3 Reasons Mountain Running Won't Destroy My Legs

You may have noticed I've been doing a lot of fell running recently. Big ones. Tough ones. A few of the posts have mentioned sore legs, feet, knees and other body parts.

In Scotland last month, I briefly met an older guy who'd been a top performer in the Ben Nevis race in previous years. He was struggling up the stairs at the bed and breakfast where we stayed.

"You'll have knees like me one day," he said, paternally.

Then, in a recent forum post I came across, a runner was explaining how bad his knees had become from years of mountain running.

So I have been thinking about this a lot. I do not want 'bad' knees or legs. Part of being Paleo is being in tune with our ancestral past and therefore living in a way which is optimal for our bodies. Optimally-used bodies don't start giving up at the age of 60.

I think there are three reasons this won't happen to me.

1. Recovery.
2. Diet.
3. Style.

Recovery

Many runners, especially the faster ones, seem to run a lot between races. "I managed to get a couple in" is a phrase often heard from someone seen at a race the previous weekend. As though it's an obligation.

I think we were designed for more episodic, traumatic runs. Perhaps a long hunt or sudden move across the mountains to a new camp. We would then have rested when we got the chance, rather than feeling obliged to do yet more activity.

There is a line, different for each person, where the volume of running exceeds the ability to repair. The sweet spot is where your body has just finished a full repair when you next traumatise it. I doubt whether the training regime of most runners in the top 25% is on the right side of that line.

By mainly running only races, I will remain on the right side. I am certainly listening to my body, and right now it tells me I need at least another couple of weeks without any significant leg trauma. I will duly oblige.

I am happy not to be one of the faster runners - I think that is an important place to get to. The law of dimishing returns can make striving for ever more improvement a depressing long-term strategy for the mid-pack amateur athlete.

These days, my priorities have shifted towards enjoying the mountains, avoiding being timed out, and following the correct route. I am choosing longer and longer distances, which means a lower heart rate and therefore more of a Paleo-friendly workout.

Six years ago I was finishing much farther up the field, but I was training hard, running hard and only really getting pleasure retrospectively from the experience.

Diet

Another factor may be diet. High volume cardio training is often fuelled by a high carb diet, which can mean a lot of grains. There is evidence that grains aren't good news for the joints.

Could my Paleo diet further protect me?

The phrase I used earlier might actually say:

There is a line, different for each person, eating a given diet, where the volume of running exceeds the ability to repair.

Style

Mountain running, which is almost exclusively the type of running I do, takes place on a more random terrain. This means runners are less likely to get the kind of specific oversuse injuries road runners can expect.

Nevertheless, many fell running shoes have big heels just like normal running shoes. A heel strike on any terrain will create more force through the legs than a forefoot strike and therefore promote more injury.

If I successfully apply the pose running technique (I am still working on this) in the context of mountain running, it should also avert the threat of leg deterioration. ... Read more

Stretching and Mobility

I used to stretch a lot. Being the obsessive type, I developed a routine that hit all the muscles and took around 15 minutes to complete. I would do this before and after each run, and even on non-running days or after weights sessions.

Stretching Injuries

Something stuck me time and again: most of the injuries I developed appeared to originate from stretching. Not all of them, of course: as any former running shoe user, I can tell stories of runner's knee, Achilles tendonitis and shin splints. But most of them were indeed from stetching.

Over-zealousness was probably a factor. I was not content to just stretch. I had to become really flexible. Overstretching is not good.

I have now stopped stretching more or less entirely.

Why I Stopped Stretching

Other than my tendency to injure myself doing it, I stopped because I read a variety of articles that question whether it is effective. This one suggests it leads to reduced strength. This one suggests it has no impact on reducing running injury.

That said, some studies suggest it may reduce stiffness when done after exercise, so admittedly the evidence is mixed; but for me, mixed evidence did not justify the time I was spending on it - and since stopping has apparently done me no harm, why bother?

Cavemen did not 'Stretch'

Hunters of yesteryear certainly didn't stretch in a way that resembles what runners typically do, so provided we exercise it a way that broadly aligns with what they did, it should not be necessary.

