Doing the big things makes the little things littler

A couple of things happened over the last several days that have made me reflect on the impact that being strong makes.

Obviously, being strong makes you better able to lift heavy things. Duh. But what I don't think the cardio-centric mainstream recognizes is the improvement in capacity and ease in doing things that are not necessarily strength dependent. The more strength you have in reserve, the less any given activity actually is "cardio", or work in general.

The first incident that comes to mind is simple: walking up the stairs chatting with a coworker. The coworker in question is an average nondescript fellow, probably within the "healthy" range for his height or close to it. As we walked up the stairs together, I kept up the chat, while he huffed and puffed. I take the elevator whenever possible (yes!), so I was honestly somewhat surprised on both counts.

The next was more obviously a test of strength, or at least strength-endurance, when the sweetie and I bought a new foundation for our bed at Ikea. This is not a terribly heavy piece of furniture, something in the neighborhood of 70lb fully clad in its packaging, but there is a tight turn in the stairs in our house that makes the project a little more interesting. Together we piled it up on top of the car, then got it back down again and up through the house to the bedroom. I did most of the prep of getting the mattress and old box spring out of the way by myself. While there has never been a time when I would've been unable to complete this task, it was a surprise to be energetic and ready for more when it finished. Particularly after doing a few sets of extracurricular front squats earlier in the day.

And then today, the most trivial yet most satisfying in a way: at the gym I made it through 3 sets of jumping rope without trouble, interspersed with push presses and pullup negatives, after squat triples up to 77kg. I am terribly, self-consciously, perhaps-I-really-have-dyspraxia-ly horrible at jumping rope, and more so when exhausted. I literally refuse to do it in front of people. But with the reserve that I have now, it was less of a teary-eyed horror than it has been before.

40 ain't nothing but a power jerk

Wednesday was my 40th birthday. Earlier in the week I was pretty bummed about it, but by the day of I had made my peace with the number.

It's weird that an arbitrary number should have any emotional power anyway, and particularly a number that doesn't even necessarily represent a halfway point in life expectancy or even professional lifespan. I fully expect Silicon Valley age discrimination to end my tech career before age 65, but it's unrealistic to expect that with my personality I'll stop working when that day comes. As the way point for hormonal decline -- I believe there is a requirement that anything written on the topic must have a line about the typical percentage of decline experienced by age 40 -- it can be pretty forbidding, but that has less to do with 40 itself and more to do with the inconvenience of including accurate graphs and charts in lay audience materials.

Regardless, on the day itself I felt pretty OK about it all. I took the day off of work, but not off of my gym schedule. Of course. My favorite days are holidays and work from home days that I go to the gym. It's so refreshing to do some hard work, shower in my own home, and then possibly make something healthy and delicious.

In this cycle, Wednesdays are power jerk days. So this was my 3rd day of attempting to do them. I've really struggled with figuring them out: First, it was the realization that the dip at the start is not a matter of coiling up for a pounce like a cat, but more of a quick bounce. That was the breakthrough of the week before, despite doing snatch grip behind the head push presses in the last cycle. This week, like last week, I was still in pain, struggling with 25kg, up through the midpoint of my appointment. I went up in weight, grudgingly, hoping that more weight = more momentum = figuring it out already.

And then...it happened. 35kg flew up like it was weightless and my feet ended up where they belonged. I think a big part of it was forgetting about the cues (what are "aggressive elbows" in a context where you aren't hitting people with your elbows, anyway?) and just going with where I had to be to allow the weight to fly straight up to the end of extended arms. We did some doubles at 38, and they went even better.

My trainer offered me the opportunity to do one at 40kg in honor of my birthday...and that was the best one yet.

Frailty Pt. 2

After my first run at trying to learn cleans last Friday, my shoulders were pretty tender. Sunday I added insult to injury when I took down the 45lb bar my sweetie left racked above eye level (we are an extremely mixed-height household) and re-racked it at a reasonable height, without warming up first. In the muscle-clean portion of the exercise I turned to my friend and said,

"I'm going to feel that."

Talk about an understatement. My shoulders were sore in the gym on Tuesday, when my little post-squats metcon involved the rowing machine. It got worse yesterday, not so much from the push-presses and power jerks -- which don't move the arms in whatever direction my shoulders don't want to move -- but just in loading the bar, and to a lesser extent lowering the bar back to rack after a successful jerk. The final straw was a 15kg plate. I returned to the office unable to lift my right arm, but by the end of the day it was more cooperative.

