Fight or Flight Fitness

Here at fight or flight fitness we argue you both need long term endurance ability but also very fast twitch fiber driven ability which includes sprinting but also even more pure reaction ability.

Lindsey Vonn, Olympic gold medal winning skier, credits her new reaction and agility training for preventing a terrible ski crash, as you can see in the following video (at about 48 seconds). She ended up coming second in this race, but if she hadn’t rescued her fall she would have not even finished, and could have been badly injured.

In the wired article she credits her new additional agility and reaction training to preventing this accident and another one.

…she added a routine of agility exercises like cone drills, knee-high hurdles, and agility ladders, which encompass a horizontal circuit divided like a ladder and you step between the “rungs.” Combined with explosive power workouts, it was designed to boost her reaction times and reflexes to respond to the kinds of minute but important course corrections needed to excel at events like the slalom. As Vonn learned, it can pay off elsewhere

She also thinks her new training program helped in another near crash situation.

Similarly, at a November slalom in Levi, Finland, Vonn made another near-instant course correction that she says saved a crash. She finished sixth, and now says that “I never would have been able to do that” before her training.

So add reaction and agility training to our workout routine. It might not only save you on the slopes (or other x-like-sports) this winter, but who knows when else.

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With the new year in sight many people are deciding to go on a new fitness and diet program as part of their new year resolution – are you?

The question becomes what program to follow? Fitness program X, and diet Y, or the super special combo of fitness and diet XY. The reality is if you can perform some type of consistent exercise program and eat healthy food (we know them at a common sense level) you will make gains – get in shape and lose weight.

But we humans are always looking for the ‘secret routine’, the super-efficient program. And sure I could offer you a potential example such as fight-or-flight fitness, but many times we are searching for the sake of searching – instead of just doing something – moving, jumping, running, throwing some weights around.

Lyle McDonald over at bodyrecomposition wrote up about this problem (information vs application) and I think his observations are true in many cases.

…what many do is this: they keep flailing about for that perfect program, the secret program, the magic program.  They continually look for that new and ideal program; and in doing so they never ever get around to acting.  Or if they do act, they do it in such a haphazard/half-assed way that nothing good comes out of it anyhow.

Lyle has over 300 articles on his blog with many of them about diet so you can see there is plenty of information out there, not to mention the million+ diet books that exist out there, all available at the click of your mouse. Now of course many of these ideas are basically rehashing of the same principles, and there is a range of how much scientific evidence behind them, but there are more than enough that we know works (but of course I think diet and fitness could be more effective if the industry stopped following some of the dogmas – but that is another story). But what do people do?

… people will cast about for the magic program, the magic diet, the magic training and wonder why, by December 2011, they still haven’t gotten anywhere.  They will have spent the entirety of 2011 doing the same thing they did in 2010: continually absorbing new information without ever getting around to actually applying it in any consistent or meaningful fashion.

This is pointless and self-defeating.  What these people need is not information, they need to actually apply what they do know.  In a lot of ways it was simpler before the information overload of the Internet.   When you only know about one or two programs, you either do one of those two or you don’t do anything.  Now people can literally waste a career of training and dieting doing nothing but reading about the next magic program.

Consistency is key. It is hard to know if a program is working for you if you don’t do it consistent enough and long enough. Yes, I understand the desire for new programs to keep you motivated, but most exercise programs have some sort of periodic cycling pattern, including new exercises, etc.

We tend to think we are missing out, we haven’t found the magical formula that will make you jump 6 inches higher, take 13 minutes off your marathon time, give you that 6 packs of abs you always wanted to display at the beach, or allow you to finally beat your nemesis at your favorite sport.

Lyle finishes off on this topic quoting another trainer:

But that doesn’t change the basic point I’m trying to make: most people don’t need more information, they need to apply the information that they have.  If this hasn’t made sense yet, I’ll follow up with a quote from strength coach Steven Plisk, written years ago in Hardgainer magazine (if my memory serves).

He said something to the effect of this:

We’ve tried every periodization scheme known to god and man with our athletes. What we found is that hard work       on a mediocre program works better than half-assing it on the ‘perfect’ program.