Mark Sisson recommends two Primal 'stretches' - the hang and the squat (at 0:50 in the sprint video). I often do these for a minute when I feel like it, usually after a workout.

Mobility

Instead of stretching routines, I've started doing mobility work. This is more akin to dynamic/ballistic stretching, which the above study on strength suggests might not have the same adverse effect on performance. Mobility work has the added benefit of ensuring joints are able to go through a full range of movement.

The routine in this video is one I often use.



This is a good website that focuses on mobility.

More Information

Chris from Conditioning Research has done a lot of reading around this subject, so to find out more, check out his posts on stretching and mobility. ... Read more

From Foot to Fell Shoe: A Photo of My Grip Range

This will be a good reference for future posts, as I try to make appropriate selections for different activities.

... Read more

2 Weeks of Hotel Workouts and Bad Living

Last Friday I returned from a 13-day business trip to Asia. It was a whirlwind of busy schedules, flights and unhealthy living (a post about the horrific diet I had is on PNLL.)

I drank a lot, ate a lot and tried to do a lot of working out to compensate. But as time went by, fears about burning the candle at both ends and a lack of motivation shortened my workouts. Here is a summary.




Singapore

On day one, I did a round robin of weights in the gym - dumbbell chest, chin-ups, dumbell bent-over rows, upright rows. No rest in between, about 20 minutes. I had binged on the flight the night before so felt the need to work hard.

The gym in Singapore

The following day, an hour-long run around the botanical gardens. I didn't feel like it, but had eaten a stack of food the night before (again!) and lots of beer. This is breaking my own rules - fighting food and beer with cardio is not the answer.

On day 3 I did a Tabata burpees session to clear my head for a presentation I had to give. My legs were already shot from the run, not to mention that I had eaten bad food and drank beer the night before. But I did feel better after the burpees, if a little wobbly.

This had been three days of exercise in a row. Not like me.

I managed to have a rest on day 4; then on day 5, before the flight to China, another punishing round robin of weights in the gym, this time including Romanian deadlift with a slippery bar and no straps to help. Once again this was to combat a night of buffet food and beers.

China

In spite of consuming an impossible amount of buffet food on arrival, on the following day there was no time for working out because we had so much to do. The day after that, though, I got up early and jogged down to the river front where I did some much needed sprints following.... yes, you guessed it, after a night of too much food and beer.

The river front, ideal for sprinting

In case you were wondering, yes, coffee was an essential ingredient in the ill-advised balancing act I was performing.

The following day, before the flight to India, I did a standard bodybuilding workout in the gym, regretting the seated pulley row immediately because I had forgotten it inflames an old whiplash injury on my right trap. Those 3 x 10 workouts with rest between sets seemed easy compared to the stuff I normally do and it was welcome, given my increasingly poor state of health.

The gym in Shanghai, China

The inviting pool in Shanghai, which I didn't go in

India

I rested on the first day, then the next day did another round robin, this one only 10 minutes, as I was not feeling great. I also did, later in the day, a spontaneous BBS-style 90-second leg extension set in a vain effort to reduce the flight-induced swollen feet and ankles, made worse, I suspected, by bad living (more on that in the PNLL post.)

The gym in India. Small.

At this point you can assume that every night is buffet, cakes and beer. I was not feeling much like working out, which was just as well, because the gym was not good.

I had a couple of days without exercise, then a day before flying back to the UK, a perfunctory weights session consisting of a single set of about 30 Romanian deadlift. By now I was just trying to produce some beneficial hormones and keep my insulin under control.

Back in the UK

Once back, it was detox time. I was still not ill, and utterly baffled by that fact. Determined to keep it that way, I have have stuck to short, sharp, varied workouts and, naturally, pure eating (you can see that on the meals page of PNLL)

Thursday REST
Friday REST
Saturday Single round of Mixed Tabata Circuit Intervals (4 mins)
Sunday REST
Monday Swimming sprints - 10 mins total - 6 sprints 25 seconds each
Tuesday REST
Wednesday Weights circuit - 8 minutes - Press Ups, Chin Ups, Deadlift, Crunches, Box Jumps
Thursday REST
Friday (yesterday) Tabata rowing machine

So I didn't get ill, in spite of my wife having a cold and my UK office being full of coughing, sneezing people. I am feeling fit again. I am back in the game. But it was a struggle. ... Read more

There's Running, and there's Running

I've recently read two books which have inspired me to think about endurance exercise and Paleo/Primal in a new light: Joss by Keith Richardson and Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. I have also recently read some posts about the possible dangers of running which reminded me how polarised the coverage of this topic can be.

