Summary: Blog so far

I've recently noticed (I know, I'm a little slow) a huge surge of traffic coming from Dan Djurdjevic's awesome blog (thank you very much!)  Welcome - the kind of people who read Dan's work are exactly my target audience.  For you new readers, and anybody else new to my blog, I thought I'd write up a summary of the key points I've been trying to convey.

KC Philosophy:

I began training in the late 80's.  I took a 12 year break and when I got back into training in 2006 I found that a few things had changed.  I was in worse shape (not as strong, not as flexible, with less endurance, less resistant to injury) at 35 than I had been at 21 - and I had never been what you'd call an athlete.  I had less time and energy for training - a family and a full time job can really interfere with two hour training sessions.  But, (and this turned out to be my saving grace), I was connected to a huge body of information about training that I hadn't had access to before, all thanks to the internet (thank you Al Gore!).

I've spent a considerable amount of time over the past 5 years reading and looking at books, magazines, blogs, websites, videos, and DVD's about diet and training - not just about martial arts training, but about training for athletes in all sports, and every minute of it was devoted to figuring out how that information could make me better at karate.  I learned a lot - I learned how to become and stay more flexible throughout the day, how to get faster and stronger, how to improve my health, how to dramatically improve my endurance, how to practice my skills, all without having to train more than a few hours a week.

It didn't take me too long to realize that not everybody knows all this stuff.  Plenty of wonderful karate instructors spend their time learning and teaching technique instead of poring over the latest research on VO2 Max.  Which is fine - I don't mean to criticize anybody's teaching.  I thought I had learned some things that could help other people - people like me, older people or people who aren't very athletic or don't have fifteen hours a week to train - become better at karate.  Not by showing them or teaching them karate, but by helping them train better so their karate can be better.

Nothing, or almost nothing, in this blog is original.  I stole every last idea from sources from Pavel Tsatsouline to Mike Boyle to Bret Contreras.  I've discovered no secrets, no ideas that you couldn't figure out yourself if you want to spend the hundreds of hours of reading to learn it all.  But if you don't have time for that, you can read my blog and hopefully get a few useful tips that will make your karate training more productive and more efficient.

Here's a summary of the key points I try to convey:



1.  Flexibility Training:


You should do two types of stretching: static stretching and dynamic stretching.  Static stretching means moving a muscle into a stretched position and holding it.  Think of things like sitting on the floor and leaning over a locked leg to stretch the hamstrings, or wedge your legs apart to stretch your adductors.  Dynamic stretching involves moving a muscle fairly quickly into and out of a stretched range of motion.  Think mae keage, or swinging your leg up and back, or up to the side and back. 

Do your dynamic stretching daily, preferably early on.  Do ONLY dynamic stretching before a workout unless you have an injury.  I like 2 sets of 10 leg swings to the front and sides per leg.  Do 3 sets if you're very tight or sore.

If you do any static stretching - which will gradually lengthen the muscle tissue - do it when you're cold (not right after a workout).  You can do it as often as you'd like, but you'll probably need at least 3 times per week to get any results.  And don't do it before a workout!

If you need better range of motion, say in your adductors so you can round/side kick higher, you have to build strength in the target muscle (the one that's holding you back) when it's stretched.  If your adductors are tight, get close to a split (as close as you can) adn draw your legs together - either pulling into the ground or actually pulling them together, sliding so you end up standing.  You can do various other exercises as well, but the point is to build strength in the stretched position - that's how you get the muscle to relax when it's being stretched so it doesn't restrict your movement.


2.  Skill Training:

When you try to get better at a skill (say, punching or kicking) you are making a neurological adaption - your nervous system is changing.  This process doesn't work the way, say, building muscle does.  Your nervous system learns new things best by practicing them well; and practicing them often.

That has several ramifications.  You want to practice your techniques as often as you can - every day or more would be best.  You want to practice most often while fresh.  At the end of a workout, if you're tired and drained, your technique will be relatively sloppy.  That is the wrong time to practice karate.  Instead, practice karate when you're fresh - even performing just a few minutes of drills several times a day - and save your endurance work for when you're tired.

That also means your workouts should start with a warmup, then dynamic stretching, then skill practice, then strength training, then endurance training - don't put the strength/ endurance stuff before the skill stuff or your technique will suffer.


3.  Strength Training:

If you're doing a routine you got from your typical personal trainer or the pages of a fitness/ bodybuilding magazine you're probably training wrong.  Karateka need explosive strength, not big muscles (although you will gain some size as you get stronger). 

• Focus on workouts shorter than 45 minutes in length. 
• Do exercises with enough weight/ difficulty that you can only complete 5 or fewer repetitions at a time (for example, don't do regular pushups if you can do more than 5 of them; work on one-arm pushups instead). 
• Focus on movements instead of muscles - hip extension (kettlebell swings, deadlifts), knee dominant squatting (one legged squats), an upper body push (pushups, presses) and pull (pullups, body rows) and core (next bullet).
• For your core do mostly exercises where you stabilize your core against a resistance - for example, a plank instead of a situp.  Do a ton of anti-rotation - holding your core stable while some force tries to twist your body - think one armed plank, medicine ball throw, etc.

Stay away from high rep work in the name of strength training.  If you can do 50 pushups, working up to 100 pushups won't make you stronger, just give you better endurance.  You're better off working up to 10 one arm pushups.


4.  Endurance:

Presumably you want more endurance so you won't gas out during sparring or intense kata practice.  Some people train for that by doing lots of LSD (long slow distance) - jogging, hopping on a bike or treadmill for long bouts of steady state "cardio" work.  Unfortunately, you'll get at best mediocre results from that type of training.

The name of the game is High Intensity Interval Training.  You need to work at a level of intensity so high that it really stresses your cardiovascular system.  Instead of jogging, sprint.  Instead of biking, do burpees.  That means you won't be able to keep it up for long - that's fine.  Just rest for a little while and repeat.  Over and over.  I don't know the best work/ rest time ratio - working 20 s, resting 10s, repeating is popular, I also like 15/15 - but the principle is to make the work very, very hard and not to do anything during the rest.  As you get in better shape don't extend the work intervals - don't make them longer - make them harder instead.

One other point:  you may be tempted to kill two birds with one stone and do your conditioning by working martial arts techniques until you're exhuasted.  For example, doing 500 side kicks.  Don't do that.  Why not?  Becasue if you're pushing your endurance close to its limit you're going to end up doing a lot of sloppy kicks - practicing bad technique.  You only want to practice kicks when you're fresh, then once you're getting tired, hammer away at your cardio with a non-skill movement like running or burpees or something else where you don't care about your skill.


5.  Diet:

I'm a big advocate of a roughly Paleo diet.  Put simple:  Avoid all grains (especially wheat, corn, soy); avoid legumes (beans); eat no seed and vegetable oils (corn oil, vegetable oil, canola oil, etc.); restrict any artificial and processed foods; limit dairy; and limit fruit and nut consumption.  Eat animals that are fed on the same principles - so eat only grassfed beef, pastured chicken, etc.  What can you eat other than meat?  Vegetables, fruit, root veggies (sweet potatoes, yams), some nuts and fruit, some dairy (preferably raw, preferably from grass fed cows).  Yes, you'll be eating a lot of fat.  Yes, it's okay.  No, it won't make you fat.  It might heal your gut and cure your arthritis, though.  This diet, which improves insulin resistance and lowers inflammation, will improve recovery, enhance your endurance, help you drop any excess fat, and make you healthier.

There are a lot of resources on the ins and outs of paleo eating both on this blog and in other places.  This diet has made huge differences in my personal health and fitness.  Many paleo bloggers lean towards the low carb end of the spectrum - I don't.  I find that my karate goes better if I eat plenty of carbs.  I just get my carbs from sources other than wheat, corn, and soy.  Meaning I eat plenty of sweet potatoes and rice but no bread.  Try it for 30 days and see how you feel!

 

 

That's a brief summary of the key points to improving your karate practice that I've discovered over the past 5 years.  I have posts up about all of this which cover each in more detail - if you're interested in more explanation of anything here please post questions to comments.

 

Thanks!

9 Steps of Paleo Adoption

Like grief and love, changing your diet has various emotional stages that one has to pass through.  Not everybody experiences each stage to an equal extent - some people breeze through one or more stages, while many get stuck, or arrested, at some stage.  In case you're wondering how far you've come and how far you have to go, here's a brief description of the process:

1.  Awareness:  It's hard to believe it now, but there was a time when you'd never heard of a paleo diet.  At some point you ran across Art De Vany's blog, or Mark Sisson's, or, God help you, Richard Nikoley's, and you became... aware.  You probably lumped it into the part of your brain where you store information about the grapefruit diet, that popular French diet, and a bunch of others that have come and gone over the years.  You've taken the first step towards a Paleo lifestyle.

