Back to Uni

About 15 years ago, ‘functional fitness’ became a hot trend in the fitness industry.  Suddenly, people everywhere were doing squats on top of BOSUs, bench pressing on stability balls, and doing crazy one-arm, one-leg movements using cable pulley machines.  At the time, I dismissed the trend as garbage.  And, in the years that followed, studies backed that opinion: EMG muscle readings showed that people simply used their muscles less intensely when they used them in weird, unstable, cockamamie ways.

But as fitness expert Alwyn Cosgrove has observed, we tend to overreact to new ideas in the short term, and under-react to them in the long term.  So while the functional fitness trend has largely now passed, I recently read Mike Boyle’s newly updated *New Functional Training for Sports, 2nd Edition*, and I think Cosgrove may be right.  While there was certainly much to disdain about the functional fitness trend, I’m also pretty sure I threw out a valuable baby with that bathwater.

For example, as we’re working with a bunch of Baby Boomers and older adults through Composite, training to prevent falls is an increasing element of our programming.  Previously, I had always thought of that as a ‘software’ question – improving the proprioception needed for balance.  However, it’s increasingly clear to me in practice that the functional guys had it right: it’s not that your brain doesn’t know when your shin isn’t vertical, or when your hips aren’t parallel to the ground; it’s that you don’t have the strength to stabilize them correctly while you’re moving and on one leg.  And, similarly, it’s not that your brain doesn’t try to move a foot to catch yourself if you start to fall; it’s that you don’t have the speed to move that foot fast enough.  While strength falls off at 1% a year as we age, power, the fitness attribute that underlies foot speed, declines twice as quickly.  So making sure we strengthen on one leg – and build unilateral power in particular – seems like a wise training priority.

Or consider “core work,” which often focuses on lumbar flexion (sit-ups) or lumbar rotation (Russian twists). However, as the functional training crowd points out, that’s not really how the body moves in sport or real-world pursuits.  Instead, if you watch carefully, you’ll notice that almost all athletic movement comes from flexion, extension, and rotation at the hips and thoracic (upper) spine.  The lumbar (lower) spine mostly just braces in place, to transmit power.  Therefore, exercises focused on anti-flexion (like roll-outs) and anti-rotation (like Paloff presses and plank reaches) probably better translate out of the gym.

Even the stability ball – a device I’ve long derided – might be worth its salt.  For the past few weeks, I and handful of our athletes have been using them for hamstring curls (back on the floor, feet on the ball, rolling it in and out), and we’ve found they activate the hamstrings in a remarkably intense way (especially for anyone not yet ready to graduate to a full glute-ham developer raise).  Which is to say, I’ll definitely be including the movement in programs going forward.

So, in summary, when it comes to functional training, I now stand corrected.  Possibly even on one foot.

Freedom

“There is a famous allegory in the writings of Rabbenu Yona:

‘Prisoners in a jail effect an escape – they dig a tunnel under the wall of their cell and squeeze through.  All except one: one prisoner remains, ignoring the avenue of escape.  The jailer enters to discover that his prisoners have flown, and begins beating the one who remains.’

This is a difficult allegory to understand.  Why is the one who remains being beaten?  He appears to be the one who is acting properly; after all, he is the only one obeying the law. What has he done?

The meaning is this: in remaining, he has escaped more profoundly than those who have fled. The escapees have broken jail; it no longer contains them, that is true. But the one who remains has redefined the jail: when he shows that he is there voluntarily, he shows that this is no jail at all. While the cell was intact, he appeared to be imprisoned; but now that it is clear that he has no desire to leave, he reveals the jail never held him. A jail is a place that holds those who wish to be free; those who wish to be there are not held by it. The jailer is angry not because this inmate has done something as simple as escaping, but because he has declared the jailer and his jail to be entirely irrelevant. The others have left the jail; he has utterly destroyed it.”

– Rabbit Akiva Tatz, Letters to a Buddhist Jew

Shoot ‘Em

Per my last post, I have a pretty anal-retentive approach to goals, habits, and projects, which has helped me to push forward on a wide array of big pursuits that I care about.  But, over the years, I’ve also slowly accumulated a list of small, random skills I’d also like to improve or acquire.  And, precisely because I don’t care that much about them, I never really get around to doing anything about them; they seem to perpetually live on my back burner.