I doubt I would have read either book if copies had not been pressed insistently into my hand by a friend. I'm Paleo, Primal, a caveman, a hunter. I don't run - I sprint or I walk. So don't try to indoctrinate me back into the cardio-obsessed world I escaped from a few years ago.

Flirting with Endurance

Perhaps my friend had noticed that in spite of my supposed opposition to what Mark Sisson in the Primal Blueprint calls ‘chronic cardio’, I had been flirting with distance running by taking part in mountain races lasting up to 3 hours (e.g. here and here.) In fact not so long ago, I hauled my 10kg weight vest up 250 metres of incline, which was 23 minutes of solid, throat burning effort. Not distance running - but not exactly sprinting either. I reported that one here.

In fact my flirting had been inspired by something else Mark says: that long, low intensity exercise is good - and that occasionally busting out five miles or even a half marathon at full pace can provide outstanding fitness benefits without doing harm. It was a second reading of the PB that reminded me. Prior to that I had simply allowed purism to sabotage the potential for a more varied workout portfolio.

And now that I have read these other books, I am more or less sold.

Two Inspiring Books

Joss and Born to run are very different books – yet they share an underlying theme.

You won’t find Joss on Amazon – yet in the English Lake District Joss Naylor – or ‘Iron Joss’ - is such a legend I expect more people know who he is than who is the current prime minister. He is a man whose achievements are almost impossible to do justice to with the written word.

I could tell you that at the age of 50 he ran up 214 peaks in the Lake district (the 'Wainwrights'), a total of 391 miles 121,000 feet of ascent, in 7 days; but this won't mean much to you. It barely does to me. The numbers are too big. It's too far outside the sphere of my own experience.

I once hiked the peaks around Buttermere valley with my brother. There were about 10 of them, it took us 9 hours and we were utterly destroyed by the end.

To achieve what Iron Joss did, we'd have had to do 30 peaks instead of 10 that day, travel twice as fast, then get up every morning for the next 6 days and do the same. Oh - and for the 3 hours each day when we were not running we'd sleep in a matress in the back of a van.

Some of the things Naylor has done will probably never be repeated by anyone, ever. He has a list of achievements so long it occupies and entire section at the back of the book.

One of the reasons they won’t be repeated is because in some cases one suspects he almost killed himself doing them; doctors who supported him during his challenges soon learned that their pleas for him to stop were pointless.

Joss is a Biography of Joss Naylor and a hymn to the culture and history of the English Lakes district. You come to appreciate that he is a product of the very landscape over which he roams with such ease, and that the seemingly unbreakable spirit occupying his body could simply not have been forged in a different environment.

In Born to Run, the author's own journey as a runner is interwoven with the story of a secretive Mexican tribe of virtuoso runners who beat the best endurance athletes in the world. Books about sport often lack a certain literary flair - but you quickly realise McDougall can actually write. He opens with compelling tasters of the story and themes to come, begining with his hunt for an elusive white man, known only as 'The White Horse', who gave up everything to live and run in the desert alongside this tribe.

Two races dominate the story. First, the Leadville 100, a breathtakingly gruelling challenge in the Colorado mountains that has seen some of the best athletes in the world fail. This was the race in which members of the Tarahumara stunned the ultrarunning world by beating many of their most talented members.

A Tarahumara runner trains with ultramarathon athlete Scott Jurek

Then, later, when The White Horse - or Caballo Blanco - is finally tracked down, a second race comes into focus. Caballo wants to stage a seemingly insane ultrarun around the dangerous and more or less inaccessible Copper Canyon where the Tarahumara live, bringing together stars from the ultramarathon scene and the best runners from the tribe.