2.  Skepticism:  Now you're hearing more about the Paleo diet and you have a knee jerk negative reaction.  After all, we aren't cavemen, are we?  Why should we eat like them?  Should we give up vaccines, cars, internet porn, and shaving while we're at it?  Are these people crazy?

3.  Tentative steps:  You've heard many reasoned, well thought out arguments in favor of the paleo diet.  Maybe you're coming from the low carb world and you're wondering if maybe mayonnaise shouldn't be the cornerstone of your food intake.  Maybe you've been living the low fat dream and are starting to wonder why bagels make you ravenously hungry.  Maybe you're reading more of the science and are wondering if maybe increases in intestinal permeability really could be causing an inflammatory response... 

Intrigued, you start cutting back on grains, even (gosh!) whole grains.  You cut seed oils out of your diet.  You stand in front of your freezer, throat tightening with grief, and carefully spoon the contents of your last pint of Ben & Jerry's into your piehole, sucking back every last drop, even the last few melted drops, salty and bitter with your own tears.

4.  Success:  Now you're cooking with gas.  Your food cravings have diminished.  You can see your toes without a mirror for the first time in years.  Your asthma/ arthritis/ acne/ erectile dysfunction/ whatever has cleared up and you feel good, perform better, and are healthier than you've been since a teenager.  You are once again a proverbial kid in a candy store, and your candy store is life.

5.  Anger:  You start to wonder why you spent 5, 10, 15, or more years stuffing yourself with whole wheat pasta and margarine (hopefully not together) on the advice of your doctors.  You think about obese/ sick/ diabetic/ dead family members who do or did the same, starving on a low fat, grain based diet as they got sicker and sicker, following the conventional wisdom to the best of their ability, all because the medical authorities are so deeply in the pockets of big agribusiness that they can't see the sun anymore.  You hear stories about impoverished hunter gatherers enjoying relatively good health and look around a mall and notice how rare good health is in America... and you get angry.  Really angry.  You start to give your baker the evil eye.  You spit on the sidewalk in front of your local Subway.  You might even drop a few f-bombs on your blog.

6.  Zealotry:  High on your newfound health and quality physique you now understand what needs to be done:  if the medical community, the government, and the conventional wisdom won't force people to eat the right way, it's all up to you.  You start by "suggesting" that co-workers and family members skip the bun and just eat the hot dog and casually e-mailing links to U.S. Wellness to your friends and neighbors.  Soon you're yelling at people for buying you a birthday cake, assaulting the guy who drives the Hostess delivery truck, and frothing at the mouth when your co-workers bring in boxes of Duncan Donuts to share.  You tell everyone within earshot - every last man, woman, and child, whether they're sharing your elevator or sitting in a stall next to yours in a public restroom - how they ought to be eating.

You have, in short, become an asshole.  It's okay, you're not the only one.

7.  Stall:  Your initial progress starts to slow.  Perhaps you're just eating too much food as your cooking skills gets better, or you've gotten all you're going to get from the reduction in inflammation.  Maybe your cortisol is high from eating too little food (gosh darn it, paleo food is satisfying!  It can be hard to eat enough!)  Whatever the reason, you're doing well... but not as well as before.  You might even be losing a little of your urge to proselytize as you realize that you might not, in fact, have ALL the answers (just most of them).

8.  Tinkering:  This is where you begin to add foods back in that may not be strictly paleo (some people start this stage early).  It starts with dark chocolate and often slides into raw dairy, modest amounts of sugar, then larger amounts of sugar, ice cream, and eventually... Rice Krispie Treats.  Oh, the horror!  At this point you might find that as long as you stick to a core paleo diet - mostly paleo, completely avoiding a handful of really harmful foods - you do okay.  And you remember just how delicious Rice Krispie Treats are (if you're not in this stage yet, then trust me, they are delicious - really, really delicious).

9.  Lifestyle:  As you settle into a long term eating plan you might find yourself continuing to tinker - trading one fat for another, eating more or less coconut, eating more carbs, having some white rice once in a while, maybe even drinking a Diet Coke when the mood is right.  If you're lucky (and disciplined) you stay close enough to an ideal diet to maintain the body composition you want and perform as well as you want without letting your health markers get too far out of whack.  You're also able to indulge, at least a little bit, in treats you had been avoiding like the plague - as long as you stay away from the Big Bads, like gluten.


So where do you stand along the 9 steps?  Post to comments if you think I've missed a step.  I'm somewhere around 6 still... but I've always been slow to mature!

The Tendency to Over-Complicate

I am guilty of many sins, most of them irrelevant to this blog.  One that is relevant, however, is my tendency to over-complicate things.

I've been reading Mel Siff's classic book Supertraining.  It's a fantastic book, written like a textbook for a post-graduate course in exercise physiology.  It's not the book you give your mom when she wants to lose a few pounds - it's the book you give a strength coach when he wants to compare the physiological adaptions to various exercise programs of elite athletes.  It's full of graphs, technical jargon, and actual math.  Yes, I said it, math.

If you go through the book you'll find countless examples of studies that examine the results of training, done by advanced athletes, and refined to an amazing degree.  What I mean is there's nothing about how to get stronger - but there's a ton on how to increase a very specific aspect of strength, like maximal force output at a particular speed of motion and through a particular joint angle range.

If there's one take-home point to the book (and there are thousands, but I can't remember them all) it's specificity of adaption.  For example, getting very strong at moving a big weight slowly doesn't transfer to creating more force when moving quickly.  Developing long distance endurance doesn't transfer to maximal effort.  You get the idea.

The problem with reading the book this way - and the problem is with the reader trying to get a "take home point" out of a very dense informative text, not with anything Siff actually says - is that it's easy to forget that the research Siff is working with is primarily done with advanced athletes seeking to maximize performance.  It's exactly opposite to the problem with American research, which is primarily done on untrained college students.  Let me explain.

If you take an Olympic sprinter who can squat 400 lbs. and raise their squat to 450 you will very likely not make them any faster a runner.  The squat is too slow - what you need to do is increase their ability to put force into the ground in the incredibly brief contact period of a foot striking the ground during a sprint.  If all that required was a bigger squat then the best pound for pound squatters in the world would be the best sprinters in the world, and that's not true.  Squatting is not specific enough to sprinting.  So we learn that, recognize the truth in it, and take home the idea that squatting won't improve our sprint speed.  And maybe if we want to get faster we do lots of cool stuff but leave squatting heavy out of our routine.

But if you take a 40 year old sedentary person who can't even do a full body weight squat, get them into the gym, and get their squat up to 200 lbs., their sprint speed will probably increase dramatically.  Why?  Because a sedentary person's lack of basic strength is a huge limiting factor in their quest to build up running speed.  Increase that squat to 300 lbs and you'll get an improvement, but not as much.  Get that to 400 lbs and you might not see any further increases to speed at all.

If you want to punch harder and can't do a pushup then building up the strength to do 10 strict pushups will make you a better puncher.  Building up to doing 100 pushups - not so much.  Developing a solid one arm pushup will help also - but maybe not as much as getting good at clapping pushups (which, since they require faster movements, are close to punching in the adaptions they force).

It's easy to read through Supertraining or other higher level works on strength and think that we need to so very complex sports specific exercises to get better - that we need very advanced training with bands, Kaiser air driven resistance machines, and fancy routines to improve.  And we might be right - if we're elite athletes.  Except we're not.  For most of us (and I'm definitely including me), we just need to get stronger, more flexible, and more fit.  Most of us can improve our karate with fairly basic routines that focus on pushups, squats of some kind, chinups or rows, and a handful of plank varieties.  Heck, most of us can get better doing crunches, as long as our backs are in good shape. 

The danger is that getting too hung up on the sports specific mantra can paralyze us.  We can give up on too much - avoiding strength training out of fear that it will slow us down, waiting to develop the most advanced workout possible before doing anything.  And most of us don't need the most advanced workout - we just need a workout. 

So keep learning and keep refining your routines to make them more applicable to karate - to improve your performance in karate and to make you resistant to the injuries incurred during karate.  But while you're figuring out what that routine should look like do something to get stronger, more flexible, and more fit.  It will most likely help more than it will hurt!

