There was some UFC card the other weekend where many female fighters were kiai-ing with every strike, and I saw an unrelated debate on an online forum about the value of the kiai. Most of the commentary kind of missed the point of the kiai, so I thought I'd weigh in.
What is a kiai?
In case not everyone means the same thing when they say 'kiai,' allow me to clarify. A kiai is a quick, loud (more or less as loud as you can make it) shout that is done pretty much at the point of contact for a strike (or block, I guess, though more often a strike). A proper kiai should have no hard consonant sounds in it, though some people kiai with some 's' sounds in it. A super loud 'ha' usually does the trick. The louder the better, and it should not drag on for several seconds (you do see that long drawn out scream in some performance kata, but I believe that is a mistake). And the shout is supposed to come from the belly, not the upper chest (which is necessary if you want to make the loudest sound).
What are the benefits of a kiai during a match? (short answer: not much)
It's a fun little trick to stand close to somebody who isn't ready for it and kiai, to demonstrate the way their body locks up. It would be nice if performing a kiai during a sparring match or a 'real' fight would have the same effect, and maybe it could, but I rather doubt it. When someone is ready for you, facing you, and psychologically prepared for some kind of combat, I highly doubt yelling at them is going to have any significant impact.
A secondary possible benefit of the kiai during a sport competition is to help convince judges that you have, in fact, scored a point or a significant blow. I have heard this from more experienced competitors, and I'll put it out there as a possible good reason to kiai during point fighting or even contact fighting (in situations where judges sometimes render decisions about the fight outcome).
What are the (psychological) benefits of a kiai during training?
Some people (maybe most?) can feel energized by being in a class full of like minded people shouting loudly as they execute techniques. Some feel this is a display of strong karate spirit.
I am absolutely on board with anyone who sees this as a benefit. On its own, I don't see that it justifies the importance we place on the kiai in training, but there are other reasons (see below!)
What are the physical benefits of a kiai during training?
Now we get to the bread and butter of this post.
I don't talk about the 'core' enough, but here's the idea in a nutshell:
1. Your upper body (ribs, shoulders, arms) is connected to your lower body (hips and legs) by your spine.
2. Your spine is not rigid. It can bend and twist in all kinds of directions.
3. When generating power from your lower body, and transmitting it to your upper body, the more your spine twists and bends the less efficient the power transmission. Imagine trying to hammer in a nail with a pool noodle.
4. When transmitting power through your spine, you need the muscles in that region to contract, making the link between your upper and lower body as rigid as possible (it won't be perfectly rigid, that's okay, but you don't want to be floppy either).
5. Those muscles are collectively referred to as the 'core.' The core is a bunch of muscles, some of which you can see (if you're lean enough, like what people call 'abs' and lats) and some of which are 'deep' (meaning closer to the spine).
6. Even if your core muscles are strong, you have to be able to contract the right ones at the right times in the right pattern to get the most stiffness in your core.
Why am I saying all this now? Because one of the best ways to make sure that those deep core muscles are activated (working) is to make a hard, deep exhalation (blow out), using the diaphragm (so breathing from the belly, more than from the upper chest).
In fact, in sports performance, lots of strength coaches are making a big deal out of having their athletes exhale forcefully, from their bellies, when they want to perform high force movements.
Now guess what?
You can't kiai without making a forceful, deep, diaphragmatic exhalation. The exact kind of exhalation that maximally engages the deep core muscles and stabilizes your core.
Now of course you can contract those muscles without exhaling, and you can exhale without shouting. But the cue (the instruction) to kiai is an external cue, which is generally better than an internal cue (like, "squeeze your abs really hard"). For many people, especially not-great-athletes, shouting comes fairly naturally, while controlling the deep core muscles requires a lot of concentration.
Another advantage of the kiai is that an instructor can hear it. You can sort of tell if a student has a floppy core when they punch, but it's much easier to hear that someone's kiai is weak. It's a fast diagnostic that can help you figure out quickly if there is something particularly wrong with the way a student is executing a technique.
In short:
1. A kiai, because it requires a hard exhalation, will force the core to contract, stabilizing the torso and improving power transmission from the lower body;
2. A kiai can be heard, making it easy for an instructor to make sure the student is exhaling at the proper time, with the proper force.
When you should kiai
I wouldn't argue that students should kiai with every repetition of their training, every class. I think it would make your throat hurt and make classes kind of annoying. And I think that our goal should be to learn from the kiai how to use our core, so that we are able to do it without thinking and without shouting. In other words, I think the kiai should be seen as a great training tool for relatively newer students, and something to be used more sparingly with more advanced students.
But for those who think the kiai is 'just dumb' or 'pointless,' I say that it's a very effective and simple way to teach students how to use their deep core muscles, and that's extremely valuable for instructors.
Monday, January 29, 2018
Friday, January 12, 2018
Some Motivational TV and Crossfit
I'm sure we'd all love to say that we're always 100% committed to training hard, but... that's not always true, at least for everyone.
Martial arts films and books are often good ways to get re-inspired, and I've talked about some in the past.
Another type of documentary I've been enjoying lately are related to professional athletes in Crossfit or strength events. These are people who are in amazing shape, and can do amazing things, even if they aren't making newspaper headlines on a regular basis.
On Netflix in the US, catch Fittest On Earth - there are at least a couple of them out, and each covers one of the Crossfit Games events. These are the highest level Crossfit competitors on earth, and in pretty much every event each athlete does things I can't even imagine doing.
There's also a documentary called Functional Fitness, which has more coverage of run of the mill Crossfitters (as opposed to the absolute elites). Seeing passionate amateurs doing some impressive things may be more (or less) motivational to you than watching the elites.
While you're on Netflix, if you want some good martial arts action watch the Daredevil TV show. Great fun. NOT realistic, but it's not supposed to be.
For some strongman stuff, Eddie Strongman, Born Strong, CT Fletcher, and Generation Iron were all fun (I clearly spend too much time streaming and not enough training).
None of these films are particularly worthwhile if you're looking to develop a training routine or learn more about fitness, but they're entertaining and motivational.
Now a word about Crossfit: martial artists often ask whether 'doing Crossfit' will help their martial arts. The short answer is that it might. Not all Crossfit gyms are created equal, and MANY Crossfit gyms (they call them boxes) pay too little attention to scaling workouts. Crossfit in general emphasizes workouts that push you into a very, very fatigued state, and doing high risk explosive movements when you're very tired is a very, very good way to get hurt.
In other words: doing Olympic lifts until you are ready to throw up is probably not safe. If you're a fantastic athlete you can probably get away with it, but this blog is not for people who are already fantastic athletes.
So if you want to do Crossfit, be careful that you find a gym that is less gung ho and more about scaling and safety. And no, you don't NEED to do Crossfit to get into very good shape.
Martial arts films and books are often good ways to get re-inspired, and I've talked about some in the past.
Another type of documentary I've been enjoying lately are related to professional athletes in Crossfit or strength events. These are people who are in amazing shape, and can do amazing things, even if they aren't making newspaper headlines on a regular basis.
On Netflix in the US, catch Fittest On Earth - there are at least a couple of them out, and each covers one of the Crossfit Games events. These are the highest level Crossfit competitors on earth, and in pretty much every event each athlete does things I can't even imagine doing.
There's also a documentary called Functional Fitness, which has more coverage of run of the mill Crossfitters (as opposed to the absolute elites). Seeing passionate amateurs doing some impressive things may be more (or less) motivational to you than watching the elites.
While you're on Netflix, if you want some good martial arts action watch the Daredevil TV show. Great fun. NOT realistic, but it's not supposed to be.
For some strongman stuff, Eddie Strongman, Born Strong, CT Fletcher, and Generation Iron were all fun (I clearly spend too much time streaming and not enough training).
None of these films are particularly worthwhile if you're looking to develop a training routine or learn more about fitness, but they're entertaining and motivational.
Now a word about Crossfit: martial artists often ask whether 'doing Crossfit' will help their martial arts. The short answer is that it might. Not all Crossfit gyms are created equal, and MANY Crossfit gyms (they call them boxes) pay too little attention to scaling workouts. Crossfit in general emphasizes workouts that push you into a very, very fatigued state, and doing high risk explosive movements when you're very tired is a very, very good way to get hurt.
In other words: doing Olympic lifts until you are ready to throw up is probably not safe. If you're a fantastic athlete you can probably get away with it, but this blog is not for people who are already fantastic athletes.
