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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

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.

Gary Taubes the author of the book, Good Calories, Bad Calories (where he rattled the scientific establishment and challenged the low fat dogma that has dominated diet theory), and soon to be released, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, has a new blog. He had some interesting things to say in this blog post. It is a long post and worth reading, but here are a few nuggets.

Simply put, anyone who tries to diet by any of the more accepted methods (i.e., Weight Watchers), and anyone who decides to “eat healthy” as its currently defined, will remove the carbohydrates from the diet that may be — if the carbohydrate/insulin hypothesis is correct — the most fattening. And if they’re trying to cut calories, they’ll be removing some number of total carbohydrates as well. And if these people lose fat on these diets, this is a very likely reason why.

The above quote is after a long discussion on which diet is best to lose weight.

So here’s the lesson, the moral of this story: before we assume that low-carbohydrate diets are just one tool in the dietary arsenal against overweight and obesity, and before we assume that everyone is different and that some of us lose weight and keep it off because we eat less fat (and more carbohydrates) and some because we cut carbs (and so eat maybe more fat),  we should make an effort to understand the concept of controlling variables and look to see which variables are really changing and by how much. Because it’s quite possible that the only meaningful way to lose fat is to change the regulation of the fat tissue, and the science of fat metabolism strongly implies that the best way to do that, if not the only meaningful way, is by reducing the amount of carbohydrates consumed and/or improving the quality of those carbs we do consume.

This line of thinking would be consistent with some form of a paleo diet, I have written about previously.

Some food for thought going into the high weight gaining period, and maybe something to keep in mind if your goal is to lose weight starting in the new year.

If you are over 40 according to a professor who studies longevity you might want to make a switch to a paleo diet.

You have all probably heard of the paleo diet in which you return to a pre-agriculture diet. No grains, no dairy (depending on the exact version of a paleo diet you choose to follow) and you stick to fish, meat, vegetables, fruits (but not huge amounts), and nuts. The is the diet more or less.

But now comes an interesting hypothesis about why if you are over 40 you might have to even more seriously consider a paleo diet. I say hypothesis since I couldn’t find any science backing it up even though it is being suggested by Michael Rose a professor from University of Irvine California.

Dr Rose’s logic is:

…for people of Eurasian ancestry, he disagrees with the age a paleo diet should be adopted as advised by main proponents of the paleo diet, such as evolutionary nutrition researchers Loren Cordain and S. Boyd Eaton. He said that young people of Eurasian ancestry have actually adapted well to new environments brought on by the agricultural revolution.

“But at later ages,” he added, “you will lose that adaptation to a novel environment and you will revert back to a condition to which you are better conditioned to a long ancestral environment.”

He explained that after age 40, the physiology of people of Eurasian ancestry appears to return to a pre-adapted state with age to one that is better off with the same foods our pre-Neolithic ancestors ate: meat, seafood, nuts, fruits and vegetables.

It is not just over 40 Eurasians that he is advocating a paleo diet actually he thinks if your non-Eurasian you might need to start the diet earlier.

Adopt a hunter-gatherer lifestyle after 35 to 40 if Eurasian, earlier if ancestry is less Eurasian.

I have been experimenting with a paleo diet over the last couple months before coming across this article and can report positive results, at least observationally. And since I am over 40 maybe even more reason to continue. However, as with most things you have to exercise some caution as there is a concern it you eat a misguided paleo diet and only concentrate on meat consumption and forgo vegetables and fruits it might be bad for your health. So if you choose to try a paleo diet do it correctly.

And you could say that if you are going to do caveman training you might as well be on a caveman diet.

Lots more nutrition and fueling articles to come in the coming weeks.

-

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.

-

Big changes coming to Fight or Flight Fitness.

In real life survival situations you do not know 6 months, 1 week, or even 1 day ahead of time when you might need to travel by foot 10, 30 or 50 miles (see this introduction post). So in true survival of the fittest fashion you have to ask yourself what is the most useful fitness program (see this post of the best survival of the fittest programs).  At other times you might have to sprint for your life, and again you are not going to know ahead of time when you need to do this. Sprint training is important and that is why I have written about science behind sprint intervals, and 4 minute a day of sprint training. Now the reality is you need to include shorter interval training with longer slower endurance tasks as outlined in this post.

Now you might call this type of training for survival caveman training for they had to actually exists in a living condition where there physical fitness did determine their survival. Not that cavemen trained for survival fitness it was just that their lifestyle would be what we call training. They would have to sprint, they would have to take long treks as part of their daily or weekly life.

But now days we do live the life of the caveman. We do not sprint, we do not travel for long distances on foot. But maybe we should be. If you want to lose fat try combining sprinting with occasional long distance treks. It will melt away the pounds, give you a slimmer belly. If you want to be fitter than any other time in your life try this type of training (but read on for the added real life wrinkles).