Can Cavemen Hug Trees? Paleo, Veganazis, & the Environment

Among many anti-Paleo arguments the veganazis pass around is that the paleo diet is somehow bad for the environment.  They argue that paleo foods use up a disproportional amount of our limited resources - either land or energy - and so eating this way is somehow unfair to others or not sustainable.  This line of thinking is wrong, and muddled, in a variety of ways, and since I haven't attacked a veganazi in a while I figured I'd take the time to do it here.

The first gross mistake made by your typical veganazi is to assume that the beef we are eating is itself grain fed.  This is consistent, at least - after all, the veganazis don't want you to eat your natural diet, they certainly don't care if a cow eats its natural diet.  The problem is that this assumption grossly distorts the energy and land calculations in the veganazi's favor.  Let me explain.

Suppose Abe needs 2000 Calories/day to sustain his life.  Suppose he gets that from corn and soy products primarily.  It wouldn't be too hard to calculate how much land was used, for how long, to grow that food, and how much energy it took to harvest, process, and ship that food to him (I don't have those numbers, and I won't look them up, but I think we can agree that we could get some kind of average number on these counts).  Now suppose Abe's identical twin brother Ben also needs 2000 Calories/day to sustain his life, but he gets his in the form of grain fed beef.  How much land and energy would be used/consumed getting him his daily allotment?  I don't know, but it would have to be much more than Abe's.  Why?  Because you know that to get 2000 Calories of beef, that cow had to consume much more than 2000 Calories worth of grains (that's simple thermodynamics, really).  How much more?  I'm not worried about a number right now.  Plus the cow needed land of its own to live (in addition to the land used to provide it with the grains it ate) and energy to ship the grain to the cow, to process the cow, and to ship the meat to Ben.  However much land and energy are used, it has to be more than was used feeding Abe.

The hitch is that if Ben eats grass fed beef then the energy and land cost of producing the corn and soy his cow ate would be exactly zero.  Instead, the cow would be eating grass that grows just outside his barn.  That drastically changes the energy and land cost of the beef, while making the beef itself a much more nutritious product.  And tastier, but that's another story.

Is it possible that Ben's energy and land costs would be higher than Abe's even if he's fed exclusively on grass fed beef?  I have no idea.  But if large swaths of the population switched from corn and soy to beef we wouldn't just be adding to the burden on the earth - we'd need more grassland from the cows but we'd also need a lot less land to grow soy and corn.  And land on which cattle graze is a heck of a lot friendlier to the environment than fields factory farmed to produce soy and corn.

Next the veganazi tells you that we couldn't support the current population on beef, because there isn't enough room to feed all the cows we'd need to raise.  Is he right?  Again, I have no idea, nor do I care.  Let's assume for a moment that it is true - that there isn't enough land that can grow grass to support all the cows we'd need to feed the human race a beef based diet.  Even then, the fact that we don't have the resources to feed a diet to every last person on earth has nothing to do with the healthfulness or personal benefits of that diet.  I mean, suppose some rare truffle only found on the upper plains of the Ukraine could cure cancer.  Would the fact that there isn't enough of the truffle to give to every cancer inflicted person have anything to do with its benefits?  If a researcher discovered this truffle and shouted "eureka!" would we keep his discovery out of the scientific journals because he couldn't cure everyone?

The veganazi also assumes that we should be worried that, suddenly, the great majority of people in this world will start thinking for themselves and making rational choices about diet to maximize their own health. Do you really think that's a likely scenario? And if it did, by some miracle, happen, would the problems that ensue really outweigh the benefits?

The veganazi's argument (that we couldn't feed everyone on a paleo diet) really means this: we should accept a less than optimal diet, less than optimal health, for ourselves and our children, and lie to them and to one another about it, so that nobody winds up better off than anybody else.  It's the same weird socialist impulse that would say Ferrari shouldn't build sports cars because there are poor people who can't afford them.  And, presumably, nobody should have iPads (at least not until Apple can provide one to every person on earth) or drive cars or wear designer clothes. 

A meat based diet is healthier, by far, than a plant based one.  I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is on this one - I pay a lot of money for my high quality food.  If the paleo diet grows in popularity, good food  might get more expensive.  That doesn't change the fact that it's healthier, it just means I'm going to have to make sure to earn enough money to afford it.  And, as the demand for grass fed beef grows, you can bet lots of entrepreneurial people are going to work out ways to raise grass fed beef in more economical ways.  And if it is true that many people are too poor to afford a meat-based diet, I will feel bad for them, but there are lots of wonderful things that poor people can't afford - that's what the word "poor" means.  They also can't drive nice cars or live in big houses or visit the best doctors.  That's how the system works. The alternative to rationing high quality goods is to deny them to everyone - and how does that make us better of?

If you care about the environment, buy grass fed, locally raised beef and organic produce.  You'll have a much, much smaller carbon footprint and energy footprint than any veganazi chowing down on factory farmed soy products, grains, and other plants that are harvested by gas guzzling machines and shipped in gas guzzling trucks to your supermarket.

And if the time comes when everyone wants to eat beef, and the soy is rotting in the fields as ranchers rush to plant grass for their hungry herds, and the price of meat starts to go up, at least we'll save a ton of money on our health care bills, old age homes, joint replacements, oxygen tanks, and escalators.  Maybe it would all even out in the end.

Knowledge vs. Intelligence

I was talking to a friend at work the other day about smart people who don't think things through and dumb (or less intelligent) people who become very insightful by thinking correctly.  This dovetailed into other thoughts I had about martial arts, and I figured what the heck, let me blog a little amateur philosophy at you.

Here's my thesis:  if you want to make good rational choices you need to have two specific beliefs or characteristics.

By choices I mean choices of what to do or of what to believe.  Both are choices, though they're made differently.  A rational choice is a choice made for reasons.  Think of it as a choice you could defend.  Somebody who, for example, decides which way to go at an intersection by flipping a coin may in fact be making a correct choice - that is, they may end up going the right way.  But it isn't rational in the sense that it's a choice supported by good reasoning.

If you want to make good rational choices you have to mix humility and arrogance in a very specific way.  You have to be humble about what you know.  If you think you know everything already you won't spend the time and energy needed to both fact-check the things you think you know and explore the things that are outside your knowledge base.  This is a pretty classic idea in martial arts - the parable of the student and the full cup of water is exactly about this (very briefly, a student is compared to a full cup of water, it's so full there's no room for more knowledge, so the student can't be taught).

The second thing you need is to be arrogant about how smart you are.  What do I mean by smart?  A smart person is able to quickly reach good conclusions from basic data.  It's like processing power in a computer.  Intelligence is a very complicated thing, and I don't mean to oversimplify, but you have to believe that given the same basic set of facts you are as capable as anybody of finding the patterns in those facts, discriminating between the trends in the right way, and drawing truthful conclusions from those elements.

Why do you need to think you're smart?  Because if you think a person or a group of people (doctors, strength coaches, martial arts instructors) are smarter than you and know more than you then you have no reason to think for yourself.  It would make far more sense to just do what they tell you to do.  Think about it - if your doctor knows more about bodies than you and is smarter, then he/she is going to reach far better conclusions than you will.  So why would you think for yourself?

On the other hand, if you can recognize that your doctor or strength coach may know more than you but may not be as smart, then you have motivation to study the basic facts behind the matter at hand (Should I take statins?  Should I back squat to improve my karate?  Should I pre-load my hips before strikes while doing kata?) because you'll think that you might reach a better (more truthful) conclusion than your doctor/ coach/ instructor.

If you think you're smarter and more knowledgeable than everybody, however, you'll have no motivation to think or work through any of your questions, because you'll think you already have the answers.  Which gives us the full cup of water analogy - if you already know everything then you can't learn anything new.

When I say you should be arrogant I don't mean that you should sneer in your doctor's face or act disrespectfully to your sensei.  I only mean that you have to maintain an internal belief that you can, if pressed, come up with conclusions as good as or better than anyone's, including your instructors.  You have to read an article by Mike Boyle and say to yourself, "clearly this guy knows more than me - his head is filled with observations from training hundreds of athletes for many years that I can't hope to match - but if I can learn from him what he's observed I have a chance to understand exercise as well as he does, if not better."

Be arrogant about how smart you are and humble about how much you already know.

And be smart enough not to wear your arrogance on the outside!

Osu.

Reasons NOT to go Paleo

Check out this week's Paleo rodeo; some good stuff in there, as usual, from all over the paleo blogging world.