So if you want to do Crossfit, be careful that you find a gym that is less gung ho and more about scaling and safety. And no, you don't NEED to do Crossfit to get into very good shape.
Wednesday, December 27, 2017
Energy Systems: The Overview
Endurance is super important for martial artists for 2 sets of reasons: 1) not getting tired while sparring or performing your kata makes your sparring or kata better; and 2) not getting tired while training to improve your martial arts skills makes your training more effective. Practicing skills while you're fatigued is, simply, not very effective (remember, it's not 'practice makes perfect,' it's 'perfect practice makes perfect.' Practicing sloppy technique just makes you very good at doing sloppy technique.)
Endurance is also super important for life. I've explained before - if daily tasks cause your heart rate to go really high and leave you gasping for your air, not only is that unseemly, but it means your body is going into a high stress response to handle an everyday thing. That's really, really bad for your health, since you're pushed into a sympathetic state very frequently.
I used to think I had a strong handle on the kind of training that pretty much anybody should do to improve their endurance. You can scan old posts on this blog to see examples of that. Sadly, I had an overly simplistic view. The real story is more complicated, and training for endurance is harder (and easier, as I'll explain later) than I thought.
[Note: this post is background information, meant to be a reference. It isn't really about training, it's to set up later posts on training. Also, the information here is not particularly controversial, and has been pulled from many, many sources - this is the consensus right now, and as such I'm presenting it with a very high degree of confidence. Later on I'll get into more theoretical conclusions where my confidence is not as high.]
What is energy?
Energy in this context means biological energy, the energy used by all your bodily systems to do pretty much anything. And almost all of your body's chemical reactions, when they need it, get energy by splitting molecules of ATP into ADP and a phosphate (ATP is adenosine triphosphate, meaning it has 3 phosphates - when one gets knocked off it turns into ADP, adenosine diphosphate, an adenosine with 2 phosphates stuck to it, and a loose phosphate, and a bunch of energy.) ATP turning into ADP + P is kind of like burning wood in the sense that it releases energy but it is UNLIKE burning wood because the ADP and P can get stuck back together, giving you another ATP, ready to use, as long as you can get the energy for THAT from somewhere else. So your ATP is more like a rechargeable battery - it can discharge, giving you energy, and then recharge, as long as you have a power source to recharge it with.
From a martial arts or movement perspective, you can think of it like this: To execute any movement, your nerves carry a signal to the muscles, which contract, which exerts a force on the body. The action of the nerves (carrying the signal) and the muscles (to contract, then relax) depends on ATP - ATP is 'used,' fueling the action, and you end up with ADP + P.
Also worth noting: your cells use energy all the time, not just when exercising. They need a constant stream of energy (that's why you burn calories even at rest). All that happens when you exercise is that the amount of energy you need goes up, or you could say the rate at which you use energy goes up.
What are energy systems in general?
If you took high school biology you have a general sense of how this works from a big picture perspective - your body takes in energy from food, 'burns' it with the aid of oxygen, and uses that energy to turn that ADP and P back into ATP, where it can be used again (and again and again) to fuel chemical reactions, like muscle contractions.
More specifically, what we call energy systems are the chemical processes that directly regenerate ATP.
Or, you could say that the energy systems are the systems that provide ATP for use by your cells (and by provide, we can mean store a bunch of it, or restore the ATP by combining ADP and P back into usable ATP).
What are the 3 energy systems?
1) Alactic anaerobic system (also called PCr, AtP_CP, ATP_PCr, Creatine Phosphate Energy System, Oxidative Independent Energy System, Short Term Energy System) is the FIRST place your cell 'looks' for ATP. You are ALWAYS using the alactic anaerobic system - ALWAYS. It consists of a bunch of ATP, just sitting around waiting to be used, and some Creatine Phosphate (you can get ATP back from ADP by breaking down Creatine Phosphate super fast, so these two are sort of counted together). It's super fast, but super small - you only store somewhere between 4 and 10 seconds worth of energy in the alactic anaerobic system. And it doesn't depend on anything else - the alactic anaerobic system is just atp and creatine phosphate, to 'work' (i.e. provide energy) it doesn't need oxygen or any other substrates.
So think of your alactic anaerobic energy system as a pool of energy that is always, immediately available, in full. It's the fastest energy system of all, and once it's run down close to empty nothing can replace it as fast as you can use it - that's why if you look at Olympic sprinters, they are ALL slowing down by the time they get past 70 or 80 meters.
If all you had was alactic anaerobic, you wouldn't need to eat or breathe, and you could exert maximal power for maybe 10 seconds, but then you would DIE. That would be bad. So:
The next two energy systems are there ONLY to replenish the Alactic Anaerobic System. They don't really make sense on their own.
2) Aerobic energy system (also called oxidative dependent) is the PRIMARY way your body replenishes that ATP as it gets used. The aerobic energy system requires oxygen (that's literally what 'aerobic' means), so how fast it can pump produce energy depends on how fast your body can get oxygen to your cells, as well as a few other factors.
The aerobic system is SLOW. It can only replace a little ATP every second. When you exert yourself, you can pretty easily use up ATP faster than the aerobic system can replenish it (though your aerobic system can get better, and faster, with training).
The aerobic system can go for a LONG time, even at its maximum output. It burns fat and/or glucose, and requires oxygen.
The aerobic system is working ALL the time. Just like you are ALWAYS using ATP from the pool in the alactic anaerobic system, your aerobic system is ALWAYS working to refill that pool. When people say that their workout is not aerobic, or that it is only anaerobic, they are not really correct. The aerobic system is always involved (it may not be by itself, is all).
The aerobic system is relatively 'clean burning.' It can work without involving a lot of stress hormones or negative effects on your body. This is sort of obvious - since it's working all the time, every second of your life, your body can't interpret aerobic activity as a threat or an emergency.
Your aerobic system isn't always fully 'on.' It's working a little bit all the time, but it takes time to 'ramp up' when you put more demands on it. That's one (in my opinion, a big) reason why warming up is important - your aerobic system needs time to get into gear so it can replenish your ATP faster. If you start a workout by immediately going into high intensity work, you'll greatly outstrip your aerobic system's ability to replenish your energy.
With training your aerobic system can become able to produce energy faster, but there are limits.
When you're just sitting around or going for a walk or doing something leisurely, the ATP you burn is replaced as fast as you burn it by your aerobic system (ADP is converted back into ATP as fast as you are turning ATP into ADP). BUT once you start using energy at a faster rate, and your aerobic system can't keep up (because at that moment the aerobic system can't replenish ATP as fast as you're using it), then...
3) Lactic Acid system (also called anaerobic lactic, Lactate Energy System, Lactic, anaerobic energy system, non-oxidative glycolytic energy system, glycolitic energy system) is normally more or less dormant, but it kicks in when your alactic anaerobic system gets depleted (runs low) and your aerobic system can't keep up with the demand. This typically happens either because it's very early in your workout, and the aerobic system hasn't ramped up yet, or because your workout is hard enough, depleting energy fast enough, that the aerobic system can't keep up.
The lactic acid system is FAST. It can produce energy much faster than the aerobic system, though not as fast as the alactic anaerobic system. It burns glycogen (glucose stored in the muscles). It produces lactic acid, which will build up in your system and make you feel like crap (it's the hydrogen ions, not the lactate, that causes problems when you produce lactic acid). It doesn't require oxygen. It doesn't last very long, but it lasts MUCH LONGER than the alactic anaerobic system.
The lactic acid system is sort of an emergency system, linked to your sympathetic nervous system. When you need it a lot - when you work in such a way that you get a big accumulation of lactic acid - your body thinks "there is something happening, we need more energy than we can comfortably provide, even if only for a little while." In other words, when it is used, there's a lot of associated stress on the body. You can expect elevated cortisol, activation of the sympathetic nervous system, all the other things that happen with fight or flight.
Here's the big thing - the lactic acid system produces lactate. So as it works, lactate is made, and starts to build up in your body. The lactic acid system itself can't get rid of that lactate - only the aerobic system can do that, and it can't do it nearly as fast as the lactic system can produce it. And the more lactate builds up, the worse the lactic system gets at producing energy (it gets inhibited), and the more tired you feel. In other words, the lactic system is self limiting.
What's the big picture with how these interact?