There is a strong sense that the Tarahumara's running and the landscape in which they dwell are somehow inextricably bound - and that their ability has nothing to do with interval training and power bars, but rather some fundamental state of mind which to some extent we are all hard wired to be capable of experiencing.

Along the way, we learn some startling facts about human physiology that separate us from every other animal and point to our being designed for endurance running. Further evidence points to persistence hunting being a feature of our recent past.

McDougall also takes breaks from the story to educate us about the way running shoes have evolved - not in response to our real need, but in response to problems created by the shoes themselves and, of course, the desire for profit.

The common theme between the books is the human urge to run - the running psyche, if you like. I got a sense that this drive is something that transcends the clinical analyses of ancestral behaviour and physiology that tends to underpin our discussions around distance running.

The two stories choose as their centrepieces runners whose cultures could not be farther apart, yet whose lives are influenced in a strikingly similar way by an innate desire to be at one with the landscape through the medium of running; and how that very philosophy seems to unlock abilities beyond those exhibited by athletes trained in the sterile labs of modern athletics.

There’s Running and there’s Running

In recent years there have been a number of studies, articles and blog posts about running and it’s effects on health. Of course for years we had been told it was good for you. Then studies started to cast doubt on that assertion.

Art Devany’s blog post, Top Ten Reasons Not to Run Marathons was my first exposure to an emerging doctrine on exercise, which ultimately led me into the Paleo/Primal arena and to the more general principle that exercise patterns that do not mimic our ancestral ones – such as the kind of training marathon runners perform – are likely to be bad for us.

Recently Kurt at PāNu re-opened the topic in the Paleo blogging sphere with his post, Still not Born to Run. Chris at Conditioning Research added some little insight with his post Long Distance Running – Bad for the Heart and drew some interesting conversations from commenters, some of whom raised the point I am going to make here.

There is a fundamental problem with the debate about whether or not running is good for you, or whether we were ‘born to run.’ Simply - there are different ways of running; and the problem with many of the studies fuelling the debate is that they use as their subjects the types of runners whose training program is about as far from our ancestral activity patterns as it’s possible to get – elite distance runners.

Let's say that once per week I jog in Vibram Five Fingers for 3 hours around my local hills at a pace allowing me to easily chat with my running partner at a sub-150 heart rate. Am I having the same effect on my body as an elite marathoner who spends at least 10 hours per week in Nikes on the road with a much more aggressive heart rate profile?

Clearly not.

Yet we both run; we are both ‘runners’; we are both endurance ‘athletes’ in the loosest sense of the word.

So until someone studies some real people running in all the different ways it’s possible to run, I won't pay too much attention to the headlines and will carry on running, sticking to a pattern that feels appropriate given what I’ve read and my own instinct.

Update: by coincidence, Richard at Free the Animal has posted on the same subject, including an excellent letter from one of his readers. Worth checking out: Born to Run?
... Read more

Knee Surgery Part 2: Drugs, Muscle Wastage & Crutch Workout Videos

The Drugs and the Pain

As I mentioned in part 1, I was given morphine when I came round after the surgery. I was still wired via the top of my hand, so they whacked me with "2" (mg I assume) when I reported pain.

"Does it still hurt?"
"Yes"

Boom - another 2.

4 x 2 later, I said "Don't worry about it." I was starting to sound like a junky and it was clear that at this dosage, their willingness to administer the drug was going to run out well before it had a tangible effect. In any case, it was tolerable. It seemed only right I should be in at least some discomfort.

Shortly afterwards, they gave me two codeine and paracetamol tablets (30mg and 500mg respectively, combined). Later, after they had wheeled me to my room, they gave me another tablet, this time diclofenac, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory.

Add to this two cups of strong coffee and the fading anaesthetic and you've quite a cocktail. I spent an hour sending ill-advised Blackberry work emails from my hospital bed while I waited for Mrs M to arrive, then half an hour marvelling at the passing street lights.

The first two nights after the surgery were painful. As I mentioned in Part 1, the small scars left after keyhole surgery do not reflect the extent of the trauma underneath.

