Happy New Year ... just 14 days after the fact.

Some quick updates:

* I went back to my old site, Male Pattern Fitness, with a guest article. In it, I review my favorite new workout books of the past 12 months, including Adam Campbell's outstanding Big Book of Exercises.

* I did a really, really fun podcast with Mike Robertson. The goal was to talk about how fitness professionals can improve their writing to move their careers forward, but the most memorable stretch comes when I go off on a spontaneous rant about how annoyed I am by Facebook. I've been thinking about it for a while, so I guess it was going to come out sooner or later. Still, it caught both of us by surprise. I just hope it's as entertaining to you as it was to me when I was getting it off my chest.

* One more trip back in time: I did an interview with actor Sean Faris for Men's Health magazine, talking about his workouts and diet. Sean is a smart young guy, and comes off as truly passionate about sports and exercise.

* Finally, going all the way back to October, I did this interview with Sean Barker for his Dad Fitness blog. In it, I make a point that I think is important for all parents today:

So that's what I've been up to. What about you?

Tags: books, dad fitness, mens health, mike robertson, podcast, writing, journalism

One of the real joys of the holiday season is reading the annual Christmas letters from family and friends. The best letters manage to be funny, clever, poignant, self-mocking, and most of all brutally honest -- quite a trick to pull off with just a few hundred words. 

This I freely admit: My friends inspire me to write better Christmas letters. I won't say I compete with them -- if I did, I'd have to push my kids to be more interesting, and there's no telling what dark alleys that would lead us toward. I just like to think that the people reading my letters get a kick out of them.

Unfortunately, there's another kind of holiday letter. The worst are the chirpy ones that stop just short of offering the exact amount of the husband's annual bonus and photocopies of the kids' perfect SAT scores. 

We got one today ... well, I can't go into details, because it would be unfair to the very nice people who sent it to us. We like these people a lot. I'll go as far as to say they're instantly likable. You meet them, and you feel comfortable around them. They're warm, friendly, and gracious.

But during a week like this, when Kimberly and I are fighting with the kids to not leave dirty socks under the Christmas tree, I really don't need to read about how someone else's children all make perfect grades, master technology instantly, and pick up their rooms without being told. 

You know?

I can barely get my kids to bathe this time of year, much less organize their bookshelves or defrag our computers. They're great kids in many ways, but I'd rather go off the holiday grid than to stack our family letters with details of their finest attributes. In two sentences I could make each of our kids sound so perfect that other people would start drinking early the day the letter arrived, knowing their children can't possibly measure up to ours.

But I'd never do it, for two good reasons: First, it would be a gross misrepresentation of who our children really are. Second, it would serve no purpose other than to make other people feel bad about their own kids. 

So how do you write a good Christmas letter? I've seen useful advice posted here and there. But the real key is this: Your friends and family should look forward to reading your annual letter, and when they finish, they should wish it had gone on a little longer. 

Easier said than done, I know. But if you're going to take the time to write anything at all, you should at least put in enough effort to get it right. A Christmas letter doesn't have to be clever or even memorable. It just needs to make its recipients happy they took the time to read it.

Is that too much to ask?

Tags: writing, christmas, christmas letters, children

The news about my mother gets more disturbing all the time. At Thanksgiving dinner, I was told, she referred to her daughter-in-law with a vile epithet ... even though she was in that daughter-in-law's home, and the insulted person had just cooked dinner for 11 members of our family.

I'm sorry to be vague about what was said; it would be a much more interesting and powerful story if I just repeated the insult, especially if I described the context. But because I have filters, I won't. My family would never forgive me, and I wouldn't expect them to.

The open question is whether my mother was always thinking such nasty thoughts about the people around her, and we only know it now because dementia has removed her filters.

If that's the case, all I can say is, thank goodness for filters.

So here's a question: How many times a day do your filters stop you from saying what's really on your mind? As a person with ADHD, I can tell you that I cherish my filters, and I'm never embarrassed to admit I need Concerta and caffeine to keep them up and running. I have plenty of regrets about the times I wrote or said what was really on my mind, and can't think of a situation where I held back and regretted it later.

We have a media culture today that thrives on the appearance of people speaking without filters. Some of them are really, really good at it. But I don't believe for a second that the people who have the most to gain from saying outrageous things -- whether we're talking about Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, or even Glenn Beck -- are truly speaking to us without filters.

