Working out When Sick

The shots are being administered. The cold remedies are moved front and center of the drug stores. Some of us are coughing and sneezing. Others are wearing masks and running around like SARS just broke out. It's flu season and sooner or later, someone's going to bring up the second-most pointlessly asked question...

"Is it okay to work out when you're sick?"

If you asked me, I'd say...

It depends

You couldn't ask for a more intuitive and though provoking answer, could you? While these people are at it, they might as well ask about the best workout music (that being the most pointless question).

I'll read any book that has words in it. That even includes British Survival Guides. I recall in that book about making sure that if you're in a group survival situation that it's important that every person has a job, no matter how ill or injured they are. The reason for that is to keep boredom at bay. An idle mind with a sick body will kill rapidly and any little thing that can keep someone stimulated and feeling important could be a life saver.

Face the facts: if you sit around and think about how sick you are, chances are good you'll be sick longer. I know that I can only tolerate the monotony of watching TV in my bed clothes while I try desperately to get the taste of cough drops out of my mouth with fizzy, sludgy mixtures of Airborne and orange juice for so long.

Yes, this blog entry came to mind when I thought I might have a cold. I usually go to the doctors just to make sure it's not strep throat (which I used to get a lot when I was a kid). Just being at the doctor's office made me feel sicker even though
the only thing that was bothersome was my throat. Other than that, I was fine. It's one of those times where the more I thought about being sick, the more sick I felt.

If I can work, then I'll work out. I'm not trying to set any records here. Working out is, after all, a controlled breakdown of the body. I'll just do something to keep busy but not bust balls. I'll keep the reps low, rest more between each set, and drink more water than I usually would. I followed this advice with a work out after going to the doctor's office. I felt fine the next day.

The scale of mental health versus physical health need to be carefully evaluated on more serious things than the flu. I'll never forget the sensation of trying to use my CoC's when I had the shingles earlier last year. Sensation is too gentle of a word. For those who've never had them, this is the best description of the pain: Life-threatening electrocution! So, that time, I had to deal with being one with the couch. Use some good sense on more extreme cases of illness.

Sickness and exercise is one of those moments where you need to be honest with yourself. A very modest amount of self reflection should give you the answer to your questions on this one. It doesn't require a key stroke ride to your favorite forum of internet-strength Gods. Chances are, you already know the answer to this question. Act accordingly.

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Training Wheels for Real Training

There are a lot of reasons why we all keep strength training. The most universal reasons that we all do it is the soul-moving qualities that come with overcoming hard, physical challenges. We also learn to appreciate the importance of being physically capable. Life just sucks when we're weak and that fact can only be avoided for so long. I could keep going on and on about why it's awesome to pursue physical strength for reasons beyond just the physical realm but smarter, more insightful people have poured over that in countless blog entries all over all of the internets. I do have a question though. It's one that a few of my Friends have taken up the keyboard for answers and action on the question at hand:

Why does real strength training have to be so gender-specific?

Indeed, there are no good answers to this question outside of a really fucked up notion of beauty that claims that any sort of real strength builder strike down the mere identity of women and render them men at the slightest touch of a pull-up bar or a barbbell. Anyone who cares to do some honest research into the topic, beyond Traci Anderson and women's fitness magazines, will realize this.

Now, I freely admit that my opening paragraph should apply equally to both sexes should be free from judgement about how someone will look when they train to excel. It shouldn't matter how a person looks nearly as much as it does...but that's the way that the cards have been dealt. It's the somewhat unfortunate fact of life.

The last time I wrote on this topic, I said the following:

Maybe that's what we should be doing to begin with here: promoting real strength training for real health for the sake of being able to do real-life movement. Then, after we've got that mastered, maybe we can all learn to appreciate a healthy, strong body and learn to find it desirable, maybe even attractive.

So, that leaves me with one thought. If the notion of promoting a look that looks like strong-health as attractive, then what would someone use? The thought that crossed my mind is: do most people even know what that looks like anymore?

I freely admit that there isn't usually a dramatic difference in how a strong woman and an ordinary woman look. There are tell-tale signs. There are things that you don't usually see on women who do some sort of real strength training. These are things that I don't think most people probably wouldn't find attractive. Using the notion that what's attractive is what's strong and healthy, I think that these are points that we can all agree on.

Let's start easy: the muffin top. While I'll freely admit that this is more diet-related than exercise-related, I've always maintained that good training is the ultimate feedback on how good your diet is. Five rounds of The Magic 50, Girondas 8x8, some a nice super-set of pull-ups and push-ups will tell you that your binge eating the day before was really stupid far faster than walking on any contraption ever would. That ultimately translates to a far better body. Besides, doing workouts like this for a sustained period of time won't allow for lots of body fat. To succeed at this stuff, you have to lean out!

