MobilityWOD: Fixing Phil.

Quick update: San Francisco has been fun. I got to visit a few gyms here as well as hang out with some very talented coaches and athletes.

I’m also very thankful that I was able to see Kelly Starrett, the owner of San Francisco Crossfit and the mind behind Mobility WOD. Long story short: I broke my arm about a decade ago and I haven’t been able to put it over head correctly since. Barbell movements I could approximate as long as the load was light, but everything else was close to impossible.

Enter Kelly.

My arm still moves a bit awkwardly, but I hadn’t been able to press my left arm upwards in about a decade. Now, I might even be able to strict press more than an empty bar. My overhead squat position and handstands have improved as well because my shoulder position doesn’t suck anymore.

We’ll get into some more theoretical stuff next time, specifically surrounding the voodoo band, and the changing model of sports conditioning.

Sidenote: Kelly is a lot bigger in person then he looks on his videos.

Victim or Villain?

This is part of a larger piece of work that I’m building on. The inspiration came from an essay by Sebastian Marshall and is well worth the read.

If you’re the first among your friends to make a lifestyle change, a very large majority of them are going to hate you for it, unless the change can be externally attributed.

So you’ve done some reading and decided that you want to try the 30-Day Paleo Challenge?

If your friends don’t know Gluten from Guetta and you all go out to dinner, your food choice just labeled you “that diva” who eats funny.

Forget getting support, your friend eating the cookie in front of you is going to offer you one.

If you accept, you’re weak and “weren’t that serious anyway”

If you refuse, you just reinforced the label of “diva”

Congratulations.

Because you made a choice, you just became the enemy. You’re a Villain of the vilest sort.

If, on the other hand, your doctor told you that you had to cut out wheat because you have a Gluten allergy?

Your friends will not only support you, they will do everything to make your life easier.

Going out? One of them is going to double-check that the restaurant can accommodate you.

Dinner party? Someone will make a dish just for you.

You aren’t “that diva” you’ve become “that poor thing”.

Because the choice was taken out of your hands, you are now a Victim.

When a lifestyle change is a choice, people get defensive. They feel threaten. As far as they’re concerned, you’ve just said, “What you’re doing is wrong.”

They now have two choices: Either they justify why they continue the behavior, or they can discredit the person not maintaining the behavior.

When the lifestyle change is externally attributed, people don’t get defensive because they secretly think “They would still behave this way if they could!” No one feels threatened so there’s no reason to act defensively.

It’s ridiculous, but it’s true.

If you’re going to make some lifestyle changes, especially when it comes to health and nutrition, here are three steps to help make the transition easier.

1) Externally attribute your lifestyle change, regardless of the actual reason for it. 

“I have a gluten allergy so I have to go paleo.”

“My doctor told me I needed to quit drinking.”

This makes the initial transition easier. You’ll have to face much less social pressure which makes it easier to ingrain the lifestyle change. Once you aren’t worried about regressing to old habits while under stress, you can try step 2.

2) Internally attribute your lifestyle change and ignore everyone who gives you grief. 

“Sorry, I don’t eat bread. It makes me feel weird.”

“Sorry, I don’t drink. It messes up my sleep.”

No matter how apologetically you might do it, if you internally attribute your habit change, you’re going to get grief. If you hang out with cool people and everyone is happy for you or at least no one cares? Good for you. The amount of grief will be minimal. Enjoy your new habit and all the changes it brings. If the group of people you spend time with aren’t as cool and they start to bother you, enter step 3.

3) Draw the line in the sand and potentially Get New Friends. (More on this in a later post.)

“I don’t eat bread.”

“I don’t drink.”

You’ve made your lifestyle change, you’ve reaped the benefits, and you’re happy. The rest of the people in your life don’t need to be happy for you, but they can’t make you feel bad about yourself for choice either.

Draw the line in the sand. Tell them when enough is enough. Give them plenty of warning. They might not know that their behavior or comments are actually bothering you.

But.

The moment that a friend knows that what they do or say is a problem and they do it anyway?

Cut them loose and find a new friend.

There are plenty of people who can hang out with you without making you feel like shit for your choices.

Cold Showers? Cryotheraphy? Pfft. This is Canada.

I hate to break it to my friends overseas, but London isn’t a cold city. When Andrew and I started experimenting with thermal loading, we had to take cold showers on a regular basis to try to induce a shivering reaction. (With hilarious results)

Enter, Thermal Loading: Canadian Edition!

In Canada, it’s much easier. Instead of trying to expose your body to lower temperatures with cold showers or ice baths, you play chicken with the thermostat.

-1C outside? No reason to turn on the heat. We’ll think about it when it starts to hit -30C.

In the meantime, you can either put on another sweater, or you can sit in a T-Shirt and shiver. Opt to shiver.

Why would anyone subjugate themselves to this?

The benefits of thermal loading don’t depend on the mechanism by which you lower your temperature, just that do without a subsequent increase in caloric intake.