You're always sort of sipping energy from the pool of ATP and creatine phosphate in your alactic anaerobic system. If you start to sip faster (say, by exercising), the pool shrinks, your lactic acid system starts working a little bit, and your aerobic system starts working harder to replenish the pool. If your aerobic system can't keep up, and you take energy out faster than it can be replaced, the lactic acid system works harder, and lactate starts building up in your bloodstream. At that point your aerobic system is desperately working to keep your alactic anaerobic system topped off AND to reset the effects of the lactic acid system.
The harder you work the lactic acid system, without taking the time to completely recover (meaning take some time where you're using up energy slower than the aerobic system can replace it), the worse you're going to feel and the more your performance will suffer (your body starts to say, "whoa, you're using energy way faster than I can replace it, I'd better make those muscles slow down"). It's the lactic system that really causes fatigue.
Is this meaningful for your whole body or also for individual muscles?
Imagine a workout where you're only working one small muscle (or a couple of small muscles). Something like seated cable curls - your biceps and maybe forearms are working very hard, but the rest of you isn't.
In that sort of case the muscle fibers in your biceps are going to use ATP at a high rate, but your body as a whole isn't. The muscle cells in your biceps will start pulling in oxygen so they can replenish that ATP, but your heart and lungs won't register this demand, because your biceps are pretty small, and even if they're pulling oxygen out of your blood as fast as they can, it won't impact your blood oxygen levels nearly as much as if, say, you were sprinting, and two thirds of the muscles in your body were pulling out oxygen.
So in that case you can have a workout that heavily involves the lactic system in one part of your body (the biceps) but NOT in your body overall.
How does training help?
With training, your aerobic and lactic acid systems can become much, much better. You can develop a much higher tolerance for lactate, get much better at quickly removing lactate, and greatly increase how much energy you can get every minute from your aerobic system. Your alactic anaerobic system can be increased a little bit but probably not much.
As to what kinds of training improve which system, that gets more complicated.
I'm going to address training the energy systems at some point in the future, it's too much for this post. But here's the important principle:
Developing the aerobic system competes with developing the lactic acid system, and vice versa.
In other words, if a workout really develops the lactic acid system, it does NOT develop the aerobic system and may impair it a bit. And workouts that develop the aerobic system do NOT develop the lactic acid system.
What's the take home message for martial arts training?
Ideally, you would have a maximally developed lactic system AND aerobic system. But that's not really possible - training for one is different from training the other. So you have to find the right balance. And the types of training that are good for the aerobic system are not the same as the kinds that are good for the lactic system.
The good news is that, if you are kind of stuck in your training, or if you feel that you're working really hard but not making much progress, understanding these systems might help you break through and make progress again.
I will talk more about training the different systems in future posts.
If you want a more in depth understanding of these issues, read Joel Jamieson's work - here or in his book (now out of print, unfortunately).
Endurance is also super important for life. I've explained before - if daily tasks cause your heart rate to go really high and leave you gasping for your air, not only is that unseemly, but it means your body is going into a high stress response to handle an everyday thing. That's really, really bad for your health, since you're pushed into a sympathetic state very frequently.
I used to think I had a strong handle on the kind of training that pretty much anybody should do to improve their endurance. You can scan old posts on this blog to see examples of that. Sadly, I had an overly simplistic view. The real story is more complicated, and training for endurance is harder (and easier, as I'll explain later) than I thought.
[Note: this post is background information, meant to be a reference. It isn't really about training, it's to set up later posts on training. Also, the information here is not particularly controversial, and has been pulled from many, many sources - this is the consensus right now, and as such I'm presenting it with a very high degree of confidence. Later on I'll get into more theoretical conclusions where my confidence is not as high.]
What is energy?
Energy in this context means biological energy, the energy used by all your bodily systems to do pretty much anything. And almost all of your body's chemical reactions, when they need it, get energy by splitting molecules of ATP into ADP and a phosphate (ATP is adenosine triphosphate, meaning it has 3 phosphates - when one gets knocked off it turns into ADP, adenosine diphosphate, an adenosine with 2 phosphates stuck to it, and a loose phosphate, and a bunch of energy.) ATP turning into ADP + P is kind of like burning wood in the sense that it releases energy but it is UNLIKE burning wood because the ADP and P can get stuck back together, giving you another ATP, ready to use, as long as you can get the energy for THAT from somewhere else. So your ATP is more like a rechargeable battery - it can discharge, giving you energy, and then recharge, as long as you have a power source to recharge it with.
From a martial arts or movement perspective, you can think of it like this: To execute any movement, your nerves carry a signal to the muscles, which contract, which exerts a force on the body. The action of the nerves (carrying the signal) and the muscles (to contract, then relax) depends on ATP - ATP is 'used,' fueling the action, and you end up with ADP + P.
Also worth noting: your cells use energy all the time, not just when exercising. They need a constant stream of energy (that's why you burn calories even at rest). All that happens when you exercise is that the amount of energy you need goes up, or you could say the rate at which you use energy goes up.
What are energy systems in general?
If you took high school biology you have a general sense of how this works from a big picture perspective - your body takes in energy from food, 'burns' it with the aid of oxygen, and uses that energy to turn that ADP and P back into ATP, where it can be used again (and again and again) to fuel chemical reactions, like muscle contractions.
More specifically, what we call energy systems are the chemical processes that directly regenerate ATP.
Or, you could say that the energy systems are the systems that provide ATP for use by your cells (and by provide, we can mean store a bunch of it, or restore the ATP by combining ADP and P back into usable ATP).
What are the 3 energy systems?
1) Alactic anaerobic system (also called PCr, AtP_CP, ATP_PCr, Creatine Phosphate Energy System, Oxidative Independent Energy System, Short Term Energy System) is the FIRST place your cell 'looks' for ATP. You are ALWAYS using the alactic anaerobic system - ALWAYS. It consists of a bunch of ATP, just sitting around waiting to be used, and some Creatine Phosphate (you can get ATP back from ADP by breaking down Creatine Phosphate super fast, so these two are sort of counted together). It's super fast, but super small - you only store somewhere between 4 and 10 seconds worth of energy in the alactic anaerobic system. And it doesn't depend on anything else - the alactic anaerobic system is just atp and creatine phosphate, to 'work' (i.e. provide energy) it doesn't need oxygen or any other substrates.
So think of your alactic anaerobic energy system as a pool of energy that is always, immediately available, in full. It's the fastest energy system of all, and once it's run down close to empty nothing can replace it as fast as you can use it - that's why if you look at Olympic sprinters, they are ALL slowing down by the time they get past 70 or 80 meters.
If all you had was alactic anaerobic, you wouldn't need to eat or breathe, and you could exert maximal power for maybe 10 seconds, but then you would DIE. That would be bad. So:
The next two energy systems are there ONLY to replenish the Alactic Anaerobic System. They don't really make sense on their own.
2) Aerobic energy system (also called oxidative dependent) is the PRIMARY way your body replenishes that ATP as it gets used. The aerobic energy system requires oxygen (that's literally what 'aerobic' means), so how fast it can pump produce energy depends on how fast your body can get oxygen to your cells, as well as a few other factors.
The aerobic system is SLOW. It can only replace a little ATP every second. When you exert yourself, you can pretty easily use up ATP faster than the aerobic system can replenish it (though your aerobic system can get better, and faster, with training).
The aerobic system can go for a LONG time, even at its maximum output. It burns fat and/or glucose, and requires oxygen.
The aerobic system is working ALL the time. Just like you are ALWAYS using ATP from the pool in the alactic anaerobic system, your aerobic system is ALWAYS working to refill that pool. When people say that their workout is not aerobic, or that it is only anaerobic, they are not really correct. The aerobic system is always involved (it may not be by itself, is all).
The aerobic system is relatively 'clean burning.' It can work without involving a lot of stress hormones or negative effects on your body. This is sort of obvious - since it's working all the time, every second of your life, your body can't interpret aerobic activity as a threat or an emergency.
Your aerobic system isn't always fully 'on.' It's working a little bit all the time, but it takes time to 'ramp up' when you put more demands on it. That's one (in my opinion, a big) reason why warming up is important - your aerobic system needs time to get into gear so it can replenish your ATP faster. If you start a workout by immediately going into high intensity work, you'll greatly outstrip your aerobic system's ability to replenish your energy.
With training your aerobic system can become able to produce energy faster, but there are limits.