Moving onto an actual show of muscle on a woman, I'd have to single out the skinny thighs. I think that men instinctively show off their upper bodies because they know that's what defines them as powerful men. Women have the power in the legs on a pound-for-pound basis more then men do. It's one of the few places where women can have some muscle definition and show it off without the "man" label. First image found on Google when I typed, "model legs".


So, there's no reason for women's legs to only meet at the knees. It could be said that it's actually incredibly feminine to have this display of strength on a woman!

Another, more subtle problem area that bothers me about women is the winged shouldler blades. How many times do we see this look on women...For some reason, ribs poking out the sides is prime tabloid material for actresses who are to skinny but this one somehow gets a pass. It's still bones sticking out of the skin where they shouldn't be sticking out! Furthermore, it's an unhealthy posture issue that begs for some stronger muscles in the right places.

I cringe to even bring up using attraction as a method of selling strength training to the other sex. Ever-changing notions of beauty have lead generations of women to do some very bizarre, and dangerously unhealthy things to their bodies. The reason why even mention it is that it worked so well for men 120 years ago.

I believe it was Lionel Strongfort who commented that for every person who wanted to be strong like Eugen Sandow, 20 just wanted to look like him. Indeed, if you do a Google Image search of Sandow, you'll find that most of the pictures of him out that exist have him showing off his body more than his lifting prowess. We can argue about the limitations of how much sex appeal should sell strength training all day but it's hard to deny that it works and it certainly has it's place. If anything, it's like training wheels: Something that gets you started on the road to better things. Things like the stuff I described at the beginning of this entry.

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DIY Bench Press and Squat Stand

All in one DIY Bench Press and Squat Stand from Garage Gym Resource End of Three Fitness.

This is a very similar build to the earlier DIY Squat Stand we looked at, incorporating the uprights set into buckets of cement. Full details can be found over at the diy corner garage gym along with some other great DIY builds well worth a look

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The Time and Place, Part 2

I can tell that it's one of those days when I haven't drank enough water throughout the day. I'm tiring more quickly than usual and my sweat is unusually salty. It's already made it to my eyes and they're starting to sting. I'm on set number 5 of hip belt squats and I figured I'd use my 30 second break to grab a towel and wipe off my face.

The only problem is the fucking mice made their way into my house for the winter, leaving mouse shit all over my gym towels. Things like this happen when you turn half-finished basement room into a gym. It works but it's hardly perfect. It's certainly not the cleanest until I can get rid of the mice. My ceiling is too low to put any weight, other than kettlebells, overhead. At least I can just barely do pull-ups without my knees touching the floor. To top it off, I had to cram my desk and books into the same area when my son Henry was born.
OOPS! Sorry, kids...
So, I move outside when I need some serious overhead space to work with. A good example is my rope climbing work. I'm still plucking away at my goal to climb my 3" thick rope. It's not getting any more fun though. The temperature's seriously starting to drop and keeping my fingers warm dictates that I move through most of my pulling and pushing sets with some haste, disregarding that my lungs feel like they're a barely-contained explosion.

Thing is, I don't do this work at home. I have to go to our company's shop to use a forklift to get the 15' of overhead space. Finding a clean patch of ground is, well, I gave up trying. It all smells like some variation of shit, antifreeze, dust, gas, and god-knows what else! I just suck it up, throw the chains on my neck, and keep doing my push-ups.

Why not just join a gym? If you're asking this then you're new here or you're just not paying attention. I travel and lately, I don't have any money. You'll find out if you don't have a wife and a kid. Soon enough. Those two reasons make a gym membership impractical. Besides, I hate most gyms. They're fluffy and not very serious. I can get the work done in them, sure, but they're distraction-filled. At least with the cold, smelly ground and the mouse-bordello basement gym, there's no TV, bad posing routines, and people asking me if I'm doing something from P90X.

I decided to do this two-part blog entry for a simple purpose: to demonstrate that there is no perfect time and place. In point of fact, there are times when there isn't even a GOOD time and place. Yeah, you have to mold your life around training your body to some degree but your training is going to have to do the same. This isn't a bad thing unless you make it that way.
Good example of less-than ideal settings to train.

This is all about getting your mind right. If you do that, and not get stuck on the specifics and circumstances, then you'll find that you can overcome any shortcomings in environment and timing.

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Homemade Weight Machine

Here's another great Homemade Weight Machine build.

Lou Wozniak from HowToLou.com has made a superb instuctional video packed with information for building a DIY Weight Machine. Most of the materials for this could be from a recycled source, but can also be bought cheaply from a hardware store.

