Books for the buff 
Tom Venuto: Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle
Detailed info on healthy nutrition, goal-setting and motivation, the basics of weight-training,
and cardio for fat loss. If you could
have just one volume on getting lean, this is it.
Ian
King, Lou Schuler: Men's Health The Book of Muscle
Terrific guide to weight training for
both sexes. High-quality photos, innovative exercises as well as standard
fare, good background in laymen's language.
Lou Schuler: The New Rules of Lifting for Women: Lift Like a Man, Look Like a Goddess
Tells women what they need to know about lifting weights: their workouts should be heavy and intense, just like a guy’s.
Barbara
J. Rolls: The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan : Feel Full on Fewer Calories
The science of satiety. This book teaches real-world portion control and how
to make healthful, filling choices.
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Just got an e-mail blurb about the National Strength and Condioning Association’s latest Performance Training Journal. The focus this issue is core training. As in your midsection, fore and aft. (I’m old enough to remember the days before anyone spoke of the body’s "core." Instead, we discussed abdominals, the lower back, obliques, etc. Actually, wrapping it all up in a package makes sense.)
Online access to the journal is free, and if you subscribe to NSCA’s e-mail list, you’ll be notified when each new issue is published. As I’ve said before, this is research-based, solid information–unlike what you find in your average muscle magazine.
The list of articles for this issue is as follows:
VO2max: The Golden Calf of Exercise Physiology
What is VO2 max and is it the strongest predictor of athletic
performance? This article answers these questions, along with
discussing the elite level measurements and how you can improve your
own VO2 max.
A New Look at Core Training
While basic core training methods may prove beneficial and helpful for
certain training goals, competitive athletes can benefit from training
that is more closely related to the demands of their sport, involving
the whole body and subsequently the core. This article discusses how the
core is involved in three traditional training methodologies.
Developing Hip Joint Adduction and Abduction Strength
Hip adduction and abduction are important movements when working on
lateral movement. This column describes three exercises to help you
develop the hip joint area and improve adduction and abduction
strength.
FitnessFrontlines
The latest news from the field on stability balls, stability ball
exercises, abdominal training devices, and trunk extensor machines.
Advanced Lumbar Stabilization Exercises
If you have been performing basic spinal stabilization exercises to
decrease your risk of injury, try to update your program with these
advanced exercises. If have not been performing any stabilization
exercises, the basic exercises are included in this article as well.
The Healthy Vegetarian Athlete (Part I)
Despite the lengthy list of benefits attributed to following a
vegetarian diet, there are various myths that still persist with
regards to its appropriateness for athletes. This first part of a
two-part column on vegetarian athletes will discuss some common myths
surrounding vegetarian athletes.
Strategies to Manage Performance Pressure
In the last issue this column took a look at competitive pressure. This
follow-up article addresses strategies to help you manage competitive
pressure.
The Use of Unstable Training for Enhancing Sport Performance
Are you looking to add some core training exercises to your
conditioning program through instability training but not sure how to
create unstable environments? If so, take a look at this article, which describes five exercises that use various methods of
instability.
Core Flexibility: Static and Dynamic Stretches for the Core
Core training is one of the hottest training methods right now. But
before you begin to train those core muscles, you need to properly warm
up and stretch them. This article describes both dynamic and static
stretches you can use to stretch your core muscles.
Here’s an eye-opener: teenage girls gain weight when they stop exercising.
Read the article on msnbc.com:
Weight gain in girls blamed on drop in exercise
Adolescent girls in the United States are putting on weight because
they are doing less physical activity than they did as children,
according to a study.
So Atkins Nutritional is going belly up, and diet observers say the bloom is off the low-carb trend. I’m sure the sanity won’t last long.
Low-carb is fine for very short periods of time–when one is preparing for a bodybuilding or figure competition, for instance–but even then, a body needs at least a few decent carbs. Under normal circumstances, if you want vigorous workouts, you need to fuel with carbohydrates: whole grains, fruit, vegetables, and the sugars in milk products, as well as any discretionary calories you care to spend on dessert, French bread, etc.
Here’s what mystifies me. I read women’s fitness magazines (Oxygen, Shape, Fitness) and find articles therein about women who claim to work out six days a week and yet subsist on 1,400 calories a day. How is this possible? Yes, rate of metabolism varies from person to person. But if a woman is highly physically active and burning many calories at the gym, there’s no way she can sustain muscle mass (or sanity) on starvation rations. Do the editors think we’re stupid? Or are these women lying? Or do they have unnaturally slow metabolisms?
I’m pushing 49, work out with weights three days a week, use the elliptical trainer two to three days a week, and walk my dogs for 30 minutes about every day. So I’m active but not obsessive. I weigh 130 pounds and maintain that weight on somewhere around 2,300 to 2,400 calories a day. I lose weight at 1,800 to 1,900. I don’t get it.
What do you do with your time between sets?
Here’s what I usually see: people sitting on a piece of equipment between sets, zoning out, or chatting with people. The sitting around part can be a pain because in a crowded gym, chances are good someone else would like to be using the bench or machine you’re perched on.
Now I’m going to sound like an old crank. But when I first started working out in gyms, in the early 1980s, it was common gym etiquette to allow others to “work in” with you. The person using the bench, machine, whatever, might ask someone standing nearby, “Did you want to work in?” And nobody took offense if you approached someone and asked whether you could work in. That’s a phrase I rarely hear these days.
The other problem with sitting around, as I see it, is that you’re losing focus and losing an opportunity to keep your heart rate up.
