researcher Bruce McEwen calls allostatic load.

The supercompensation model treats recovery like hitpoints in a video game. Sitting in the morning traffic jam takes some. Angry boss and kids and bills coming due all take their cut. Training, if you have any left to give, takes its share. Rest and relaxation are power-ups that bring you back to full health.

Under the model of allostasis, there are no hitpoints. Your body sits somewhere on a continuum ranging from mostly-normal, at one end, to entirely stressed-out. The closer you are to that stressed-out state, the harder it is for your body to function properly. Your whole system gets knocked out of equilibrium and otherwise normal bodily functions just don’t work right.

To the untrained eye, the distinction between “fatigued tissues” and “disrupted state of entire body” may not mean much. As far as you can tell, you feel beat up and worn down after a hard workout. Does it really matter what Science^TM says about that?

As with Paleo Man’s Flat Earth, the question isn’t which is right, but which is useful. Does the supercompensation model stand up to the allostatic model on that front?

In some ways it does. I don’t think there’s any harm in using supercompensation as a model to design workouts for bodybuilders, as one example. I think bodybuilders, whether bulking or cutting, can benefit by thinking of how individual muscle groups recover between workouts. The biological processes relevant to muscle-building and fat-metabolizing are compatible with that thinking. When left alone there, I have no gripe.

Supercompensation has a way of creeping outside its useful box, however. Viewing your body as subject to exhaustion leads to ideas like “adrenal fatigue”, a phenomenon of chronic fatigue (fatigue in the mental sense of feeling tired, which need not imply any fatigue in living tissues) that in all likelihood results from an overactive stress-response intersecting with vulnerable personalities. The adrenals aren’t fatigued at all — how could they be when dumping out corticoids at record levels? — and it makes no sense to address the problem as if they are.

Much the same can be said for common ideas on overtraining and the monstrosity that “CNS fatigue” has become. Both of these conditions sit out towards the stressed-out end of the continuum. You rack up wear-and-tear that makes you feel bad and takes resources away from growth processes.

Exhaustion? Burn-out? Recovery doesn’t work that way.

Life processes continue on. Muscles and connective tissues and nerves repair damage and rebuild themselves with fresh proteins. Meanwhile, the stress-response kicks your body into adrenaline-rush high-gear, jacking up immune signals and catecholamines and glucocorticoids (including cortisol). Stress-mode makes you feel bad and, if left unchecked for too long, worn out. Not because you “aren’t recovered” but because you spent too much time coping with tremendous stress levels.

That’s allostasis: stability through change. You can be “burned out” and recovering simultaneously. It’s the net condition — how much the wear-and-tear of stress-mode takes away relative to your current fitness level — that matters.

A Systems View

Supercompensation appeals because it’s linear. There’s One Single Cause. You’re either recovered or you aren’t. Easy.

It isn’t the idea, so much as the thought process behind the idea, that interests me. Supercompensation as a concept is fine for what it is, but it reveals the reductionist views that define the fitness world. Our field is sitting three to four decades behind modern biology and it shows in our ideas.

I’m trying to get to the heart of the philosophical divide between what coaches and trainers are taught, on the one hand, and what contemporary biology is doing. There’s a whole new field out there going by the unwieldy name psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), a cross-disciplinary study of the interaction between the mind and the nervous and immune systems. We’re discovering that there’s little use to describing these systems as independent actors. Everything works so much more elegantly if we view them as integrated parts of the same cloth.

The PNI field couldn’t exist if biologists were still locked into reductionism like most personal trainers and coaches. If we only zoom in a little more, take all these little nuggets of wisdom about muscle fiber types and biomechanics and hormones and molecular signaling, we’ll have a complete Theory of Training that we can use to create Ultimate Workouts.

Modern thinking invokes the arcane powers of complexity science and chaos theory. You can’t take all the little pieces and add them up to get the complete picture. Information organizes into levels of meaning, and those levels aren’t easily crossed. To study the thing, you must study the thing itself.

Think of a fisherman’s net. The thick ropes knit together into a pattern, and it’s that pattern that matters. Remove any of one of the strands and you still have a net. Pull on one, and the whole thing moves in response. It makes no sense to talk about the net by talking about any one rope or thread within it. The “net” object is distinct from the ropes and threads that it’s built from.

The fitness field still thinks in reductionist terms. We see questions like “What’s more important: diet or training?” We hear things like “don’t spike your cortisol, cortisol is catabolic and bad”. What’s the best exercise, squats or deadlifts or bench press? Do deadlifts go on back day or leg day?

What’s more important to stay alive: your brain, your heart, or your kidneys? The answer isn’t important because the question itself makes no sense. You won’t live long missing any one of them, so why try to rank them — linearly — by importance? In a living body, the connections between the pieces are as important as the pieces.

A living body is nonlinear.

I want the fitness field to understand this perspective, what’s called the systems view of biology, and adopt it. The systems perspective challenges all the lovingly-held reductionist views, in which we can zoom in to One Single Cause and identify it as the source of all our woes. Insulin. Cortisol. Adrenal gland fatigue. Too many Type I muscle fibers. There’s one thing we can point to and say “that’s it”.

Looking back on my old articles, many of which were complaints or outright flame-posts, the one common factor I can see between all of them is that the “stupidity” I address always emerges as a consequence of reductionist thinking. Reductionism covers all kinds of fitness and nutritional kookery, from low-carb zealots to Paleo dieters to supplement hucksters and the dumbest of training ideas, even the new-age quackery of adrenal fatigue. These are all level-crossing offenses, with details from one level brought to a place they don’t belong.

In keeping with my desire to explain rather than condemn, I think this makes for an elegant explanation. It’s not stupidity as much as a conceptual or philosophical gulf. People simply aren’t looking at the problem from the right stance.

What are we missing out as coaches and trainers by not viewing life on its terms? Even the common ideas on recovery don’t quite work right when viewed reductively. Supercompensation is fine as a description over a small window of time, but how much does it hold you back if that’s the only way you can think about recovery? You’d certainly never be able to squat to a max every day, for months on end, and see constant improvements if recovery really worked like that.

Life is nonlinear. To understand it, we have to think nonlinearly.

The systems perspective extends to your workout programs and diets and all the detail-questions that you want to ask. Should I do this or that or that over there? Don’t ask if it’s right. Ask if it’s useful. Think in terms of real life cause and effect. If you do this at the gym, are you really going to die of cortisol poisoning? Are you really going to get fatter by eating fruit?

Systems theory tells us that we don’t know enough about those details to make level-crossing guesses, and anyone who claims they can is probably making it up. System theory, ironically, tells us to ignore all that mess and just go lift some weights and eat some food.

The only ideas that have any importance are the useful ideas. Train and eat and see what happens. Keep science in mind when testing it and, if it works, keep it. If it doesn’t, ditch it.

Original Article

Now that we’ve officially flipped into another new year, activity at the gym — and in the kitchen — is about to boil over into that first-quarter frenzy of new goals, new resolutions, and the hard determination that only the buzz of the holiday season can kindle. For the starry-eyed masses recently-committed to laying down the cigarettes and twinkies and getting some exercise, the new year is a time of optimism: they have dreams of better health and better bodies.

For the old gym hermits, it’s time to fortify the defenses, shore up the walls, and hunker down until late February. Not because we resent the influx of greenhorns. I’ve waffled on this over the years but in my mellowing-out I’ve had to admit that the January rush makes me happy for what it is. Sure it can be irritating to see all the chuckleheaded tomfoolery going on when you just want to squat, but let’s keep it in perspective: at least they’re trying.

The Serious and Dedicated know that, year after year, the Resolutioner rush inevitably fizzles out by late February, March at the latest, as that post-holiday enthusiasm gives way to the hard truth about reality. It’s hard work. Changes aren’t immediate and to call gratification, such as it is, delayed is an understatement. Those of you with “the bug”, who enjoy lifting and intense cardio for what it is, have to realize that, like coffee, it’s often an acquired taste.

The average Resolutioner doesn’t get that, and without any guidance or mentoring, the odds are stacked heavily against them ever figuring it out. Take a look at all the fresh faces you see on the second week of January, and compare that to how many are still there in August.

It’s easy to snicker and shake your head in judgment. It’s even easier, if you’re like pretty much everyone I’ve ever met in the fitness or strength community, to write these people off as lazy, unmotivated, weak, and other assorted insults continuing on down the spectrum of disdain.

A depressingly large number of people abandon exercise programs, and diets, and plans to quit smoking, and most anything else you can name. Why is this? Are people really just lazy and weak-willed? Are they just stupid and in need of your brilliant workout and diet plan?

I don’t like that answer. One-word responses like “lazy” and “stupid” trivialize the complexities of human nature and, from a pragmatic stance, they aren’t Useful. Capital-U Useful is my way of putting aside all the arguments over science-correctness and the ego-feeding bluster of “being right” and focusing on solutions.

Lazy isn’t a Useful concept. It’s an easy way to judge and rank and otherwise look down your nose, but it’s certainly not helpful as a fix for the problem at hand. As for stupid, I know how tempting it is to throw that word out, but as often as not your rational problem-solving faculties — otherwise known as “intelligence” — have little to do with motivation for or adherence to lifestyle changes.

As I’ve learned more about psychology, and the biological processes that underpin our decision-making and problem-solving powers, I’ve moved away from my old determinist views. The idea that a human being can be summarized by unchanging biological factors the way a clock’s gears and springs sum into the motion of the minute and hour hands appeals to many, especially in the strength and fitness communities where squat numbers and great abs are so wrapped up with ego. And of course anyone who falls short of the physical ideal is simply weak, lazy, and unmotivated. Cold survival-of-the-fittest determinism underpins the entire community, with individual agency — your power to make decisions and act on them — being the one and only cause of success or failure.