Lou builds this weight machine in a very small room in his basement, but with some adaption I could see this being built in the corner of a garage or shed as the weight slider fits inside stud walling.


I would also recommend checking out some of Lou's other Youtube videos, Lou certainly has developed some serious DIY skills (building a fireplace is one of his achievements!)

If you liked this, you may also like this Homemade Backyard Workout Machine or this DIY Calf Raise Machine or even Make Your Own Elliptical Trainer
or set of your New Year with some Modified Lat Pulldowns

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Weights vs. Bodyweight, Part 2

Hopefully, attention spans are restored and clear minds are brought to the table because it's time to get back to comparing Weights vs. BW again. In the first entry, I decided to lay out what I considered the advantages of training with iron in the hands. This time, it's time to turn the tables and look at the disadvantages of iron and when it's a better idea to look around for different methods of making strength training harder.

The most obvious, clear-cut, and convincing advantage of BW has over weights is the convenience factor. Weights are stuff. Stuff costs money. Stuff takes up space. A lot of us don't have a lot of money...or space. Some of us travel and can't take a lot of stuff along. The majority of BW exercises can be done with bare minimum of extra apparatus outside of our own body. The importance of this advantage isn't stated nearly enough.

Getting strong and healthy gets determined by how well we can maintain a strong and healthy lifestyle. Right now, you could probably shove away from your computer and start doing a very productive BW-only routine. You can go on a vacation and do the same thing. If you went broke, you still have the ability to work out. Very little of this applies if your strength training heavily relies on adding ever-increasing amount of weight to make it a challenge. That can hurt the ability to keep that strong-healthy lifestyle thing going.

Now, we have to venture into more murky territory. I have to freely admit that a lot of what happens with weights isn't always the problem of the weights but what people do with them. Too many of weight trainings most popular shortcomings really have more to do with what's in between the trainee's ears than in the palms of their hands.

That being said, I really do think that BW training is better for overall health.
No, this isn't going to be the normal, "weights will bust you up," rant. I never believed that and I still don't, especially after the weight training that I've done. Furthermore, I am fully aware that it's possible to injure yourself with BW (worst thing I've done to myself training in recent memory was hyperextending my left thumb on a 5 finger, one-arm push-up) if not done properly.

Although I feel that I've had more of the wrong kind of aches from weights than I have from BW, that's not my reasoning for tipping the healthy factor in favor of going the non-metallic approach.

The first one has to do with the whole notion of strength-to-Bodyweight ratio(S-2-BW). There's a lot of pseudo-science out there about this but I still think that there are some very convincing reasons that maximizing this ratio is important for maintaining your health. The most obvious it's very difficult to have a high S-2-BW if you're fat. There are numerous BW moves that are impossible to do if that ratio isn't off the charts because you're carrying around too much extra blubber. When was the last time you saw someone who was 50 lbs overweight pull off One-Arm push-ups, a flag, pistol, or climb a 15' rope? On the other hand, you can find plenty of fat guys lifting huge piles of weight.

Now it's time to bring up those other, even more murky reasons for giving BW an edge over iron. As moving iron become easy, what do we do? DUH! We start lifting more. and more. AND MORE! I think that it's hard to dispute that it's very easy to lift more than we should. That makes it easier to hurt yourself while doing it. Yes, this can be negated by checking your ego at the gym entrance, making sure that we control the lift and not add so much that we let the lift control us. Still, the temptation is there. Every iron game revolves around moving more and more iron so the urge to move more than we should is always there.

Another temptation of moving iron is to shorten the movements so we can lift even more. Weight training happily embraces partials of a lot of the lifts for the sake of moving more weight. BW, on the other hand, really frowns on partials. We don't like partial pull-ups, pistols that aren't ass-to-grass, and the jury is still out on dips to parallel. I've always looked at range of motion as a use-it-or-loose it proposition. I don't see reducing ROM for the sake of moving more metal as a healthy trade-off.

Getting back to getting stronger, I gave weights the advantage for the lower body. I'd have to give BW the advantage for the upper body, and for the opposite reasons. The upper body isn't built to take the work load that the legs and hips can easily handle. They're built to move around in lots of cool ways and so there are lots of ways to make them really, REALLY strong without really needing to add weight to the movement that you do them with. Most of my readers could probably work the upper body extremely effectively with no iron at all for a long, long time with little else than a few scraps of rope, some pipe, and some towels. If that.