When you're just sitting around or going for a walk or doing something leisurely, the ATP you burn is replaced as fast as you burn it by your aerobic system (ADP is converted back into ATP as fast as you are turning ATP into ADP). BUT once you start using energy at a faster rate, and your aerobic system can't keep up (because at that moment the aerobic system can't replenish ATP as fast as you're using it), then...
3) Lactic Acid system (also called anaerobic lactic, Lactate Energy System, Lactic, anaerobic energy system, non-oxidative glycolytic energy system, glycolitic energy system) is normally more or less dormant, but it kicks in when your alactic anaerobic system gets depleted (runs low) and your aerobic system can't keep up with the demand. This typically happens either because it's very early in your workout, and the aerobic system hasn't ramped up yet, or because your workout is hard enough, depleting energy fast enough, that the aerobic system can't keep up.
The lactic acid system is FAST. It can produce energy much faster than the aerobic system, though not as fast as the alactic anaerobic system. It burns glycogen (glucose stored in the muscles). It produces lactic acid, which will build up in your system and make you feel like crap (it's the hydrogen ions, not the lactate, that causes problems when you produce lactic acid). It doesn't require oxygen. It doesn't last very long, but it lasts MUCH LONGER than the alactic anaerobic system.
The lactic acid system is sort of an emergency system, linked to your sympathetic nervous system. When you need it a lot - when you work in such a way that you get a big accumulation of lactic acid - your body thinks "there is something happening, we need more energy than we can comfortably provide, even if only for a little while." In other words, when it is used, there's a lot of associated stress on the body. You can expect elevated cortisol, activation of the sympathetic nervous system, all the other things that happen with fight or flight.
Here's the big thing - the lactic acid system produces lactate. So as it works, lactate is made, and starts to build up in your body. The lactic acid system itself can't get rid of that lactate - only the aerobic system can do that, and it can't do it nearly as fast as the lactic system can produce it. And the more lactate builds up, the worse the lactic system gets at producing energy (it gets inhibited), and the more tired you feel. In other words, the lactic system is self limiting.
What's the big picture with how these interact?
You're always sort of sipping energy from the pool of ATP and creatine phosphate in your alactic anaerobic system. If you start to sip faster (say, by exercising), the pool shrinks, your lactic acid system starts working a little bit, and your aerobic system starts working harder to replenish the pool. If your aerobic system can't keep up, and you take energy out faster than it can be replaced, the lactic acid system works harder, and lactate starts building up in your bloodstream. At that point your aerobic system is desperately working to keep your alactic anaerobic system topped off AND to reset the effects of the lactic acid system.
The harder you work the lactic acid system, without taking the time to completely recover (meaning take some time where you're using up energy slower than the aerobic system can replace it), the worse you're going to feel and the more your performance will suffer (your body starts to say, "whoa, you're using energy way faster than I can replace it, I'd better make those muscles slow down"). It's the lactic system that really causes fatigue.
Is this meaningful for your whole body or also for individual muscles?
Imagine a workout where you're only working one small muscle (or a couple of small muscles). Something like seated cable curls - your biceps and maybe forearms are working very hard, but the rest of you isn't.
In that sort of case the muscle fibers in your biceps are going to use ATP at a high rate, but your body as a whole isn't. The muscle cells in your biceps will start pulling in oxygen so they can replenish that ATP, but your heart and lungs won't register this demand, because your biceps are pretty small, and even if they're pulling oxygen out of your blood as fast as they can, it won't impact your blood oxygen levels nearly as much as if, say, you were sprinting, and two thirds of the muscles in your body were pulling out oxygen.
So in that case you can have a workout that heavily involves the lactic system in one part of your body (the biceps) but NOT in your body overall.
How does training help?
With training, your aerobic and lactic acid systems can become much, much better. You can develop a much higher tolerance for lactate, get much better at quickly removing lactate, and greatly increase how much energy you can get every minute from your aerobic system. Your alactic anaerobic system can be increased a little bit but probably not much.
As to what kinds of training improve which system, that gets more complicated.
I'm going to address training the energy systems at some point in the future, it's too much for this post. But here's the important principle:
Developing the aerobic system competes with developing the lactic acid system, and vice versa.
In other words, if a workout really develops the lactic acid system, it does NOT develop the aerobic system and may impair it a bit. And workouts that develop the aerobic system do NOT develop the lactic acid system.
What's the take home message for martial arts training?
Ideally, you would have a maximally developed lactic system AND aerobic system. But that's not really possible - training for one is different from training the other. So you have to find the right balance. And the types of training that are good for the aerobic system are not the same as the kinds that are good for the lactic system.
The good news is that, if you are kind of stuck in your training, or if you feel that you're working really hard but not making much progress, understanding these systems might help you break through and make progress again.
I will talk more about training the different systems in future posts.
If you want a more in depth understanding of these issues, read Joel Jamieson's work - here or in his book (now out of print, unfortunately).
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Protein consumption and you: How much, what kind, and when
I was listening to an episode of the always excellent Sigma nutrition radio, this one an interview with Dr. Donald Layman, who is one of the top researchers in the world studying dietary influences on protein synthesis.
I'm not new to the science on protein synthesis, but if this research is new to you, listen to the podcast, because it's a great overview of the science as we know it today, given by a guy who isn't selling anything (Dr. Layman is an academic, not a supplement salesman), interviewed by a very, very good podcaster in Danny Lennon.
In case you're less of a geek for this stuff than I am, I thought I'd review the key points on what we know regarding protein synthesis.
What is protein synthesis?
Protein synthesis is the process of building new protein in your body. Your tissues in general are not static - your muscles aren't made of the same stuff they were 10 years ago; instead, your body is constantly breaking down and building new tissues. So if not for protein synthesis you would slowly lose muscle mass, or at the very least be unable to gain new muscle.
Why is it important for performance?
If you're any kind of athlete, martial artist or otherwise, you need your muscle. That's what moves you. As you age it gets harder and harder to gain muscle, and to keep the muscle you have, so strategies to grow muscle become more and more important. Almost nobody has too much muscle, and almost everybody who does only gets that way by taking a LOT of drugs that have harmful side effects.
Why is it important for health and longevity?
1. Muscle improves your metabolism, by burning calories and by storing glucose. So having very little muscle will make you prone to accumulating bodyfat. Also, if you have very little muscle and eat a high carbohydrate meal, those carbs have nowhere to 'go' for short term storage, so your blood sugar gets and stays high, and those carbs are turned to fat. If you have lots of excess muscle those carbs can be stored as glycogen to be used in your next workout.
2. Muscle exerts force on your bones. Whenever you move, the bigger and stronger (those are very closely connected) your muscles the more force gets put on your bones, which increases your bone health and strength. Strong dense bones are better at resisting breaks, and broken bones are a huge health risk when you're older.
3. Muscle is key to mobility and independence. If you're not strong enough to get up out of a chair, or carry your luggage around, you lose your ability to be independent. Stay strong, stay out of the nursing home.
What kind of protein is best for increasing protein synthesis?
Protein (all protein) is made up of amino acids. There are different ones (20), and different proteins have different proportions of those amino acids, so the protein in quinoa has a different relative amount of each amino acid as the protein in dairy or beef or eggs or rice.
To get an increase in protein synthesis you need 2 very specific things: 1) 2.2 - 2.5 grams of leucine, a particular amino acid which is relatively high in animal proteins like whey or beef and relatively low in vegetable proteins - this amount acts as a sort of spark to the protein synthesis pathway; and 2) enough of all the essential amino acids so the synthesis can occur. Think of leucine as the guy yelling at the workers to get to work - less than 2.2 or so grams in a meal and the workers don't hear the guy - and the other amino acids as the bricks, without which the workers are trying to work but can't build anything.
Overall, Dr. Layman recommends a meal with at least that much leucine (2.5 g) and somewhere around 50 g total protein. That will kick off a session (my word, not his) of protein synthesis that will last 2-3 hours. He recommends repeating that 3 times per day (more often if you REALLY need to build a lot of muscle, like if you're a competitive bodybuilder). Yes, that's a lot of protein.
As you get older, you get resistant to these cues, so you might need more leucine and/or more protein to get the same response. I imagine the same is true if you have any kind of digestive impairment.
Generally speaking, whey, beef, and eggs are your best bang for the buck for protein that has lots of leucine. Sorry, but vegetable and grain proteins are low in leucine. Getting enough quinoa to spark protein synthesis requires eating just a ridiculous amount of quinoa (think 1000 kCal worth of quinoa in a meal, each meal).