So don’t worry about finding the perfect program for the start of 2011 – just get out there and put in some hard work, and eat a healthy diet.

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In a real life situation where you have to sprint for your life you don’t have the opportunity to sit around a doing your stretching routine, well now research indicates that all that static stretching that so many people perform does not help you run faster, and in fact decreases performance. When compared to when the same runners did not stretch a standard static stretching routine ended up decreasing running efficiency by 5% (as measured by calories burned) when running at 65% of their VO2 max for 30 minutes. Next the subjects ran as far as they could in 30 minutes and in the non-stretching situation the runners ran 3.4% further.

But here at Fight or Flight fitness we are not just concerned about endurance type performance but also more anaerobic sprinting ability. Research finds the same thing, in which static stretching decreases performance, in this case sprinting speed. There are a number of studies that have found similar results.

Now you might argue that at least you should do the stretching to prevent injury but quite a few studies now show that stretching actually doesn’t help prevent injuries. Here is a paper that examined many stretching studies in a meta-analysis to add to this evidence of no positive effects on preventing injuries, but another more recent paper found “preliminary evidence, however, that static stretching may reduce musculotendinous injuries.” Still not a ringing endorsement and other studies did not find a positive effect on injury reduction.

In contrast there appears to be evidence that dynamic stretching does help performance. This dynamic stretching also seems to have more than an acute affect on performance.

However, in many more real world situations you won’t have the time to any type of stretching so it might be a good idea to ‘train’ your body for those situations. For more on this see my recent post on a new way to train for real life fitness.

Fun video showing some real life sprinting.

Get out there and sprint.

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Yesterday’s workout:

5 stair sprints of 5-6 floors, followed by an approximately 200 meter uphill sprint. 8 sets of push ups with a minute rest between sets.

Today’s workout suggestion:

Try sprints again – slow gradual buildup so your body gets use to them. Chin ups. One of the big advantages to these type of workouts are they do not take up much time.

Endurance – long flight:

In the past humans in many situations had to travel many miles by foot, to either hunt game or to obtain certain additional food sources. In fact remarkably, humans over a fairly short period traveled out of Africa to inhabit the entire land mass of the world.

In our modern world we travel everywhere by plane and car. Heck people will even drive two blocks to go to the gym.

There can be extreme situations which require long distance travel by foot. These aren’t your everyday situations – such as your plane has gone down in a remote area, you get lost skiing or hiking, a natural disaster of some sort. The point is do you have the ability to coverage many miles by foot? We are not talking about running a marathon. Running a marathon is a very controlled situation where you have to travel exactly 26.2 miles and people are lined up every few miles to hand you water, sports drinks, oranges, sports bars, even jelly to rub on your bits that are getting raw. In a flight or fight situation you are unlikely to be receiving handouts.

The question is can you travel 10, 20, 30, 50 miles or more with nothing but the proverbial shirt on your back? Sure by luck you might be in a situation where you have two liters of water to carry with you – or a stream you are following – but you might have no water and no streams – can you travel the distance? Can you survive? I am not necessarily talking about running, but just a good paced walk. There are some advantages to long distance walking compared to running which I will detail in later posts.

I will be outlining a practical training approach so you can increase your endurance (combined with the sprint training) that will teach your body to burn fat so it can handle long distance mileage with very little input of energy – basically you want to become a fat burner. And by teaching your body to be a better fat burner this will improve one the modern day health problems.

Tomorrow:

Tomorrow I will post about the science behind how sprint training is a very effective, and time efficient, manner of training not only for anerobic sprinting but also for general aerobic conditioning.

This blog will offer fitness that may keep you alive.

In most survival situations you will not be given a warm up period as you have to fight or flight. You will not know when you have to travel 20, 30 or more miles (and I doubt you will have to travel exactly 26.2 miles – the length of a marathon) and nobody will be handing out ‘sport’ drinks to you. You will have to travel all those miles with what ever you happen to be lucky enough to start out with – or find along the way.

Fight or flight fitness is all about preparing you for these type of situations – even though they will be very rare. But maybe even more valuable on the day to day level is the suggestions and exercises I will be offering will get you in fantastic shape in an efficient manner.