How many times a day do you read a cheesy aphorism or repetitive slogan meant to motivate you and push you into the realm of “hardcore”? How often are you reminded that you have to be tough as a sack of nails and unfazed by even the most daunting of challenges? How often do you feel pressured to keep up that facade and put on a show for the group because any sign of weakness reflects badly on your character? You can’t spend 15 minutes around the average fitness-minded group without coming across low-budget posturing.

You’d think willpower were just a matter of sucking it up and changing yourself. Why don’t you just work harder? Why don’t you be more like that guy? What’s your excuse? A fair enough message, but not when coming from the same mouth that believes in a predetermined and unchanging human nature.

Western culture perceives the mind and traits of character and personality as ineffable things — maybe a soul, or supernatural energy, but certainly not crude like squishy organs and tissues. Odds are that, whether you realize it consciously or not, you think of your mind as something separate from your body and not subject to the same rules.

That’s not entirely accurate. Mind is no easy concept to define, but it’s certainly not biological or even physical at all — you can’t touch a thought or quantify what it is about an emotion that you experience — but at the same time, that internal life of thought and experience intimately relates to the activity of nerves in your brain.

Ignoring the thorny issues of cause and effect for the sake of the point, neurological correlates of behavior, neural networks that activate or switch off in rough correspondence with feelings or behaviors, suggest that our psychology is a biological function (perhaps not precisely, because of those thorny causality issues, but for the purposes of our discussion it’s close enough to the mark).

Psychological traits are inherited and biologically determined much like your height and hair color, emerging from your brain the way hair grows out of follicles in your skin.

Traits including willpower.

Anyone who’s ever suffered from depression or anxiety disorders knows how powerful those ailments can be. You just don’t feel right on the inside, and the feelings aren’t powerless illusions — at their worst they creep out into the world and distort everything with an ugly tint. Mood disorders correspond to altered brain chemistry in several networks related to mood, sense of fear and anxiety, and motivational drives. Causality aside, the clear connection between the neurology and the internal experience has lead neuroscientists and psychiatrists to recognize the biological origins of these diseases.

Imagine telling the victim of a house fire to suck up his third-degree burns. Pain’s all in your head, after all, just another set of nerves firing in the right places. The flaw in that reasoning glares at you: there’s an obvious malfunction in the tissue that needs medical treatment and time to heal.

Mental health issues, subject as they are to considerable stigma in our society of iron-willed work ethic, don’t get that same benefit of the doubt. Those afflicted are greeted with disbelief, often as not told to “suck it up” and “deal with it” by those who’ve never shared that particular internal state. The brain’s dysfunctions aren’t so obvious or easily ignored as third-degree burns, and yet there’s hardly any difference in the character of the two scenarios. Tissues and organs, whether caused by trauma or infection or plain old genetic inheritance, don’t behave how they’re supposed to behave and the result is a health problem.

Obvious damage to skin, or liver, or heart demands medical attention. We treat every organ system in our body as deserving of medical treatment except the brain, which, to ask your average fitness expert, is fixed by being more hardcore. That’s the extent of Western insight into problems of the inner self, and that’s an obstacle when dealing with questions of why people aren’t behaving as you’d expect them to behave.

If people aren’t exercising and sticking to diets, it might be that there’s an internal cause worth treating the way you’d treat a burn or a cut to fix the health problem. I know that certainly some of you reading this are from the I’m So Hardcore school of thought and you’re rolling your eyes at me right now. Validating all these lazy people will only encourage them to be lazy.

Maybe. I don’t deny that there’s a cultural dimension to our collective willpower failings, in that we’re wired to follow the path of least resistance and our society brings resistance to a low unprecedented in human history. But I’d rather understand why the willpower failures happen and look for solutions rather than bringing out the L-word and the S-word and transforming this into a moral failing. If there is a genuine connection between biology and willpower failure, then it’s worth investigating.

Roy Baumeister heads the social psychology lab at Florida State University, a lab with his name on it. Since graduating from Princeton in 1978, Baumeister has studied questions of self and identity. Not only what they are, but how our notions of self relate to wider society. In what’s become perhaps his most popular thread of research, Baumeister and his colleagues have demonstrated in a series of studies that self-control and willpower act like a limited resource. When we have to make executive decisions and impose our will — putting down the cookies, skipping that afternoon smoke, or doing math problems — we use up some of that supply. Use up too much and all those temptations overwhelm us; we literally don’t have the mental energy to say no.

To understand this in context, you aren’t an idealized free-thinking decision-maker reasoning out logical decisions based on facts. You’re an emotional thinker on a level you probably don’t realize as your brain’s built to hide the fact from conscious awareness, driven by intuitive emotional biases that color your rational thoughts. The notion of free will, your capacity to make decisions and follow them through, draws on the brain’s rational and emotional circuits in tandem, and repeated experiments have shown that it’s the emotional spearheading the efforts with the more evolutionarily-recent rational-self playing lackey.

Self-control isn’t so much about drawing up plans with your shining intellect, rather than suppressing the urges and emotionally-colored thoughts spit up by your reptile brain. Willpower is saying no to the stream of intuitive, knee-jerk impulses coming out of your mind, clamping down on them and hopefully giving yourself space for the slower conscious processes to make smarter, or at least better-informed, decisions. Free will is more like free won’t, as the brain-nerds say.

Baumeister’s work implicates the brain’s store of glucose as willpower’s fuel source. Once depleted through intense concentration, heavy drinking, or forcing yourself to eat yet another meal of chicken and broccoli, self-control tanks along with its fuel supply. You’re no longer able to resist the emotional urges, and any cookies within striking distance are doomed.

Baumeister compares willpower to a flexed muscle. You can only hold it so long before you run out of energy, and once you’ve worn it out, that muscle won’t be good for much else until it recharges. He calls this phenomenon of exhausted self-control ego depletion.

It doesn’t take much imagination to think of the ways ego depletion might affect, and be affected by, exercise, being one of the top contributors to physical and mental fatigue. Even without research to prove it, you know what goes on during hard exercise. We tend to sit in a zone of intense concentration and focus, using up willpower reserves to push through pain and fatigue. Working muscles compete for circulating blood glucose, limiting the brain’s access and hampering any possibilities of recharging.

Kathleen Martin Ginis of McMaster University in Toronto has examined the depletion of self in the context of exercise, and her findings bolster the view that exercise is both cause and effect. A recent study with Stephen Bray first exposed the participants to a task meant to deplete self-control before 10 minutes of cycling. The ego-depleted subjects produced less work than fresh counterparts in the control group, as you might expect. But it didn’t stop there. Not only did these subjects look ahead and plan to do less work in an upcoming workout, the degree of reduction in planned effort also predicted their adherence to a program over the following eight weeks.

Depleted ego influences the effort you put into workouts and your planning for future workouts, setting off a domino effect of self-sabotage.

Another study from Bray and Martin Ginis indicates that even thinking really hard depletes self-control to a degree that impacts maximum voluntary strength. That’s worth remembering in light of “central fatigue” problems that apparently plague us all now — you’ve only got so much mental effort to go around, so prioritize it where it matters (which won’t always be exercise if you have more important things happening in your life). Hard training and a busy life may not always cooperate (see also: 21727299, 17995906)

A 2010 study by Martin Ginis and Elisa Murru tested a “possible selves” intervention on exercise behavior and self-regulatory efficacy, a way of saying that you believe in your own performance as a means of reaching a goal. Participants were divided into two “possible self” groups, one a “hoped-for” group in which they imagined themselves in the future as healthy exercisers, the other a “feared” group imagining their future as unhealthy and inactive.

It may not sound like much, but evidently it worked. Participants in either of the possible self groups reported greater exercise adherence at both four and eight weeks after the intervention, adherence boosted in part by improved self-efficacy.

Belief in your own competence matters, and for reasons extending beyond sticking to a workout plan. A 2011 study from the University of Gent in Padova, Italy, suggested that a disbelief in free will — that is, the belief that you’re in control and able to act — leads to measurable changes in brain activity, and those changes affect social behavior and performance in a given task.

Participants were asked to read two different passages, one of which argued against the notion of individual choice and free will, while the other affirmed the power of the individual to act. The passages were expected to briefly affirm or discourage a belief in free will, and indeed scans of the subject’s brain showed that those in the disbelief group had less activity in the regions governing voluntary movement.

Baumeister has also done his share of research dealing with belief in free will and self-control. A paper from 2009 suggests that disbelief in free will leads to selfish, impulsive — and thus socially undesirable — behavior. In contrast, believing in freedom to choose and act appears to make people more thoughtful and reflective, less aggressive and more willing to be helpful.

Another article co-authored with Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota suggests that, in dealing with addictive behaviors, belief in free will is the socially-useful stance:

“Self-control is an important form of what people understand as free will, and the capacity for self-control is real but limited – thus neither complete nor completely lacking. The traditional notion of willpower may be useful here, especially if one understands willpower as a kind of psychological energy that fluctuates as people use it up and then re-charge it. Free will is a partial, sometime thing.”

The mere belief that you aren’t in control causes changes in neural activity and in the resulting behavioral outcomes. Free will may or may not exist as we’d want it to be, but believing in it sure does matter. Feeling out of control and believing that you’re helpless means that, in a real sense, you are.

Let’s relate that back to the typical exercise and diet recommendations trickling down to our Resolutioners. Even coming in with the best of intentions, how long will a person subsist on pain-chasing “feel the burn and suck it up” training and diets built on deprivation? With immediate and obvious results, maybe longer than you’d think, but how many get that instant feedback and stay with it long enough to form a habit?

When the behaviors are both demanding, depleting self-control resources, and devoid of self-validation — like results, or at least being entertaining enough to hold their interest — then of course you’re going to have a high washout rate. That’s not a willpower failing, that’s a disconnect between gym and trainer, on the one hand, and prospective exerciser.