I'm continuing the Great Leucine Experiment.  Some thoughts:

1. The leucine tastes much better if it's dissolved in at least 12 oz. of warm water.
2. It still tastes pretty bad.  It also smells bad.  
3. I think it's working, but I've been less than perfect diet-wise, so it's hard to tell.  I'm also handicapped by my libraphobia.  Since I can't get on a scale it's hard to discern small fluctuations in bodyfat, especially when you add in the problem of my salt intake varying so widely (I don't watch my sodium intake very much).  If I eat a few ounces of prosciutto on occasion I'm pretty sure I'm going to retain water the next day, so that's going to disguise any visual evidence of fat loss.  Overall, it's hard to tell what's working and what isn't when you have an experimental population of 1.

I went shopping the other day (not my favorite activity) and realized that there are many good reasons not to start or continue a paleo diet.  Here are a few:

• You may receive unusual attention from the opposite sex.  This can be very disconcerting as well as being hard on your existing relationships (perhaps your marriage).  Let's face it, hotness is a curse (so I hear).
• You will likely need to buy new clothes.  I am in the midst of replacing all my size 38 pants with size 32's. I also need a new suit and some new shirts.  Thank goodness my shoes still fit.  This is time consuming, expensive, and bad for the environment (throwing away old clothes and getting new ones).  Sorry, environment!
• Many clothes off the rack will fit you poorly, if at all.  You may find the waists of regular (even loose fit) pants are too loose while the butt and thighs are tight.  Buy a belt!  Sorry, fashion!
• Some people will hate you for effortlessly losing weight - you're sabotaging their ability to excuse their own obesity.  Some will hate you overtly, others will subvert you by encouraging moderation (have just one donut!) or splurges (have some cake, it's your birthday - surely one piece of cake won't hurt!)
• As you age, your continued interest in physical activity will put you further and further out of touch with your peers.  Your old friends will gradually spend more and more time sitting in place and, eventually, in wheelchairs, while you pursue kickboxing, rock climbing, Zumba, and other high intensity activities.  This can be very alienating.  Sorry, friendship!
• Your continued mental vitality will make you acutely aware of how many stupid people there are in the world, preventing you from enjoying the relative bliss of a long, slow slide into dementia.  Sorry, peace of mind!
• You may find yourself annoyed and angry when you read articles by registered dieticians recommending that people feed their kids "heart healthy whole grains" instead of, say, bacon.  Knowledge is a difficult burden to bear.
• With your newfound energy you may find yourself doing more cleaning, home repair, and organizing, instead of living in a disintegrating craphole.  This is great as long as you enjoy cleaning, home repair, and organizing - which I don't.  
• Your doctor will try to convince you to eat more grains and vegetable oil despite the fact that your blood panels show you're in better health, by far, than (s)he is.

I could go on, but I won't.

Stick to your guns!  Eating right is difficult, but it offers serious rewards.  Try a strict paleo diet for 30 days and see how you feel.  See if that feeling is worth more to you than the joys of having toast with breakfast.  It's your body; your call.

Grouping Variables: Scientific Fallacy of the week

First, please read this post about a study on stroke risk.

I read this the other day and got to thinking (I know, dangerous).  There are a lot of ways in which scientific research has steered us wrong over the last 50 years or so that share a very specific commonality that I haven't addressed much before.  In all of them some variable was used and compared to some outcome - positive, like protein synthesis, or negative, like heart attack raate.  In all of them the variable measured failed us because it wasn't specific enough.  Let me explain with what we used to call in my field a thought experiment:

Suppose, for example, that red (and only red) M&M's contained some toxic chemical that caused liver cancer after prolonged exposure, and that nobody knew this.  Suppose some intrepid and well meaning researcher was concerned about liver cancer and spent a lifetime examining epidemiological records (perhaps by studying data collected about the diets and health over a long period of time for a large group of nurses, or doctors, or teachers) to search for possible risk factors for liver cancer.  At some point this researcher might either notice or suspect that chocolate eating was linked to liver cancer - maybe he has some theory to explain this, maybe not.  So he compares the statistics surrounding chocolate eating to liver cancer rates - what do you think he'll find?

Keep in mind that in my imaginary example red (and only red) M&M's contain some unknown substance that causes liver cancer at a moderate rate (that is, not everyone who eats them gets liver cancer, but some do).  I think it's clear our researcher will find a nice correlation of some kind between chocolate eating and liver cancer - people who eat lots of chocolate will get more liver cancer, all else being accounted for, than those who eat none.  Why?  Because people who eat no chocolate certainly aren't eating any red M&M's, while some of those who eat lots and lots of chocolate eat some of that chocolate in the form of red M&M's.  The chocolate eaters are more likely to be exposed to our imaginary toxin.

What would happen if this guy did some real science?  Suppose he took two groups of people and had one group eat more chocolate on purpose than the other, while otherwise keeping all the variables the same.  Some of the chocolate eaters would probably choose M&M's, at least some of the time, and would also eat the red ones.  Some might eat only organic dark chocolate.  The M&M eaters would get cancer at a higher rate, but if the study only compares chocolate eaters to non-chocolate eaters then the rate of liver cancer in the chocolate-eaters would be higher - but ONLY becasue the red M&M eaters would get more liver cancer.  By not specifying the type or source of chocolate you wouldn't be able to tell that from reading the study.

You can imagine what would happen next - this guy would be on the cover of Time magazine telling everybody to stop eating chocolate, the chocolate industry would go into a nosedive, health conscious people would stop eating chocolate.  People might get sicker on average - because they'd be missing out on the health benefits of good chocolate (dark chocolate) in a mistaken attempt to avoid liver cancer, not knowing that they should just be avoiding red M&M's.  It might be decades before doctors were willing to look at new, more sophisticated studies and realize that the problem isn't chocolate in general and recommend that people eat chocolate again, just not the red M&M type of chocolate.

What in real life has run a course like this?  Take fat for a great example.  Good science shows that saturated fat is bad for your heart - if by saturated fat you mean saturated and trans fats grouped together.  Why?  Because some of the people who eat more [saturated and trans fat together] are going to eat a lot of trans fats - and they are bad for you in various ways.  So if you study them together you might blame both saturated and trans fats for causing heart disease when in reality all of the damage is coming from just the trans fats.  This has really happened, in this country, over the past 40 or so years.

Another example?  Carbs.  You can look at high carb diets and show that they lead to insulin resistance.  Then you find groups that eat lots of carbs and don't get insulin resistance!  Why not?  Because it's not carbs, it's fructose.  Carb eaters in general get more fructose than non-carb eaters - but you can eat carbs from non-fructose sources (think starch, like sweet potatoes) and not develop insulin resistance (I'm slightly oversimplfying this, but the truth is close).  Carbs get a bad rap because some carbs cause health problems.  Then health conscious people avoid all carbs, when some might be better off getting some starch every day as long as they get it from non-fructose containing non-grain sources.

Want more examples?  Branched chain amino acids.  It was discovered something like 20 years ago that some proteins cause a boost in muscle protein synthesis.  So people ate tons of those proteins.  Then it was determined that it's not the protein as a whole that's signalling the protein synthesis, it was the branched chain amino acids (BCAA's) that were doing it.  Then people could take the BCAA's alone and possibly skip the whole proteins.  Recently it was discovered that it wasn't the BCAA's - it was the leucine, which is one of the BCAA's, that was doing all the signalling work.  Now those whole proteins and BCAA powders did contain lots of leucine, so the science on them wasn't wrong, it just wasn't specific enough.  The dangers of these misunderstandings aren't significant, this didn't cause widespread health damage, it's just another example.

Want more?  The study I linked to at the top of the page is a good one, and we've seen various versions of this recently.  Processed red meat is like the red M&M of the meat world.  If you measure total meat consumption against health risks for different stuff you're going to see a correlation - because some (or many) of the people eating a lot of meat are getting it processed.  The harm done by the processed meat will make the meat-eating group on average sicker than those who eat no meat - even though the individuals who happen to eat just fresh meat are just fine!  This study actually took sensitive enough data to recognize that, although the idiots writing the conclusions and the bigger idiots writing the news article about the study didn't care enough to include that.

Want more?  Omega-3 fats.  DHA and EPA are omega-3 fatty acids that are super important to your health - you need a good amount of them, and a good ratio of those fats to omega-6's, to keep systemic inflammation under control.  So lots of people go out and eat lots of omega-3 fats.  But not all omega-3 fats are DHA and EPA or are even turned into DHA and EPA in your body in significant amounts.  So people who hear that omega-3's are good for them, then go out and guzzle flax seed oil (which contains omega-3 fats, just not the kind that humans can easily turn into useful forms), they aren't doing themselves any good at all and might be doing lots of harm.  All because they weren't specific enough.

I'm sure there are other cases like this, I just can't think of any right now.  Post to comments if you have others.

