The Eagle Press – complex, not complicated

When meeting with a prospective client one of the big things we discuss is obstacles to training.  And sure enough one element that pops up over and over again is that there’s ‘no time’ to train.

We can address this issue from a number of angles such as journaling and analyzing our daily routine, assessing and reconsidering priorities, and progressively building new rituals.  Most often this results in the discovery that the time is indeed there to train if we want it bad enough and are willing to put forth the effort.

However, some people aren’t willing to go through a lifestyle reassessment for a number of reasons – fear being a major factor.  Thus, I’m dealt the hand of putting together a routine that’s not only effective but takes ‘no time’ to perform.

But let’s be real:  if you want to make a change, you have to do the work.  And doing the work takes time.

It just doesn’t have to take a lot of time.

In fact, if it takes too much time, it could work against your goals.

So, in the spirit of getting the most bang-for-your-buck, where time is of the essence, I like to employ Complex Movements as much as I can.

Whereas an isolated movement may involve the articulation of 1 joint in its performance, such as a bicep curl, and a compound movement may involve the articulation of multiple joints in its performance, such as a squat, a complex movement is a marriage of two distinct movements in their own right.

I look for a few key things when putting together a complex movement.

First, it must be effective.  It absolutely must address our needs.  The build of the movement must get us to where we want to go.  It might look cool in its performance, but if it doesn’t get you closer to your destination it’s a waste of time… and remember, we’re starting with ‘no time’ to begin with.

Second, it must be efficient.  It has to hit as many degrees of freedom as possible.  If the complex movement is intended to save us time it must pay mind to the elements of tri-planar movement.  The 3 elements of translation:  heaving (moving up and down), swaying (moving left and right), and surging (moving forward and back).  The 3 elements of rotation:  pitching (bending forward and back), yawing (twisting left and right), and rolling (bending side to side).

Third, it must flow.  Complex doesn’t mean complicated.  We can certainly Frankenstein a bunch of single movements into some kind of monster movement that’s jagged and disconnected.  But we’re looking for grace and ease in movement.  Therefore, it must be smooth and fluid, working towards flow.

The complex movement thus saves us time by addressing our needs in such a way that performing it results in a greater training effect than if we were to train the movements that comprise it all by themselves.

Enter the Eagle Press.

The Eagle Press is the union of the Eagle Leg Swoop with the Get-Up Press.  The linchpin in our relationship here is the core, as anyone who’s done the movement will be quick to tell you the next day upon rolling out of bed.

The Eagle Press is deployed into a program with 5 mission objectives:

1.  Take out the spare tire. Many people carry around an unnecessary donut all day long.  Unfortunately, unlike the one in your vehicle, it’s not going to replace anything that goes flat on your body.  And even if by some modern miracle it does, we all know that riding around on a donut is in no way efficient.  The neuromuscular edge and spike in metabolism you get from training complex movements has great fat-burning implications.

2.  Build a fully functional core. The Eagle Press combines rotation, trunk flexion and deceleration to work a whole slew of musculature within the core.  While I love stability movements such as plank variations for core strength, the Eagle Press challenges dynamic stability as opposed to static.  And it is this challenge to dynamic stability that seems to transfer more optimally to sport performance.   The eagle press is a complex movement that uses a larger kinetic chain. Sports performance studies have shown that optimal adaptations will occur with replication of synchronized and dynamic integrated movement.

3.  Increase striking power. Our core is a transfer station for power.  A finely tuned core takes the energy we generate from the ground and funnels it up through our trunk to the upper extremities and out to whichever external object we see fit.  In the Eagle Press that object is your tool of choice:  dumbbell, kettlebell, or clubbell, and we’ll be utilizing rotational power to spiral energy upward and outward.  This has carry-over implications to empty hand striking, where the external object is our intended target.

4.  Learn to maneuver from your back. Elements of the Eagle Press can be seen in many styles of dance and martial art, with implications for safely getting to and up from the ground.  The swooping movements in the Eagle Press also help to prepare you for later sophistications when threading is added.

5.  Have fun. It has to suck, but in a good way.  A quick search on Google for core, abdominal or oblique training will yield a ton of isolated, boring movements as top hits.  Rote repetition after rote repetition, with little to no stimulation through sophistication, and little to no carry over into actual performance.  While some of the movements are funny to look at, we need them to have some semblance of fun in performance.  If we don’t enjoy it, we’re less likely to stick with it.

Now, not everyone can jump right into a complex movement without first training the movements that comprise it by themselves.  If you don’t recognize the partners in matrimony first as independents, the marriage will never work.  Undesirable and unpredictable side effects are sure to ensue.