Is muscle protein synthesis really all that matters?
No.
Researchers study muscle protein synthesis because it's relatively easy to study. Give someone a meal, see what happens. But in a way, it's a proxy for what we really care about - long term protein balance. That is, we REALLY care about whether some eating/workout strategy helps us gain (build) net muscle, not whether it results in some short term chemical process.
What exactly do we really care about?
We really care about long term muscle gain or loss. But that's very hard to study - you'd have to control people's meals for weeks or months at a time, and deal with dozens or hundreds of confounding variables. The fact is, if some eating strategy is increasing synthesis but is increasing catabolism (muscle breakdown) even more, you're going to lose.
So there is definitely more to know. I suspect that short fasts decrease catabolism, meaning that you wouldn't necessarily see the best overall muscle mass increase by eating a huge meal every 4 hours, 6 times a day, but that you'd see less synthesis but also less breakdown by eating less often. But I can't prove that, it's just an hypothesis.
What do I REALLY need to know about this research?
1. To gain muscle, you really need to get 40-50 grams of high quality protein in a single meal, and you need to do it probably at least twice a day. Eating 10-15 grams of total protein in each meal, but spreading it out over many meals, is NOT going to get you equivalent results. You can do this by supplementing a normal meal (eat a little, drink a protein shake for dessert) or by eating an animal product heavy meal (this is NOT a huge amount of protein - we're not talking about a pound of steak). If you're not sure whether a particular protein is 'good,' remember to look for the amount of leucine. That's the only amino acid you really need to worry about.
2. DO NOT eat your 50 grams of protein close before your workout. If you spark a session of protein synthesis, that takes a lot of energy. Your muscle cells will be depleted, and you'll be relatively weaker. Try to eat your main meals long before or right after your hard workouts!
I'm not new to the science on protein synthesis, but if this research is new to you, listen to the podcast, because it's a great overview of the science as we know it today, given by a guy who isn't selling anything (Dr. Layman is an academic, not a supplement salesman), interviewed by a very, very good podcaster in Danny Lennon.
In case you're less of a geek for this stuff than I am, I thought I'd review the key points on what we know regarding protein synthesis.
What is protein synthesis?
Protein synthesis is the process of building new protein in your body. Your tissues in general are not static - your muscles aren't made of the same stuff they were 10 years ago; instead, your body is constantly breaking down and building new tissues. So if not for protein synthesis you would slowly lose muscle mass, or at the very least be unable to gain new muscle.
Why is it important for performance?
If you're any kind of athlete, martial artist or otherwise, you need your muscle. That's what moves you. As you age it gets harder and harder to gain muscle, and to keep the muscle you have, so strategies to grow muscle become more and more important. Almost nobody has too much muscle, and almost everybody who does only gets that way by taking a LOT of drugs that have harmful side effects.
Why is it important for health and longevity?
1. Muscle improves your metabolism, by burning calories and by storing glucose. So having very little muscle will make you prone to accumulating bodyfat. Also, if you have very little muscle and eat a high carbohydrate meal, those carbs have nowhere to 'go' for short term storage, so your blood sugar gets and stays high, and those carbs are turned to fat. If you have lots of excess muscle those carbs can be stored as glycogen to be used in your next workout.
2. Muscle exerts force on your bones. Whenever you move, the bigger and stronger (those are very closely connected) your muscles the more force gets put on your bones, which increases your bone health and strength. Strong dense bones are better at resisting breaks, and broken bones are a huge health risk when you're older.
3. Muscle is key to mobility and independence. If you're not strong enough to get up out of a chair, or carry your luggage around, you lose your ability to be independent. Stay strong, stay out of the nursing home.
What kind of protein is best for increasing protein synthesis?
Protein (all protein) is made up of amino acids. There are different ones (20), and different proteins have different proportions of those amino acids, so the protein in quinoa has a different relative amount of each amino acid as the protein in dairy or beef or eggs or rice.
To get an increase in protein synthesis you need 2 very specific things: 1) 2.2 - 2.5 grams of leucine, a particular amino acid which is relatively high in animal proteins like whey or beef and relatively low in vegetable proteins - this amount acts as a sort of spark to the protein synthesis pathway; and 2) enough of all the essential amino acids so the synthesis can occur. Think of leucine as the guy yelling at the workers to get to work - less than 2.2 or so grams in a meal and the workers don't hear the guy - and the other amino acids as the bricks, without which the workers are trying to work but can't build anything.
Overall, Dr. Layman recommends a meal with at least that much leucine (2.5 g) and somewhere around 50 g total protein. That will kick off a session (my word, not his) of protein synthesis that will last 2-3 hours. He recommends repeating that 3 times per day (more often if you REALLY need to build a lot of muscle, like if you're a competitive bodybuilder). Yes, that's a lot of protein.
As you get older, you get resistant to these cues, so you might need more leucine and/or more protein to get the same response. I imagine the same is true if you have any kind of digestive impairment.
Generally speaking, whey, beef, and eggs are your best bang for the buck for protein that has lots of leucine. Sorry, but vegetable and grain proteins are low in leucine. Getting enough quinoa to spark protein synthesis requires eating just a ridiculous amount of quinoa (think 1000 kCal worth of quinoa in a meal, each meal).
Is muscle protein synthesis really all that matters?
No.
Researchers study muscle protein synthesis because it's relatively easy to study. Give someone a meal, see what happens. But in a way, it's a proxy for what we really care about - long term protein balance. That is, we REALLY care about whether some eating/workout strategy helps us gain (build) net muscle, not whether it results in some short term chemical process.
What exactly do we really care about?
We really care about long term muscle gain or loss. But that's very hard to study - you'd have to control people's meals for weeks or months at a time, and deal with dozens or hundreds of confounding variables. The fact is, if some eating strategy is increasing synthesis but is increasing catabolism (muscle breakdown) even more, you're going to lose.
So there is definitely more to know. I suspect that short fasts decrease catabolism, meaning that you wouldn't necessarily see the best overall muscle mass increase by eating a huge meal every 4 hours, 6 times a day, but that you'd see less synthesis but also less breakdown by eating less often. But I can't prove that, it's just an hypothesis.
What do I REALLY need to know about this research?
1. To gain muscle, you really need to get 40-50 grams of high quality protein in a single meal, and you need to do it probably at least twice a day. Eating 10-15 grams of total protein in each meal, but spreading it out over many meals, is NOT going to get you equivalent results. You can do this by supplementing a normal meal (eat a little, drink a protein shake for dessert) or by eating an animal product heavy meal (this is NOT a huge amount of protein - we're not talking about a pound of steak). If you're not sure whether a particular protein is 'good,' remember to look for the amount of leucine. That's the only amino acid you really need to worry about.
2. DO NOT eat your 50 grams of protein close before your workout. If you spark a session of protein synthesis, that takes a lot of energy. Your muscle cells will be depleted, and you'll be relatively weaker. Try to eat your main meals long before or right after your hard workouts!
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Netflix Movie Reviews: The Final Master
I've been trying to watch more martial arts movies, hitting up Netflix's catalog (which is nice, but not huge). I want to do some brief amateur reviews.
The Final Master is set in 1930's mainland China. The main character... well, I don't want to give too much away. A Wing Chun master sets up a mildly elaborate plot to pay back a debt to his deceased master (mostly about gaining face for Wing Chun), trains an apprentice, people die, lots of fighting happens.
That synopsis makes this movie sound like nothing special, but it is special. The acting is phenomenal, and I don't mean "really good for a B movie acting," I mean, "really good for any movie acting." The fight scenes are fantastic - unarmed, armed, a wide variety of weapons, extremely varied (you don't see the same moves repetitively, and the way the characters fight seems responsive to their opponents' style).
Realism Level: Bruce Lee (skilled characters can fight off dozens of opponents simultaneously, but nobody can catch bullets with their teeth or shoot energy blasts or cast spells).
Scenery: B-. Good sets, but this isn't the film to go to if you want those majestic views of Chinese landscapes that suffuse other Chinese martial arts movies.
Cheesecake factor: Some shirtless guys, but they have realistic builds (lean, muscular, but not cover of a magazine built). Some very attractive ladies, who are mostly fully clothed. [Note: I include this category both for people who want cheesecake in their media and for those who want to avoid it. I myself am not a huge fan of cheesecake in action movies, but I understand those who have less neutral feelings about it.]
Training Montage: B+. Some good but not amazing training scenes.