In addition to ice and ibuprofen, today was supposed to feature plenty of rest for my poor arms. Unfortunately, like a moron, I decided to change the water cooler in the work kitchen. Not only did I fail to get the water bottle to shoulder height -- we have a particularly tall water cooler -- but I also managed to aggravate my shoulder badly enough to bring tears to my eyes. Six hours later I'm back to being able to lift my arm, but it seems pretty clear to me that cleans should not in my future tomorrow.

I have always expected myself to be up to the strength-oriented tasks of normal life. I was the older, and more sturdy, daughter in a family with no boys, and I always took it personally whenever my dad complained about being the person who carried things in our family. I carry my own suitcase, even when the suitcase is 42" tall to my 60" and the stairs are steep. And I always, always change the water cooler for myself. The last time I declined to do so involved a real shoulder injury, after a serious fall in a skating class. It feels shameful to be unable to lift 5 measly gallons of water.

I am ruing the cost of this attitude now that the workout I looked forward to all week is in jeopardy, though. I've wanted to learn to do cleans for so long, since they've always been that 4th or 5th major movement that "everybody" should do but "nobody does them right without good coaching". Here is finally my chance to capitalize on good coaching, and I've fucked it up for a water bottle.

Argh.

Frailty

I rescheduled this week's squat workout for tomorrow because last night I managed to anger my back by lying the wrong way on the floor, and when I woke up this morning (not on the floor) it still hurt to walk. I'm pretty much back to normal now. I'm not sure what the mechanism is for something that makes all movement a misery for 18 hours or so and then resolves, but my uneducated suspicion is that the SI joint is involved. That or mental illness. Probably both.

The thing that sucks the most about hurting yourself lying on the floor is getting up. In my case, I got to explore what means of getting to my feet and up the stairs would be least damaging to body and dignity while my SO looked on, eager to help but really not capable of doing so. I guess that's a relationship milestone: the first time you watch your sweetie writhe on the floor like a moron.

One good thing about it all is that I haven't had one of the multi-week ordeals of back pain that seem to be more related to my original injury in over 5 months now. So I feel pretty good that my training may have helped me finally get over the hump on that issue.

In praise of a gym teacher

There were two gym teachers in my high school, a man and a woman. The woman was a nice enough lady who had lost her first love to the Vietnam War, and might not have been teaching otherwise. The man was also the wrestling coach, and probably exactly what you imagine when you think the words "wrestling coach". He could have been dropped in by central casting.

I was no fan of gym class. I did well enough to avoid sinking my GPA, but I was constantly on edge about it. I was a strong swimmer, an adequate runner, a profoundly mediocre gymnast, and completely hopeless in ball sports of any kind. Until I went abroad my junior year, to a country where I was average height and basketball was off the curriculum, I was convinced I was about two steps above disability.

Looking back on it, though, the interesting thing to me is that the second gym teacher, the gruff wrestling coach, programmed his class not for the confirmed jocks but for people like me. He taught us about flexibility. He had us try aerobics (this was like 1986, practically Peak Fonda). While I'm not sure his message actually got across, I do sincerely believe he was trying to introduce us to options for lifelong fitness.

And he did one other highly unconventional thing after class: he let girls into his weight room. It may sound pretty ridiculous now, but back then it wasn't uncommon for the weight training equipment to be inside the men's locker room, so even basic physical access was hardly a given.

I had read somewhere, probably in something Olympics-related in the 1984 cycle, that swimmers were now lifting weights, so I wanted to try it. That gruff wrestling coach let me in, and taught me some moves: curls, shrugs, upright rows,  bent-over rows, dumbbell presses and flyes. These same movements were the bulk of my non-cardio gym activities through most of the 90s, eventually supplemented with leg presses, lunges, and unweighted squats thanks in part to (yes!) the Stripper FAQ.

I would like to be able to say that I took to it like a duck to water, and the crusty old wrestling coach became my mentor. Alas, that is not the case. Without a program or a goal, I lost interest in the weight room and didn't return until college, and fairly haphazardly then. Still, here I am, 25 years on, still moving weights, so in the end I guess that lesson of lifelong fitness did stick.

Mind your knees

With the recent holidays, many people I know, including myself, spent time with family and loved ones. In the days that followed, an interesting trend emerged: quite a few women who lift weights, again including myself, were told by some well-meaning family member to be careful about our knees. It's interesting to me how widespread this caution is.