However, one big problem is timing. I can’t go into the research right now (but I will soon) is you don’t want your training to be predictable. You need randomness in your training. The caveman did not know when they might have to sprint: if they came across game to hunt, or had to escape a predator. They didn’t have time to stretch their legs and do a 15 minute warm-up program, they had to go now. And the same thing with their long distance treks. Sure sometimes they knew when the tribe might be migrating to a new location, but it wasn’t like they had full control on how much food they ate before these trips. You rarely knew when or where you next meal was coming from. They sure didn’t have much opportunity to carbo load like almost every person running a marathon in our current times.

And in our modern times if we are talking about survival fitness you don’t know when you might have to sprint, or when you might have to run/walk say 20-100 miles.

Adding in the growing science behind the number of benefits that are found with a more random based training approach and the one obvious answer is to make this paradigm a cornerstone of your training. And this is exactly what Fight or Flight Fitness will be offering. Does this sound interesting to you? Do you want a better prepared body, in a faster time frame that traditional training, and that is far more functional than any other system out there? Then sign up for the newsletter on the right hand side of this blog.

Sure I am adding in some hype here, but just at a common sense level I think you can tell this makes sense. The best way to prepare your body for random life events is by a random training method. Say you get an email that says go sprinting (also in the near future we can enable this to occur in a more real time fashion via mobile messaging). Then two days later you are told to run/walk a long distance (based on your current fitness level). The thing is you won’t know ahead of time of what is going to happen, and your body won’t know. And that is where some of the big adaptive changes will be found.

Sounds interesting to you? Sign up for the newsletter to find out more in the near future.

I have only been able to give you the briefest outline of this new training paradigm, and haven’t even touched all the science behind it but I will hash out the details in coming posts. But the newsletter will contain additional details that really make the program come to life.

Are you prepared?

happy training

Sure you do, for by increasing the number of your muscle stem cells your muscles are better able to repair themselves. A new research study published in PLOS ONE tested rodents running for 20 minutes a day (moderate intensity), which is not that much in rodents, done over a 13 week time period increased muscle satellite cells, which are muscle stem cells.

In younger rodents they found that running increased the number of muscle stem cells by 20-35%. But even more impressive, and I was surprised at, was that in older animals (middle aged) there was a 33-47% increase.

Now the more impressive gains in the older running animals compared to their equally aged matched non-running groups is likely due to the older animals started at a lower level due to age. As the older non-running animals only had 1/3 the number of muscle stem cells as their younger non-running counterparts. This suggest that training is more important for older subjects and has greater benefits in terms of increasing the number of muscle stem cells in older animals.

There still is the open question if this increase in muscle stem cells also occurs in humans, but there are so many other reasons for all of us to be exercising that you might want to assume it is true if it increases your motivation to get out there and exercise.

What will these extra muscle stem cells do for you is a question you might be asking. Normally these muscle stem cells are in a ‘quiet’ state but after you exercise (or other mild/moderate damage), which is a form of muscle damage, they first become ‘activated’ then start proliferating as myoblasts before differentiating into muscles (myocytes). These new muscles therefore repair the muscle system and hopefully make them better prepared for the next bout of exercise. Therefore, having more of these muscle stem cells around would likely make the muscles more quickly repair and therefore able to function in a full state sooner compared to having less muscle stem cells.

Also it would it be interesting to see what the results would be with sprint like training (see these series of posts: sprint training, interval training, 4 minute a day of sprint training), or some type of weight training routine.

Bottom line: get out there and exercise and increase the number of muscle stem cells you have.

Alex Hutchinson, over at Sweat Science, when discussing the article that came out (and covered by many blogs) about the optimal running pace, asked a question I have found interesting for a while:

Well, I’ve often pondered the scenario where you’re stranded in the desert with no food, 100 miles from the nearest aid, and you have to decide what your strategy is. Do you run? Walk? How fast? Seems like if you know your optimal pace, you can maximize your odds…

This same question is part of the impetus for this blog. Can a human travel by food 100 miles without food, without food and water? And since biking is 4-6 times more efficient what about traveling 500 or so miles by bike without food (and/or water)?

I have searched around and haven’t come across any mention of anyone having accomplished or even tried these tasks. No doubt our ancient (maybe not so ancient) relatives were faced with having to travel a 100 or so miles without food.

Now maybe most people would think it is impossible to travel 100 miles without consuming any calories – but I guess we won’t know until somebody is willing to try.

We do have enough energy in our fat stores for 11 days of walking or 3 days of running (on average).

Are you up to the challenge?

(H/T to Andrew)

When you think about survival fitness, or just the ability to complete a marathon or an ironman you need to become aware of how much energy storage you have and of what type. And maybe more importantly how far these energy stores could take you if you are performing a low level task such as walking or a higher energy task such as running.