I do have a mental advantage to give to BW. I recall that Eric Cressey commented that the human body, when sufficiently motivated by necessity, will move weight regardless of proper mechanics, personal safety, or perceived lack of strength. I don't bring this up to comment on the safety or practicality of such a lift. It's simply that the resistance is always there. Gravity never takes a rest. When doing a BW movement, chances are there that effect isn't there. That's not a bad thing. In fact, that can be a huge advantage. If doing the move heavily relies on you focusing on the move and forcing it to become more difficult, then there has to be a more intense mental focus. Without it, you get no work out of it. This might be why many BW guys feel that there's a meditative element to certain BW moves.

So, the somewhat logical conclusion to this would be to try to determine whether BW training beats weight training. I'm not sure of the answer. When you figure it out, if you could kindly let me know if Flint and Snake Eyes would beat The Cobra and Copperhead in a fight to the death and if the Marvel Universe is really superior to DC, please?

In the meantime, I'm going to point out something else that doesn't get mentioned a whole lot in the weight vs. BW fisticuffs. The choice of which one and which one is better to use over the other is highly personal and subject to what you're looking to do and what you have to work with. This varies so much that it's hard to nail down a favored method of strength training. By reading this Blog, you already know my answer. That's my personal choice. A little bit of analyzing on your life and goals has to go into your consideration for working out prior to selecting your tools. Choose your favorite accordingly.

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The Time and the Place, Part 1

I've grown a severe aversion to people who run on at the mouth, or punching keys and creating piles worthless words, discussing things that they have no clue what it is they're talking about. There are places all over the internet that overflow with such mindless shit. I've grown up around too many people like that much of my life.

I've never claimed to be an expert on anything up until now. Today will be the day that I declare myself to be an expert on working out on the road. After several internet explorations, I've discovered people who think that a piece of exercise equipment that fits into a duffel bag is portable and others who think that it's feasible to check a doorway pull-up bar in their luggage. I wonder if these are the same bone bag metrosexuals who travel with no less than 5 shirts no matter if they're taking a three day weekend to a nudist colony.

Well, they could be halfway right if they were traveling by car, or especially by truck. Most of last years business travel for me was done by car. That makes things a lot easier since you can bring a modest amount of gear. Kettlebells tuck neatly behind the seats of most pickup trucks and my much-worn, much-loved sandbag doesn't mind the ride in the bed. A set-up like this provides a very-wide variety of training, no matter where traveling may take you. Within reason, you're only limited by your desire to bother loading it into your respective automobile.
Traveling by car is easy enough. Where things get really tricky is the airplane. Thanks to fat bastards all over the USA, your bag weight is down to 50 lbs each. Things get exacerbated when you have to travel in the winter time. The 50 lbs bag weight is very easy to exceed when you need jackets and sweaters. There's not a lot of room for exercise gear.

You're probably back to BW-only. We're all here reading because we love BW. Chances are good that part of that devotion is precisely because we can do it anywhere with marginal amounts of equipment. Well, air travel combined with hotel living will put that to the test.

Still, some stuff helps out a lot. Near the top of the list is something for pull-ups. Too often, a collection of running machines are what passes for a gym in most hotels, if you find anything at all. In spite of how simple the needs for pulling up in a gym are, they're just not common. That doesn't make you too down and out if you stay in one of those multi-story hotels where all of the rooms' doors are outside. They usually have railings and stairways that you can attach a suspension trainer to. Easy.

Not so if the hotel room entrances are inside of the building. This quickly renders a suspension trainer less useful. What I've used through the years (until I lost my pair. SHIT!)are doorway pull-up handles. As long as you're not too heavy and you're using them on a solid-core door with durable hinges and a good lock (which, if your room doesn't have that, I suggest you find another hotel) they work great. You can also use them for ab leg raise work as well if you place them at the bottom of the door.
Both of these options are very lightweight and don't take up much space in a bag. While you're at it, it might be helpful to pack something to make push-ups more interesting. To popular candidates are either some sort of push-up spikes or a travel Perfect Push-up. If you topped off your travel kit with a jump rope and some sort of gym timer (preferably a Gymboss), you're good to go.

Now, if you're difficult and you have to have some weight, then go back to the sandbag. I packed my Alpha Strong Sandbag on a trip to the beach in Peru. When I finished up, I washed, dried and re-packed it in my suitcase. If you're not going to the beach, then take a discreet walk through your hotel's landscaping. Chances are good you'll find a stone that you can build a workout around. Did you rent a car? That could make a good piece of workout gear if the hotel isn't too crowded.

I've done all of the above when I'm traveling. I can vouch that with enough imagination you can see a source of a good workout if you're willing to look at things in that light. Yeah, it's helpful to bring some of your own stuff when the opportunity presents itself. The best advice I can possibly give is not to let yourself fall victim to thinking that your workouts are made and broke by your access to stuff.

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