Overall Rating: A-. I cannot recommend this highly enough. Really fantastic fight scenes - not a ton of non-combat action, not a lot of chase scenes or gun combat, just martial arts action.
The Final Master is set in 1930's mainland China. The main character... well, I don't want to give too much away. A Wing Chun master sets up a mildly elaborate plot to pay back a debt to his deceased master (mostly about gaining face for Wing Chun), trains an apprentice, people die, lots of fighting happens.
That synopsis makes this movie sound like nothing special, but it is special. The acting is phenomenal, and I don't mean "really good for a B movie acting," I mean, "really good for any movie acting." The fight scenes are fantastic - unarmed, armed, a wide variety of weapons, extremely varied (you don't see the same moves repetitively, and the way the characters fight seems responsive to their opponents' style).
Realism Level: Bruce Lee (skilled characters can fight off dozens of opponents simultaneously, but nobody can catch bullets with their teeth or shoot energy blasts or cast spells).
Scenery: B-. Good sets, but this isn't the film to go to if you want those majestic views of Chinese landscapes that suffuse other Chinese martial arts movies.
Cheesecake factor: Some shirtless guys, but they have realistic builds (lean, muscular, but not cover of a magazine built). Some very attractive ladies, who are mostly fully clothed. [Note: I include this category both for people who want cheesecake in their media and for those who want to avoid it. I myself am not a huge fan of cheesecake in action movies, but I understand those who have less neutral feelings about it.]
Training Montage: B+. Some good but not amazing training scenes.
Overall Rating: A-. I cannot recommend this highly enough. Really fantastic fight scenes - not a ton of non-combat action, not a lot of chase scenes or gun combat, just martial arts action.
Monday, October 9, 2017
Consistency Vs. Change: Cycling and Chaos for Comprehensive Adaptation
The best workout is the one you're not doing.
Someone who chases two rabbits at once catches neither.
Programming - which just means how you design your training over time - is one of the most interesting and least talked about aspects of martial arts training.
I have never seen a traditional martial arts school that implemented any formal programming. People who compete in professional sports, especially ones with big peaking requirements (like professional fighting or Olympic sports, where you have to be awesome for a brief period of time) have training programs where they work on specific qualities at different times of the year - maybe a a few weeks to work endurance, then a few weeks to specialize in strength, a few weeks in power, a few weeks in skill, etc. I've never seen a karate dojo where there are blocks like that - building aerobic endurance for 6 weeks, then 6 weeks of alactic training, then 6 weeks of hypertrophy, 6 weeks of power development, with deloads in between.
There are good business reasons not to structure karate classes like that, including the fact that it would seem weird, and you'd have to spend a lot of time explaining it to people. However, it's probably a good idea to have this kind of structured programming for yourself, so your out-of-class workouts are focused on building different physical qualities at different times.
Why?
Martial arts ability depends on many different physical qualities - strength, endurance, power, flexibility, balance - in addition to skill. If YOU want to get better at martial arts, you should become more skilled (skill is just a catchall phrase for your nervous system - your brain is better at making the right muscles fire at the right time with the right force to execute the right move), but you should ALSO add some muscle, get stronger, increase your aerobic capacity, increase your alactic anaerobic capacity, increase lactic capacity, increase power, increase rate of force development, and lose bodyfat. Obviously not EVERY reader will need or benefit from an increase in every single one of these qualities - maybe you are already as lean as you should be, or as muscular, or as aerobically fit, and for you, increasing that particular quality won't translate into an improvement in martial arts ability, but EVERY reader could benefit from increasing some of them (no person is so strong, aerobically and anaerobically fit, muscular, lean, and flexible that there is no point in improving ANY of those qualities).
Great, you're probably thinking. That sounds like a lot of work.
And it is!
Maybe at this point you're trying to figure out how to cram your week full of workouts that will build all of those qualities optimally. And that's a wonderful idea, except it won't work.
Your body simply can't do all of these things at once. Unless you're an absolute beginner (if you're completely untrained, you can probably improve all of these things at the same time, because beginners are lucky like that) you can't build muscle and endurance simultaneously. You can kind of train for all of these qualities all of the time, and you will improve, but you'll improve faster if you focus on each of them for short periods of time.
I don't mean you should take 3 months off from karate and just lift heavy weights. I do mean that your training should place extra emphasis on one or two qualities, hit those qualities extra hard, and then switch what quality you focus on after 4-12 weeks.
There are better and worse ways to organize these cycles of training, and if you're a professional athlete you should pursue that more carefully. But if you're a martial arts hobbyist, it's not critical. Focus on some physical quality for a while. When you get bored, or stop seeing progress, switch! You really don't have to make it more complicated than that.
So for example:
Suppose you take 2 martial arts classes a week, and train on your own for a solid hour on 2 other days, and maybe have 2, 15 minute blocks of time a week to do easy stuff.
Here's what you do:
1. The classes, I presume, you don't control. You'll do whatever your instructor tells you to.
2. In your 2 hourlong workouts, pick a quality. Say you decide to build some muscle. For those workouts, lift heavy weights, for 5-8 reps per set, with big multijoint movements (squat, deadlift, overhead press, row, chinup/pulldowns, bench press, maybe some curls and tricep pushdowns for the guns). Or, say you decide to build up your aerobic system. Do an hour on the elliptical trainer, with your heart rate at a constant rate between 130 and 150 bpm, or do some running, or do HIIT, whatever. Or say you decide to build up your power. Do medicine ball throws, sprints, depth jumps, and so forth.
3. In the 15 minute blocks, do some mobility work (stretching). Stretching is always good - not necessarily right before your workout, but stretching on your off days will not, as far as I know, interfere with progress in any other physical quality. If you are in a muscle building phase, maybe do 10 minutes of intervals to keep your heart going. If you are in an endurance phase, use those 15 minutes to do a little heavy lifting (one arm pushups and single leg squats, for 5 sets, will give you a whole body strength workout in 10 minutes).
4. When you get bored, or stop getting better at whatever you're working in your 'phase,' switch!
Now the fear people have is that the qualities they build up during the 'phase' are lost when you switch to a new phase. To a certain extent, that is true: after a muscle building phase, if you do 6 weeks of intervals you might lose some muscle. But you're not doing NO strength training - you'll do a little during those 15 minute workouts, and some during the martial arts classes. So you'll likely retain a lot of the muscle you've built, even if you don't keep adding more.
The same is true of endurance. If you increase your aerobic fitness, then move on to specialize in other qualities, you're still working the aerobic system in class and while doing your other workouts. So it's not like running two hours a week, then sitting on the couch for 6 weeks.
Imagine the simplest breakdown: you need to develop 2 incompatible qualities (how many qualities there are, and how specific we get in our blocks, will vary depending on how detailed you want to be) - let's stay super simple and just say strength and endurance (strength can be broken down into several different types, as can endurance, but we don't have to). Spend 6 weeks really focusing on strength, but doing just enough endurance work that you don't lose any, or much, of your aerobic conditioning. Then switch, and for 6 weeks hit the aerobic work hard and do just enough strength work to hold onto your strength gains. And remember that that just enough work is very likely to be getting done in your formal classes, so you might not need to devote any extra time to that.
Rinse and repeat. Depending on your stress levels and how close you are to overtraining, take a deload week (maybe skip the extra 2 independent workouts) in between phases.
If 6 weeks seems too long, and you get bored, do 4 weeks. If you're still making gains at 6 weeks, and want to push it harder, go for 8.
There are a couple of big advantages to this style of training:
Someone who chases two rabbits at once catches neither.
Programming - which just means how you design your training over time - is one of the most interesting and least talked about aspects of martial arts training.
I have never seen a traditional martial arts school that implemented any formal programming. People who compete in professional sports, especially ones with big peaking requirements (like professional fighting or Olympic sports, where you have to be awesome for a brief period of time) have training programs where they work on specific qualities at different times of the year - maybe a a few weeks to work endurance, then a few weeks to specialize in strength, a few weeks in power, a few weeks in skill, etc. I've never seen a karate dojo where there are blocks like that - building aerobic endurance for 6 weeks, then 6 weeks of alactic training, then 6 weeks of hypertrophy, 6 weeks of power development, with deloads in between.
There are good business reasons not to structure karate classes like that, including the fact that it would seem weird, and you'd have to spend a lot of time explaining it to people. However, it's probably a good idea to have this kind of structured programming for yourself, so your out-of-class workouts are focused on building different physical qualities at different times.
