Want explosive power? Ditch the aerobics...

So, I was sitting contently in the upper-bowl of Energy Solutions Arena (up near the rafters, where I belong), watching my Utah Jazz wail on the 76ers, and it must have been sometime during the goofy half-time presentation that I picked up the program for the game and began flipping through it.  

Inside the program there was an article by either Mark McKown or Gary Briggs--one of the fitness trainers for the Jazz--talking about developing athletic explosiveness.  His comments were interesting, and I wish that I had the article in front of me to quote from.  

Basically, he declared that playing basketball is actually primarily an anaerobic activity, not an aerobic one.  This was stunning for me; the thought that all of those 3 to 5-mile runs were practically done in vain was, well, kind of a downer.  While there may be a kind of aerobic element to the sport, according to this trainer, the vast majority of playing hoops has nothing to do with endurance energy.  Players are best served by spending the majority of their workouts doing wind sprints, plyometric activities (jump training), and other explosive movements.  

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that he was right.  You DO have to be in decent cardiovascular shape to play basketball well, but true professional basketball--a sport that is high-speed, but more often than not a kind of stop-and-go activity because of fouls and other violations--is all about bursts of explosive energy.  

According to the trainer, many people go on these long runs to train for basketball, when they should be going on shorter runs at maximum speed.  If they don't train at maximum-speed sprints, they will actually tire out more quickly, despite their endurance training experience.  

On the flipside, basketball also is not bodybuilding.  The trainer dude stated that while we can basically break exercise down into the two aforementioned categories--aerobic and anaerobic--the anaerobic category actually is subdivided into two smaller categories.  The first is what we traditionally think of as anaerobic--slow, methodical weight lifting.  It is power and strength in 4-6 repetitions.  It is muscle and grunting and not a lot of dancing around like a pixie.

The second category is the explosive athlete, which is fast, explosive, high-jumping, ankle-breaking, slam-dunking goodness.  Again, maybe my efforts in the weight room have not been geared toward the correct end result.  

With this in mind, last night I had a totally different approach in the gym.  

It was legs night, which usually means squatting and calf-raising, and wall-sitting and all that jazz.  And, to be sure, there was still some of that in there.  But the very first thing I did when I got into the fitness room, was start jumping.  That's right, I just squatted down, and leapt as high as I could off of two feet with no running start.  As I landed, I tried to come down softly.  Then I immediately exploded upward again.  I did 10 reps, then did some lateral jumping off of one foot.  I also tried high skips, and 180-degree jumps.  When my jumping sets were done, then I finally started doing some leg lifts with weights.

I'll let you know when I play ball next to see if I feel a difference.  Check that, I'll hand you the rim I tore off the backboard on the final play of the game.

Okay, I'm still 5'9".  But you never know--I've surprised people before...

Am I Stuck with What I've Got???

Okay, here is a question that I will send out into the void, and perhaps some bored personal trainer or fitness expert can enlighten me (and any potential readers of this blog).


And let me preface the question by saying that I understand that as human beings our bodies are made up of genetic code that dictates things like our eye color, baldness potential, and possibly even obesity. These things are set in stone. My 5' 9" height has been dictated almost entirely for me by genetic information encoded within me (nope, I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with whether or not I finished my plate of chicken pot pie, although that certainly could have added a substantial amount of GIRTH...).


I also realize that, as human beings, current science tells us that, despite the overwhelming diversity of individuals in our species, our body types can generally be broken down into three categories: mesomorph, endomorph, and ectomorph.

Mesomorphs are muscular and compact. They tend to look shorter than they actually are. They are generally the guys you don't want to mess with. They are usually powerful and fast with poor flexibility.



Endomorphs are the "perpetually doughy" look. I know this kid who was quite overweight, and then was able to lose all of his weight and maintain a healthy B.M.I. and all that jazz. He STILL looks a little pudgy, simply because he has this body type.



Ectomorphs are the bean-poles. They look long and lean, and are the kinds of people who seem to eat and eat and never gain a pound.



Obviously, in reality most people are not one single body type, but a mix of two or more. For example, I tend to have a very strong, mesomorphic lower body, yet my arms, shoulders, and chest are usually weaker than average.



I guess my question is: How much can diet and exercise affect the overall make-up of our muscularity and fitness?



I mean, taking examples from the basketball world, I look at a guy like Andre Kirilenko, or the retired Shawn Bradley. These guys have the country's best personal trainers working with them, and play positions, power forward and center, respectively, which almost REQUIRE some extra beefiness to battle for rebounds. Yet these guys never gain a pound. I remember reading one time that they had Bradley on like a 6,000- or 7,000-calorie diet to try to add some poundage to him, and it just didn't work. That's insane.



I realize that those are probably extreme examples, but the fact that even with a very rigid workout regime, these guys remain shockingly thin.



So, I again pose the question: Can you alter your body type? Can a mesomorph be as limber as an ectomorph or have the endurance of an endomorph? Can an endomorph get a 'cut' look like the mesomorph, or the lean look of the endomorph? Can the ectomorph pack on muscle like a mesomorph, or fill out their frame like an endomorph?



I have no idea.

P.S. Here's a good article I just found on the topic.

Messing around with my website...

Okay, so besides fitness, I would consider myself a newbie to the world of computers--particularly website development. In fact, I'm downright terrible. But I do try to celebrate the small victories in this endeavor, like realizing that I can change the alignment of pictures or applications that I add to a webpage, or discovering HTML text colors for the first time.

