On a completely unrelated thread, a reader asked this question:

I, like many others, have been taught similar squatting techniques as outlined in your book. However, I was given an article recently by a personal trainer who has CHEK qualifications like Alywn. It advocates going through the full range of motion (i.e. letting your hamstrings touch your calf musles) when squatting. The article, called "How to perform a squat", can be found here. I would be very interested in your views on the article.

I downloaded the article, and it's clear the author, Tony Boutagy, has a different view of squat technique. Here's how he says you should start your descent:

The knees first move directly forward as far as possible. After the knee initiates the movement, the hips lower down as low as flexibility allows.

As I wrote in NROL, if you see an inexperienced lifter in the gym trying to teach himself to squat, you'll often see that knees-first movement. Almost inevitably, the lifter's heels will come up off the floor.

So I've been standing here in my office trying to squat with that knees-first technique, and I'll concede this point: I'm able to get lower with my feet closer together than I can with my usual hips-first squat. I much prefer to use the wider stance and start the movement with my hips, or with simultaneous hip and knee movement, but that's probably because I've been doing it that way as long I've been squatting.

Is there some potential to presenting the squat as a knees-first exercise? Maybe. My instinct is that it would be a lot harder for people to learn the squat without coaching if they saw it described with the knees-first action. But it's not really an easy exercise to master without coaching, no matter how you describe it. 

I disagree with some of his other points, and find this argument absolutely absurd:

I have yet to see an obstetrician treat the newly born baby for patellofemoral pain on birth, which, according to some, should happen given that humans spend the first few months from conception living in a deep squat position in their mother’s womb! 

That's because babies don't have bony kneecaps. The cartilage hardens into adult-type kneecaps around age three. What infants and toddlers can do is completely different from what adults can do. 

And, honestly, I don't see the point of making arguments like this:

The way I see it, if a trainee cannot perform a full squat, they are considered to be in the rehabilitative stage of training. This is because a full squat that is performed correctly indicates structural muscular balance in the lower limbs and sufficient flexibility of the ankles, knees and hips. If a trainee cannot perform a full squat with correct technique, specific flexibility and special exercises, such as split squats and step up variations, will be recommended to address the imbalances that prevent the client from full squatting.  

If I've accomplished anything in my dual career as a journalist and fitness professional, I hope I've encouraged nuance in our conversations about training. Nothing is black and white. There's no such thing as one perfect technique that everyone should either master ... or go into perpetual remedial training as a punishment for not being able to master that particular technique. 

When people start taking training seriously, they want to do the serious exercises. As fitness professionals, we can't just say to them, "Sorry, but you're not good enough to hang with us Kool Kids over here at the squat rack. Go back to the machines."

Some guys, even elite athletes, will never get the hang of back squats with the full range of motion, as Mike Boyle has argued. His solution is to have them do front squats instead. 

I'm not trying to start an argument here so much as remind everyone that absolutes are counterproductive in any area, perhaps especially in the fitness industry. As Alwyn Cosgrove and others have said, when hardly anyone squats to begin with, do we really need to fight over things like this?

Tags: squats , training , form

Two months ago, I decided to join some friends in an adult baseball league for geezers 45 and older. This represents a huge leap of faith for me. I haven't played on any organized team, in any sport, in at least 15 years, and that was slow-pitch softball. I haven't played baseball on a team since I was 12. I've never swung at a breaking ball, never gotten a sign from a third-base coach, never tried to hit the cutoff man from the outfield.

My friends tell me I'll do okay -- I'm in decent shape for a 52-year-old, and it's not like the pitchers are going to buzz 90-mph fastballs under my chin. My biggest fear is that I'll go the entire season without a hit, but they assure me that nobody's that bad. 

I hope they're right. My sports career includes some moments of epic suckitude, and I'm too old to revisit them. 

But that's not actually the subject of this post.