Take home message: science is hard and specificity is important.  Pay close attention to the fine print in these studies, especially before you go around changing your eating habits for the worse. 

(Please note that the red M&M thing was just a way to explain my point - I have no reason to think that M&M's of any color are especially harmful.)

HIT vs. SST: What's the deal and what's at stake?

New Rodeo is up - go there and check out the latest and greatest in the world of paleo blogging!

Today I'm going to explain to you one of the biggest controversies in contemporary strength and conditioning theory and give you my take on it.  There's a practical take home message, too, and if you only care about that, scroll down...  way down...

The Exercises:

To explain the controversy I'm going to compare the training effects of two similar but different exercises, the deadlift and the power clean.   Why?  Because both work the glutes, my favorite muscle.

To do the deadlift you approach a loaded bar that's resting on the floor.  Walk up to the bar, squat down, reach down and grab the bar in both hands.  Then stand up, lifting the bar as you do.  At the end of the movement you are standing upright with the bar in both hands, your arms straight down, the bar about even with the tops of your thighs.

The deadlift is typically a slow, steady type of movement.  A heavy deadlift can take up to 10 seconds to complete.  The glutes are the primary mover, but the quads, hamstrings, spinal erectors, lats, biceps, and grip are all also heavily involved.  To get good at the deadlift you have to get good at generating a high peak force in your glutes - you don't have to get there quickly, but you have to wind up pulling really hard and for a sustained period of time.  So your glutes get stronger - add tissue (muscle protein) - and your nervous system gets better at recruiting the glutes and contracting them in coordination with all those other muscle groups I mentioned, all for a fairly sustained period of time.  I don't think many strength coaches would disagree with anything I put here, but if you do please post to comments.

The power clean starts in a similar fashion.  You approach a bar resting on the floor, squat down, and grab it.  You start to lift it, looking for a few inches like somebody deadlifting.  But once the bar gets to about mid-shin height you have to explosively accelerate the bar - really snapping the hips into full extension, as if you were jumping off the ground - and give it enough momentum that it basically flies up to chest height.  You hold on, but your arms aren't really pulling up once that "jump" happens.  At chest height you catch the bar, with your elbows under the bar and the bar resting at your collarbones.

Obviously, nobody can power clean with the same weight they can deadlift.  You use a lighter weight but lift it much faster - a power clean, whether successful or not, doesn't take a full second.  Like the deadlift the primary mover is the glutes, with assistance from all the same other muscles.  Unlike the deadlift you aren't generating a high, sustained force - you're very quickly generating a very large force.  That's the big difference - in the deadlift you ramp up to a very large, sustained force, in the power clean you very quickly go from nothing to a very short, intense burst of force.

I think it's clear that the neurological adaptations induced by the two exercises are different.  Grinding out a slow, max force movement is different that very quickly exerting a burst of force.  In both cases mostly similar muscles are trained through a mostly similar range of motion, however.

The controversy:

Now we get to the controversy.  Everyone would agree that the best way to improve your deadlift is to deadlift and the best way to improve your power clean is to practice power cleans.  But what if you want to improve, say, your punching power?  Suppose you're already practicing your punch.  Punching power comes in part from extending the hip - would adding deadlifts to your routine be equally useful in improving your punch as would adding in the power clean?  Remember, in a punch you're doing a rapid snap of the hip, not a slow, grinding extension.  So on the face of it the power clean certainly seems more similar.

One camp, the HIT (High Intensity Training) crowd notable among them (Body by Science, superslow training, those guys), would say that the deadlift is the better choice.  Being slower and less technical the deadlift is safer (a steady high force is safer than a sudden burst of very high force).  Since both work the glutes you'd get muscular development from either exercise.  The HIT advocates would then point to a bunch of studies that show that neurological adaptions are specific to a movement - that is, learning to fire your glutes fast doing a power clean wouldn't translate at all to firing them fast doing a punch.  So since either exercise develops the muscles, and neither one will help with the neurological ability to use that muscle while punching, you're better off doing the safer exercise in the weight room and count on punching practice in the dojo to push the neurological adaptations you're looking for (the ability to very rapidly contract the glutes).

The other camp, the Sports Specific Training camp or the Functional Training group, might say that the research the HIT Jedi's pointed to wasn't well done or clear enough.  They'd say that even though the power clean isn't exactly the same movement as a punch, training in a movement pattern - like forcefully and very quickly extending the hip - will definitely have carryover to any other movement that incorporates that pattern.  So doing power cleans makes you better at forcefully and quickly extending the hip whenever you need to do it - they'll make you a better jumper, give you a quicker first step, and make you better at punching.

The SST group would say that the most important part of punching better is to practice punching (the HIT crowd would agree).  They'd also say that if you want to support that practice you can do other movements - like the power clean - that make you better at doing parts of the punch as long as they're done in the right range of motion and the right speed (explosive, not grinding).  They'd tell you to also do anti-rotational core work - to help you learn to keep your core stiff during the rotation of punching.  They might also point to some research studies - honestly I have no idea, nor do I care, because most studies done in this field are so poor that they give us no good information.

You should know me well enough by now to suspect that I have a position on this issue.  And you're right, I do.  I used to be in the HIT camp on this, but I've changed.  Why?  The kettlebell swing.

Like the power clean, the kettlebell swing includes a very fast, forceful contraction of the glutes, a lot like what the glutes do when you punch (Pavel Tsatsouline has famously said that the swing is as close as you can get to throwing a punch in the weight room).  When I started doing swings - when I started really focusing on my glutes, on the hip snap into full extension that you need to drive the kettlebell up - my punch almost instantly improved.  I could feel my hip driving the punch much more clearly than I had before.

Was that just because I'd strengthened the glute muscle?  Maybe.  But I doubt it.  I had a very strong subjective experience of an enhanced mental connection to the glute - I could feel it work more easily and control it more easily.  I could also fire it more easily.  I am convinced that there was significant neurological carryover between the swing and the punch.  Despite the research that says I'm wrong.

There are other arguments involved.  The HIT advocate can't be right that neurological adaptations are perfectly specific - that there is no carryover between one movement and another.  Take an experienced martial artist - one who has been punching and striking for years - and teach them a strike with a part of the hand they've never used in their art - knifehand, koken, palm, whatever.  How long will it take them to master it?  As long as a beginner doing it for the first time?  I doubt it.  The master's nervous system already has most of the biomechanics down - movement at the hip and torso is probably almost the same as what they've been doing - and the change from one movement to another won't negate that mastery.

A HIT advocate would have you do slow, deliberate, safer movements in the gym to develop your muscles, then be explosive only when practicing your specific skill.  A Functional Training advocate would have you do explosive movements in the gym so you get better at moving explosively.

Take home message:

If you're in very poor shape you probably are better off doing slow, deliberate movements.  But once you get 12 or 24 weeks or a year of strength training under your belt you should focus on movements that make you move the way you want to move while fighting - explosive, with a very rapid development of force.  Don't overdo them, as there is an injury risk when you train with speed, but your karate will improve from sports specific training.

If you have no performance goals (aren't a martial artist) and are just working out for health, sticking to high tension (high weight) but more methodical movements (deadlifting vs. powerlifting) might be better for you.  You'll be able to more safely train, which is good, while keeping your fast twitch muscle fibers going, which you need so you'll be able to get out of your chair when you're 80.  And getting out of our chairs at 80 (and doing other physical stuff at 80, 90, and 100+)  is pretty much the ultimate goal.

Osu.

Hero of the Month: Bruce Lee

First of all, I apologize for the lapses in this series.  I have no excuse, really, other than laziness.

If you haven't heard of this month's hero, Bruce Lee...  Actually, I don't even know how to finish that statement.  Crawl out from under the rock you've been living under?  Carefully reach down and remove your head from your colon?  I'm not sure...

I will admit that many people might not understand how far reaching Lee's influence was.  Lee is probably best known for being one of the most charismatic and visually impressive martial arts movie stars in history - his popularity was extraordinary, and was partially responsible for the explosion of martial arts awareness in the US in the 70's.  He was not only popular but innovative as a film star.  His action scenes and even the structure of his films were vastly different from the work that had gone on before.  But even if he hadn't made a single movie Lee would still be an important figure in martial arts history:

1. He was one of the first to popularize cross training.  Lee studied not only different Asian martial arts but also Western boxing and fencing to try to cull out the best techniques for his own system.  He's been called the first mixed martial artist.  I can't say he was the first to do that, but he was certainly the most influential.
2. Lee was an early adoptee of weight training and cutting edge (for the time) fitness and nutrition ideas - remember, this was at a time when most people thought weightlifting would make you "musclebound" and inflexible.
3. He rigorously tested his ideas in combat, rather than accepting the old "my master taught me this way so this is the right way" ideology so prevalent in martial arts.  Lee was famous for taking on all challengers in no holds barred streetfights even while his fame grew as a movie star.