As it happens, my knees have some history.

I didn't own a car until midway into my first year in Silicon Valley. I hear there is public transportation in the valley, but other than occasionally being stuck behind a bus on El Camino I really haven't seen much evidence of it. Consequently, I cycled. Most days clocked in at 10 miles or fewer, but the occasional 30 mile day was not uncommon. My employer provided a free 24 Hour Fitness membership, so every so often I biked over to the gym to do...more cardio. Despite having discovered real west-coast burritos, tempura ice cream, and a host of other decadent new foods I could suddenly afford, and a new 10-hours-at-an-office lifestyle, I was way too active to gain weight.

The car, of course, changed all of that. I did what any good American does when she finds herself gaining weight: I started running. This was my first brush with running for exercise rather than transportation, and I tried to do everything right: I did the "couch to 5k" program, carefully programming intervals into my fancy watch. I had my gait analyzed and became jealously loyal to The Perfect Shoes. I tried to minimize pavement miles, preferring a local dirt track. Runner's World told me runners should lift weights, too, so I diligently did my 15lb dumbbell chest presses and curls. Despite my best efforts, my knees, especially the right knee, were soon in pain. By the end of the 90s, my running program was gone for good, but the pain lingered. At times I could not fully straighten my leg, or sleep without supporting the knee.

With the gorgeous hills all around me, I went through a hiking phase. 7 miles was my limit before the knee acted up. Sometimes in the last mile I'd contemplate letting the mountain lions eat me.

Years passed, and eventually I picked up lifting. Armed with instructions from The Internet, I took to Gold's with a 5 x 5 program, performing low-bar squats to parallel. The weight got heavy quickly, and to be honest my right knee did hurt before too long. I went to get it checked out...the orthopedist yelled at me to go back to jogging. I did return to lifting once the pain subsided somewhat, but I never got back to squatting the weights I reached in that first round.

Not long before I started my current program, the knee randomly got worse of its own accord. Suddenly walking down stairs was a challenge, standing for a meeting could have consequences for the rest of the day, and straightening it fully was again out of the question. Scared, I got it checked out again, but there was no obvious cause. This ultimately led in part to a very low calorie diet and 30lb weight loss: I hoped that reducing food would reduce inflammation. It seemed to work.

Today, I write all this with a bit of a sense of wonder. I'm in no pain, my leg straightens smoothly. I sleep how I choose. Sometimes I run to cross the street or a parking lot, just for the hell of it (although I'm sure I have no interest in longer distances), and nothing crunches. To be fair, I do have some soreness around the patella on both legs on squat days that I mostly notice going up stairs, but nothing significant.

I can't say for sure that full-depth squats have been the cause of this rehabilitation. It's almost equally likely that consistent foam-rolling and warmup activities have done the work, or at least a portion of it. (Incidentally, the warmup routine is a large part of why I chose Catalyst.) Maybe unrelated factors are at play. But I can say that I'm squatting more weight, through a greater range of motion, than ever before, and I am in less pain than almost any point in the last 15 years.

So...obviously every well-meaning dad and uncle in the world doesn't know me, but I still wonder about the widespread concern with women's knees. Surely the number of women lifting weights seriously with some sort of persistent knee injury is tiny compared to the number of women tolerating a running-related knee injury. In my own family, knee trouble seems to be related more closely to endurance sports or plain inactivity. The concern is meant with love, and that is how we should take it, but it is a shame if it discourages any of us from activities that promote healthy knees. 

Max numbers of the time period

In the 4 months that I've trained at Catalyst, there have been two rounds of max testing, roughly 2 months apart (go figure).

The first round was daunting, since it began with a max effort back squat. The back squat is where I originally injured myself: during a warm-up set at Gold's, something in my back went wrong and my next several months became dedicated to questions like "will my left leg ever work normally?" and "how do I avoid having this happen again?" Frustratingly, the medical establishment was not at all helpful in providing treatment or education, and for quite some time I had no idea what the prognosis might be. Vicodin scrips were doled out freely, of course. U.S.A. #1! (I didn't fill them.)

...So I was a bit nervous about back squats, and doing them was the first leap of faith with my new trainer. I relearned them Olympic-lifter style, but until the end of the cycle I rarely if ever exceeded the fairly light weight that did me in.

