Bucking the Trends
Have the balls to make up your own mind!
by Ian King
Drop the Flock!
"You shouldn’t squat because it’s bad for your knees!"
"Don’t use free weights because they’re dangerous!"
"Don’t use creatine because your left kidney might squirt out your arsehole! Same goes for eating too much protein!"
Ever
get tired of hearing people say that stuff? I sure do. But I let it
slide when it comes from pencilnecks who’re more suited for a chess
match than a workout, or a healthcare professional who learned all he
knows about sports training from a one-hour lecture back in college. But when equally dumb stuff comes from someone who’s switched on enough to be reading
T-mag,I feel obliged to encourage these people to broaden their outlook and
to apply some simple, objective analysis. In other words, I encourage
them to have the balls to make up their own minds! I gave a
seminar recently in Sydney, Australia, and some of the strength and
conditioning coaches in attendance told of their frustrations with gym
owners who discourage them from doing power cleans because the lift was
"dangerous." Some even told of gyms that totally frowned on the use of
free weights for the same reason. The seminar attendees were smart
enough to conclude that the gym owners were off track, but obviously
the prevailing attitude regarding power exercises and free weights is
going to impact the lay population of gym goers. The one that
really stunned me was the seminar I gave in LA! Get this — the majority
of the participants were shocked when I suggested the appropriate range
for a bench press was from full extension all the way down to the
chest! I think they wanted to string me up then and there! Most of
these participants were gym instructors and personal trainers, and
after I picked my jaw up off the ground, I learned about the influence
that they’d been exposed to — a subculture of thought in the US that no
one should ever bench beyond halfway down because of the "danger" to
the shoulders!I don’t expect too many
T-mag readers to
be so intellectually challenged that they accept the "interesting"
theories such as the "never bench below halfway in range," but there
does seem to be some gullibility or blind acceptance in certain areas.
I say this based on some of the letters I receive. I’m not going to tell you what conclusions you should come to, but I’m going to encourage you to give
thoughtto trends or beliefs before endorsing them. Realize that you can make
up your own mind; that you don’t have to follow the crowd like a bird
in a flock. And I mean that literally. Check out this excerpt from a
letter I received:
"Scientists studying flocks of
birds with high-speed film made a remarkable discovery. They found that
birds react faster to subtle movements of the flock than they do to
signals from their own brains. As the flock veers to avoid a predator,
each bird takes about 1/70 of a second to mirror a neighboring bird’s
change of direction. This is less than the reaction time of an
individual bird." (15)
Now I’m sure there’re great
survival benefits to birds from behaving like this; however, I doubt
that conforming to trends is beneficial to
T-mag readers.
Still, I suspect that many may inadvertently find themselves reacting
like a bird in a flock. I don’t like to see you miss out on great
training methods, exercises, or training tools simply because you acted
upon or adopted the dominant thoughts of the time. Can you
imagine a time when the dominant beliefs were: deeps squats should
never be done; athletes need no more protein than the average person
(who only needs 0.7 gms/kg of bodyweight); and anabolic steroids don’t
work? Well, those times existed, as this brief history lesson below
will show. If you adopted the "flock mentality" during the 60’s and
70’s, where would that have left you? Would you have been spouting
these myths along with everyone else? Looking forward, imagine
a time when strength training fanatics like yourself look back and
laugh at the times when people were silly enough to believe that leg
extensions are bad, that machines cause injuries, and that you should
never allow the back to round in good mornings or stiff legged
deadlifts! What’s that? You mean you
have accepted those trends as truths? Then I encourage you to keep an open mind when reading the rest of this article!
Trends in Strength Training I’m
going to work with two examples here: the squat and the leg extension.
Firstly, let’s look at the squat. In 1961 a researcher by the name of
Karl Klein published the following statement (6):
"The
evidence accumulated in the various phases of this study strongly
indicated that the deep squat exercise, especially as done in weight
training… should be discouraged from the standpoint of its debilitative
effect on the ligamental structures of the knee."