This applies even to those of you with “smart” and well-informed training programs and diet plans. You can have all the information and productive methods you want. If you can’t parse it in a way that generates appeal and motivates consistency, then it’s useless. You can complain about women who think they’ll get bulky and guys curling in the squat rack and decry all the stupid people that just won’t listen to this awesome advice — and you’re not reaching a single one of them.

It would be unfair to make this completely one-sided, though, and I’m not putting blame on anyone (even though I think the fitness community leaves much to be desired, as we’re supposed to be the professionals). The problem, such as it is, has causes distributed all over society and it makes no sense to think “big”. Rather, let’s think of how we can fix it on an individual basis.

Baumeister and Martin Ginis both note that willpower can be trained with practice. The analogy with a flexed muscle doesn’t stop at tiredness. Like a muscle, continually flexing it makes it stronger. Regularly challenging your willpower, by resisting the cookies or making yourself sit just a little longer, improves self-control.

Of personal interest to me have been mindfulness-based programs and cognitive therapies. Mindfulness training is interchangeable with meditation. You sit and breathe and keep your thoughts on the breath. It may seem boring at first, but with practice you’ll notice improvements in concentration and focus, improvements that seem to correlate with growth of the respective brain regions. You aren’t just watching your breathing, it turns out. You’re developing the parts of the brain that handle attentional focus and self-awareness, two qualities intimately related to self-control and which, unsurprisingly, many people are lacking in the fast-paced information-soaked lives we’re expected to live.

Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR), developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, combines elements of Buddhist spirituality and meditation into a more formalized (as formalized as that sort of thing gets, anyway) stress-reduction process. MBSR has its own clinical results showing it effective as a coping strategy for a broad spectrum of problems. Kabat-Zinn has written several books cover his methods in more detail if you’re after a more in-depth treatment.

Cognitive therapy works from the opposite direction, talking back to those impulsive thoughts and using your powers of reason to put them away. Cognitive therapy isn’t a single strategy or intervention, but rather a mental tool-kit that you can draw on according to the situation at hand. Cognitive therapy has a clinically-proven track record, not only as a treatment for mood disorders but in other life-changing scenarios, so you may well find it useful as a tool for diet and exercise adherence. David Burns has written the comprehensive and easily-accessible Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy which is recommended for a detailed overview of cognitive therapy.

The mind goes where you send it and reflects what you put in it. You can let impulses run your life, or you can realize that you do have control and find the tools to turn things around. Mindfulness and cognitive therapy and willpower practice all put you in a specific frame of mind meant to counteract that mindless state, and, at least in the case of mindfulness, this actually leads to measurable changes in brain structure (see also: 21071182, 19015095, 21334442).

This leaves us almost full circle, though not quite. Willpower and self-control must be part of the solution, and at the same time, these are not magical qualities separate from biological influence. The brain generates the self-control feeling, and a poorly-wired brain with a weaker impulse-control function — whether due to inherited genes or environmental signals — may be more susceptible to addictive or impulsive behaviors. Behaviors which include sitting in a rut on the couch eating junk food.

Just as any two people can stand at different heights and have different hair color, self-control and the unconscious impulses it has to fight can be very different between them.

I’d suggest that the slogans, the aphorisms, the motivational quotes and go-get-em attitude treats the whole problem backwards. Successful athletes and fitness models who act out those one-liners didn’t get that way by beating themselves into submission. They learned to do what they do by practice, training, and conditioning. And I don’t mean in the sense of a Nike commercial. You didn’t grow up in their life, so you can’t expect to adopt their inner drives.

Overcoming adversity, if it can be learned at all as a life-skill, definitely won’t be learned through self-righteous admonition and brow-beating. To change, people have to believe that change can happen at all and that it’s a process of on-going refinement. Setting a bar impossibly high and using the tact of a Parris Island drill sergeant, Biggest Loser style, probably doesn’t get it done.

You’d get mad over curls in the squat rack or women spending three hours a day on the treadmill to lose fat. Don’t treat the mind with Bro-science.

What you can do, however, is firstly realize that you have a measure of control, and secondly that you can fix it by practicing and cultivating that control through psychological techniques. You can learn to coach your mind, and believing that you can is the first step on the way. That’s Useful.

My pragmatic and cynical side knows that you can’t reach everyone this way. Some people, well, you’re just not going to reach them at all, and maybe the L-word and the S-word does apply sometimes. I just don’t think we should give up so easily when, at least in our own lives, we feel we aren’t living up to the Tough As Nails ideal that encompasses sports and athletic training. You can succeed without going there, and I really wonder how many enthusiastic beginners are put off by that attitude and the elitism that automatically labels them as stupid and lazy.

For further reading, Baumeister has a new book out, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, co-authored with New York Times science writer John Tierney. I mentioned Willpower as a book of interest in my year-end book wrap-up, as, while Baumeister’s research is accessible, I also believe in getting good science writing from the source whenever possible, so keep an eye out if you find this a topic of interest.

Original Article

I read a lot. Have I mentioned that? This year I managed to put back more than a few books, and now that we’re winding up 2011 I want to give a nod to those that really stuck out to me (a list which, in the interest of brevity, only covers books published in 2011) as an informal sequel to my recent post about learning new things.

As I say on my Goodreads profile, I only tend to read books that I have a good idea I’m going to like in the first place, and those I approach from an optimistically bright outlook such that I’m probably going to find something interesting, thought-provoking, and just entertaining enough to rate well. The presence of a book on this list does not serve as an endorsement of every statement or argument made within said book. It only means that I found something of value in reading it.

There’s virtually nothing fitness-related here, as I don’t really care for most of those books, although at least some of the nonfiction will be (indirectly) of interest to any exercise buff. I’m also including fiction along with the nonfiction because, well, I just want to.

Books of 2011 that I Read and Enjoyed

The Information: A Theory, A History, A Flood by James Gleick. Gleick has to be one of the best science writers, and after his biographies of Richard Feynman, Isaac Newton, and his book on chaos theory, he didn’t disappoint. I happened to come across this one shortly after reading Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach, and let me tell you that was a well-timed segue. Gleick starts out with a history of messaging and communication which quickly stumbles into Claude Shannon’s information theory, Alan Turing’s whole thing with computation, and where we are now with the problems of complexity and nonlinearity (themes which seem to keep popping up everywhere for me, which I take to be a sign of the gods I don’t otherwise believe in. I also read Cryptonomicon around this same time frame, and I don’t know if I had some unconscious selections going on or what, but I felt mildly awed at the conjunction).

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker. Having just recently finished this title, I’m still not quite done digesting it. The best word I can use to describe this book is “ambitious”, and as I write this I’m confident in saying Pinker set out achieving what he wanted to achieve: dispelling the common belief that we live in a more violent world than ever. He trashes the myth of the “noble savage”, validating Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all” and the notion that life before the advent of modern civilization was indeed short, nasty, and brutish. He points to forces of pacification and civilization which have had the net effect of not just reducing violence, but — at least in modern Western nations — lowering it to historically unprecedented levels. We’re living in an aberration of peace, as history goes, and Pinker does not shirk on the statistical or historical data to make his point.

I found this to be above all else a thought-provoker and context-shaker. With paleofantasies of lost golden ages in the past being all the rage these days, I’m glad to see someone temper the nostalgia with a sobering appreciation of Enlightenment values and the modern world. Unless you’re a raw psychopath you’ll come out of this with more appreciation than ever for the timing of your birth and the trappings of modern liberal civilization.

The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer. A nice fun summary of all the psychological biases that define “human stupidity”. Shermer starts out with the premise of “belief-dependent realism”, that we humans don’t reason our way to truth but instead start with ideas we like and then work backwards, using our intellects to construct a nice-sounding story to rationalize what we already think. The idea of the lying brain has been another spooky recurrence in my recent readings, in which our decision-making isn’t nearly so rational as we expect it to be.

Amusingly enough, even intelligence is no insurance against irrationality, as Shermer cites research showing that the more intelligent aren’t better at discriminating truth from brain-generated fiction, but they are good at using their intelligence to spin out rock-solid justifications for their irrationalities. If you’re one of those people who goes through life exasperated at how “stupid” human beings are, Shermer will go a long way towards curing your ails. Not only is there a good explanation for all manner of dumb behaviors, but you can’t help picking up a little humility on realizing that, ego aside, you make all those same mistakes in some way or another. A fascinating read in any case, and, if you’re not familiar with the psychology of self-deception, it’s a good overview and accessible starting point.

The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good by David J. Linden. Linden gives us a comprehensive look at the pleasure-reward axis (a topic I’ve discussed in the past in my articles on motivation and neurological aspects of fatigue) as a driver of behavior in mammals, starting with Olds and Milner’s brain-electrode experiments and showing how the dopamine and opioid signals of the reward centers drive us to do all kinds of kooky and self-destructive things. Things like overeating or exercising ourselves into the ground, or getting hooked on cocaine or the craps table. All of these behaviors activate the same “feel-good” circuits in your brain.

I enjoyed this as another piece in the lying-brain puzzle, told this time from the perspective of the unconscious, emotional brain. The so-called pleasure-reward axis is of particular interest to me in its relationship to not only motivated behavior, but how it affects our concepts of “willpower” and (especially) the relationship to voluntary movement. If you’re not familiar with any of that, this is a great place to start.

The Ego Trick: In Search of the Self by Julian Baggini. The Ego Trick tackles some thorny questions of selfhood and identity (what really does happen to Captain Kirk when he steps into the transporter?), straying into current views on philosophy of mind. Being that much of the book is philosophical meanderings — albeit very lay-accessible — some of you may be put off. Nevertheless, following on from The Information and my earlier reading of Godel, Escher, Bach, I found it a solid continuation of those themes and a well-stated view of what identity “is”.

Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton. This book, which covers exactly what the title suggests, probably won’t be popular — because, you know, Karl Marx — but I still found it an interesting look at the political beliefs and philosophies of one of history’s most controversial characters. Even if you’re only interested for historical completeness, Eagleton makes a reasonable case that Marx wasn’t quite the advocate of views often ascribed to him. How accurate Eagleton’s assessment is I can’t say for sure, not having read a whole ton of Marx’s writings, but the picture he paints is certainly a far cry from the caricaturish pejorative thrown around in internet debates. As per my criteria, I appreciate anything that brings nuance to the table and makes me think in the process.

The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser. A must-read for anyone heavily reliant on social networks and search engines for news and information. In a mockery of Orwellian totalitarianism, competitive market forces meant to customize your user experience are also shaping your reality more than you might realize, determining what you do (or don’t) hear about through clever editing of the information you’re presented. Big Brother watches you and controls what you think…because that generates ad revenue.

You can watch Pariser’s TED talk on filter bubbles to get a taste of his argument.

The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human by V.S. Ramachandran. The brain, how it generates sensations of experience and how that’s all tuned in to motor control and language. Ramachandran covers the sweep of modern neuroscience, tackling issues of movement, language, intelligence, and empathy. Worth a read just for the survey of knowledge.

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris. Sam Harris’s work of philosophy by way of neuroscience, an attempt to solve David Hume’s “is-ought problem” by arguing that science can indeed prescribe moral values (at least in principle) by defining a standard of “well-being”. I didn’t find myself entirely on board with his conclusions, for a variety of reasons that probably aren’t important right now, but I still found a lot to think about here.

REAMDE by Neal Stephenson. It’s Neal Stephenson with another 1000 page adventure thriller. I can’t say no to that. The meandering geek-chic Stephenson novel may not be up your alley but personally I can’t get enough of them. And this time he actually wrote an ending.

Embassytown by China Mieville. In the field of currently-active authors of non-mainstream fiction, China Mieville sits up in the fabled land of Read Anything With His Name On It. I find myself in a strange place with fiction, in that I don’t care at all for trendy vampire books or 13-book fantasy series that rehash Tolkien, so there’s not always a lot to go on in the speculative fiction genre. If it were conceptually possible for me to rank my favorite authors by an ordered list, China Mieville be in the top five (probably). I’m just finishing up Kraken as I write this and I’m positively dazzled by his skill with prose and the not-quite-right worlds he manages to paint with it.

Embassytown is his first foray into “science fiction”, complete with spaceships and aliens, but even so he manages to put a clever spin on the pulp. In fact the plot centers on matters of language and communication, as a remote colony of humans interact with a bizarre race of aliens that literally cannot lie. Hijinks, of course, ensue.

The Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan. As far as authors I really enjoy, Egan may well be the most underrated. It may be that he’s a recluse, or that he’s not shy about teaching physics classes (no, really) during the course of his novels. I understand that could put off a lot of readers who just want some vampires or rayguns or other trappings of genre fiction. I find that easy to overlook because I don’t think I’ve encountered another author of speculative fiction who can blow me away with ideas in quite the same way. Egan is one of those horizon-expanders, if you could imagine Philip K. Dick blowing you away with physics instead of drugs and hallucinations (and I could slot a dig in about better prose and characters, but PKD will get no hate from me).

The Clockwork Rocket, the first in a new trilogy, happens in a universe where the speed of light isn’t a constant, which is interesting enough, except that Egan takes it a step further and fleshes out what that conceit really means with a precision that might floor Einstein. Egan’s worked out the consequences to a staggering degree, and it shows in the setting. The book was worth the read just to see that in action.

Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth. Written as a travelogue adventure to China, Nigeria, and the South American black markets of Paraguay and Brazil. Neuwirth plays on words with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (a quote from Smith’s work introduces each chapter), showing how the illegal, underground and unregulated “System D” stands second only to the US as the engine of economic productivity.

Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven and Hell With Black Sabbath by Tony Iommi. Yes, that Tony Iommi. Sabbath’s always been one of my favorite acts, and I enjoyed reading about the band and all it’s troubles from Iommi’s perspective. Plenty of times I found myself laughing out loud or sympathizing with their drunken antics.

Books of 2011 I’m Not Quite Done With

Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert. A surprisingly good book. I have to admit I’ve never rated movie critics all that highly, Ebert included, but he’s a lucid and insightful man and not at all what I expected. I’m glad I followed up on the suggestion. All the fun you’d expect from the biography of a man who moves in both newspaper and Hollywood circles, and even a few gems about the art and practice of writing, which I always enjoy.

Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How physics and scientific thinking illuminate the universe and the modern world by Lisa Randall. I’ve only just started this one and consequently I’m sitting right past the intro and before the first page of Chapter One. The introduction looks promising, and Lisa Randall is one of the smartest people in the world with regard to theoretical physics and all the mathematical headaches that entails, so I expect good things.

Books of 2011 That I Wanted to Read but Won’t Get to Until Next Year

I got really backlogged and there was a long waiting list at the library to boot. I’ll get to these as soon as they turn up.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, along with his partner the late Amos Tversky, did a lot of the original research into cognitive biases back in the 1970s and thus have influenced the psychology posts I’ve made over the last year or two. Yes, the lying brain yet again. Like Shermer’s Believing Brain, I expect this will have a lot to say about distortions and self-estimation errors that we’re all prone to making.

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney. Baumeister is yet another researcher of note within the sphere of my personal universe, who specializes in, among other things, willpower. It was his team that discovered willpower to be a finite resource, that concentrating and focusing on one task makes it much harder to flex your will in order to do something else. It’s an interesting subject to me, in that the “willpower centers” also tie back into the motivational and reward circuits, making the ego-depletion phenomenon very close to the whole “central fatigue” subject. I’ve read most of Baumeister’s published research, but I’m always interested in another perspective.

Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber. How debt began in history and where it is now. Should be fun.

11/22/63 by Stephen King. It’s Stephen King, and going by the reviews its a Good Stephen King, so I’m keen to pick it up.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is an acquired taste, like Pynchon or Franzen, but I’m easily mesmerized by the dense postmodern novel so I’m wanting to have a look at this one.

Original Article

I rank Iain M. Banks as one of my favorite authors. Banks’ Culture series was one of my first exposures to so-called “literary science fiction”, which uses the backdrop of science and technology but also focuses on interesting characters and quality prose not always associated with “sci-fi”.

The Culture books deal with the eponymous anarchistic super-civilization, run by intelligent machines (called Minds) and inhabited by mostly care-free citizens. With boredom as an eternal problem in utopia, the Culture eschews the Prime Directive in favor of a more hands-on approach to civilization-building. The books handle all the questions of morality and dramatic hijinks that ensue from said policies.

The first book I read in the series, Excession, turns the tables on the Culture and introduces them to an interloper of tremendous power, which prompts one of the Minds to elaborate on the Outside Context Problem:

“The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.”
- Iain M. Banks, Excession

You’re idling along, happily nested within your cozy little world, and then out of the blue, BAM! Not just a problem you never expected; a problem you never could have expected. You’re blindsided by a complication that would be impossible to foresee within your current worldview.

That’s an Outside Context Problem.

Framing the Picture

Context matters. That may well be my new catch-phrase. But it’s very true — everything depends on the frame of reference. Nothing exists in isolation.

The happy natives in Banks’ novel framed their world as a paradise of hunting and gathering, and they couldn’t know otherwise until the Victorian steam-ships made a visit.

Framing means everything. What if you frame all the advice you read on the internet as competing ideas that cannot coexist? You’re going to think that there’s a whole lot of programs, and whole lot of diets and nutritional advice, and none of it makes a lick of sense.

Reframe the problem. Look for the common features between all the advice you read. What sticks out to you? What are the things that everybody agrees on? What looks like a disagreement but might be a matter of phrasing?

Does the landscape look different when you look at conflicts from the vantage point of universal principles?

When we frame a problem, we step into a worldview and play by its rules. If you pick bad rules, the game won’t make much sense. In the above case, you move from looking at details to looking at general principles. You redefine the rules and the whole picture changes. You haven’t changed anything about the situation. All the same facts are still right there.

What changed was the point of view. Shifting perspective and reframing the problem makes conflicts go away.

Context matters.

Step Out of the Problem

People can always find reasons to obsess over details. A competitive field means distinguishing yourself from the crowd with branding and packaging up ideas in novel ways. Western thinking loves reductionism. Mostly I think it’s a case of institutionalized tunnel vision. Zooming in to the details, reductionist style, and specializing in a razor-thin slice of knowledge is, for better or worse, how things work today.

But we lose something of the general sweep of knowledge in doing that. I recently read an article about the loss of humanities programs to cost-cutting measures at modern universities, and one passage stuck out to me:

“Science unleavened by the human heart and the human spirit is sterile, cold, and self-absorbed. It’s also unimaginative: some of my best ideas as a scientist have come from thinking and reading about things that have, superficially, nothing to do with science.”

There’s an understated truth in those words. Science is, yes, about focusing in and hammering out ever-finer details of the chosen subject. And of course you’re going to be interested in learning about the issues you care about. But for our purposes, speaking as coaches and trainers and writers, it’s also about scope, about pulling ideas and concepts from other fields, about seeing the Big Picture. It’s about making connections across disciplines, thinking laterally and outside the tiny rabbit-hole of a narrow field.

We need to be willing to see past the conceptual boundaries of our field. Otherwise, we risk being blindsided by a perspective we never saw coming.

Think general. Think universal. Break out of the frame and redefine the problem. Step back, zoom out, and take the eagle-eye view of the landscape.