To fight this pain, I had been armed with a pack of the codeine/paracetamol 30/500's and a pack of diclofenac. Codeine every 4 hours, Diclofenac every 12.

The problem with codeine, as with all opiates, is that it causes constipation. Evidently I am especially sensitive because three days later I realised I was a stranger to the toilet seat; and the trouble with Diclofenac is that, as with all NSAIDs, it's not very good for your stomach.

I therefore went out of my way to medicate on the basis of need, rather than habit. As a result, I awoke squealing in pain once or twice, usually because I had slept with the leg in a bad position. I found the best approach was to avoid the meds during the day, then take them at night, thus ensuring a good night sleep in return for a little suffering while awake.

Muscle Atrophy and Physiotherapy

Never underestimate how quickly a muscle will waste away if you don't use it. Not going to the gym for 3 weeks will not appreciably reduce your leg muscle mass if you are reasonably active - simply walking up stairs is a strong enough signal to your body that you need those quads.

Yet when you put a leg into a brace [click to enlarge], your quad stops being used at all. Here, three weeks later, is the difference in size between mine. Note - this photo was taken in the mirror, so it looks as if the wasted leg is on the wrong side.


I'd been given exercises by the physiotherapist at the hospital. One was designed to progressively introduce bending to the knee, the other to tense the quads and prevent wastage. This latter was pretty lame, as the photo would suggest.

Had I realised the importance, I would have initiated my own program sooner; but it was not until 2 weeks later, when I saw my regular physio, that I realised how much muscle I had lost and that there was much more I could do to prevent it.

Now, I tense the muscle like a posing bodybuilder for 30-60 seconds a few times a day. In addition, I am doing Romanian (straight-legged) deadlift, which the physio also endorsed (I described the most recent session here.) It allows me to give the lower body a serious workout without affecting the knee.

Crutches

Although I can happily limp around my apartment with the knee brace on, it's not an efficient method of propulsion for longer journeys; and eventually it does start to aggravate the knee.

I took a fine pair of crutches home after the operation, and it has been interesting to experiment with ways to use them for exercise. Here are my top 3 crutch-based workouts.

Crutch Cardio
When using crutches to walk, you can rely completely on your upper body, or only a little. It depends how much you want to protect the affected leg from contact with the ground. Either way, it's actually rather an effective, low level workout because it combines upper and lower body effort. You can aslo move pretty fast once you get used to it.

Note: if, like me, you are crutching for up to an hour per day, it does take a few days to adjust. For the first week I struggled. Doing a few thousand shallow dips per day comes as something of a surprise to the triceps.

Crutch Leg raise
The video says it all - this was a good discovery and I expect to continue to use the crutches when I am working out at home and would like to do leg raises.


Crutch Balancing
As you can see, I need to work on this one... but it's pretty taxing and something to pass the time when you are waiting for trains or buses.


In three weeks the leg brace comes off. I can still only manage 70-80 degrees of flexion. Full fitness should come in two months. No doubt there will be a part 3 to this post.

Knee Surgery Part 1 ... Read more

Knee Surgery Part 1

I injured my knee the week I started this blog in February, mentioning it in my first post.

What I don't mention is exactly what caused it. It was this. Skip to the 4-minute point in the video. This is a fantastic exercise, but after about 15 reps done at full effort, my form starts to slip.

On this occasion, my left foot placement was not correct when I pivoted the dumbbells over my head to move into the squat thrust. My leg was fully flexed but not at a good angle, so when I quickly extended it to thrust, something popped out.

To get it back in, I had to fully extend my leg. Ouch. Once it was back in, it felt okay, so I did a Tabata on the rowing machine. I have no idea whether this did any more damage, but in retrospect it seems like a really stupid thing to do. At home I iced, elevated and compressed, and it seemed okay the next day - just a little tender.

10 days later it popped out again when I was stretching. At this point I was referring to the problem as "my medial collateral ligament popping over my knee cap", which I later found out not to be true.

Over the next few months, it happened a few times. I got quite good at popping it back in. Then I got quite good at avoiding it popping out in the first place. All I had to do was ensure good form and avoid excessive knee flexion. I was even doing pistols.