This fall, however, I came up with a new idea: each quarter, I’d choose one of those random back-burner pursuits, and commit to spending 5-10 minutes on it daily for three months.  At the end of the quarter, I could make a more permanent, ongoing habit of anything I discovered I really cared about; for everything else, a quarter’s worth of daily progress would be enough to check the box, and to make me feel like I had put in the effort.

So, in September, I started off with chess.  Prior to that, I had played perhaps five games of chess in my life.  I knew how the pieces moved, but that was about it.  So I read a handful of chess books (in case you’re on a similar quest, I highly recommend Bobby Fischer Teachers Chess), and then started playing games. Three months later, I’m still a bit short of grandmaster.  But I can, at least, hold my own in a casual game – well enough to play with a friend, or against a simulator on the iPhone to kill time on a plane or train ride.  Which, really, was all I wanted.

This week, with a new quarter, I moved on to a new skill: playing pool.  Fortuitously, there’s a pool table in my building lobby, which is almost always abandoned in the mornings.  So, for five or ten minutes on the way to work, I stop in and practice some pool drills.

Much like with chess, I think I’ve played maybe two dozen pool games in my life – usually while in a bar, fairly drunk. It’s a frustrating game for me, as, in my mind, I’m excellent.  The geometry and strategy make perfect sense.  But somehow, when the stick hits the cue ball, things never unfold quite like I envisioned them.

We’ll see how much that changes over a quarter of practice.  But if I’m diligent, I think I should be able to make it from horrific to just moderately terrible.  And, for me, that should be good enough. I can move on next quarter to massacring drawing instead, and can keep crossing those little things, one by one, off my back-burner bucket list.

Taking Stock

My freshman year at college, neck-deep in starting my first company, I got an early taste of worrying about work/life balance.  How much time should I spend on the company, I wondered, versus on classes and homework, or on boozing, socializing, and pulling crazy pranks with friends?

At that point, I had also just re-read Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and I still remember being struck by the exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat.  When Alice asks the Cat for directions, he asks her where she’s headed.  “I don’t much care where,” says Alice.  To which the Cat replies, “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

With that in mind, I set out trying to envision an ideal future life, a clear sense of where I wanted to end up, so that I could choose the right roads going forward.  By the time I turned 50, I asked myself, what did I want to be doing?  What did I want to have already accomplished?  Who, really, did I want to be?

To keep things structured, I broke my life down into four broad categories: Work (the things I did for a living, and to make a broad impact on the world), Play (things I did just for my own enjoyment, like writing, playing music, or travel), People (friends, family, and eventually building a family of my own), and Self (mind, body, and spirit).  And, for the better part of a year, I tried to work out a vision for each of those areas that seemed right, that excited and inspired me.

It’s now some 20 years later, and though the age of 50 has inched closer (I’m now just 12 years off), my vision has changed surprisingly little over that time.  Which is excellent, as those long-term goals serve as the basis for my short-term planning, too.  I work backwards from them to 5-year goals (where do I need to be in 5 years on a given goal, to be on track to hit the overall goal by 50?), then to 1-year goals.  And then I translate those, in turn, into either habits for the year (like daily meditation, a monthly museum visit, or a quarterly weekend trip) and projects (big but finite things, like building the Composite client app, which I sort into a long ordered list, then knock off by focusing on one at a time for the first couple of hours of my day).

Most days, I can just get down to work, knowing that, if I stick to those projects and habits, I’m on track to my longer-term goals.  But twice a year – once on my birthday (which happily falls on the middle of the year, in July) and once at year’s end – I stop and take stock.  I look at the big picture.  If I spend the rest of the year climbing the ladder as quickly as I can, those two times, I pause to make sure the ladder is on the right wall.

I start by reviewing my goals – the age 50 ones, as well as the 5 year, 1 year, and project/habits that stem from them.  And then I take a careful look at where I am right now.  During the week between Christmas and New Years, I write in-depth reviews of the four areas of my life – Work, Play, People, Self.  For each, I summarize where I stand, how I fared the past year.  And, for each, I give myself a letter grade, and then see if I need to make any tweaks to my upcoming projects and habits to do better in the year ahead.

Sure, it’s a pretty wonky and time-consuming approach.  But as the world basically shuts down this week anyhow, it’s easy to fit in.  And, for me at least, it pays dividends in purpose, productivity, and sanity for the next twelve months.