Bruce Lee was a scientist, a self-experimenter who constantly sought out new ideas in training and in fighting, tested them, and ruthlessly discarded the things that didn't work.  You can argue with some of his conclusions but you can't fault his methodology. 

There's a ton of material about Lee - movies about his life, biographies, and his own writings.  You can read inspiring stories - one after another - about his wife finding him on the floor in front of the television with a boxing match on while in a full split working a hand gripper in one hand with a book open in front of him.  He trained constantly - not jogging mile after mile, but working on his speed, his precision, and his art.  That combination of intellectual openness, work ethic, and intelligence made him a powerful force for change.

Lee's movies changed my life.  I was a kid during the kung fu explosion of the 70's, and the central theme of the martial arts film (which to me was always that with hard work and correct training a person could overcome literally anything) might never have trickled into my consciousness if Lee's films hadn't pushed so far into the public awareness.  Now what's interesting about this is that we can imagine that someone like Jackie Chan or Jet Li, had they been around earlier, might have had the same cultural impact if kung fu films hadn't been popularized by others before them.  But neither of those individuals were anywhere near as accomplished or innovative as actual martial artists.  Lee was, in that sense, an awesome talent.

And my hero.  This month.

The Wizard, The Scarecrow, and the Paleo-Hating Munchkins

Lately I've been noticing the stirrings of a Paleo backlash in the fitness/nutrition community.  Not that the backlash is just starting - I have no idea, to be honest, how entrenched it is - but I can guarantee that it's going to get a lot worse.  As more and more people use some version of the Paleo diet to look, feel, and perform better, more and more public authorities on nutrition (doctors on TV, nutritionists, journalists) are going to write articles and give talks about how misguided it is.  You will read these articles, your friends will read them, and your family members will read them.  You may or may not be swayed by some of the things these Paleo-haters will write, but I guarantee members of your family and circle of friends will start to think that you're killing yourself by eating the way you evolved to eat and avoiding modern innovations like "heart healthy whole grains" and the statins that come with them.

The Paleo-haters will use a number of tactics in their arguments.  They'll argue that you can't poop without fiber (because if you eat a grain based diet and are sufficiently mineral deficient you can't, and they can't imagine what it feels like to NOT be mineral deficient).  They'll simply lie and say that dietary saturated fat is harmful to your cardiovascular system.  They'll say a lot of things.  One of the most common tactics I've seen (and I can guarantee you'll see more of) is the straw man argument.  Now it's time for a little logic lesson (in another life I actually taught classes in logic, so I'm licensed to discuss this in public).

The basic format of a straw man argument is that you attach a weak claim or position to your opponent, then tear that weak claim apart, then claim victory over your opponent.  We see this in politics all the time - some candidate is pro-choice, for example, and  his enemies will make campain ads that say "Candidate X hates babies and wants all life to end."  Well, that's not exactly his position, but since baby hating is so horrid and indefensible, the candidate is lessened in the eyes of the voters.  You'll see, "Paleo authority Y thinks we should live like cavemen and stop wearing clothes," when in fact that authority wants us to eat our natural diet and has nothing against clothes (shoes might be another story...). 

Here's a short list of the things you're going to be hearing and seeing if you start a paleo diet (some of which are straw man arguments, some of which are not):

So you're living like a caveman now?  You won't immunize your kids or go to the hospital if your appendix bursts?  This is classic straw man at work.  While I'm sure some Paleo diet proponents are against vaccinations, that's not the position of the majority of them.  The Paleo diet just means that we're susupicious of foods that haven't been a big part of our evolutionary history, not that we eschew all modern conveniences or innovations with a proven track record (like trauma medicine and polio vaccinations).

How can you follow that diet when we don't even know what paleolithic people ate?  This is sort of true but both misguided and irrelevent.  We don't know exactly what paleolithic people ate - I'm sure the diet varied from place to place and over time with changing climatic conditions.  Even accounting for that, it's hard to be certain about the exact ratios - did they eat entire animals or did they eat the fatty parts first (as I suspect)?  How much of different types of vegetation did they eat?  The thing is that this argument misses the central point of Paleo eating.  We may not know exactly what they did eat, but we know for certain many things that they didn't eat.  No grains, for example (the technology to process grains and cook them is relatively recent).  No nightshades (they're Western Hemisphere plants, they didn't exist in the places where the bulk of our evolution took place).  No refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners (this should be obvious).  So to be suspicious of those foods does NOT require us to absolutely know exactly how paleolithic peoples ate.

The primates that are our closest animal relatives are vegan, so we are obviously "meant" to be vegan as well.  This one you'll hear a lot from... vegans.  I'm not going to get into a huge debate about how many bugs or other animals chimps or apes eat - they do, but I don't care.  Here's a newsflash for you:  you are not a chimp (unless you are, in fact, a chimp, in which case I apologize, and kudos for learning to read!).  Chimps are related to us but have followed a distinctly divergent evolutionary path.  They have much larger guts than we do (room for lots of bacteria to process leaves and plants into usable nutrients), smaller brains relative to bodyweight (reducing the need for essential fatty acids), and can spend all day (or most of the day) chowing down on plants, which are not nutrient dense, to get the food they need.  Humans evolved thanks to eating meat - only the nutrient density of meat allowed our ancestors to support theirr energy-hungry and fat-hungry brains (try to develop a human brain with flax oil - not gonna happen).  It was meat eating that allowed us to become human.  Apes can eat leaves and twigs all day, and bacteria in their guts turn those into fats their bodies can use for energy.  Our guts are too short for this to work.  If we want that energy, we have to eat butter... or something.  If you had the gut of a chimp you could thrive as a vegan.  Otherwise, watch out.

You're using the term "Paleolithic" incorrectly - that term refers to the period from X years ago to... blah, blah blah.  Answer:  Who cares?  Seriously.  I'm not an anthropologist.  I have no idea what the word "paleo" really means in terms of actual years - I have spent exactly 0 hours looking into that issue.  The point isn't the correct use of the word - the point is that there was a lifestyle and eating pattern that distinguished our evolutionary ancestors from other primates, that allowed us to evolve, and it's pretty obvious that after a few million years we'd be well adapted to that eating pattern, and it focused on eating whatever animals we could hunt or scavenge and whatever vegetables we could find by foraging.  If we're calling it by the wrong name, so be it.  Let the academics worry about it.  Who cares if the eating style that makes us feel better and be healthier is mislabeled?

But Paleolithic humans only lived to be 35.  I think I've addressed this before.  It's simply wrong, and it's based on listening to people who don't understand basic math.  Paleolithic era humans (and primitive hunter gatherers through today) may have had an average lifespan that was much lower than ours, but that's because their child mortality rate was much higher than ours and their trauma medicine was much worse.  A badly broken leg in primitive conditions is often a death sentence - today, not so much.  So if three kids are born to hunter gatherers and one dies in infancy, one is murdered or gets mauled by a bear and dies at 40, and one dies in his sleep at 80, the average lifespan will be 40.  Can we infer from that number that their diet causes heart disease?  Absolutely not.  Lots of studies of both paleolithic remains and contemporary hunter gatherers living without modern medicine show that those people are almost free of the diseases of aging (heart disease, diabetes, arthritis) that plague modern man and that they live a nice long time barring injury, infection, or violence.

We didn't evolve - God slapped us down here just over 5,000 years ago, and He (or She) planted a fossil record and put vestigial limbs in animals and created a detailed mitochondrial DNA trail to falsify evolution to test our faith.  If someone pulls this one out on you, don't argue.  Pick up your drink and walk away.  There is nothing you can say or do that will help in any way whatsoever.  The ship of reason has sailed.  If someone is willing to rationalize away the quantity and quality of evidence supporting evolution then no possible evidence in favor of any diet will convince them.

You're just jumping on the latest bandwagon.  Well, okay, that's fair.  But the paleo diet is like Naruto - it's popular because it's good.  I know it's cooler to be into things that are fringe or counter to convention, and it's sad in that sense that Paleo is getting more and more mainstream, but that in itself is not a reason to think it's bad.  It just means that us Paleo eaters aren't as cool as we'd like to be.