I think they're remarkably adept at creating facsimiles of partisan outrage, but if you could peek behind the curtain I think you'd see a savvy and extremely successful business model at work, rather than true anger born of genuine philosophical convictions. If any of these guys spoke into an open mic without filters, I think we'd hear more Lonesome Rhodes and less Tom Paine.

That said, I think this blog post by Chris Faust, the recently laid-off travel editor of USA Today, comes as close as we're going to get to a genuinely unfiltered commentary by a media insider. Consider this lament:

But what bothers me the most is what my firing represented. See, I’ve been learning all the tricks that a modern multi-platform journalist is supposed to know. In the past 22 months, I’ve blogged, tweeted, shot photos and videos, and handled speaking engagements. I edited my section, managed my high-personality staff and then in my spare time, I wrote cover stories – something that very few other editors at USA TODAY do. I hustled and I cajoled and I ended up out on my ass anyway.

Do you doubt, for even a second, that this is what she really thinks about what happened to her?

Compare it to this paragraph in the same post:

But increasingly, things have become more interesting outside the newsroom bubble. I’d go to conferences and meet people who were making it just fine on their own. Some were creating niche businesses, busting up the paradigm. Others were parlaying old school media talents into fresh ventures, with a moxie that made me wish I had the freedom to emulate them. The air inside USAT’s towers on Jones Branch Drive always seemed a little stale after that.      

These freelancers-slash-entrerpreneurs are smart. They are nimble. And now they are my role models, as I join their ranks. 

Now I get the sense I'm being sold a product. I don't mean that as criticism -- I've been in the exact same situation as Chris, and I understand how it feels to find yourself adrift after years of safe passage aboard one of the biggest ships on the sea. You have to create a new brand and sell your products as if your life depends on it ... which of course it does.

That's why you need the filters. 

Tags: media , trends , filters , adhd , family , dementia

Here's a sample of the new information and insight I picked up from Mike Boyle's Functional Strength Coach 3.0, the eight-DVD set that I mentioned in this post:

• Mike categorizes exercises with a small variation on the original Ian King system. In addition to the well-known designations -- knee dominant, hip dominant, vertical push, vertical pull, horizontal push, horizontal pull -- he adds a category for diagonal movement patterns.
• In recent years, he's shifted from an equal emphasis on horizontal and vertical pulling to one that favors the former over the latter. The vertical pulls, he says, were leading to upper-trap dominance in his athletes, which is why he now does twice as many rowing-type exercises, vs. pull-ups and pulldowns.
• He divides hip-dominant exercises into two subcategories. First are the expected deadlift variations. The second is what he calls the "bridge pattern," which includes supine leg curls, using a Swiss ball or Valslides.
• Mike's views on core training are accessible in lots of places -- this TMUSCLE article, for example, is a perfect introduction to training your anterior core with rollout-type exercises. The big take-away I got from his new material on mid-body training is that fitness professionals have to understand there's no such thing as "normal" for the people they train. In his lectures and demonstrations, Mike notes that some of his strongest athletes can't do rollouts particularly well, while he has a 60-year-old client who can do them better than many of the competitive athletes he trains.
• A similar point: Some people will naturally have more arch in their back when their spine is in a "neutral" position. It only becomes a problem if the arch gets more pronounced during the exercise. 
• In the last DVD of the set, Mike encourages his audience of personal trainers and strength coaches to remember that the people they train aren't like them. They don't always think like athletes, and they don't necessarily like to work out. Even athletes sometimes hate to train. And you can never assume that your clients, whether they're athletes training for a sport or people who want to get to get into better shape for health or weight loss, understand what you want them to do. People won't push themselves to lift more or work harder unless it's clear that's what you expect of them. 

Perhaps his most controversial argument -- that there's absolutely need to do any traditional steady-state aerobic exercise unless you're training for a sport in which you run, ride, or swim at a steady pace -- isn't even on the eight-DVD set I got from Mike.

It's on this video, in which he says, "I don't believe there's any need for an aerobic base." Aerobic training gives you "the gift of slowness." Athletes need improved work capacity, which is achieved through start-stop activities and other forms of anaerobic training. The capper: Mike says the best hockey players he trains do the worst on tests of aerobic fitness.