I won’t discuss the energy system that are the main contributors to events that last less than 1 or 2 minutes, but instead concentrate on the ‘endurance’ energy systems.

glucose and glycogen stores:

——————————————————————–Provides energy for:

—————————————————————————-walking                     running

blood glucose:                            20 g                 15 min                       4 min

liver glycogen:                             80 g                 1 hour                      18 min

muscle glycogen:                    350-700 g         5 – 10 hours             2 – 3 hours

Adipose tissue (fat)           9,000 – 15,000 g        11 days                     3 days

So you can see even if you add up all the glucose/glycogen stores that come from consuming carbs you don’t have enough for completing a marathon in a time that most people are capable of. Most people will complete a marathon in  2.5 to 5 hours and a major part of ‘hitting the wall’ is when you run out of glycogen muscle storage. And obviously any longer events such as ultramarathons, hiking, or ironman events you require fat burning – and you better be good at it.

Despite this fact there are not many of the sport trainers telling you about the importance of the ability to use fat or that this can be trained. If you want to be able to perform well in long endurance events, do a long hike (be it for pleasure or to survive) you want to become an efficient fat burner. Additionally, this might help you lose fat, which is of prime importance for many people.

Many of us want a very detailed layed out exercise program – but the reality is that if we just get off our butt and get out there and do something physical you are not only automatically better off that laying paralyzed on your couch but probably ahead of the vast majority of everybody else.

Chuckie V who was a world class ironman triathlete (you might remember the mohawk guy) and two time completer of the pacific coast trail (a 2,700 mile hike – wow!) has a good post on caveman training here.

In training, don’t be afraid to occasionally take the caveman approach and find some shit out for yourself. Go ape-shit! After all, where’s the fun in playing it safe? No Internet forum is going to know what works for you, or what doesn’t. No coach or scientist or “expert” is going to either, without some trial and error. You need to think like the bumble bee or the caveman or the German goddess and do what it takes to learn for yourself. This is the best form of learning and it’s called EXPERIENCE. We learn from experience and we gain experience from making mistakes. Go out on a limb, because as any Neanderthal can tell you, that’s where the fruit is found.

Chuckie offers coaching service but is not afraid sometimes you just got to go learn yourself. He offers these caveman tips in a followup blog piece.

1) Eat like a caveman. This means avoid eating food in packaging or food that contains more than one ingredient. It does not mean drinking tea or coffee or smoking something that grows in the ground. If you can’t get through a single day without coffee, a drug, something is wrong.

2) Train like a caveman. Go out all day and see what you can discover for yourself; go primal! Discard the power meter or the heart-rate monitor or the bike computer or the GPS or your MP3 player or your watch. Eschew all electronica and get in tune with your own frequencies. It may take some time to descramble them.

3) Get in touch with your fears. Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed. Cavemen were full of fear and theirs were far more tangible than yours likely are.

4) Make some mistakes. They will likely not cost you your life, so go on, make them. Then, more importantly, learn from them. If you’re too afraid to make mistakes, you’ll never be a caveman.

5) Under-dress. Try it: you’ll learn how fragile and insignificant you truly are. You are just a smudge of a fingerprint on a window of a skyscraper, a speck of sand on vast beach on a tiny island in an endless sea floating in a universe without boundaries, a molecule of nothingness.

6) Get lost. Go somewhere new, somewhere unfamiliar, and get acquainted with it and with yourself. Leave the city of comfort and find the wilderness of your intuition.

7) Sleep outside, under the stars. Talk about feeling insignificant! If you don’t think this will have an affect, you haven’t tried it. Those same stars are the very ones your caveman cousins gazed at each night and I’m willing to bet they knew more about them than you or I do.

If you lack raw physical talent, try making up for it with lots of long and hard training. If you fail then, at least you gave it an honest effort. Throw hard work at almost any problem and the problem is no longer a problem. Of course, it’s the hard work that then becomes the problem, but only if you abhor it.

9) If it can’t be done, give it a shot. Find out for yourself whether it’s true or not. Those who repeat that it can’t be done are almost always interrupted by someone doing it. Just as it was back in the days of the caveman, rules are constantly rewritten.

10) See if you can do this once every so often and perhaps more than just a day; maybe a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. I propose trying it one day a week, a designated Day of the Caveman. I’m not advocating giving up on society (as you might think I have) but rather to not let it suppress you or shape you or your decisions. Grow a beard, quit being metrosexual, end this nonsense of “leadership” (you too are trivial and insignificant), walk to work, open-water swim, play with fire, throw caution to the wind, or spit straight into it. Don’t settle for someone else’s lessons or their experiences. Write your own story, even if it’s in hieroglyphics.

Thanks Chuckie for sharing your thoughts with us.