But I need to eat every 2.5 hours or I pass out.  Let's say this is true.  Do you think that's your natural state of being or is it the result of you having trained yourself to consume food 6 times a day?  Do you really think that our hunter-gatherer ancestors would fall unconscious to the ground every time they spent 3 hours without food (say, during a bad hunting day)?  Without getting all National Geographic on you, do you really think we'd still be around as a species if that happened?  Try going without food for a few hours at a time until you've built up the ability to burn bodyfat for fuel.  Then you too can go 20 hours without food without skipping a beat - that's what I do!

I need carbs to function at the highest level.  Maybe, maybe not.  But regardless, this is another straw man - the Paleo diet is not necessarily low carb.  I personally eat a moderate carb diet - it's Paleo because the carbs come from fruits, veggies, and root veggies, not grains.  Most people who think they need to eat a lot of carbohydrate would be fine if they ate a low carb diet for a few weeks anyway.

We've clearly had enough time to adapt to neolithic foods - it's been 10,000 years!  This one is, to me, a little tricky.  Populations that ate dairy for 1,500 years did lose lactose intolerance - which is not to say that even those people don't suffer leaky gut syndrome from consuming dairy.  Maybe the prevalence of coeliac disease in the general population is a clue that this is wrong.  Maybe the fact that so many of us feel so much better, and get so much healthier, when we give up grains is the clue.  And maybe some people are adapted to a grain diet (though I doubt it) - how would one know?  The answer has to be to try Paleo eating for 30 days and see how you do.  If you feel better and are healthier, then none of the arguments that anybody brings up should hold any water with you.

Why do so many "experts" rail against the Paleo diet?  Well, think about it.  Suppose your name is Leigh and you're a fat loss "expert" or trainer or nutrtionist or whatever.  You have to either jump on the Paleo bandwagon yourself - and explain how you never realized before how much damage grains, legumes, and dairy do to your clients despite the abundance of research that's been published on the topic - or you have to rant against it.  Very few people have the intellectual integrity to recognize that they've been wrong, especially about some field that they supposedly know a lot about, and change their tune.  Plus, there's a financial issue.  Paleo is pretty simple to implement and doesn't depend on a whole lot of supplements or special powders.  If you plan to make a living doling out nutritional advice you don't want your clients reading Robb Wolf - they're not going to write you a check afterwards, they're going to follow his advice and get great results without you.

I'm sure you'll see more specious arguments against Paleo eating as time goes on.  When the munchkins try to bring you down you have two general choices.  You can study a ton of evolutionary biology and anthropology so you can answer their charges one by one.  OR you can use the 30 day test - just say, "hey, maybe you're right, but I tried it for 30 days and I feel better/ healthier - have you tried it?" every time someone challenges you.  Or just lift your shirt and show them your cheese grater abs.  Either way, don't let them derail you from your path to health.

Osu.

Correlation and Causation: NOT THE SAME

I've been meaning to write about this issue for a long time but didn't have a nice test case until now (I wasn't really looking for one).  I was listening to a podcast, the Performance Nutrition Show (9/26 episode if you care), which is mildly entertaining.  The host mentioned a study (no, I won't look up the reference and quote the abstract, there's no point).  The study looked at Vitamin D levels in people and found a correlation between Vitamin D levels and body fat (an inverse correlation, meaning people with higher Vitamin D levels tend to have lower bodyfat) and fitness (I didn't listen enough to remember how they measured fitness).

Sounds great, right?  Take a Vitamin D supplement, which is cheap, and watch the pounds melt away.  Except not really.  Why do researchers do studies like this if they don't really show anything?  Because they're easy.  Get a bunch of people to come in and do a bodyfat analysis and donate some blood, check their blood levels for a bunch of things, see if there's a match anywhere.  Quick and easy.

What's the problem?  Basically, the problem is that the fact that there is a correlation between two variables does not mean that either one causes the other.  And if we don't understand the causation then there's no  take-home message. 

Why do people with higher Vitamin D levels have less bodyfat?  Maybe Vitamin D improves body composition through some biochemical mechanism.  If so, fantastic.  But maybe people who spend more time in the sun, outside - being active, presumably - tend to be in better shape.  That is, some third variable - exercise outside - causes both lowered body fat and higher Vitamin D.  Maybe bodyfat somehow inhibits Vitamin D formation or removes Vitamin D from the blood.  That would be bad, and interesting to know about, but it wouldn't entail that adding dietary Vitamin D would lower bodyfat.  Maybe there's some genetic link between the ability to synthesize or absorb Vitamin D and the tendency to put on fat.  People who tend to absorb Vitamin D well also tend to stay lean.  I'm not arguing for any of these results - the point is that a statistical correlation doesn't tell you anything about which of these explanations is correct.  And whether fat people should start popping Vitamin D gelcaps and expect to lose weight does depend on which explanation is correct.

We see this in lots of situations, often to public detriment.  The classic examples are studies showing that vegans score better on some indicator of health, be it blood pressure, metabolic syndrome, rates of contracting cancer, whatever.  These are correlational studies.  They show that people who choose to be vegan tend to be healthier in some way.  Does that mean that you, the health seeking human, should become vegan?  Absolutely not.  The fact is that in our society most people who choose to become vegan do so for health reasons.  How many of them do you think smoke?  Or shoot heroin?  How many of them exercise, do yoga, take the medications they're supposed to take on time?  The type of person who cares enough about health to choose to eat such a crappy diet under the misguided belief that it will make them healthier is very likely to make lots of other difficult choices for their health - and most of them will probably work.  Not smoking?  Good for you.  Meditation?  Good for you.  Avoiding other carcinogens?  Good.  Exercise?  Probably good.  Do you see the point?  Veganism correlates with health despite the diet, not because of it.  Well, that's only partly true - if you compare vegan diets to standard American diet of eat whatever crap you can find at a fast food joint or a 7-11, then the vegan diet probably really is healthier for you.

How should these things be studied?  Take Vitamind D.  A large number of people with low Vitamin D should be found and analyzed - bodyfat, health, etc.  Half should be given Vitamin D supplements and half a placebo.  Neither the people nor the researchers should know who has which - you give everyone a number, the person giving out the pills doesn't know if they're giving the real stuff or the placebo, and the doctor doing the measurements doesn't know which group his subject belongs to.  After 3 or 6 months or a year or whatever do the same analysis over again.  Try to find some way to account for the people, placebo or not, who didn't take their pills.  Then see if the subjects getting the real pills do better than the ones who got a placebo.  That will give you some real insight into whether the higher levels of Vitamin D really improve anything - really cause a change in any of the other variables you're looking into.

Why don't researchers do this type of study more often?  To be honest, it's really expensive and really hard.  Instead of a one time interview and blood test you're asking people to stick to some plan for an extended period of time.  You have to wait a lot longer to publish your results - it might take a year to get your data, instead of a long weekend.  And since most people don't or won't understand the difference in value between the two studies (one type is worthless, the other priceless), you're not getting a lot of publicity bang for your buck.  You can still make headlines with the correlational study and tie up your lab assistants a lot less.  Which gives them more time to take in your dry cleaning or fetch you coffee.

Correlational studies are all but useless.  They do show interesting stuff - if two variables do correlate, that's worth knowing - as a guide for further research.  If D levels inversely correlate to bodyfat it means we should do another study - a double blind study - to see if there's a causal relationship.  That's all.  It shouldn't guide public behavior because it doesn't really show anything of value.

Really, correlational studies should be published in a separate journal that is only read by research scientists and to which the general public doesn't have legal access.  Guys in lab coats should look at them and say, "Hmm, that's interesting, I'll design a study to test that for a causal relationship so I can get published in a real science journal!"  Only after the real research is done should journalists be allowed to write about the study and my mom be allowed to read about it in the paper or whatever (my mom is actually a pretty bad example of the general public, being a Ph.D in chemistry and a high level radiochemist, but leave that alone for now).  We'd all be a lot better off not being bombarded by headlines ripped from poorly conducted studies with crappy conclusion sections.

Of course, that's not going to happen.  Science journalists aren't scientists - they're journalists.  That means they took journalism classes in college.  I'm sure some of them are super smart and talented, but frankly that's not exactly required to become a journalist.  The journalist's goal is to make their story exciting enough to be picked up by the media outlet, not to give you good information.  "Two things may be connected, but we're not sure how or if it really means anything" doesn't sell as well as "Meat causes cancer!" 