In the following videos you’ll find variations for working up to the Eagle Leg Swoop and Get-Up Press respectively.   When trying to groove in a new movement I like to hit a few repetitions while fresh, several times throughout the day.  Think of it more as practice than as training.

As you get comfortable with a particular movement, feel free to add it to your current training program in place of either a core or pressing movement.  Once you’ve hit the top end of the progressions marry the Eagle Leg Swoop and Get-Up Press into the Eagle Press for a powerful, safe and effective training session.

Looking forward to your progress…

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John Belkewitch is a Circular Strength Training® Coach and Fitness Professional from New Jersey. He owns and operates Day 1 Personal Training, offering In-Home and On-Line training, as well as CST® fitness classes and boot camps. He also blogs about health and fitness related topics at www.day1personaltraining.com

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Learn the Eagle Press in 3 Steps (for all fitness levels)

Step 1 – Eagle Leg Swoop Tutorial: Four progressions for working up to the Eagle Leg Swoop body weight movement.

Step 2 – Dumbbell Get-Up Press Tutorial: One half of the Eagle Press compound movement.

Step 3 – The Eagle Press. A great compound movement that hits multiple degrees of freedom.

If you have any questions for John or I about the Eagle press or any of the tutorial steps, please let us know in the comments. And heck, you could even thank John for putting together this excellent series for you. Much appreciated JB!

“How can I gain muscle and lose fat at the same time?” That’s right up there with “How do I get six pack abs” as one of the most frequently asked fitness questions of all time. The problem is, when you ask it, you get all kinds of conflicting answers – even from experts who are supposed to know these things. So what’s the deal? Is it really possible to lose fat and build muscle simultaneously?

Short answer: Yes, you can gain muscle and lose fat at the “same time.”

Long answer: It’s difficult and it’s complicated. Allow me to explain….

First we have the issue of whether you really lose fat and gain muscle at the “same time.”

Well, yes, if your definition of the “same time” is say, a month or 12 weeks. But in that case, you’re probably not gaining muscle at the “same time” literally speaking, as in, right now this very moment you are reading this, or 7 days a week, 24 hours a day for months in a row.

The best explanation for what’s really happening is that you alternate between periods of caloric surplus (anabolism) and caloric deficit (catabolism) and the net result is a gain in muscle and a loss in body fat.

You see, if you stay in a calorie surplus, it’s the body’s natural tendency for body fat and lean body mass to go up together. And if you stay in a calorie deficit, it’s your body’s natural tendency for body fat and lean body mass to go down together.

There may be exceptions, but the general rule is that it is very difficult to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time – the mechanisms are mostly antagonistic to one another. When it does happen, it’s almost always the result of “unusual conditions” – I call them X factors.

The 4 X-Factors

The first X-factor is “training age” . Ever hear of “newbie gains?” The less trained your body is and the further you are from your genetic potential, the easier it is to gain muscle. The reverse is also true – an advanced bodybuilder with 20 years experience would be thrilled just to gain a few pounds of solid dry muscle in a year!

The second x factor is muscle memory. It’s easier to regain muscle you’ve lost than it is to gain new muscle in the first place (ergo, the fat out of shape semi retired bodybuilder who starts training again and blows up and gets ripped “overnight”).

The third X factor is genetics (or somatotype). Ever heard of the “genetic freak?” That’s the dude who sprouts muscle like weeds even when he’s on the “50-50 diet” (50% McDonald’s and 50% pizza)… and he never gets fat. (That dude chose the right parents!)

The fourth X factor is drugs. It would stun (or sadden) you if you knew how many people take performance and physique-enhancing drugs. I’m not just talking about pro bodybuilders, I’m talking about “Joe six pack” in the gym – not to mention those fitness models you idolize in the magazines. How did they get large muscle gains with concurrent fat loss? Chemicals.

I’m not a gambling man, but I’ll place a wager on this any day: I’ll bet that in 99% of the cases of large muscle gains with concurrent large fat losses, one or more of these x factors were present.

That’s not all! There are actually 5 more X factors related to your body composition and diet status (the X2 factors). But I’ll have to talk about those later.

So you’re not a beginner, you don’t take roids, you’re not a genetic freak and you have no muscle memory to take advantage of. Are you S.O.L? Well, I do want you to be realistic about your goals, but…

There IS a way for the average person to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time.

The Secret: You have to change your “temporal perspective!”

