Home

Archives

About Lou

Email Lou

You Ask, Lou Answers

Read Lou's email

Lou's Links

FAQ

Lou in Print

New Rules of Lifting

Men's Health
Book of Muscle

Home Workout Bible

The Testosterone Advantage Plan

September 24, 2004

Cross-training shoes

Have you come across any independent research on the
life of cross-training shoes? I've only seen info put
out by the shoe companies themselves, so I've been
wondering if anyone else has done some research into
how often one should replace their gym kicks.

I blogged about this a couple weeks ago. In a study looking at running shoes and knee injuries, the only category of shoes that were correlated with higher injury rates were those 1 to 3 months old--in other words, there were slightly more injuries with new shoes than with older ones.

Here's the link (scroll down to the last item).

As for cross-trainers, I don't have any idea. Based on the above, I'd say you can wear them until they fall apart. I mean, if you're just talking about regular gym stuff, like lifting or riding a stationary bike, I don't know why it would make any difference at all how old or worn-out the shoes are.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:23 AM

September 13, 2004

Heavy Lifting, High Blood Pressure?

I used to do Bill Starr's famous Big Three program. [The program focuses on squats, deadlifts, and power cleans.] Now, at 47 my doc wants me to do more walking and try to tone down my strength training a bit due to some blood pressure problems. Can you help me?

There’s nothing about strength training that raises blood pressure chronically. Acutely, sure, blood pressure will spike during strength training. But long, slow, all-out sets (as in Super Slow or high-intensity training) are probably far more dangerous than the type of training Starr recommends.

I understand why a doctor would be concerned, and I actually researched this carefully when I wrote an article called “Death by Exercise” for MH (August ’03 issue). I mean, logically, you’d think that a max-effort squat or deadlift would be an aneurysm or aortic dissection waiting to happen.

But there are virtually no cases of this occurring in the medical literature. And believe me, I looked, and I interviewed the top experts in two fields: death during exercise, and strength training for rehabilitating cardiac patients.

I’m not a doctor, and I don’t know any details of your situation. But my guess is that your doctor doesn’t know that much about strength training. The fact he thinks some walking will lower the blood pressure of someone who’s probably fit and strong kind of worries me.

I’d recommend a second opinion.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:45 AM