So be very, very wary of anything you read if it comes out of a correlational study.  This is especially relevant to anyone following a paleo or low carb diet!  There are a number of reasons for this, but one important reason is that health conscious people in the United States have gravitated to a low fat, low animal product, high carb vegetarian/vegan diet for the last 30 years or so.  Why?   Because the government told them to.  Which means that if you survey 100 people who eat a lot of meat a handful might be paleo dieters who eat only grass fed meat, exercise, and generally take care of themselves, but most of them are the people who have totally given up on health.  They eat their 12 oz. steak (from a grain fed, hormone and antibiotic laden cow) with bread covered in margarine, 3-4 bottles of beer, a piece of pie for dessert, and then step outside for a cigarette.  Followed up by more beer and potato chips cooked in vegetable oil while watching TV.  Who do you think will have more cancer, heart disease, and diabetes?  Do you think it's because of the meat?  Of course not - but the correlational study won't make that clear.  And that's why you regularly see headlines that claim that meat eating causes cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and erectile dysfunction.

You can glean information from scientific journals, but it's tricky.  Studies contrasting closely related populations with very different lifestyles - like people living a native lifestyle contrasted with their close relatives who have moved to another island and eat McDonald's three times a week - can be very illuminating.  Studies examining chemical mechanisms can be useful.  Common sense doesn't hurt (there's an excellent argument about animal fat intake made by Richard Nikoley - if eating lots of animal fat was bad, then anybody who lost a significant amount of fat would be harmed, since when you lose bodyfat it has to go through your bloodstream just as if you had eaten it.  Since people who lose a lot of fat are in all ways healthier, then eating a lot of fat can't be bad for you). 

Don't let the conventional wisdom about nutrition get you down or deter you from your plan.  If you're at all concerned about those headlines, you can always get some labwork down.  Get your a1c and crp tested, get your metabolic panels done, learn enough to understand the results.  Be in charge of your own health - nobody cares about it more than you do.

And last, check this out.
http://xkcd.com/552/

Osu.

What I Eat (plus a little bit about confidence)

I got a comment asking about my food intake and I thought it would make a better post than a comment (plus my computer won't let me write comments right now).  But first a little bit about confidence.

I had a logic teacher in grad school who was always annoyed by statements like "I think that..." He felt that it added no information to the proposition.  I always thought he was wrong - knowing how confident someone is in some claim is important in many situations.  Diet is one of them.  There are some things I am very sure about, things I'm less sure about, and things I suspect but am really not sure about.  The first two groups are what I'll recommend to others - that is, if I tell you to absolutely do something it's because I'm at least pretty sure that it's right.  Now I could find out later that I was wrong all along - nobody has all the answers in this business.

What am I sure about?  Artificial trans fats and high sugar intake are bad for you.  I'm really sure that wheat is bad for you, less sure about legumes and dairy.  I'm sure that interval training is better for your karate-specific endurance than jogging, but I'm not at all sure which intervals are best (20 seconds work, 10 seconds rest?  30 s work, 30 s rest?  30 s work, 4 minutes rest?)  I'm pretty sure that green leafy vegetables are good for you but not absolutely sure.  I think you get the idea.

One thing I suspect but which I'm not confident about is the value of intermittent fasting (IF).  Basically, this is a style of eating where one fasts for extended periods of time on a regular basis.  Now everybody (almost) fasts for 8-10 hours a day, every day (when they sleep), so I wouldn't count that as IF.  To me IF means fasting at least 16 hours (leangains style) and at most 36 hours (alternate day fasting, or ADF), repeated anywhere from every day to once a month.  I do something very like the Warrior Diet (a book you can pick up) - I eat most of my food during a 2-4 hour window in the evening.  Is this something that works well for me?  Yes.  Is it something I would recommend to others?  Not until I get more evidence.  I suspect that periodic fasts will improve longevity - literally that they'll help me live longer - and there's some science to back that up, but it's pretty minimal.  If you want to try it, go ahead (as long as you're over 18 - it's not something I'd recommend for somebody who's still growing!), but I can't be sure it's a good idea.

Keep that in mind.

So here's what I eat most days:

I get up and have 5 capsules of fish oil, 3 capsules of Respir-All (a quercetin supplement with bromine), 1 Allegra D (prescription allergy medication), 1 capsule of green tea extract (about 80 mg caffeine and some other good stuff), 4 tablets of calcium carbonate (Tums - but not actual Tums, the Kirkland knockoff, because it's cheaper), all with water.  I make a mug of green tea sweetened with 1 packet Truvia to drink on the way to work.

At work I don't eat.  I drink water and up to 2 liters of cold green tea sweetened with Truvia that I made up the night before.  I have another capsule of green tea extract on my way home if I'm working out (which I do most days).  If I'm home I'll drink water and hot green tea.

If I work out early (like on a weekend, where the workout might end at 2 or 3) I'll have a snack when I get home.  Maybe 2 oz. of roast beef, 2 oz. of cheese from grass fed milk, and a couple of ounces of nuts (I like cashews from Trader Joe's - they come in individual bags so portion control is easier).  If it's a regular workday I won't eat until dinner (which is right after my workout.

Dinner:  Usually 1 lb. ground beef (from grass fed cows) browned in a pan with 2 tablespoons coconut oil.  I'll mix in some mashed sweet potatoes - I get white sweet potatoes (called Korean yams by my grocer), peel and cut them up and roast them in coconut oil or in tallow if I have any around.  I mash then and add in some more fat - tallow, coconut oil, lard, or butter, and stick them in the fridge.  Each day I try to eat about a pound worth - but not a pound of mashed sweet potatoes, I mean whatever I get after starting with a pound of the raw stuff (they lose a lot of mass because they lose water when I roast them, so it's the same calories but doesn't actually weigh a pound when I put it in the pan.)  I mix the mashed potatoes and beef together - the potatoes absorb all the fat and liquid, so I'm not losing any nutrients.  It looks kind of disgusting (I"ll post pictures as soon as I get a camera situation worked out), but I don't mind.  I also season it - garlic, cayenne pepper, a little salt.

Some days I'll have a package of smoked beef ribs and some noodles instead - I get these noodles called "korean vermicelli" which are made from sweet potato starch.  I make about 100-120 grams of raw noodles.  I cook them and add some sesame oil and red pepper flakes to taste.  I'll use the leftover fat from the ribs to cook my potatoes for the next few days.

Some days I'll eat (instead of either meal above) 5-6 eggs cooked in butter, half a package of nitrate free bacon, 4 oz. or so of cheese (from grassfed cows), some leftover cold cuts like turkey, ham, or roast beef that my wife leaves me, and the sweet potato vermicelli. 

With dinner I'll take a multivitamin, my D3 and K2, C and E.  I'll drink water or seltzer (plain, just carbonated water). 

Closer to bedtime - maybe 2 hours after dinner - I'll take 5 more capsules fish oil or 2 teaspoons of cod liver oil, eat about 100 calories worth of dark chocolate (85% dark from Trader Joe's), all with water.  I might also have some fruit or some nuts (nuts only if I haven't had any earlier).  Last night I ate 1/2 a cantaloupe at that point.

I'm actively trying to lean out now.  If I can get down to a good bodyfat level I'd add in more protein and more fat, but NOT more carbs.  I might start eating more fruit, or more low-carb desserts (I don't know if I wrote about this, but I take coconut milk, cocoa, and erythritol and a little vanilla and xanthan gum and refrigerate it - comes out like chocolate mousse). 

IMPORTANT:  My diet is not perfect, even by my own standards.  I should be eating more vegetables, I just don't like them very much.  I'm working on it!  I should probably cut back on caffeine - again, I'm working on it.  I'd like to do away with artificial sweeteners altogether, but I think I'm doing better with Truvia than I was with aspartame (I gave up diet soda just about a month ago).  I go out probably once a week on average - I stay grain free, but I'll eat regular potatoes, steak from grainfed cows, salads made with regular Caesar dressing, and so forth.  I have a bad habit of eating dried fruit with added sugar as a night time snack - which is not good, I know, I only do it occasionally.  I also cheat and have some ice cream over the weekend (but not every weekend).

So if you ate like me but cut down on the tea and sweeteners and added a large mixed salad every day you'd be doing pretty well!

This diet has me at the leanest I've ever been with relatively few cravings.  When I ate low carb I'd keep breaking the diet - like the day before a sparring session I'd eat some carbs, knowing they'd help me perform.  By intentionally putting carbs into the diet I have no excuse for cheating, and... I don't cheat as much.  This works suprisingly well!

I've always had trouble controlling my food intake when eating carbs.  By eating all my food in one sitting and staying away from grains I've been really successful lately keeping the portions under control. 

Feel free to ask more questions if anybody wants more details or if you want more explanation about why I do certain things the way I do them!  And thanks for all the positive comments!