Most of the bickering and arguments that happen about strength training and fat loss and muscle-building and whatever else aren’t arguments about facts. They’re arguments over perspective — or that emerge from narrow perspectives.

We get caught up in our boxed-in worldviews and find it challenging — if not impossible — to step outside them, to see things from a higher vantage point.

This study says this. No, it says this. This workout builds muscle. Well so does this one, and it’s completely different. All the arguments and paralyzing decisions over what workout to do next, they all vanish when you look at them from the right perspective.

It’s not that details don’t matter; it’s that they’re subservient to higher, more general principles. If you never realize that, you’ll spend your life worried about what some study says or whether or not you should do three sets of five or five sets of five.

Figure out What Matters and use that as your frame.

Original Article

A question I’ve been asked a lot, and never really sat down to answer, is how I go about learning new things.

Before going there, I want to tackle the whole “smart” matter. I think that, firstly, “smart” — or “knowing lots of stuff” — has more to do with the amount of time you’re willing to spend grappling with difficult concepts than anything else. If you aren’t almost compulsively interested in knowing about some subject matter, then you aren’t going to know much about it. You’ll spend lots of time on things that do interest you, and therefore know a lot more about them. Pretty easy there.

Intelligence certainly plays a part but I really don’t like that kind of deterministic explanation. Although there’s a measurable component to specific kinds of abstract intelligence, I also think that many people underestimate what they could learn if they just applied themselves. For whatever reasons learning stuff for the sake of learning stuff isn’t a huge priority for people, but that’s all getting into discussions for another time.

The other issue relates to meta-cognition (how you think about how you think) and that’s off in another zone of its own. Let if suffice to say that there needs to be a degree of introspection and self-awareness going into any learning process, because knowledge isn’t about rote memorization and regurgitation of facts. You have to be able to think, and most importantly of all, to step away from the details of the problem to more generalized and universal principles. These are not traits always valued in higher education, thus explaining the “dumb PhD” phenomenon.

The framework of knowledge matters as much as the contents.

All I can tell you is that a. I get a warm glowy feeling of satisfaction when I read topics of science and philosophy and b. that drives me to read a whole lot of things in those subject areas which c. leads to a self-sustaining feedback loop.

The rest of this article outlines the rough steps I go through in learning about things that interest me and give me the warm glowy feeling of satisfaction. I’ll warn you up front, I treat my autodidactery seriously, so if you’ve got a Science^TM allergy or a real smug contempt for Knowing Stuff, you’ll want to skip this one.

Get your feet wet: Wikipedia

Wikipedia^[1], for all its faults, may well be the most-referenced source in the history of citing sources of data. It pops up every single time people disagree on a subject, ranking only behind Hitler as the most-referenced item in an internet argument.

^1. I use the HTTPS “secure” Wiki because, well, I just like encrypting things.

I can get lost on Wikipedia for hours at a time. It’s like walking into a Borges story, with links leading to more links and then more links after that. After 20 minutes I don’t even remember what I was looking for in the first place.

What about those faults, then? The details come down to nerd-drama far beyond the scope of this post, or anything I can bring myself to care about in any detail, but put simply, since anybody can edit the thing, vandalism is common both in the form of trolling and people trying to Orwell in a sanitized version of events.

To counter this, Wikipedia uses a decent-sized army of volunteer civil-servants to curate the articles, doing minor fact-checking and correcting edits and such. That sounds fine and for the most part it works Well Enough. But, as happens any time a group of people try to decide on rules and regulations, you wind up with lots of bureaucratese and legalism, and inevitably the Group Culture becomes the arbiter of truth.

That makes me cagey. Groupthink is lame and conformity runs against the whole spirit of science-minded learning. To understand a subject, you need to expose yourself to the raw ideas — which, more often than not, will involve lots of bickering, criticisms, and criticisms of criticisms — not what a group of nerds have decided is and is not relevant.

These shouldn’t be taken as game-ending criticisms, mind you, and for one good reason. Wikipedia should only ever be the start of the trip, not the end. For that purpose, it’s a goldmine. I still remember the ancient days of the pre-Google internet, when you could stumble on all manner of underground dungeons overflowing with secret wisdoms. Problem was, you had to work long and hard to find that stuff, and you’d just as likely forget it because you didn’t write down the 400-character string of a URL.

Wikipedia dumps a whole lot of concise, potentially inaccurate but generally referenced, knowledge on just about any subject you can imagine, and it’s all right there for your perusal. Use the Wiki to get a rough sketch of your subject, and then as a lead to the real meat.

Written for Laymen: Good Nonfiction

I’m what you could call a bibliophile. I read all the time. I rarely have fewer than three books checked out of the library, and there’s a good chance I’ll have bought some of those titles before I’ve read them completely. I’ve got more unread books on my shelves than I could read in a year (seriously: according to Goodreads I’ve put back roughly 90 books in this year 2011).

There are worse problems to have, I guess.

When it comes to learning things, sitting down with a good science writer won’t lead you wrong. Nonfiction books, presuming you stick to good — which is to say, authoritative and non-kooky — science writing, are a goldmine of both understanding and further research.

Good science writing speaks to you on a level that makes the complex sound simple. This isn’t always possible with the Really Hard material, but when you have Richard Feynman explaining quantum electrodynamics, you can feel like you begin to understand it. Authors well-versed in their subject matter can almost always give you a survey of the field that you’d never be able to assemble on your own by mining Pubmed or Google.

Not only that, but you get a nice concise collection of notes and references at the end of the book. As with the Wiki, the fun begins with the references. I always wind up scratching down, at minimum, two or three new authors to check out or papers to go investigate out of every book I read. Sometimes, it’s many more.

The Garden of Forking Paths: Peer-Reviewed Articles & Reputable Journals

The constant branching-out happens with the Wiki and with science writing. You assemble the roughest sketch of What Happens and then set out to fill in more and more details. You’ll notice a cross-reference that looks interesting, and that will have more links still, and those will link to others. The web branches out and grows exponentially. At that point, the ever-growing tree ‘o links can become positively overwhelming.

Still there will be times when you want to know more, whether to follow up on the subject or check out a point that may have been vague in the text, and the only way to do that is to head straight to the primary sources. As great as Wiki articles and science writing are, they’re still considered “second hand” sources a step or two removed from the real guts of the subject.

Eventually, as you read more and information accretes around the kernel of ideas in your head, a pattern will start to shape up. The pieces start to fit together and fall into place, and a Big Idea takes shape.

Be warned: You can very quickly reach a point of diminishing returns. There will always be more to read, but in many subjects this tapers off to ever-smaller increments of knowledge which have little relevance to your original interest. I say this not just to save you time, but also so you don’t get the wrong idea.

If you think Wikipedia is bad, trawling the research databases will ruin you. Whereas Wikipedia can take you from psychological trauma to 19th century locomotives in 4.23 steps, digging into bodies of research literature takes you right down into some level of Hell that Dante never imagined where sinners browse through infinite cross-references.

I’ve lost whole days in Pubmed. Google Scholar and the arXiv aren’t much better.

If you aren’t a skilled Lich-Lord comfortable in the dungeons of the science-clergy, you don’t have to go that far. Sometimes you just want to see what a paper said in its own words, or find a researcher who’s interested in the topic at hand, or maybe grab a few links that can lead you to follow-up reading.

Just be aware that Usefulness tends to decrease inversely with Detail. Once you’ve assembled a good-enough picture of the Big Idea, further research tends to add marginally less return on investment.

What to Avoid

I almost wrote “avoid blogs”, but that’s not what I want to say. It would be hypocritical on one level, as I take pains to be (mostly) on the level with what I write, and I can say the same about at least some of my colleagues. Really it’s not hard to find well-informed bloggers in most any field, so saying “avoid blogs” isn’t fair at all.

But you do need to be aware of potential pitfalls. While mainstream media and science journalism surely have their share of fear-mongering, conclusion-jumping, and outright errors, there is at least a structure in place for fact-checking and error-correction.

Blogs have no quality control. Literally anyone can write anything about anything if they’re willing to sign up for a Blogger or Wordpress account, and the democratization of blogging platforms kicks the QC back to you. If you’re fine with that, cool. If you can discriminate the good info from the bad, cool. Most people can’t, and that’s no condemnation. Stick me in a field in which I know little or nothing and I’ll fall for the shiny bait too. In taking your first steps into new knowledge, you don’t know enough to know what you don’t know (you know?)

And that’s before we even get into the Filter Bubble effect. Sadly, modern “informed” Westerners are as likely to get caught up in their own confirmation biases as they are to seek out anything novel or threatening to the existing world-view.

That danger doesn’t limit itself to blogs, however. We’ve all seen the conspiracy nutters who construct a whole thesis dissertation of news articles, research papers, and blogs carefully crafted to support their lunacy. What you never see, if you buy into that sort of thing — 9/11 truthers, Big Pharma Gonna Get You, that crowd — is what’s left out of the analysis.

(Also, as you can see in Eli Pariser’s TED talk there, the technology companies we’re increasingly reliant on for news and information go out of their way to encourage our insulated worldviews. All the more reason to be a discriminating consumer of facts.)

Filter Bubble Bad.

Don’t discount the effects of A Little Knowledge, either. You might think that a few Google searches, a few Wiki articles, and years of forum-experience give you an in-depth knowledge of a subject matter, leading you to proclaim yourself Forum Critic #1 — and causing you to dispute, discredit, or dismiss information that really is valid because your perspective lies to you. Humans are very bad at self-estimation, and consequently very good at believing we’re smarter than we are.

Teal Deer

The more I’ve learned over the years — not just about exercise science but in math and psychology and philosophy and everything else — the more I realize that Knowing Stuff is a process rather than a goal.

Get cocky, forget that you cannot ever know anything but a small slice of reality (not even touching on the epistemological issues of what qualifies as “known”), and you will be humbled.