Since I haven't played baseball in 40 years, I'm missing some basic equipment. It's a wood-bat league, so I needed one of those. I also needed an aluminum bat for hitting in cages. Plus a helmet. And spikes. And pants. And a belt. And a cup. 

Yesterday was shopping day. Harrison and I had to run an errand anyway, so I made him tag along with me while I loaded up on baseball gear.

I should note here that I never pay full price for anything. Kimberly got me in the habit of bargain shopping when we got married 15 years ago, and since then we've rarely made a purchase that didn't involve a sale, a coupon, or both. We sometimes compete to see who can get the best deal on whatever we have to buy. For example, the last pair of jeans I bought had a retail price of $45. It was on sale for $35, and I bought it with a $10-off store coupon. But that barely gets me in the game against my wife, who'd laugh at my inability to score the jeans at less than 50 percent off the original price.

We started at Modell's, where I had a terrific coupon -- 15 percent off anything baseball-related. But before we could find anything on my list, another customer's cell phone went off with the loudest, most obnoxious ring tone I've heard in recent memory. Rather than being embarrassed, he seemed pleased with himself. He let it go on until everyone in the store was staring at him, then had a loud, leisurely conversation with whoever loves him enough to set off that brain-cell-mutating ring tone. Since this guy was blocking the aisle with the baseball equipment, Harrison and I agreed that it was time to move on.

That brought us to Sports Authority, where I had two coupons, each good for $10 off a $50 purchase. I know from past experience the store lets you divide up your purchases and use multiple coupons, and I knew I'd easily spend over $100 on baseball gear. What I didn't know is that the process would take more than a half-hour, and leave a long line of people stranded behind me while two different kids working the registers tried to figure out how to make it work.

The problem is that the coupon excluded UnderArmour gear, and the $75 spikes I'd chosen happened to be UnderArmour. I didn't even know they made shoes until yesterday. More important, I had no idea the coupon excluded that brand, for a pretty simple reason: In the Sports Authority circular, the UnderArmour logo was directly beneath "save $10 on $50 purchase." (I tried to scan the image, but for some reason my computer and my website aren't playing nice today.)

I didn't discover this glitch until one cashier had rung up everything and used one of the coupons. This was after I'd waited several minutes in line to check out. (Quick recession-related note: The local shopping district had as much traffic as I've ever seen there. A lot of bargain shoppers, I guess.) 

He sent me to a different register, which meant waiting in another line. The cashier, pleasant but math-challenged, couldn't figure out how to add up the non-UnderArmour purchases to get to $50 twice. It took three of us, including a manager, to get it right. (We ended up throwing a couple of pieces of gum on one of the orders to make the math work, which was good news for Harrison.)

There was a long line behind me while all this was going on, and I apologized to the people closest to me. They were nice about it, and agreed with my point that not using a $10 coupon was like throwing a ten-dollar bill on the floor and walking away.

For all that, I was glad I stood my ground and used both coupons. I know the time I spent getting it done was worth something, but most of it was a sunk labor cost anyway -- by the time I realized how long it was going to take, it had already taken longer than I'd expected. So I was left with the choice of giving Sports Authority $10 it hadn't earned, or continuing my quest to get the discount, without the promise of which I wouldn't have shopped there in the first place.

On the bright side, I think I taught my son one of life's most important lessons: Hang in there long enough, and eventually someone gives you some gum.

Tags: baseball , personal , shopping , sports authority , cell phones

For a brief time in the 1970s, I cared more about football than baseball. The football Cardinals, under Don Coryell, were more interesting than the baseball Cardinals. And my college team, the Missouri Tigers, regularly upset the top teams in the NCAA. In 1976 alone, they upset #8 USC, #2 Ohio State, and #3 Nebraska -- all on the road. That was after beating #2 Alabama in 1975 and before toppling #2 Nebraska in 1978.

And I'm sure they beat Notre Dame somewhere in there, along with some other ranked teams that I can't recall just now.