If on the other hand, shivering in your house seems excessive, you can always turn on the heat and try cryotherapy instead.

Cryotherapy is starting to make the rounds in professional running and rugby as a new mechanism for sports recovery. It totes all the benefits of an ice bath or cold shower,and while the temperatures are drastically lower, the exposure time is shorter as well.

Liquid nitrogen is pumped into a cylinder in which the athlete stands wearing gloves, mittens and a cap, while the surrounding air temperature drops steadily to -160C. (fun!)

After 2:30-3 minutes of exposure, you’re done.

Each session costs about $70.00 (35.00GBP) a pop but athletes who have under gone the procedure have a much faster recovery rate which means they can increase their total training time and maintain a high level of intensity throughout.

I’m not going to lie, I really want to try it.

While constant low level cold exposure won’t give you the same effect as cryotherapy, if you’re looking for a low impact way to increase fat loss and you live in a place that has an actual winter (as opposed to England, which just gets a bit chilly), give it a shot.

Lesson Learned: It’s not about what you could do..

Crossfit has a way of teaching us lessons. “Crossfit, as in life.” Kinda deal. I figured I’d make this an ongoing series on the lessons I’ve picked up along the way.

My name is Philip Rolling, and I am a “Returning Athlete”

What’s a returning athlete? Someone who trained very hard at one point, then took time off, but comes back from that time off still thinking they can perform at the same level they used to.

Their ego can’t accept the fact that they aren’t as good as they were. The harder they push, the more prone to injury they are.

The most common refrain heard from this type?

“But I used to be able to do this!!”

And now, that’s me.

In September when I left London, I was in the best shape I’d ever been in. I was hitting high reps on pull ups, heavy weight on deadlifts, and my olympic lifts were progressing nicely.

I started training again in late October after a month off. I finally have to admit to myself, I’ve fallen far. Even thought it’s only been a month, I’m not close to where I used to be.

As a coach, whenever I dealt with a “Returning Athlete” my response was the same:

It’s not about what you could do back in the day, it’s about what you can do today.

Time to take my own advice.

Lesson Learned:

Put ego aside. It’s not about what you could do. If you’ve taken time off training, you’ve lost some measure of your ability.

Accept it.

What you have to worry about is what you can do today. Then, you recover.

Then you try to do a better next time.

And so on and so forth.

How to destroy your patients: A note to medical professionals.

Right. I’m really pissed off. So this is an angry rant. Brace yourselves.

Yesterday, I had a good friend of mine come in looking like someone had shot her dog.

She’s 5ft, has bigger traps than me, and is tougher then most guys. She’s motivated. She loves her Pilates. She can run like a beast. She has excellent push ups. She doesn’t do crossfit, and thank god, because if she ever tastes that blood, she would destroy us all.

She also has less than 25% bodyfat.

But at her doctor’s appointment earlier that day, she was told that she was borderline obese because her Body Mass Index is high.

Her BMI is high, because she has muscle. It’s not high because she’s fat. Dumbass.

Your stupidity in that comment is near criminal.

You shattered the confidence of a girl who’s tough as nails. It’s going to eat at her. She’s shorter than average so she already has a different body shape then everyone around her. She gets bombarded with the message day in and day out that to follow conventional definitions of beauty, you have to be tall and slim. She can’t ever get that, because she’s visibly strong. She’s spend years coming to terms with the fact that, yeah she’s got muscle, yeah that makes her look different, but her boyfriend still thinks she’s gorgeous.

But you’re a doctor. No matter what the people close to her might tell her, she trusts what you say, for better or worse. You tell her she’s fat, she’s going to believe you.

Luckily, she’s got a whole bunch of people, and a lot of self-confidence behind her. So it’ll hit her hard, but she’ll shrug it off, keep training and she’ll be fine.

Except you’ve probably made the same remark to other people as well. People who can’t bounce back as easily. People who can’t understand why they don’t look like the girls on the cover of magazines.

Congratulations: Your stupid comment just created an eating disorder. A body image issue. Someone who self-harms. Someone who runs 2 hours a day, everyday and doesn’t eat to desperately try to lose weight.

So you know what doc? Fuck the BMI. 

Get informed: Test body composition. Check blood profiles.

Build your assessment of a body off more than one outdated, misinformed and useless measurement.

In the mean time, I’m going to try to undo the damage your idiocy did with my friend.

And the girl who just walked into the Crossfit where I train.

And all the female athletes I train who don’t look slim because they can out squat me.

- To everyone who trains, all the instructors, all the coaches, doctors and parents:

Encourage your daughters, sisters, and female friends to lift something heavy. To determine their self-worth by something other than their pant size or a needle on a scale. Give them someone to look up to. Try her. Or her. Or her.

Women have it hard. The message they get from popular media is an unattainable, unhealthy standard of beauty. It’s our job to change that.

Get to work.