All the ideas I laid out above really come down to the same thing: read a lot and read widely. Subjects only become difficult and impenetrable when you try to take in everything at once, and when you have no background in which to frame the new ideas. Read with an open mind and a critical eye and you solve both problems.

Sketch out the basic ideas first, whether that’s reading the Wiki entry or picking up a good book or two, and then start filling in the blanks with the Forking Paths method.

I can’t promise you’ll be an expert in anything and everything, but you’ll know a lot more than you did.

Original Article

The last few months, during my yearly layoff from hard training (I’d rather spend my free time at the pub during New Zealand’s nice summer weather, and “yearly layoff” sounds nicer than “lazy slug”), I’ve been gravitating towards less demanding, more fun kinds of lifting.

Regular readers will know of my love for autoregulated daily training, but I’ve discovered that I really only care for this during the winter months. For whatever reason, I find myself uninterested during the summer. That reason is beer and sunshine.

Instead, I prefer a more unstructured and unfocused approach, which you might call “screwing around”.

The last few weeks, I’ve been messaging back and forth with JC Deen about good old fashioned Bro-training. You know the stuff: body-part splits. Having an arms day. Pumping the hell out of everything to get that hurt-so-good burn.

Why? Why not? For one thing, it’s fun. Training like this is nowhere near the mental exercise of getting under a heavy squat or pulling a big deadlift. I like paying more attention to the little detail muscles that I’d normally ignore.

Most of all, it keeps me in the gym when I’m just plain sick of the heavy work. You may call me lazy or unfocused if you wish. I call it an ad-hoc yearly plan.

Ahem.

Anyway, since we’ve been bantering back and forth half-seriously, I figured this would make a good topic: how to Bro up your training, enjoy yourself a little (in contrast to the always-on PR OR DIE! mindset), and still get something out of it.

For me, any physique-based training program has to follow three rules of thumb, so I’ve been building my Brogram around them.

Step 1: Tension Rules

Protein synthesis, myonuclei activity, and muscle remodeling and hypertrophy all respond to tension above all else.

Tension is what you get when you stretch a rubber band. Muscle tissue works much the same way, albeit with a reverse gear. Unlike a piece of rubber, the muscle can actively contract to produce tension on its own. This happens whenever you move, and is particularly evident when you’re contracting the muscle against resistance (otherwise known as “lifting weights”). The greater the resistance, the greater the tension.

All else equal, the heavier the weights you’re working with, the greater the stimulus to grow.

Some of you will want to play the “but strength isn’t size and the science isn’t settled!” refrain, so I’ll remind you that bodybuilders lift weights. They do this for a reason, and it’s not because endurance training builds muscle mass. You want to grow, you need to make the muscles in question hoist some iron. That’s self-evident just from paying attention, no research required.

But it’s easy to read too much into that statement, too, since the else isn’t always equal. As I’ve said so many times, lifting heavy weights is not the same thing as powerlifting. Putting 200 pounds on your squat doesn’t matter much if it happened because you moved to a low-bar style and put on a triple-ply suit and knee wraps.

Strength matters, but so does the circumstance.

Step 2: Get Some Work Done

Tension is important but it’s also what we’d call a permissive variable. High tension is necessary, but not by itself sufficient, to maximize hypertrophy processes; it has to be there, but it’s an enabler rather than a direct cause.

The research suggests that, tension aside, hypertrophy is work-induced. There are several definitions of work but, for our purposes, it means “energy used up while making the muscle contract”. Making the muscle contract, and thus do work, stimulates it to grow.

The easiest way to measure work of this type is with volume or tonnage. Multiply the weight by the number of total reps done (sets * reps per set) and you’ll get a number that’s good enough. As you improve over time, that value should grow along with your muscles.

Now, obviously we can’t measure work by itself. If it were that simple you could just sit on the exercise bike for eight hours at a time and get huge quads, or whatever equivalent for any other muscle.

This is where tension matters. Work has to be done with high-enough tension. That’s why going for jogs doesn’t give you huge legs; the tension isn’t high enough. Do work, but do work with heavy-enough weight.

Step 3: Think Muscle

For the sake of completeness, I want to mention a final piece of the puzzle: hypoxic or occlusion training, which I’ve written about several times in the past. To quickly summarize, when you keep a muscle under constant tension and work it to failure, you wind up causing some neural and metabolic voodoo that acts very much like a heavier work set. In effect, you shortcut the process and mimic the effects of training heavy without actually training heavy.

Along with tension and work, we need to keep this in mind. My current belief is that the occlusion effect accounts for most bodybuilding methods and techniques, the constant-tension, slow-tempo, push to failure-and-beyond kind of training. This includes drop sets, rest-pause training, partial rep “burns”, giant sets, and anything else I’m leaving out.

Whether you’re using heavy HIT-style sets or pumping work, make the muscle do the work.

Doctor of Brolosophy

In my recent Brogramming I’ve been combining two approaches, based on those three rules:

1. Letting volume happen with heavy weights. I’ve got no real strategy here. I’ve been drawing on two viewpoints that I’m familiar with: Pavel’s Russian Bear workout from Power to the People! and Borge’s Myo-Reps. Without any strict plan, my mindset coming into these sessions is to hit something reasonably heavy for 3 or 5 reps, then get some work done on top of it.

The Bear approach is to drop back say 10% (I just go by Plate Math) and then knock out a lot of sets with short-ish rests, say a minute or thereabouts (I just use the breath-timer). So I’d hit a top set of say five, then cut back and do more fives every 60 seconds or so (triples also work really well if you’re having a lazy day).

Myo-Reps works a little different, taking a rest-pause approach where you knock out a lot of mini-sets. Borge’s written a ton about this so I’ll just point you at his articles (hint: use Google Translate).

Which works better? That question doesn’t have any meaning to me. I just do what I feel like as long as I can measure progress.

2. Constant tension movements with light weights. The quintessential Bro method. I especially dig this for the upper body detail-work, but it works well for quads and calves too (hamstrings I’m not quite sure about, but that’s a personal thing — they cramp — rather than a blanket criticism).

I don’t get too wacky here. I pick a weight I’ll get at least 10 reps with, work the movement through most of the ROM but not to a point where the muscle relaxes, and just go until it hurts. Sometimes I’ll do short-ROM “burns” for another 4-5 mini-reps after fatigue sets in, or even a static hold for however long I can take it. I don’t ever bother with the drop-set or giant-set stuff, though you could if you wanted. Rest-pausing a la DC Training could go well here too.

Besides the obvious pumpitude, I’ve developed a real love of this stuff because it does wonders for my poor joints. Since I’m not training as often, my aches and pains are coming back with a vengeance, so it’s nice to stick with lighter weights.

Scheduling

Do whatever you like. Seriously. It wasn’t that long ago that I’d have been up in arms over a body-part split but, being realistic, I don’t think it matters as long as you’re being reasonable about it. You want to go do push/pull/legs? Have at it.

What I’ve been doing is one or two leg days, and then (ideally) 2-3 days to hit the upper body work. Since I’m not hammering out anything heavy, the recovery isn’t any big deal. I’m also not getting up to any major volume, generally only 2-3 work sets per muscle, so there’s also that.

Upper Body Day
Overhead Press up to a reasonable triple or five (with back-offs or rest-pause)
Chinups, the same. Some days I’ll just do pulldowns instead and treat them like one of the accessory exercises.

The rest of this workout is accessory work for the detail muscles. I go for chest on an incline, traps with dumbbell or machine shrugs, delts with the cable or dumbbell, and then whatever for the gunz. Typically I’ll do dumbbell curls on the preacher bench and then pulldowns with the rope attachment, but sometimes I’ll do curls in the squat rack or close-grip bench or something like that.

You’ll notice I’m not benching and that’s for a good reason. That lift chews up my shoulders and I’m tired of it. I’d rather stick with overhead work for my strength move and then leave chest work for dumbbells. If you want to bench, that’s your call.

Leg Day
Front Squats up to a reasonable triple or five with back-offs. Triples are better because let’s face it, reps on front squats suck.
Leg Press and Calves (on the leg press sled) for the constant-tension move.

I could stand to throw in a deadlift of some kind for triples, or maybe a stiff-leg or RDL for fives, but so far I haven’t made myself care enough.

Also one option I’ve got in mind is to do sled work or tempo work on the cycle as extra leg work. This would get me some cardio in, and let’s face it I need it, but it also gives some extra leg stimulus. Legs like conditioning-type work so long as it’s reasonably intense. This covers your excuse for not training legs, as you run a lot.

This is pretty Bro-ish without getting up there into red-alert frat-boy territory, and it’s got some Science^TM behind it to upset all the people that get allergic around science, so there’s something to please everyone.

Original Article

Since I get Pubmed updates every Sunday, I usually find one or two papers that catch my eye. I figure it’s worth having a look at them, what they mean, and why they’re interesting to me.

First up, here’s a new one from Stu Phillips’s team up at McMaster University.

Associations of exercise-induced hormone profiles and gains in strength and hypertrophy in a large cohort after weight training

The purpose of this study was to investigate associations between acute exercise-induced hormone responses and adaptations to high intensity resistance training in a large cohort (n = 56) of young men. Acute post-exercise serum growth hormone (GH), free testosterone (fT), insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) and cortisol responses were determined following an acute intense leg resistance exercise routine at the midpoint of a 12-week resistance exercise training study. Acute hormonal responses were correlated with gains in lean body mass (LBM), muscle fibre cross-sectional area (CSA) and leg press strength. There were no significant correlations between the exercise-induced elevations (area under the curve-AUC) of GH, fT and IGF-1 and gains in LBM or leg press strength. Significant correlations were found for cortisol, usually assumed to be a hormone indicative of catabolic drive, AUC with change in LBM (r = 0.29, P

Any paper with Stu’s name on it gets my attention. It’s hard to get much better than the work coming out from his department, so long as you define “better” as applicable to everyday Gym Stuff. Lately he’s been on a kick to debunk the whole obsession with cortisol, GH, and testosterone — particularly the way those hormones respond to acute stimulus. We’ve seen it in all the textbooks; after an hour of training, test drops off and cortisol spikes, which quashes your gains until you go eat some carbs to spike insulin.