Klein then went on to share his views in two sports training journals,
Coach and Athlete and
Texas Coach(16). Do you think this negative view on squatting had an impact? Sure
did! It had an impact on scientists, therapists, doctors, coaches, and
trainers! Phillip Rasch, in his 1966 book, tells of that impact:
"Full
squats and full deep-knee bends have been condemned by the National
Federation of State High School Athletic Associations and the Committee
on the Medical Aspects of Sports of the American Medical Association as
potentially dangerous to the internal and supporting structures of the
knee joint." (16)
It appeared to take at least ten
years before any research was presented to refute Klein’s work (9). You
could say that some of the mud thrown by Klein still sticks in some
quarters. In retrospect, many recognize that Klein conducted studies to
conform to his prejudice. His studies were flawed in other words.
Fortunately, not all people in that decade were ready to accept the
influence of Klein. Rasch himself went on to say:
"During
the forty-odd years that he has been interested in weight training,
this writer has never known a man with damaged knees which were
attributed to doing full squats or deep-knee bends."
Despite this admission, Rasch felt some need to conform as he explained:
"Until
the question has been clarified, it seems safer to avoid full squats
and deep knee bends. A simple way of gauging the degree of knee flexion
is to squat until you are sitting on a bench and then rise again." (15)
Now
Rasch may have felt some litigation concerns (more likely in today’s
climate) or more likely a need to conform to his peers (still a trend
in academia). Despite this, full squatting did continue throughout gyms
in America, influenced by proponents, writers and publishers through
the earlier stages of that millennium, men such as Heinrich "Henry"
Steinborn, Joseph Hise, Alan Calvert, Mark H. Berry, Perry Rader and
Bob Hoffman. (15, 19)The question is, how would
youhave handled this information? Would you have had the balls to make up
your own mind? Well, here’s your chance to find out! The leg extension
received similar bad press in the 1990’s to what the squat did in the
1960’s. I’m not suggesting that the researcher that highlighted the
limitations or downsides of the leg extension is fundamentally flawed,
as Klein’s earlier works may have been, but I do believe the research
conclusions have been taken out of context and that there’s been an
overreaction to the "evidence." Let me give you a real-life
example. When I was rehabilitating a knee in the early 1980’s from
anterior cruciate reconstructive surgery (from a sports-related
injury), the dominant mode of
rehab was the leg extension.
There was no way that a therapist was going to recommend the squat!
When I had that surgery repeated in the early 1990’s, the tables had
turned. No way was the therapist going to recommend the leg extension! We’ll look closer at the leg extension issue later in this article and you can make up your own mind.
Trends in NutritionPrior
to about 1990 it was extremely rare to see any mainstream nutritionist
or scientist recommend anything above the US Recommended Dietary
Allowance (RDA) of 0.7 gms of protein per kilogram of bodyweight. The
mainstream consensus of the 1980’s is reflected in nutritional text
that taught that those over 19 years of age required 0.8 gms of protein
per kg of bodyweight. (21) It went on further to say that "the minimum
necessary intake of protein is much less than the RDA…." According to
the text, the RDA was actually adjusted upward to take into account the
variability in the biological quality of protein!This author did
recognize the existence of theories supporting higher intake of protein
but aimed to debunk them. Fortunately, there were scientists — even
during the 1980’s — that were reaching and teaching a different opinion
to this mainstream conservative approach. They suggested 1.8 to 2.0
grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight per day. (7) But it
wouldn’t be likely that the average man on the street would be exposed
to this "radical" approach in that decade.So what were the
American strength and conditioning fraternity being taught in the late
1980s? According to a 1988 NSCA report:
"RDAs for
protein are calculated at two standard deviations beyond the average
requirement. This extrapolation then includes virtually all the
population regardless of variance in physical activity behaviors… To
date there is insufficient evidence to suggest that the
well-conditioned strength or endurance athlete needs to alter what is
now considered a healthy diet for the American population."
It gets better:
"In
the strength and conditioning community, the conventional wisdom that
athletes need additional protein beyond that provided by normal dietary
practices is due in part to simple myth, to poorly designed studies
given undue credit." (18)
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