Ultimately, though, the crushing disappointments inherent in following those teams, watching them beat some of the best teams one week and then the following week lose to some of the worst, wore me out. By the time Whitey Herzog came along to manage the baseball Cardinals in the early 1980s, I was ready for a permanent switch to baseball fandom.

So, unlike a lot of former St. Louis (football) Cardinals fans, I don't have any particularly deep or wistful feelings associated with the fact our former team is finally successful in a completely different city. I'll watch the Super Bowl tomorrow with about my usual level of interest, which isn't particularly deep or passionate. I'm just hoping for a decent game and entertaining commercials. I'll be happy for the fans of whichever team wins, but that's as far as my emotional involvement goes.

I do, though, have a story about the football Cardinals that I don't believe I've ever told in an article or blog.

In 1978, the team made what's widely regarded as one of its worst draft picks ever, taking Steve Little in the first round with the 15th overall pick. He'd been a two-time all-American at Arkansas, most famous for a 67-yard field goal in a game the Razorbacks lost to Texas in 1977. I can't tell you why a great college kicker failed so miserably in the pros, but he did. He was cut in 1980.

I was working for the Riverfront Times then, and my editor, Ray Hartmann, was interviewing Little for a feature. I can't remember any details about the story, except for the fact that the entire staff went out drinking with Little the night he was cut. 

He was friendly and generous, pulling $50 bills out of his pocket to pay for rounds of drinks. I remember he flirted with one of my coworkers, whom I happened to be dating at the time. 

Two things struck me as odd: First, a guy who'd just been fired from his job was spending money like he owned the printer and could make as much as he wanted. That made an impression on a guy making $120 a week at his first post-college job. Second, a married guy was flirting with a young woman who was, however briefly, my girlfriend.

That's all I remember about the night. I was shocked, like everyone else in St. Louis, to wake up the next morning and hear the news that Little had been seriously injured when he wrecked his car driving home that night. 

Little ended up paralyzed, and died 19 years later, when he was 43. He ended up living almost as long in the wheelchair as he'd lived out of it, spending much of his life as an elite, celebrated, and then vilified athlete.

I don't know if there's any lesson to be learned from Little's story, other than the obvious one about DWDU -- driving while drunk and unemployed. But it's the one that comes to mind when I think of the hapless history of the football Cardinals in St. Louis.

And it's probably the reason I've never cared about them, or pro football in general, ever since.

Tags: football , sports , super bowl

I don't always answer my email promptly, a character flaw that I'd like to correct but probably won't anytime soon. However, I did answer a couple of random questions sent by readers this weekend, and thought I'd share the answers here. If this is something you'd like to see here, I'll do it more often.

And if you disagree with my replies to those readers, please let me know where I'm wrong and how I should've answered. With both questions, I've done some slight editing for the usual reasons (grammar, punctuation, clarity) and to protect the correspondent's anonymity.

I'm a newbie personal trainer working in a local gym. Whenever I try to talk to my fellow trainers about functional training and training the body as a unit vs. body-parts style, they think I'm stupid and new and just don't get it.

I'm intimidated to train my clients in front of them, but I know that unless you're a bodybuilder it really isn't necessary to split your body up. I tell them that everyone should do squats and deadlifts, and they say that beginners must start on machines!

Any suggestions?

Chad Waterbury told me a great story about getting a job early in his career at a big gym in Chicago. The other trainers thought he was nuts when he had his clients doing basic strength and power exercises with free weights. But when those clients got better results than the ones who worked with the other trainers, he got promoted to head trainer.

That's the bottom line: Who gets results?

I'm not a personal trainer -- I'm CSCS, but have never trained clients in a gym, and don't plan to -- but I don't think there's any doctrinaire way to go about it. Some clients, especially those recovering from injuries, severely detrained, or cruelly uncoordinated, might be better off with a mix of machines and free weights until they improve their strength and muscle quality.

You'll still have to get them off the machines as soon as you can, but for some clients it probably makes sense to let them see some kind of training effect before you start worrying about whether they're doing functional exercises. Simply improving their strength and muscular conditioning will probably have some functional crossover.