Deadlifting on the other hand was a different kind of struggle. I have always been strong and confident with this lift. It's a very straightforward experience: you remove the weight from the floor and stand up, or you don't. Now, the main stress in this experience was that the weight was so very light compared to where I had been. Even some weights I'd managed relatively recently during gym false-starts were a fairly huge conditioning challenge in sets of any length. It was terribly humbling.

My numbers from that first testing week:
Back squat: 82kg (!)
Deadlift: 95kg

The second round of testing came just before Christmas. In this round of training, the three major movements were the front squat, overhead squat, and deadlift. I loved the overhead squat, on those occasions when my push-press went right it felt like the easiest and most fun thing I've ever done with a barbell. Front squats...not so much. I struggled to find a consistent way of doing them. I ditched incorrectly and sprained my hand. Weights that felt easy refused to go up. Body parts seemingly unrelated to the movement hurt. The Internet (by which I mean some random formula attributed to Polinquin) told me I should be able to move 69kg, but 60kg and higher was a festival of dumped bars. It was pretty much a disaster.

When overhead squat test day came, I had a good run of luck with the push-press up through 41kg or so, and then I failed 43kg, narrowly grazing the top of my head with the bar. I asked to try it again and it went up smoothly. My trainer was prepared to call it a day at 44kg, but I asked to try 45kg, confident that I could at least avoid dropping it on my head. The push-press went up like nothing and the squat was smooth with the slightest, fixable left-elbow buckling at the end. I win!

The day of front squat testing, I was super-sad for no good reason. The company Xmas party -- not the pigging-out opportunity you might imagine, thanks to my gluten issues -- took my usual gym time, so my session was pushed into mid-afternoon. I showed up at the gym wanting to call the whole thing off, or cry in the corner. Possibly both. Instead I did the work and surprised myself by a wide margin.

My numbers from the second testing week:
Deadlift: 106kg
Snatch-grip push-press + overhead squat: 45kg
Front squat: 70kg

There is another result that isn't captured in the numbers. Even as late as the first round of testing in October, an hour session was sometimes a struggle, and training two days in a row was an unspeakable idea. By the beginning of December, two days in a row was a good way to work around a conflict with my usual MWF plan, and by the end of December a one hour session no longer felt even remotely adequate. I started to contemplate two-a-days.

In the next round, the back squat returns, along with power jerks and power cleans. I'll also be continuing to work on front squats on my own time, working to recapture whatever easy trick of form made 70kg possible.

Meet the new blog, same as the old blog

One of my priorities for this year (let's not call them "resolutions") is to write more, and to that end I'm resurrecting this blog. The focus will still be fairly in line with the title (I hope), but if all goes well there will be a lot more content.

I shut down this blog two? years ago, during a rough time: I was injured, I was over-subscribed, and I had a hard time imagining a path to improving my situation. Repeatedly, I suffered false-starts and setbacks: finding consistency for a month or two only to be laid low by a back pain flare; trying to return to the ice and discovering I just did not have the logistical fortitude to make it happen with my stress level. I could honestly imagine myself sliding into a useless and painful middle age before my time, even after a 30+lb weight loss -- excuse the pun -- lifted the weight a bit. Fortunately, quite a bit has changed in the last handful of months. The two biggest factors have been training at Catalyst Athletics, and moving.

 Before you (or I!) get too excited about "training" I should make it clear: I am certainly on the "paying the bills" side of the house rather than the "Olympic weightlifters with competitive potential" side. I will hopefully have more to say soon about being a more-money-than-brains fitness client in a serious athletic environment. Still, being trained by, and around, real strength athletes has made a huge difference to my practice. I've gotten stronger and more confident more quickly, and with less pain, than ever before.

Moving is the other major factor. For over two years, I was like a business traveler with an extremely limited itinerary, living out of an overnight bag 30 miles from home several nights per week. While it was my choice and my reasons were worth it, it was a stressful and uncomfortable way to live. I rarely slept well or enough, I had little opportunity to prepare my own food, and in general I was stretched thin enough that the social engagements I did manage to make were often embarrassing due to my over-tired, cracked-out demeanor and conversation. Since moving in mid-November, all this has changed: in my new home I go to bed when I'm tired, wake up without an alarm, and my big, beautiful new kitchen is stocked to feed myself as I see fit. To say nothing about the company! Having lived both ways, I can't stress enough how huge of an impact this has had.

So here we are today, at the start of a shiny new blog much like the old blog, with shiny new activities to record and shiny new rants to be ranted. Stick around, won't you?