What I like to do upon finishing a set: immediately move to another exercise for the same or a different bodypart or immediately begin a few laps (40 seconds each) around the indoor track. I find that staying in motion keeps my energy up, and if I’m walking, I start thinking about the next set and what I hope to accomplish with it.
If I just sit and wait, I can almost feel my energy level draining.
And although I don’t want to be antisocial in the gym, there’s only so much time I’ll devote to chatting with people unless the workout is over. Talking about something other than what I’m doing at the moment also causes me to lose focus and energy.
So what do you do between sets? And are you happy with the energy level of your workout?
Many months ago I posted a question about creatine use to a popular bodybuilding forum. Specifically, I was wondering whether it might be helpful for a friend who was working hard in the gym but needed to lose quite a lot of weight. I made the mistake of waxing eloquent about the stuff and commenting that I thought creatine was “almost magic.”
The young person who responded let me know that she thought that was a ridiculous thing to say.
But here’s why I said it. I’ve been in and out of gyms since my first weight-training experience in, like, 1976 or ‘77. Back in those days and in my heyday, the mid-1980s, we didn’t have supplements that accomplished jack. Our protein powder was unbelievably nasty stuff (made from soybeans, and I don’t even want to tell you what that does to a person’s digestive system), and the supplements the magazine ads touted were more or less snake oil.
Creatine really works–and in my book, that translates to “almost magic.” Whey protein works too. These are the good old days of supplementation, no question.
It’s just so cool to do a creatine cycle and see one’s muscles getting fuller.
I’ll toss two scant teaspoons into a shaker with 8 ounces of Parmalat (sugar-sweetened, vanilla-flavored milk with extra protein) after a workout, and on a non-workout day, I combine creatine with a glass of milk and sugar-free Nestle’s Quik before bed. Mmmmm-good.
Remember when there were just four food groups? Then we got fancy, with the much-vilified food pyramid that everyone from Dr. Atkins to Barry Sears wanted to revise.
Now we’ve got a much cooler pyramid that’s actually tailored to your age and activity level–and that gives specifics not only on how much grain, how many vegetables and fruits, how much milk (etc.) you should consume but also how much sugar and fat and how many "discretionary" calories are left after you tank up on all the "required" foods.
It’s pretty neat.
Take a look at mypyramid.gov. If you’re inspired, you can do an eating journal and see how well or poorly your diet is meeting your needs–or an activity log that indicates how many calories you burn.
Golfers will be interested in the National Strength and Conditioning Association’s June
NSCA Performance Training Journal, which focuses almost exclusively on their sport.
It’s Greek to me, as golf requires hand-to-eye coordination–of which I have none. No doubt that’s why my preferred sports have always been related to track and/or weights.
Well, I’ve had to set some new goals, as I’ve achieved most of those I set a year ago (having to do with pants size, scale weight, and bodyfat).
Since sometime in April I’ve been holding steady. Having gotten to 130 pounds, it was a relief to just maintain for a while. I didn’t count calories or do the zig-zag most of that time, and when I went out to eat, I tried to make healthy selections but didn’t restrict myself unduly. Kind of nice just to maintain.
Workouts, same thing–holding to the pattern of weights and cardio three days a week, plus the 30-minute dog walk most mornings.
The great thing about all this is that maintaining this weight is pretty easy. As long as I’m working out, I can eat (within reason) whatever I want. Big caveat: that almost never includes junk food. Most of the time what I want is decent quantities of good stuff–grains, whole-wheat bread, milk, fruit, vegetables, cheese, chicken, etc.
Having gotten to this point, I want to take things a bit further. I’d like to increase my strength level in lifts that mean something to me (pullups, dips, bench press), and I also want to shed a little more bodyfat.
Estimating from my (wildly fluctuating) Tanita bodyfat-measuring scale and my Accumeasure calipers, I believe my bodyfat is 17 or 18 percent. I’d like to get to 14 or 15 percent.
Having recently sung the spiritual "Walkin’ Down That Glory Road," which includes the text "Now the rich get richer/and the poor stay poor," I’m unable to stop the phrase "the rich get fatter" from going through my head as a tune.
Nonetheless, it ain’t just a tune but a phenomenon. How do we know? MSNBC.com tells us so, with this Associated Press story:
Richer are getting fatter, report finds
Obesity has long been a problem mostly of the poor, but new research shows that the more affluent are catching up fast.
Proof, if we needed it, that wealth doesn’t insulate one from problems.
I know it appears that I dropped off the face of the earth. Indeed, I did not cease to exist–nor to work out or even to think about and read about fitness. My progress continues, and I’m now just below 130 pounds (and maintaining my muscle mass) for the first time in probably 10 or 15 years. Can’t wear size 8 pants anymore; they’re just too baggy.
I feel terrific, and my back pain has largely abated. A bulging disk hurts like hell for a few months and then calms down (at least in my experience), and I think the rather more severe pain I was going through earlier this year was the hot phase of my new bulging disk. No complaints now. My workouts go well, my strength increases, and I thank God for feeling so good.
I do miss the weekly bodypump class, but I now suspect that its (admittedly baby-level) squats and deadlifts were exacerbating my disk troubles.
So how come you haven’t been posting?, you ask.
Some of you know that I’m the editor of a Catholic newspaper. Well, these have been difficult and exciting times for the Catholic press. The death of our beloved pope and the election of our new beloved pope (viva il papa!) have necessitated two special editions back to back, and in short, I’ve been fried.
No guarantee that I’ll be more timely now . . . but at least you know what’s going on.
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