When I visited the physio, he manipulated my leg in various ways and announced himself to be unsure. When he inadvertently popped it out himself and heard the 'kerchunk' sound it made when it went back in, he immediately referred me for an MRI scan.

For the scan, they strapped me to a stretcher, stuck a pair of headphones on me with the radio channel of choice, cranked me into a huge, cylindrical device that looked like the Hadron Collider, then asked me to keep totally still while it made so much noise I couldn't hear the radio anyway.
This was not the machine I went into, but it looked the same: . Sadly this was not the nurse who looked after me either ;-)

Weeks later, the specialist scratched his chin before the startlingly detailed 3D representation of my knee this ordeal had yielded, then pronounced himself convinced. I had caused a small but significant tear in the shock absorber between by calf bone and the knee.

Bottom line: I could have a small operation now, or a large one in 30 years. The small one would be easy peasy - keyhole surgery, in and out in a day. Knee brace for a couple of weeks. If I were a footballer, I'd be back on the pitch in 6 weeks. So I booked the operation for the beginning of this month.

The surgery was a pretty slick affair. They knocked me out with propofol while asking me superfluous questions I now realise was to distract my attention while they administered the drug. I awoke 45 minutes later.

As I sat drowsily contemplating my strapped up, post-operative leg, the surgeon swung by to tell me the good news and the bad. Good news: he had found the interior of the knee to be healthier than expected - a good blood supply, apparently. He was therefore able to stitch up the tear rather than remove some tissue.

The bad news: this now meant I would need to wear the knee brace for 6 weeks... and if I were a footballer, it would be 3 months before I was back on the pitch. Since I was high on morphine and residual propafol when he delivered this news, I thanked him warmly and told him how pleased I was.

When I was alert enough to be driven home by Mrs M later, it was a struggle to get into the car. The brace holds the leg almost entirely rigid.
At home, I inspected the damage and took some photos. This is the brace on the knee: . Fashion was going to have to take second place for a while.
I would, of course need crutches to get around at any speed: .

Underneath the brace and the bandage, this was the scene. You can see the arrow drawn pre-operatively to ensure the surgeon got the correct knee: . It's difficult not to be amused by this apparently crude approach - but if it had been an amputation they were performing I think I would have welcomed every possible precaution, however basic.

Finally, the wounds underneath, complete with neatly tied sutures: .


I had gone into the operation without any real thought about the practicalities of recovery. This was partly because I had expected it to be relatively brief.

In fact there have been some significant challenges. The two small holes over my knee cap, which after 2 weeks are little more than small scars, belie considerable turmoil beneath.

In part 2:

• Battling to prevent my left quad from wasting away
• Reluctantly taking the meds and treating the swelling
  
• Some good workouts using crutches
• A video of the operation? I have been told that most operations like this are recorded and DVDs are often provided. I've emailed the specialist's secretary to ask for mine, and will of course share it with you if she obliges.

Knee Surgery Part 2: Drugs, Muscle Wastage & Crutch Workout Videos ... Read more

Exercise and Weight Loss - Challenging the Unconventional Wisdom

Is diet the most important thing for weight loss because exercise simply makes us more hungry?

So we are told by the most recent thinking on the subject. This post on Pay Now Live Later explores why it may not be as simple as that and why it might be perfectly possible to lose weight with exercise if we set our mind to it...

Why Exercise WILL Make You Thin - if You Really Want it to ... Read more

ROM - Gimmick or Ahead of it's Time?

Remember this?

I was today reminded of its existence by this post on Real World Strength Training.

The ROM looks and feels like a marketing scam; but having in recent years embraced the HIT concept and in recent months read Body by Science and started putting into practice the 8 - 12 minutes per week concept, suddenly I am looking at the claims of ROM's makers in a different light.

Has anyone ever seen or used one of these things? I am now wondering whether my perception of the product, based on the sensationalist marketing and low quality website, as a gimmick or scam, is unfair. Could it actually a product with some merit?

I haven't had time to look at ROM website in detail, but thought I'd throw this out there for comments... ... Read more

Who Needs a Gym When you have a Wife?