Why?
Martial arts ability depends on many different physical qualities - strength, endurance, power, flexibility, balance - in addition to skill. If YOU want to get better at martial arts, you should become more skilled (skill is just a catchall phrase for your nervous system - your brain is better at making the right muscles fire at the right time with the right force to execute the right move), but you should ALSO add some muscle, get stronger, increase your aerobic capacity, increase your alactic anaerobic capacity, increase lactic capacity, increase power, increase rate of force development, and lose bodyfat. Obviously not EVERY reader will need or benefit from an increase in every single one of these qualities - maybe you are already as lean as you should be, or as muscular, or as aerobically fit, and for you, increasing that particular quality won't translate into an improvement in martial arts ability, but EVERY reader could benefit from increasing some of them (no person is so strong, aerobically and anaerobically fit, muscular, lean, and flexible that there is no point in improving ANY of those qualities).
Great, you're probably thinking. That sounds like a lot of work.
And it is!
Maybe at this point you're trying to figure out how to cram your week full of workouts that will build all of those qualities optimally. And that's a wonderful idea, except it won't work.
Your body simply can't do all of these things at once. Unless you're an absolute beginner (if you're completely untrained, you can probably improve all of these things at the same time, because beginners are lucky like that) you can't build muscle and endurance simultaneously. You can kind of train for all of these qualities all of the time, and you will improve, but you'll improve faster if you focus on each of them for short periods of time.
I don't mean you should take 3 months off from karate and just lift heavy weights. I do mean that your training should place extra emphasis on one or two qualities, hit those qualities extra hard, and then switch what quality you focus on after 4-12 weeks.
There are better and worse ways to organize these cycles of training, and if you're a professional athlete you should pursue that more carefully. But if you're a martial arts hobbyist, it's not critical. Focus on some physical quality for a while. When you get bored, or stop seeing progress, switch! You really don't have to make it more complicated than that.
So for example:
Suppose you take 2 martial arts classes a week, and train on your own for a solid hour on 2 other days, and maybe have 2, 15 minute blocks of time a week to do easy stuff.
Here's what you do:
1. The classes, I presume, you don't control. You'll do whatever your instructor tells you to.
2. In your 2 hourlong workouts, pick a quality. Say you decide to build some muscle. For those workouts, lift heavy weights, for 5-8 reps per set, with big multijoint movements (squat, deadlift, overhead press, row, chinup/pulldowns, bench press, maybe some curls and tricep pushdowns for the guns). Or, say you decide to build up your aerobic system. Do an hour on the elliptical trainer, with your heart rate at a constant rate between 130 and 150 bpm, or do some running, or do HIIT, whatever. Or say you decide to build up your power. Do medicine ball throws, sprints, depth jumps, and so forth.
3. In the 15 minute blocks, do some mobility work (stretching). Stretching is always good - not necessarily right before your workout, but stretching on your off days will not, as far as I know, interfere with progress in any other physical quality. If you are in a muscle building phase, maybe do 10 minutes of intervals to keep your heart going. If you are in an endurance phase, use those 15 minutes to do a little heavy lifting (one arm pushups and single leg squats, for 5 sets, will give you a whole body strength workout in 10 minutes).
4. When you get bored, or stop getting better at whatever you're working in your 'phase,' switch!
Now the fear people have is that the qualities they build up during the 'phase' are lost when you switch to a new phase. To a certain extent, that is true: after a muscle building phase, if you do 6 weeks of intervals you might lose some muscle. But you're not doing NO strength training - you'll do a little during those 15 minute workouts, and some during the martial arts classes. So you'll likely retain a lot of the muscle you've built, even if you don't keep adding more.
The same is true of endurance. If you increase your aerobic fitness, then move on to specialize in other qualities, you're still working the aerobic system in class and while doing your other workouts. So it's not like running two hours a week, then sitting on the couch for 6 weeks.
Imagine the simplest breakdown: you need to develop 2 incompatible qualities (how many qualities there are, and how specific we get in our blocks, will vary depending on how detailed you want to be) - let's stay super simple and just say strength and endurance (strength can be broken down into several different types, as can endurance, but we don't have to). Spend 6 weeks really focusing on strength, but doing just enough endurance work that you don't lose any, or much, of your aerobic conditioning. Then switch, and for 6 weeks hit the aerobic work hard and do just enough strength work to hold onto your strength gains. And remember that that just enough work is very likely to be getting done in your formal classes, so you might not need to devote any extra time to that.
Rinse and repeat. Depending on your stress levels and how close you are to overtraining, take a deload week (maybe skip the extra 2 independent workouts) in between phases.
If 6 weeks seems too long, and you get bored, do 4 weeks. If you're still making gains at 6 weeks, and want to push it harder, go for 8.
There are a couple of big advantages to this style of training:
- You'll make better long term gains doing this than trying to work every quality at once.
- You will likely be motivated to tackle each new phase. Every six weeks you're getting a whole new set of goals, and making rapid progress. And a whole new set of workouts.
- By rotating movements and exercises you're less likely to get repetitive motion injuries. Doing the same movements for high reps day in and day out for years is hard on your joints.
You can plan these shifts or just switch your focus whenever you get bored or stale or feel like a change. It's your training!
One last point: if you have a promotion or a big competition, you might want to plan your training around that. Make sure you have a deload week coming into the competition (ease off just before the promotion or the competition). Depending on your personal strengths and weaknesses, and the way promotions are handled in your style, you might want to be sure to hit that promotion right at the tail end of an endurance phase, for example.
If you'd like, let me know how your training is going in comments.
Osu.
Friday, September 29, 2017
Bad Science: book reviews and snappy punches
Sometimes people say things that are just so dumb I have to speak up. This is one of those days.
I've been reading more books than blogs lately, largely because the well of information in blogs has sort of dried up. Lots of people blog great basic fitness information, and I found that hugely useful to me personally ten years ago, but the market has reached a saturation point, and my favorite fitness bloggers talk more about business and motivation than about physiology, and that's not where my interest lies (which is not to say there's anything wrong with business talk, only that it's not what I personally care about).
I'm interested in martial arts history, at least to some extent, but my real passion (as is probably obvious to anyone who reads this blog) is application of modern science to martial arts training.
So I picked up a couple of books simply because their titles popped up on Amazon and they seemed appealing: Karate Science and Fight Like a Physicist. I had no previous experience with either author, and still don't.
Before I continue, let me just say: both books are worth a read; Fight Like a Physicist is significantly better (more clear, more correct, at least as far as I can tell) while Karate Science is less clear, but makes recommendations that are more interesting (possibly because they aren't clear) and therefore in some way is more thought provoking. But neither book is a must read (I doubt any book on the market qualifies as a must-read for a karate practitioner, at least in my opinion, unless your style's founder or your instructor has published a book. But that's a debate for another day).
A topic that is covered in both of these books, and that seems popular in martial arts forums (I've seen it asked often) is the difference between 'snappy' techniques and 'thrusting' techniques - why strikes are sometimes more 'snappy' than 'pushy', how to do one or the other, which one is better, how can we train to do one over the other, etc. If you're not sure what I mean, find a heavy bag. Jab it as hard as you can, and see what it does. Then stick out your arm and give it a long, hard shove. I bet the bag will move a lot farther with the shove than with the jab, but I bet you know intuitively that jabbing someone hard will hurt them a lot more than a long, hard shove (unless they're standing at the edge of the cliff).
A fast jab and a shove are opposite ends of the spectrum, but we have all seen people whose punches are much more like a shove and others whose punches are more like a jab. I've also seen various martial artists say that snappy techniques are better, and thrusting techniques are worse. Some say that each type of technique has its place (I lean in this direction - sometimes you want to just hurt someone, sometimes there is value in moving them, even if by doing so you hurt them less).
Both of these books deal with this topic. The treatment in Fight Like a Physicist is, I think, exactly correct, in pretty much every way. I won't reiterate it fully here, but roughly speaking, snappy punches are faster but involve less mass, giving them relatively more kinetic energy but relatively less momentum (kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity, momentum to the velocity). Thrusting strikes are slower but involve more mass, giving them relatively more momentum and less kinetic energy. The more kinetic energy, the more damage you'll do (energy is, literally, the ability to change things). The more momentum, the more you will cause the target to start moving. So a faster technique will hurt more; a technique with more mass behind it will cause the target to move farther.