Traditionally nutritionists and fitness pros have only looked at calorie balance in terms of 24 hour periods. At midnight, you could tally up the calories like a shopkeeper closing out his register, and if the balance were positive, you’d say you were in a surplus for the day. If the balance were negative, you’d say you were in a deficit for the day.

But it’s entirely possible that you might pass through periods of “within-day” surplus where you were in a highly anabolic state (for example, you eat the biggest, highest carb meal of the day after your workout), and you were in a deficit the rest of the day.

If you did intense weight training, and you timed your nutrient intake appropriately, Isn’t it possible that you could gain a small amount of muscle during those anabolic hours, while losing fat the rest of the day? Granted it might only be grams or ounces – but what if you kept that up for a week? A month? Three months?

As you pan out and look at the bigger picture, what if most days of the week you were in a deficit for the entire day, and on some days you were in a surplus? If so, then isn’t it possible that over the course of the week, you’d have a small net gain of muscle and loss of body fat a a result of the caloric fluctuation?

These within-day and within-week phases are called microcycles and mesocycles. If you also had a primary goal with a longer term focus of several months, say 12 weeks or 16 weeks, that would be a macrocycle.

What I’ve just described is nutritional periodization. Some people call it cyclical dieting. it’s where you manipulate your calories (primarily by fluctuating carbohydrate intake, hence “carb cycling”) in order to intentionally zig zag your way through periods of surplus and deficit and create specific hormonal responses.

The end result: muscle gain and fat loss during the same time period!

I know that someone out there is having a hissy fit because I’ve only talked about calories: deficits and surpluses. Rightfully so. Calories matter but there’s more to it than calories – most importantly, hormones and “nutrient partitioning.”

If you’re in a calorie deficit you are going to pull energy from your body.The question is: From WHERE? If your hormones are out of whack and you’re eating crap, you could lose more muscle than fat in a deficit and gain almost pure fat, not muscle, in a surplus!

But WHAT IF you could manipulate within day energy balance, use nutritional periodization AND control your hormones with food and lifestyle strategies?

Make no mistake – concurrent muscle gain and fat loss is a difficult goal to achieve. The good news: difficult does not mean impossible. Or as George Santayana said, “The difficult is that which can be done immediately, the impossible, that which takes a little longer.”

Train hard and expect success,

-Tom Venuto

The Holy Grail Body Transformation Program: How to Gain Muscle and Lose Fat at The Same Time

You can learn more about gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time in Tom Venuto’s new e-book called, “The Holy Grail Body Transformation System.” I’ve read it, twice actually, and it’s a superb look at how concurrent fat loss and muscle building is possible from a scientific perspective. Although it covers many different variables that come into play (lifestyle factors, training programs, etc.), the main focus of the book is on nutrition.

You’ll learn all about nutritional periodization, cyclical dieting, hormonal manipulation, within day energy balance, nutrient partitioning, AND the all the X factors, including the 5 “X2-Factors” – which are the keys to gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time.

You’ll also get Tom’s new “TNB” training system, as seen in Men’s Fitness magazine (the complete, expanded version that Men’s Fitness didn’t have room to print).

At the moment, The Holy Grail ebook is not for sale separately and there is only one way you can get it.

From now until Midnight (PST), May 13th, 2010, you can get a copy of the Holy Grail Body Transformation program ebook for FREE when you purchase the Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle e-book from this web page:
www.BurnTheFat.com

After May 13th, The Holy Grail will be taken off the market and will be placed in the Burn The Fat: Inner Circle store for $47 soon after.

Visit the Burn The Fat website now and jump on this deal while you still can.

To your health and success,

CST, CST-KS, NSCA-CPT
Fitness Professional

This is a guest column by Dr. Kathryn Woodall for expressing health first. It was originally published in the RMAX Magazine, volume 7, issue 6. I thought it was such an excellent piece, and Kathryn was kind enough to allow me to republish it here for you. The knowledge she conveys in this article doesn’t come from mere education, it comes from in-the-trenches experience. You may be shocked or even scared to digest this food for thought, but I assure you that this is the reality we are facing today. We are in desperate times, and knowledge is the greatest asset we can share with each other.

“You’re only as strong as your weakest link.” You’ve heard it thousands of times, but what does it mean when it comes to your health? It means you need to identify and take care of limiting factors.

We’ve talked about how the food you eat and absorb, the movement you do, and the thoughts you think (your paradigm) all work to create ‘you.’ If those basic components create your health or destroy it should you neglect or abuse them, then those are the first places you should look for weak links. With the exception of trauma and poison, the point at which your health begins to breakdown can almost always be traced back to those three components—they can be the limiting factor when it comes to the degree of health you create and enjoy.