Hormones do wonderful things but the typical Gym Knowledge assigns them a causal power that they just don’t have. Hormones are embedded in a much deeper web of causes and effects that makes it impossible to point to them as causes of anything (and if want to understand wahy, I’ve got three hours of Robert Sapolsky lectures to convince you). Defining cortisol as a cause of muscle wasting or a 30-minute testosterone spike as a cause of muscle gains is horribly wrong on a very deep level.

In any event, this paper is one of several coming out of Stu’s lab that challenges that assumption. The result is kinda funny in itself, where cortisol and GH weakly correlate with CSA (cross-sectional area, the effective size of muscle fibers) and LBM (lean body mass), and there only cortisol has any connection with size gains.

Catabolic indeed.

Regular readers will know that “central fatigue” and “overtraining” are two hot-spots that have really captured my attention over the past however many years, and the next two papers touch on that subject from different angles. Much like the Hormonal Causation argument, I think that our notions of recovery and overtraining are way behind the curve. We end up clinging to bodybuilding folk-wisdoms, and that ultimately affects what we can do for ourselves in the gym (not to mention time and money spent on bizarre diets and useless supplements meant to “fix” us).

Neurotransmitter modulation and supraspinal fatigue

An important aspect of central fatigue is supraspinal fatigue, or fatigue originating from an insufficient output from the motor cortex. One possible underlying mechanism is that this reaction is evoked by changes in brain neurotransmitters such as dopamine (DA) and noradrenaline (NA). In the present study, we looked into the relation between supraspinal fatigue and changes in brain neurotransmitter concentrations before and after prolonged exercise. Ten well-trained male cyclists participated in this study. Subjects exercised in 18°C and performed 60 min at 55% Wmax followed by a time trial which required the subject to complete a work equal to 30 min at 75% Wmax as quickly as possible. Pharmacological interventions were placebo, methylphenidate (DA reuptake inhibitor) and reboxetine (NA reuptake inhibitor). Voluntary activation and corticospinal excitability changes were tested in the knee extensors using TMS and motor nerve electrical stimulation before and after the cycling exercise. Reaction time and attention were measured using the psychomotor vigilance test (PVT). NA administration decreased performance significantly (9%). This was accompanied by a significant reduction in voluntary activation. No differences were observed for DA reuptake inhibition. No changes in corticospinal excitability were observed. The PVT revealed that reaction time was negatively influenced by reboxetine. Higher NA concentrations in the brain enhance central fatigue. The reduction in both the voluntary activation and reaction time shows that this decrease in performance was centrally mediated.

This one comes from Romain Meeusen’s team at Vrije Universiteit in Belgium. Meeusen is another name that catches my eye for all of his work on the neurochemistry behind central fatigue, and this paper is another piece in that work.

Folk-theories of fatigue suggest that muscles just get tired, but we’re discovering more and more that it isn’t so simple. In exhausting exercise, whether from endurance or high intensity, the brain’s output starts to decline and that decline eventually affects performance. It’s almost like your brain itself gets tired.

Which is pretty much what happens. Much of Meeusen’s previous research has focused on the three monoamine neurotransmitters, dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine, which dominate the motor-control pathways in our brains. In this study, Meeusen’s team tested the effects of two different drugs, one which elevates dopamine (DA) and another which elevates norepinephrine (NA), on cycling performance. The result is interesting because it shows that excessive NA impairs performance, whereas NA is typically the “arousal” chemical, with its networks responsible for “turning everything on”. For reference, caffeine and ephedrine work by activating NA nerves.

I haven’t seen this full paper so I really can’t comment further, but previous work from Meeusen has suggested a serotonin hypothesis for fatigue. During hard exercise both serotonin and dopamine levels increase, but at the point of exhaustion dopamine crashes, leaving you with a skewed dopamine to serotonin ratio. Our brain registers that as “tired” and the consequence is that 1. neural output drops off and 2. we experience a sensation of “tired”.

The NA connection is not hard to fit in to that, however. Imagine a day when you drank too much coffee. You were wired up to be sure, but there’s also a such thing as overstimulation. Too much arousal can be as bad as too little. Without having read the whole paper I don’t know if that’s what they’re getting at, but it’s plausible.

Why does this matter? Mainly because strength athletes can undergo something similar. Max-effort intensity and strongman-type exercises that fatigue you both do this magic on the brain, and it isn’t always a matter of “tired muscles” that leave you floored. As I’ve said so often in the past, you can make yourself exhausted just by focusing too hard for too long; the brain centers that control emotional output also control motor output. Volume aside, TRAIN TO FAILURE OR GO HOME!! thinking can lead to burn-out just as easily as — if not easier than — “high volume” training.

Use your RPEs, folks.

The second paper ties right into that suggestion. These pathways between brain and body work in two directions. Again the folk-wisdoms suggest that we “damage” our bodies with exercise and these signals filter up to the brain, which then freaks out, but it’s not so simple.

Central nervous system inflammation induces muscle atrophy via activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis

Skeletal muscle catabolism is a co-morbidity of many chronic diseases and is the result of systemic inflammation. Although direct inflammatory cytokine action on muscle promotes atrophy, nonmuscle sites of action for inflammatory mediators are less well described. We demonstrate that central nervous system (CNS)-delimited interleukin 1β (IL-1β) signaling alone can evoke a catabolic program in muscle, rapidly inducing atrophy. This effect is dependent on hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activation, as CNS IL-1β-induced atrophy is abrogated by adrenalectomy. Furthermore, we identified a glucocorticoid-responsive gene expression pattern conserved in models of acute and chronic inflammatory muscle atrophy. In contrast with studies suggesting that the direct action of inflammatory cytokines on muscle is sufficient to induce catabolism, adrenalectomy also blocks the atrophy program in response to systemic inflammation, demonstrating that glucocorticoids are requisite for this process. Additionally, circulating levels of glucocorticoids equivalent to those produced under inflammatory conditions are sufficient to cause profound muscle wasting. Together, these data suggest that a significant component of inflammation-induced muscle catabolism occurs indirectly via a relay in the CNS.

Inflammation. I’ve written of it before as a potential culprit in sickness feelings and the general post-training ickiness that blights us after a brutal workout. Our friend interleukin-1beta up there in the abstract has come up before, implicated as a potential cause of overtraining.

What you’re seeing in this abstract is roughly as follows: something, like an infection or a lot of unaccustomed exercise, triggers the innate immune system in the damaged tissues. The immune system sets off the inflammation process, releasing lots of inflammatory cytokines (including our friend interleukin-1beta). Inflammatory cytokines reach the brain and set off the HPA axis, which is the “stress manager” system of the body, releasing lots of glucocorticoids as part of the coping strategy.

Normally this is a good thing. Inflammation is, after all, a process of coping and recovering from whatever it was that triggered the response. Likewise for the HPA stress-response.

The keen eyes among you will be wondering why this is a problem if, just scant few paragraphs above, I warned against obsessing over hormones. The main reason is the difference between acute and chronic. A workout is just a workout, so to speak. An acute 30-60 minute elevation of hormones is a normal, expected response to a stressor. It happens, things go back to normal. No big deal.

The problem starts when either 1. the stress happens repeatedly, such that the HPA never gets a chance to turn off or 2. when your HPA, for whatever reasons, doesn’t settle down after you get wound up. Chronic elevation of the HPA and cortisol levels will become a problem.

Set off that cascade by doing lots and lots of training, or training while sick, or any number of activities that would qualify as “overdoing it” and you really are going to cause problems over the long-term.

Cortisol in itself is not the real issue. Bodybuilding folk-wisdom worries about the hormone, but as you can see there’s an identifiable cause in the chain: namely the inflammatory cytokines, and the brain’s response to them. The hormone just does its job; what concerns us is the “upstream” causes — the brain, and the immune-system signals that are altering it.

In training, central matters far more than peripheral; training to deliberately get yourself sore, training to exhaustion at every opportunity, that’s all activating this inflammation-HPA pathway. But even that’s not a huge deal unless you’re one of the truly obsessive personalities that won’t rest for anything.

It’s amazing to me how many people will struggle to control cortisol by fiddling with their workouts and taking crazy supplement regimens that don’t do anything, and completely neglect everything else in their lives. It’s the everything else that really matters, and this paper handily demonstrates why: chronic matters far more than acute. If you live your life in a constant state of Switched On, expect to be sick more often, to have worse subjective “recovery”, and to respond very poorly to anything that pushes you out of the norm.

West DW, & Phillips SM (2011). Associations of exercise-induced hormone profiles and gains in strength and hypertrophy in a large cohort after weight training. European journal of applied physiology PMID: 22105707

Roelands B, Klass M, Levenez M, Fontenelle V, Duchateau J, & Meeusen R (2011). Neurotransmitter modulation and supraspinal fatigue. British journal of sports medicine, 45 (15) PMID: 22077003

Braun TP, Zhu X, Szumowski M, Scott GD, Grossberg AJ, Levasseur PR, Graham K, Khan S, Damaraju S, Colmers WF, Baracos VE, & Marks DL (2011). Central nervous system inflammation induces muscle atrophy via activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. The Journal of experimental medicine, 208 (12), 2449-63 PMID: 22084407

Original Article

Back in early 2007, when I first decided to start a website, I had a mission in mind: to parody, satirize, and criticize the Fitness Industry. For those of you that aren’t aware, even the “Amped Training” brand name was meant as a riff on the hype-filled ad-copy used to sell supplements and diets and workout programs. Long-time readers will undoubtedly notice that the site has taken a different direction since those days when the posts were mostly flames and trollposts, a change coincident with some fundamental shifts in my own belief systems and outlook on the world.