This is all based on very solid physics - this isn't advanced physics, we're talking 101 level college course at most, maybe a solid high school class. These are very basic principles of mechanics, though they usually aren't applied to martial arts. If you don't agree with this stuff, please do me a favor and take it to your high school physics teacher and ask.
What you shouldn't, ever, do, please, is read Karate Science and pay attention to its analysis of snappy punches. I'll quote out of a description of snapping strikes on page 199 and 200 of the book (bold face is mine):
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Reaction forces DO NOT TAKE TIME. When you jump, you push down against the floor. There is no delay while the floor waits to push back. I don't mean there is a very small delay - I mean there is NO delay. The forces are simultaneous. Exactly simultaneous. There is no equation in any physics textbook anywhere to measure the delay before a reaction force is applied to an actor. BECAUSE THERE IS NO DELAY. NONE.
Retracting a technique quickly will NOT transfer extra energy into the target and prevent the attacker from having to handle reaction forces. The only way to lower the amount of reaction force you have to deal with is to hit with less force. You can't outrace reaction forces, you can't be so fast that the reaction forces don't have time to get to your hand before you've retracted your fist (though that sounds like a good topic for a Master Ken video or a martial arts anime. Maybe Son Goku in Super Saiyan Green form can punch that fast).
J.D. Swanson, according to the amazon author page, holds a PhD in integrative biosciences. I'm sure he knows a lot more about a lot of things than I do or every will, but those paragraphs are pretty inexcusable.
The point?
It is absolutely worth understanding the different qualities of a strike - whether a way of striking generates relatively more kinetic energy, relatively more momentum, or both. And it's absolutely worth understanding the right time to use techniques of different sorts - a great example is a teep in Muai Thai, which is a pushing front kick that is designed to create distance and push the opponent across the ring (it's a thrusting technique, but it's done purposefully to be a thrusting technique).
But if you don't really understand the reasons behind techniques, making up explanations is a bad way to go. You lose credibility with any students who took and understood high school physics. You look bad to any educated readers who might have otherwise been interested in a scientific approach to martial arts.
And, if you don't apply basic scientific knowledge and critical thinking to some of the claims you're making, you risk making really bad mistakes. Maybe you'll focus too much on retracting techniques (thinking you can actually outrace reaction forces!) and rob your strikes of power they could really use (there's a good reason to retract strikes quickly, but pulling your fist back fast doesn't make the punch harder, it just makes your arm harder to grab after the punch).
There is some interesting stuff elsewhere in that book, but it's really hard for me to take it seriously, especially the things that aren't obviously true, because the author has established a propensity for making really bad basic errors.
I promise I will not spend the bulk of my posts here being curmudgeonly!
Train hard. Osu.
I've been reading more books than blogs lately, largely because the well of information in blogs has sort of dried up. Lots of people blog great basic fitness information, and I found that hugely useful to me personally ten years ago, but the market has reached a saturation point, and my favorite fitness bloggers talk more about business and motivation than about physiology, and that's not where my interest lies (which is not to say there's anything wrong with business talk, only that it's not what I personally care about).
I'm interested in martial arts history, at least to some extent, but my real passion (as is probably obvious to anyone who reads this blog) is application of modern science to martial arts training.
So I picked up a couple of books simply because their titles popped up on Amazon and they seemed appealing: Karate Science and Fight Like a Physicist. I had no previous experience with either author, and still don't.
Before I continue, let me just say: both books are worth a read; Fight Like a Physicist is significantly better (more clear, more correct, at least as far as I can tell) while Karate Science is less clear, but makes recommendations that are more interesting (possibly because they aren't clear) and therefore in some way is more thought provoking. But neither book is a must read (I doubt any book on the market qualifies as a must-read for a karate practitioner, at least in my opinion, unless your style's founder or your instructor has published a book. But that's a debate for another day).
A topic that is covered in both of these books, and that seems popular in martial arts forums (I've seen it asked often) is the difference between 'snappy' techniques and 'thrusting' techniques - why strikes are sometimes more 'snappy' than 'pushy', how to do one or the other, which one is better, how can we train to do one over the other, etc. If you're not sure what I mean, find a heavy bag. Jab it as hard as you can, and see what it does. Then stick out your arm and give it a long, hard shove. I bet the bag will move a lot farther with the shove than with the jab, but I bet you know intuitively that jabbing someone hard will hurt them a lot more than a long, hard shove (unless they're standing at the edge of the cliff).
A fast jab and a shove are opposite ends of the spectrum, but we have all seen people whose punches are much more like a shove and others whose punches are more like a jab. I've also seen various martial artists say that snappy techniques are better, and thrusting techniques are worse. Some say that each type of technique has its place (I lean in this direction - sometimes you want to just hurt someone, sometimes there is value in moving them, even if by doing so you hurt them less).
Both of these books deal with this topic. The treatment in Fight Like a Physicist is, I think, exactly correct, in pretty much every way. I won't reiterate it fully here, but roughly speaking, snappy punches are faster but involve less mass, giving them relatively more kinetic energy but relatively less momentum (kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity, momentum to the velocity). Thrusting strikes are slower but involve more mass, giving them relatively more momentum and less kinetic energy. The more kinetic energy, the more damage you'll do (energy is, literally, the ability to change things). The more momentum, the more you will cause the target to start moving. So a faster technique will hurt more; a technique with more mass behind it will cause the target to move farther.
This is all based on very solid physics - this isn't advanced physics, we're talking 101 level college course at most, maybe a solid high school class. These are very basic principles of mechanics, though they usually aren't applied to martial arts. If you don't agree with this stuff, please do me a favor and take it to your high school physics teacher and ask.
What you shouldn't, ever, do, please, is read Karate Science and pay attention to its analysis of snappy punches. I'll quote out of a description of snapping strikes on page 199 and 200 of the book (bold face is mine):
According to physics, when you push against a wall or hit a target (action force), the target will push back into you with an equal amount of force until either the force applied stops or either side gives way. In addition, it can take time to transfer that action force, and for the object getting force applied to it to transfer that force back into the force applier (reaction force).
In these techniques, the limb penetrates the target, pushing through the soft tissue layers, then immediately retracts before the opposing body applies reaction force to the attacking limb.No. No. No.
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Reaction forces DO NOT TAKE TIME. When you jump, you push down against the floor. There is no delay while the floor waits to push back. I don't mean there is a very small delay - I mean there is NO delay. The forces are simultaneous. Exactly simultaneous. There is no equation in any physics textbook anywhere to measure the delay before a reaction force is applied to an actor. BECAUSE THERE IS NO DELAY. NONE.
Retracting a technique quickly will NOT transfer extra energy into the target and prevent the attacker from having to handle reaction forces. The only way to lower the amount of reaction force you have to deal with is to hit with less force. You can't outrace reaction forces, you can't be so fast that the reaction forces don't have time to get to your hand before you've retracted your fist (though that sounds like a good topic for a Master Ken video or a martial arts anime. Maybe Son Goku in Super Saiyan Green form can punch that fast).
J.D. Swanson, according to the amazon author page, holds a PhD in integrative biosciences. I'm sure he knows a lot more about a lot of things than I do or every will, but those paragraphs are pretty inexcusable.
The point?
It is absolutely worth understanding the different qualities of a strike - whether a way of striking generates relatively more kinetic energy, relatively more momentum, or both. And it's absolutely worth understanding the right time to use techniques of different sorts - a great example is a teep in Muai Thai, which is a pushing front kick that is designed to create distance and push the opponent across the ring (it's a thrusting technique, but it's done purposefully to be a thrusting technique).
But if you don't really understand the reasons behind techniques, making up explanations is a bad way to go. You lose credibility with any students who took and understood high school physics. You look bad to any educated readers who might have otherwise been interested in a scientific approach to martial arts.
And, if you don't apply basic scientific knowledge and critical thinking to some of the claims you're making, you risk making really bad mistakes. Maybe you'll focus too much on retracting techniques (thinking you can actually outrace reaction forces!) and rob your strikes of power they could really use (there's a good reason to retract strikes quickly, but pulling your fist back fast doesn't make the punch harder, it just makes your arm harder to grab after the punch).
There is some interesting stuff elsewhere in that book, but it's really hard for me to take it seriously, especially the things that aren't obviously true, because the author has established a propensity for making really bad basic errors.
I promise I will not spend the bulk of my posts here being curmudgeonly!
Train hard. Osu.
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