In this article, I’m going to give an example of how something as simple as ‘the food you eat and absorb’ can be your weakest link. I’m not presenting an actual case history—it’s just one possible scenario designed to show you how interconnected your health is.

EXAMPLE:

JD’s father died of a heart attack when he was in his 40’s. (JD is John or Jane Doe—but we’ll say ‘he’ for simplicity.) He does a little reading and discovers that the current research suggests a low-fat diet with soy added will help him avoid the same fate. His 20-something friends rib him about his eating habits, but health is important to him so he rides out the teasing and manages to successfully adopt his new diet. Plenty of processed foods are low-fat and contain soy, which actually works to his advantage sometimes because he can just grab a low-fat soy energy bar and avoid the hassle of cooking.

A few years go by, and JD starts feeling sluggish and tired. He’s not really sure why, but stress seems to get to him more than it used to. He and his doctor decide it’s probably just stress. After all, he’s barely 30 and exercises regularly. He’s probably just struggling to adapt to married life, kids, and the responsibilities that go with it. Nothing he tries seems to help decrease his fatigue, but he has to go to work so he starts drinking coffee to help him wake up each morning. The coffee seems to do the trick, as long as he gets a cup or 10 throughout the day.

Another year or two goes by and JD starts wondering if coffee was such a good choice. He experiences a touch of acid reflux from time to time, and has read that caffeine might contribute to it. He tries to kick the coffee, but has vicious headaches and has to set the alarm clock across the room or he won’t get out of bed each morning. He’s pretty sure the coffee is part of the heart-burn problem, so he switches to tea. There’s a bit less caffeine in it, but enough to keep him going throughout the day.

At about the same time, he notices his 6-pack abs have a little fat covering them, and his pecs seem larger than they should given his exercise routine. This concerns JD because his dad developed a beer belly before he had a heart attack. The fat on JD’s abs is mild in comparison, but he doesn’t want it to get out of hand. He increases his exercise and does a little research. New information suggests that a higher protein diet is the way to go. He decides to add more protein to his low-fat diet. He finds conflicting information about soy, but he decides to keep it in his diet because he really wants to protect his heart.

After a few weeks, JD’s acid reflux is going crazy and he has absolutely no appetite for protein. He visits his doctor, who prescribes an antacid. The reflux decreases but he still has no appetite for protein, and the amount of gas he has is increasing.

More time passes and JD is just not feeling right. His joints ache and he gets injured more frequently while exercising. The gas is awful, his shoulder and right upper back are hurting, and he’s packing on more weight. He goes to his doctor about the weight and the doctor draws blood. The test results show his cholesterol is too high, but the meds prescribed to lower it make him feel even worse. He returns to his doctor complaining about the side-effects, and the doctor recommends adding fish-oil to his diet to see if it helps. The doctor also prescribes an anti-inflammatory drug for the pain. JD’s joint pain decreases, but his stomach gets worse. The only thing he notices with the fish oil is that, in addition to the gas he’s been dealing with, he now burps what smells like nasty rotten fish. A few weeks later he gets a paper-cut that bleeds for nearly five minutes.

JD heads back to his doctor, who runs a test which shows his blood is slow to clot. Another prescription is provided to remedy that. After a couple months JD still isn’t feeling better, has put on a couple more pounds, and is frustrated. He decides to go off all his meds and the fish oil. However, the acid reflux is so bad that he can’t take it. He finds a new doctor.

The new doctor listens to his case history and decides to take a look at his gallbladder, which ends up being removed. For a few weeks, JD feels much better and is relieved to have finally found the problem. But it doesn’t last. The reflux comes back. He also notices that he only has a bowel movement every few days. He accidentally discovers that if he eats almost nothing but pasta, breads, and other carbohydrates, the reflux is less severe.

Shortly after his 40th birthday, JD sees himself in a picture and is stunned by how much he weighs. Worried that he’s going to have a heart attack just like his dad, he visits a new doctor. His new doctor diagnoses him with diabetes and talks to him about the increased risk of heart attack, as well as his already decreasing bone-density levels. He’s tired, has to drink tea to get going, is eating almost nothing but carbohydrates, exercises very little because it hurts, has lost most of his sex-drive, is fat, feels cold, and is about as far away from his health goals as he can imagine himself being. His doctor sees a fat man with diabetes so severe it has affected his sex-drive, and who eats a high-carb diet but won’t exercise because of pain. The doctor doesn’t believe it when JD tells him he was trying to avoid being this unhealthy. Given all that he initially tried to avoid dying from a heart attack the way his father did, JD decides that it must just be genetic and his attempts at better health have been in vain.