Still, despite the inflammatory postings, Amped was always about science and skepticism, about clear thinking, and penetrating the layers of obfuscation surrounding the niches of strength & conditioning, bodybuilding, nutrition, and general get-in-shape exercise. Even the harshly-worded criticisms were, at heart, about clarity, paring away the unnecessary and deconstructing the ridiculous.

As then, I still believe that scientific thinking and what Hemingway so accurately called a shock-proof bullshit detector are critical, whether you’re a coach, a trainer, or just looking to make the most of your own health and fitness. But with a new direction, without the motivating force of satirical hard-edged criticism, the Amped brand feels past its prime. So I’ve decided to change it.

My original passion, what got me into lifting weights, was bodybuilding, which then morphed into a love of strength via powerlifting — muscle and brawn, the typical motivations for young insecure males. I’ve never been much of a competitor, always hanging around the edges of the sport, more the mechanic and technician than the driver. As such my writings have always fallen into orbit around those topics, with occasional excursions into the worlds of nutrition and exercise for fitness and fat loss.

I think that constraining myself to just strength and just muscle has left a lot of potential on the table. For myriad reasons exercise science and nutrition are mutts as sciences go, with very few first principles of their own when compared to a ‘harder’ science like physics. Insights from other areas of biology and even superficially unrelated fields like psychology can be incredibly powerful when applied to an exercise context, as can more philosophical musings about how to look at science and the human world.

I’ve been writing more of those kinds of posts over the last year, and they’ve proven quite popular compared to more of the same, the usual hackneyed and overdone posts about how to obsess over squat form that you can’t change, or lists of exercises to work whatever muscle, or how to fixate on details in your diet or your training that convey exactly zero benefit. Boring.

So, in addition to my writings on exercise, I’m also writing more about those Interesting facets of neuroscience and cognitive psychology and epigenetics and computer science and whatever else strikes my fancy from Pubmed or ArXiv or Google Scholar. And while I’m at it, I’m going to talk more about daily life — what I’m doing in the gym and in the kitchen, books I’m reading, pretty much whatever I feel like chatting about. I make no promises on that front, as I’ve turned into a bit of an e-recluse the last few years as my posting droughts testify, but it’s on the table.

This is no longer a site about “lifting weights” or “getting big” or “making fun of idiots”. Think of it as my all-purpose Batman utility belt of a site, still encompassing my science-minded views on strength and muscle, but adding a new perspective.

On the technical front, this changeover hasn’t involved switching servers and the DNS records for the myosynthesis.com domain have been resolved for quite some time now, so this should be a relatively straightforward conversion. Likewise you RSS subscribers should have been switched over as well, but if not, here’s the feed address. That should have switched over on the back end but you may have subscribed view the http://url/feed method, so make the change if you haven’t already.

All old URLs should be redirecting, but I’m under no delusions that there will be a completely flawless transfer so don’t be surprised if older links redirect to 404 Hell. So far the redirection has been working smoothly, but if you’re missing an article or a post that you think should be there, let me know.

Also, you’ll have noticed that I did a mild redesign of the layout. I got tired of all the clutter, so I took a minimalist approach to a new template and streamlined everything. Here again, I expect to be some flaws with the display and shaking down bugs for all the new templates, so I don’t mind you letting me know about them — with one exception: if you’re still insistent on using IE, you’re out of luck. I’m trying to code with W3C specs for HTML5 and CSS3 in mind, and to be more honest, I just can’t be bothered trying to make my code reverse-compatible with IE6/7/8. Most things should work, but I make no promises and if something does turn up wacky, I offer no solutions.

If you aren’t using a modern browser, preferably Firefox or a Webkit-based browser by now, well, that’s what the RSS feed is for.

Original Article

We throw around the words smart and intelligent and genius casually, and I’m not sure that really applies to someone who writes articles about pumping biceps or how to eat Paleo. I don’t think there’s any such thing as genius in strength & conditioning.

When I think genius, I’m thinking names like Isaac Newton, Bernhard Riemann, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Claude Shannon, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, Richard Feynman, Douglas Hofstadter.

(If none of these names ring a bell, then you may not understand why my bar for genius is set so high.)

Reading anything written by those names (and plenty of others I’ve left out for brevity) leaves me feeling roughly the intellectual size of an ant scaled against Mt. Everest. At least one valid definition of genius must be that its sheer capability leaves you profoundly aware of your own limitations.

I can’t say I’ve had that sensation from anything or anyone in the world of strength & conditioning. There are no intellects that have left me gasping in awe of their prowess. This may be because of the material we deal with, rather than the personalities.

To be blunt, neither strength & conditioning or nutrition are that challenging to master. Even popping the hood and digging around in the guts, you just don’t find much that’s complicated in the abstract way of math and philosophy.

Exercise science and nutrition are the book report sub-fields of biological science. They’re almost entirely observational—you look at what’s happening and write up a lab report—which means there’s not a whole lot of abstract conceptualization necessary.

A good memory is useful for that kind of thing. Since exercise science is mostly hard facts, the more you can pack in and recall on demand, the “smarter” you are. But that isn’t genius. It’s not even a matter of high intelligence. Storage and recollection of facts is a function of a good memory, nothing more.

Even if we are dealing with super-intellects who have a lock on cellular biology, does that mean anything? Knowing biochemistry in and out right down to the finest resolution is not any indication that you know how a body responds to training.

In discussing living organisms, we have to be careful to avoid reductionist thinking. Bodies are complex systems not easily analyzed by breaking them down into their smallest pieces.

Julian Baggini uses a clever phrasing: “no more than, but not just”. Baggini says that we use the words just and only when we want to trivialize a thing. Creationists say that biologists consider humans to be just animals. Believers in a soul criticize neuroscientists who say that our minds are only a process of our physical brains. We can treat things as what they are without degrading them.

Our bodies are no more than chemical reactions. Take a human body apart and you’ll find nothing but organic molecules made largely from carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. There’s no magic, no animating life-force.

Yet here we are. Simply by the fact that I’m writing this and you’re reading it, it’s clear we aren’t just a soup of organic molecules.

Living organisms are an emergent phenomenon, a higher level of meaning that has importance above and beyond the individual parts, that can’t be expressed by simply knowing how mTOR interacts with p70s6k and FOXO. The pattern of the system-as-a-whole is what matters.

No more than, but not just.

Relative to exercise science, this higher level is what we mean when we talk “in the trenches” knowledge. Prep coaches that dial bodybuilders into contest condition. Powerlifting coaches who know how to get you strong. Strength & conditioning coaches who develop MMA cage-fighters or offensive linemen.

These are examples of get-your-hands-dirty know-how and they don’t require a lick of knowledge about protein synthesis or gene expression. These are mechanics who understand how the car runs, and would be entirely stumped by the mechanical engineering that went into designing it.

Is this genius? It’s certainly a specialized form of knowledge, a trained eye that knows what to look for and how to fix it. But I don’t think it’s genius. There are no deep hard-to-grasp insights, nothing that demands deep abstract thought, no incomprehensible secrets. Most of what’s presented as complicated, inaccessible or difficult in strength or nutrition falls under the umbrella of needless obfuscation, not too different from sham New Age pseudoscience.

At the bottom, we’re just molecules and complex beyond understanding. At the top, the level where everything of interest happens, we’re surprisingly simple.

Where does that leave genius? And more importantly for the purpose of this article, where does it leave the arrogant and the know-it-all?

Once upon a time I’d have phrased this as a conflict between science and practical knowledge. I no longer think that’s the case. There’s a more subtle conflict at work which has to do with an approach to knowledge and learning, rather than the sources you draw upon.

Whether knowledge comes from science or practice, the defining quality is the willingness to learn and the ability to challenge your own sense of certainty. Some people have this—it may be called “open mindedness”, although I think that’s deceptive—and some don’t.

Besides my aforementioned sense of inadequacy next to my list of geniuses, there’s another quality common to all those names: humility. Not so much in the sense of genteel politeness, but in intellectual terms.

A willingness to be wrong. A curiosity that transcends ego or the need to be right. A respect for knowledge, an awareness that our understanding will always be inadequate. The greatest geniuses, the “smartest people who ever lived” if you still think of people that way, were rarely ever smug in their knowledge or arrogant in their certainty.

What gives a strength coach or a nutritionist the right to that self-assuredness? Are your beliefs infallible because you write diet books and hang out on internet forums? Is your favorite way of working out or eating beyond reproach because you are just that smart?

I don’t mean to insult the whole community or say that we’re all idiots, as I’m sometimes prone to do. There are well-educated and even some intelligent people working in “the fitness industry”. This is about perspective.

I realize that having useful insights into biology and perhaps a wider survey knowledge of science and logical thinking can be invaluable. But we aren’t dealing with quantum physics or meta-mathematics. We lift weights. We eat food. We run and jump and pick things up.

Realizing that you will never know it all, that your brain is very likely incapable of truly understanding the hard problems^[1], is both humbling and a relief. There is no point to ego and arrogance when you define knowledge in those terms.

Knowledge is a process, a kind of striving, rather than a state of attainment. You don’t know nearly what you think, and being certain is concrete proof that you are no longer learning.

^[1]Our logical-thinking and reasoning abilities are surprisingly limited, being dependent as they are on the emotional and body-control regions of our brain. Compared to really good logical reasoning devices (aka computers), we’re just plain horrible at even conceptualizing things like complexity or emergence.

Original Article