I should note here that I received a review copy of FSC 3.0, which sells for $200. I should also note that I receive lots of books and DVDs, and rarely have the time to read or watch them. Even when I do, I almost never write a detailed review. So why am I reviewing this one?

First, I've never gotten to hear one of Mike's lectures at a conference. People who do tend to give them rave reviews. Second, Mike was one of those writers I always looked forward to working with during my year as an editor at TMUSCLE. When he has something to say about training, I'll listen.

That's why I jumped at the chance to check out this new DVD set. I came away with a lot of new exercises to work into my program, and a lot of fresh insights into what I should be doing, and why. I recommend it without reservation.

Tags: mike boyle, aerobic training, product reviews

The biggest news last week, judging by the reaction on Internet strength-training forums, is Mike Boyle's attack on conventional squats, particularly the part where he looks right into the camera and says, "Don't do conventional squats anymore."

Doesn't get any less ambiguous than that.

Boyle's rationale is that the weak link in squatting is the lower back, which he says is a poor transducer of power. The muscles of the legs are worked better in a split stance, where the back is less of a limiting factor. His preferred lower-body exercise is the rear-foot-elevated split squat, or RFESS. Most of us know it as the Bulgarian split squat.

I got the email from Mike the same day as everyone else. The difference is that I wasn't really surprised by his position. When I was at TMUSCLE, I edited Mike's article on split squats, which made the same argument, more or less. It went up on August 3.

But even then, I wasn't completely surprised by Mike's position. Back in 2004, I helped create and edit a short-lived spinoff of Men's Health magazine called Muscle. In the second issue, I asked strength-training historian Terry Todd to apply a B.S. detector to all those exercises with commie cred -- Romanian deadlift, Russian twist, etc. 

Although it didn't end up in the article, Todd told me that Eastern European Olympic weightlifters had abandoned heavy squats in favor of an exercise called the Bulgarian step-up. It's a step-up with a barbell on your shoulders, using a higher step than most of us would use for the conventional version of the exercise.

Olympic lifters, of course, have unique goals and demands; they're lifting to become better lifters, not better hockey or football players. Still, it seems counterintuitive for guys who compete in the snatch and clean and jerk -- bilateral exercises, mostly -- to train one leg at a time. And yet, Todd told me, these elite weightlifters found Bulgarian step-ups were not only superior as a supplemental exercise to increase leg strength, they also produced better muscle hypertrophy than conventional squats.

So does this mean it's time to drop conventional back and front squats altogether? No. I agree with Jason Ferruggia, who says that max-weight back squats are safer than max-weight split squats or step-ups.

But let's step back from the needs of elite and advanced lifters. In an average gym, those guys are a tiny percentage of the population. What do we recommend for beginners and intermediates, guys who're unlikely to load up the bar for max singles, doubles, or triples in any exercise?

Even Mike Boyle says conventional squats are important for beginners to master. I'd go farther and say that everybody in the gym who's training seriously should be able to do a back squat with good form. It's a fundamental strength-building exercise, and if you can't squat properly, the chances are really, really good that you can't do other lower-body exercises. 

The more serious intermediates -- the ones who're trying to improve their size and strength, vs. the ones who're more interested in holding onto what they've already built -- should probably know how to do front squats. They're certainly more challenging technically (especially if you're like me, and inevitably end up with the bar nuzzling your trachea), and probably more back-friendly, since they force you to lift with an upright posture. 

But I also think everyone who takes training seriously should know how to do lunges, split squats, and step-ups. They're every bit as fundamental to human movement as squats and deadlifts. Rear-foot-elevated split squats are among the most difficult exercises I've done in my own workouts. My goal in my next workout is 10 reps with each leg using 95 pounds. Back squats with 225 or more were a lot more fun.

That's why, when the name-calling ends, I think Boyle's anti-squat position will end up in the mainstream of training philosophy and practice. Few people in gyms today need or want to load up for max efforts on back or front squats. I think most people will benefit from focusing more on split-stance lower-body exercises and less on bilateral exercises like back squats. 

Just so long as nobody messes with deadlifts, we should all be fine with this new approach.

Tags: mike boyle, squats, split squats, deadlifts, training, strength