How did JD get so unhealthy? Where was his weak link?

Let’s go back in time and look at where everything started to go wrong.

JD switched to a low-fat diet and added as much soy as he could. He didn’t know he needed healthy fats to produce hormones, or that soy contains phytoestrogens which are thought to block thyroid hormone function and which would interact with the rest of his hormones. He didn’t know he needed plenty of vegetables and some fruit in order to have the vitamins and minerals necessary to rebuild his structure and allow his metabolic pathways to function. Nor did he know that decreased hormone function would decrease the amount of HCl (hydrochloric acid) in his stomach, which would make it more difficult to digest food.

Minerals and protein digest best in an acidic environment. Both are also vital to the function of your body and its structure. JD’s ability to digest them was decreasing, and he wasn’t getting great sources in the first place because whole foods were rarely part of his diet. Thyroid hormone also helps thin the bile of the gallbladder, but JD’s wasn’t functioning well so he began losing the ability to digest fat as easily as he could before. Vitamins A, D, E, and K are all fat-soluble, so they began to decrease. Vitamin K is required for blood to clot.

Thankfully, the ‘good’ bacteria in the colon can also make it. However, JD no longer had adequate stomach acid to prevent ‘unfriendlies’ from making it past his stomach and killing off some of the ‘friendlies,’ so he still couldn’t make adequate levels of K. He didn’t know that fish oil acts as a blood thinner. Nor did he realize that if fish oil isn’t processed properly, it goes rancid and comes with mercury contamination (the good stuff should taste like the best sushi you’ve ever had if you break open a capsule and eat it).

Enough time passed and JD’s vitamin and mineral stores fell, so his digestive enzymes had difficulty forming adequately to deal with his needs. (That and his low-fat diet caused hormone production to slow down.) The body must have glucose in order to function, so JD could extract the sugar from the carbs he was eating, but since he wasn’t able to digest the minerals he needed, his metabolic pathways were no longer working as they should. He is becoming insulin resistant and starting to add fat.

As you’ll recall, JD decided to increase his exercise to combat the added belly fat. The increased exercise also increased his need for vitamins and minerals in order to rebuild his body, but he wasn’t getting what he should from the foods he ate, even if he was eating vitamin and mineral rich foods (which he wasn’t). He was taking medication to deal with some of his problems, but he didn’t have adequate amounts of nutrients to detox them from his body, nor did he have adequate amounts of fiber to trap them in his colon so they couldn’t be absorbed again. His shoulder and right upper back hurt because that’s where the gallbladder refers pain. There was so much sludge in it that it was becoming diseased. Removing the gall bladder decreased his pain because there was no longer a gallbladder to refer from, but bile helps encourage colon contraction—JD started becoming constipated, which allowed his colon to absorb even more toxins that there weren’t enough vitamins and minerals to adequately deal with.

No one tested JD’s estrogen levels, partly because he’s a man and partly because only the basics are taught in medical school prior to specialization, so it’s hotly debated as to what affect more or less of any one hormone can have on overall function. There’s speculation that estrogen blocks thyroid hormone to the extent that the body can produce adequate amounts of it, but the cells won’t receive it. Thus, a person can appear to have normal values but still have symptoms of low thyroid function. Other research suggests this is a bunch of hooey.

Regardless, JD was getting phytoestrogens from the large amounts of soy he ate daily, and that in turn altered the function of many of the rest of his hormones. Phytoestrogens can protect the heart, especially if estrogen values were low when it was added to the diet, but too much estrogen—phyto or otherwise—is thought to lead the body down the road to the opposite effect.

After years of failing to adequately digest enough fat, minerals, vitamins, and protein to form adequate quantities of the hormones, enzymes, and building materials he needed, JD was caught in a vicious cycle. He was breaking down but couldn’t digest the very things he needed in order to rebuild.

The above example will seem drastic to some, while the progression might seem way too familiar to other readers. The foods JD ate and could absorb were his weak link, but the effects of what he did and didn’t eat took enough time that it was difficult for him to make the association. For JD to have any hope of returning to health, those things must be addressed.

I hope you can see just how far-reaching any one of the three components can be when it comes to your overall health. Until next time, may your choices and actions today create a healthier ‘you’ tomorrow.

Kathryn Woodall, DC is a CST Instructor and Senior Editor of RMAX Magazine. She is also co-author of a soon-to-be released RMAX Nutrition book. Visit: www.satisfactionandbeyond.com for more information.