With tongue slightly in cheek, I have added some new exercises to my toolbox. Wife Bent Over Rows, Wife Chest Press and Wife Squats and Wife Deadlift. The videos are below.

Yesterday morning I was gripped with the desire to do some exercise, no doubt something to do with the sack load of calories I had consumed the night before.

If you read my last post you will know I have committed to a one-a-week strength program with only one other session that's intense but essentially not about strength. In other words, it still allows my muscles to continue their recovery from the strength day. So since I was not allowed to do a session, I lay there thinking about exercise instead.

I have recently convinced Mrs M to do her own once or twice-weekly exercise session - simple circuits that involve basic bodyweight exercises like press ups, squats, jumping jacks and crunches. She also uses a chair to do rudimentary deadlifts. This Paleo diet has her losing weight hand over fist and I have explained that unless she also adopts more Paleo activity patterns she'll end up with ancestral fat content but modern muscle content - not an outcome she relishes.

As I mentally did handstand push ups against the wall and tried to think of an easier equivalent for Mrs M to do, it suddenly hit me - a novel solution to the hotel-room workout problem: use your partner.

I'm not saying I am the first person to come up with this idea - but I bet most of the time this kind of thing is done in exercise classes in schools or gyms rather. I wonder how many people have used it to solve the problem of an absence of weight lifting equipment and a wife who'd rather spend an extra 15 minutes in bed.

So here are some videos. Clearly Mrs M is not getting a particularly intense workout here, but in most cases she is having to maintain rigidity (isometric muscle contraction) and use a variety of muscles.







... Read more

Transitioning to a Paleo Diet - Guest Post on 'Straight to the Bar'

Details and a link to the article are posted over on Pay Now Liver Later... ... Read more

Video - Paleo/Primal in a Nutshell Part 2: Exercise

I have just posted Paleo/Primal in a Nutshell Part 2: Exercise on Pay Now Live Later, but am posting here too, given the obvious relevance of the topic. As I mention in that post, this is a less clear cut part of the Paleo ethos and more open to debate, which I welcome in the comments here or on the other blog - although as I am on holiday over the weekend there may be a delay before they go live.

For the sake of keeping it punchy, there were a number of areas I avoided, such as steroids – even though the photos I used invited a mention. Perhaps something for future videos or posts.

See Also:
Paleo/Primal in a Nutshell Part 1: Food ... Read more

The Supplement Conspiracy

I am sceptical about the need for supplementation, specifically as it relates to training but equally as it relates to general health. Mark Sissons and Michael Eades do make some good arguments in favour of it, but I remain unconvinced that for me it's the right way to go. I prefer to focus on getting a high quality diet and let my body extract from that what it needs. Otherwise you get sucked into a kind of vortex of 'what ifs' that lead to an ever-increasing number of tablets sitting on front of you on the breakfast table each morning.

Rusty Moore has just published an interesting (and free!) paper in which he interviews a a couple of people who work, or have worked in the industry. Worth a read. You can download it by clicking on the picture to go to Rusty's post. ... Read more

The Stolen Porsche Analogy

This has to be the most annoying conversation I find myself having with people.

This week I am trying to lose some body fat. Before Christmas I was 10%, yet now I am 12%. Since most of my training is with body weight exercises, I have certainly noticed the difference.

Here's the scenario: we're out, having a meal.

"Aren't you drinking?" someone might ask.

"No."

"Why not?"

"I am trying to lose some fat this week."

Incredulous look. "You? Trying to lose fat? But you don't need to!"

Inward sigh. "I do - I put on a load over Christmas and am trying to get back to where I was."

Typically, at this point, they are still not buying it, and start to enlist the support of others, who, naturally, are able to match their outrage.

So here's a story I have started using to explain this better.

Suppose you have a brand new Porsche. You drive around in it for a year. It's great. Around Christmas, someone steals the Porsche, but the insurance company replaces it with a Ford Mondeo. How would you feel? You would not be happy. But wait! All your friends are driving round in Mark 1 Fiestas - so it's okay, right?

It usually works. ... Read more