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Checking The Price Tag

When I was a kid, my parents taught me that if you had to ask the price you couldn’t afford it. Through the years I’ve found this maxim to be overwhelmingly true.

But, sometimes you need to check the price tag because you have to make an informed decision, weighing the need or desire with the realities of your financial situation.

This week one of my favorite athletes and coaches, Mike Tuchscherer, penned an article for Juggernaut about how he learned the hard way how to back off the throttle.

Coincidentally almost the same day my wife, Jen Sinkler, wrote an article for her own site about the cost of risky fitness pursuits.

I think you should read both pieces because they’re both important and address slightly different angles, but I want to bring up a few points about Mike’s specifically.

If you don’t know who Mike Tuchscherer is he is one of the strongest powerlifters on the planet and is the founder of Reactive Training Systems, best known for advocating a method of training in which the effort of each set is taken into account to inform the rest of the training. RPE, or Rate of Perceived Exertion, is a protocol to rate each set on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being an all-out effort in which you couldn’t possibly have completed another rep.

There is more to it than that, obviously, but the important thing is that Mike is the creator of and chief advocate of a system that hinges on being acutely aware of how much effort you’re expending on what the cost of it is.

And he missed the warning signs to back off.

Mike certainly has the champion mindset locked down, but he didn’t stop to check the price tag and make sure he wasn’t paying too high of a price.

Part of the problem is a lack of awareness and a mindset of checking in on the cost of things to make sure they aren’t getting out of line. Most people probably need to show up to the gym more often and come up with fewer excuses, but this comes down to honestly assessing yourself and as Mike said, “if it gets to the point that you have to consistently force yourself to train, it’s time for a bit of introspection.”

But the other piece of the puzzle, in my not so humble opinion and now half-decade of experience in using it is not using biofeedback.

Your body can tell you what to do and what not to do – if you just pay attention. <- my free article on how to get started using biofeedback in your training.

And as with most things, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you can stop doing things that are likely to hurt you then you can skip recovering from the injury.

by david 1 Comment

Physically Cultured Challenge: Two Hand Pinch

This week’s Physically Cultured Challenge is going to test how strong those opposable thumbs of yours really are.

There are two primary ways to train the strength of the thumb, which is often the limiting factor in overall hand strength.

You can either grip something very wide so that the fingers can’t wrap all the way around it – this is called support grip.

Or, you can train the pinch motion of the hand.

Pinch is when the fingers are extended and pressed flat on the object, and the thumb is used to press the object against the fingers.

One of the simplest ways to train the pinch is to squeeze a pair of plates and hold it for time, which is this week’s challenge.

Pinch is an incredibly important movement for overall strength of the hand, but even more so as a counter-balance or opposition movement to the flexion-of-the-fingers-heavy movements most lifters do a lot of. While it’s tempting to think that extending the fingers against resistance such as rubber bands is the opposition movement to finger flexion, and it may be technically correct from a strictly bio-mechanical perspective, it’s not correct physiologically.

This is something I learned from grip legend Adam T. Glass. Adam has always contended that the flexion-opposition movement of the fingers is not extension against resistance, but resistance IN extension of the fingers, such as in the pinch motion, because this is how the hand actually functions. The analogy he offers is that like an alligator’s jaw, the hand is very weak in creating force opening up but extremely strong in staying closed – even when the fingers are extended. This is the kind of thing you can only understand when you truly understand how the body functions in practice, rather than how a textbook suggests it should.

And the experience of grip athletes and rock climbers for whom band finger-extension work has never worked but pinch training has paid huge dividends confirms this theory.

Enough about that – let’s get to pinching.

See the video for details. If you can’t quite lift two 45 pound plates pinched together feel free to modify as appropriate. One thick rubber bumper plate may be a good option for some people.

I look forward to hearing what you can do!

by david 1 Comment

Get Obsessed With Consistency

“Get obsessed with consistency.” The words hit me like the fastball that got me one of many rounds of stitches, right at the eyebrow.

I was reading a pre-release copy of my friend JC Deen’s Stay Leaner Longer, and while that is a fantastic book that I also think you should check out, that’s not entirely the point of this email.

The quote was from a perhaps well-known in small circles Dubai trained named Amir Siddiqui. Amir is known among other coaches for his irreverent take on training, but also his formidable physique and the results he gets with his fancy-pants Emirati clients.

Amir looks like what Batman would look like if he grew a beard and packed on forty pounds of muscle. This is a guy who walks the walk and doesn’t have to convince you because you can see it.

This quote, this quote about consistency has been ringing in my ears for a couple months now since I read it. The problem, as I see it, is that people get obsessed with goals. Women imagine what it will look and feel like when they lose thirty pounds and they fit into their skinny jeans. Guys think about what they’re going to look like when they hit that 500 pound deadlift. Some literature on goals will even recommend this strategy and really encourage you to visualize down to the last detail what it will be like when you hit that goal.

And then reality sets in and you realize that the goal is months, if not years, away and you wonder if this one workout even really matters. If it makes any difference at all if you just go home and hit the couch tonight. You can always catch up tomorrow.

Except that it does matter, and you can’t catch up. Even if you could, realistically you won’t.

The consistency is what matters. Get obsessed with it. Be more obsessed with making it to your next training session than the end goal you have in mind. Be more obsessed with getting the most out of the training session that you’re in the midst of than how you’re going to feel when you achieve the goal.

When it comes to physical transformation, consistency trumps perfection every single time. In school I learned the hard way what it meant to my overall grade when I got a 0 on an assignment I didn’t do. My grade tanked. Even if I had turned in something half-assed and gotten 50%, I still would have had a better average final grade. At Juggernaut’s Become Unstoppable 3 some folks were talking to Mike Israetel and expressing some awe at just how god damn big he was. He said, “Look guys, there’s no secret. I never miss a training session, and I never miss meals.” I thought back to the previous day when everyone else was sitting around chatting and Mike was lifting. I don’t think he has missed a lift or a protein shake in a decade.

It’s not hopes and dreams that add up to big goals, it’s action.