I have a million things I need to learn, like Java and PHP. But it's fun to try to improve our old-school website, little by little.

For anyone interested in checking out the stuff I'm working on at the website, just pick your location:

Orange County
Inland Empire
Utah
Las Vegas
Other (choose from map)



Check it out and let me know what our website needs!

Biggest Loser...?

This may come as a surprise to some people who know me, but I actually watched the Biggest Loser Finale last night.  I'm not a regular fan of the show, but my mom watches it religiously--almost annoyingly, if you watch it with her, because if she misses ANYTHING that anyone says on the show, she stops the show (yes, it is being DVR-ed, despite the fact that we are watching it live)--and she convinced me to have a seat and learn the ways of the biggest of all losers.

My initial impression, being the data-first, emotion-second kind of personality that I am, was that the people on this show are losing weight at an alarmingly fast rate.  In fact, I would even have to say that it is GREATLY EXCEEDING the recommended 1-2 pounds of weekly weight loss.  In almost the same instant, I determined that for people who are quite obese, the standard weight loss model might break down, because their body fat percentage is so high that losing 5-10 pounds a week is feasible.  

[The reason that it is unhealthy for an individual to lose more than 1-2 pounds a week, in general, is twofold: 1. It is nearly impossible to create a habit out of that kind of change in eating/diet regimens.  For example, if I am used to eating 2500 calories a day, and I all of a sudden go to 1100 calories a day, I probably won't be able to keep that up for long.  2. The math doesn't add up for most people, meaning they are losing more than just fat.  To illustrate, imagine you are a fairly lean young woman who, to maintain her exact weight, needs to eat 2,000 calories a day (this makes our math easy).  Burning (and, consequently, losing) a pound of fat requires burning 3,500 calories.  So, even if our fine young lady only eats 1,000 calories a day for a week, she will only burn a total of 7,000 calories--2 pounds of weight loss.  Consequently, if she loses three pounds, and has been hydrating herself properly, one of those pounds is going to be muscle mass, not fat.  Make sense?  This, of course, would be different if she were, say 350 pounds, and if she were eating 6,000 calories a day to keep her large figure.  Then, even if she goes down to the 2,000 calories a day, she will cut 28,000 calories in a week for a total weight loss of 8 pounds.]

My next thought during this program was that we oftentimes forget what a profound impact CULTURE has on our perception of physical fitness and ideal body shape.  The two personal trainers on Biggest Loser--one a man, who, despite being tattoo-laden and sporting a smattering of facial hair, had the body of an athletic eleven-year-old girl; the other, a snarling woman, whose broad shoulders could out-military-press her colleague's.  While I have nothing against thin men and powerful women, I would beg the question: are THESE individuals the ideal?!  Has the wiry, spry man lost something of his natural aura by shedding some of his bulk (fat AND muscle)?  Is the musclebound woman our society's replacement for the curvaceousness of the Venus or the simple smoothness of the Holy Virgin?

I don't know.

I guess what I am saying, though, is that having recently returned from a three-month stay in Bulgaria--a place where ultra-thinness is oftentimes more a byproduct of lack of nutritional opportunities--I saw the individuals on the television screen in a different light.  The almost artificiality of the physical trainers was all-too-apparent, as they robotically marched across the stage; truly, they seemed as bizarre to me as the oversized posters of Biggest Loser hopefuls from Day 1.  

I repeat:  I don't know.  In the same breath I will find myself yearning for this artificial ideal--pushing myself to reach an ever-fleeting point of personal satisfaction with my body and its appearance/capabilities.  

Perhaps the perpetual dissatisfaction is the problem, and not its end products.  

You HAVE to start somewhere...

Okay, okay, I'll admit it--I CAN, in fact, bench more than the bar.

(after all, I didn't say that the bar was the MOST, I could bench, did I?)

In opening this blog, I really just wanted to create almost more of a dialogue with others who are making their own personal attempts at physical fitness, and realizing one thing:  

FITNESS IS TOUGH.

Each of us has a unique fitness ideal.  For me--I'm a baller (oh, and when I say 'baller', I mean a connoisseur of BASKETBALL; various and sundry people have found it to their liking to assume that one who enjoys, say, BASEBALL, could be considered a 'baller' of sorts, but this would be incorrect, as would FOOTballer, or any other sort of baller.  But I digress...)--and as such am a rather enthusiastic pursuer of fitness regimens that are geared towards explosiveness, speed and power.  That's not to say I won't be discussing other types of training--I am interested in everything from yoga benefits to marathon/triathlon training to bodybuilding.  Anything fitness is open for discussion in this blog, and I would appreciate any comments or direction regarding possible fitness topics to address.

Yes, I love long sentences, and I will frequently diverge on slightly pertinent tangents mid-sentence in somewhat of a more accessible James Joycean spew.  The truth is, anything I write will more closely resemble transcripts from a Jim Rome interview than anything from the literary world, but...well...you get the idea.

I look forward to garnering the interest of a few readers who can help me in my fitness quest.  

In the meantime, I invite you to visit the website I manage for WAY MORE info about staying fit and living a healthy lifestyle.

--Tony

P.S. This is what I'm working toward.  I'll try to get up videos of myself in the future, and you can let me know how to reach my goal.