So my advice is to do what's right for your clients. Leave ideology out of it. Be flexible and train each client according to his or her needs, working with what you have and building up from there.

I'm 22, and plan to return to school this fall to finish my degree. I'm leaning toward journalism/advertising. Specifically, I'm interested in writing for the fitness population.

My questions: When you attended journalism school, what was your focus? Were you mainly interested in fitness writing, or writing in general? How did you go about getting writing jobs as a new, young writer?

By pure coincidence, I wrote about that in my previous post. As I explain in more detail there, I didn't start writing about fitness until I got a job at Men's Fitness in 1992, when I was 35 and had already put in thousands of hours writing about other subjects.

If you want to get paid as a writer, you almost certainly must have a degree in journalism. Some don't, but those guys are exceptions. Furthermore, in my experience, there are only a handful of journalism schools that give you a leg up when it comes time to get hired. The absolute best chance you have is when you enter the job market with a master's degree from Columbia, Northwestern, or Missouri. For undergrad, the top schools are probably Missouri, Northwestern, Ohio University, Syracuse, and Florida.

That doesn't mean you can't get a decent job if you don't go to those schools. It's just harder to get taken seriously in the job market.

Right now the entire publishing industry is contracting, due to the drop in ad revenue. But, as I wrote last week, something similar happens every 10 years. The time to get into the business is when it's recovering from one of those contractions, which means you want to have your degree and some momentum a year or two from now, when companies start hiring again. A lot of the people who get laid off will leave the field, opening up more entry-level opportunities and more chance for advancement once you get in the door. It's cheaper to hire entry-level writers and editors and train them up to senior level than it is to hire senior-level publishing professionals who've already established their bona fides.

Specializing in anything makes it more difficult. There just aren't many full-time jobs for fitness journalists, and you have to hope one is open at the exact moment you need it. Just about everybody I know in the field stumbled into it. 

So that's the best advice I can offer -- get the degree, pursue your interests online and offline, and hope for the best when you graduate. But also keep in mind that you never really know what you want to do and what you're good at until you've actually done it. I've seen fitness geeks who thought they'd love working at a fitness magazine but then realized they didn't really like it at all.

There's a lot of compromise in any branch of publishing (or in any profession, period), and some people would rather not be part of that when it comes to something they care about.

Tags: email , fitness , personal training , media , journalism , careers , magazines

I've been resisting the temptation to write about Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers for the past several weeks. But every time I sit down to work on something else, my mind goes back to that book. More specifically, I start thinking about the book's second chapter, "The 10,000 Hour Rule." Even more specifically, I come back to the idea that not all hours are created equal.

The book, as you know, is the nation's #1 nonfiction bestseller at this moment. I think everyone I work with in the fitness business has read it. TC, editor in chief at Testosterone Muscle, wrote about it in his Atomic Dog column more than a month ago. Chad Waterbury recommended it to me even before that, and finally sent me a copy as an early birthday present when I mentioned in early January that I still hadn't gotten around to reading it.

That's why I didn't want to write about it -- who cares what a mid-list fitness-book author and website editor thinks about a bestseller that was published two months ago and already has 275 reviews on Amazon?

But here's why I just can't quit Gladwell: I don't think the 10,000 rule is correct as stated. This is from page 38:

The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do -- the innately talented ones. Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.

He goes on to look at specific examples of individuals who rose to the top of their fields for no obvious reason beyond the number of hours they worked, rehearsed, and otherwise prepared for their careers. He cites professional violinists vs. amateurs -- the only difference being the number of hours they practiced. 

The striking thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals," musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction fo the time their peers did. Nor could they find any "grinds," people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works.

That bit about getting into the top schools is kind of a big caveat, isn't it? It also fits into the other big theme Gladwell develops in Outliers: individual success depends as much on circumstances (of birthdate, of family connections, of generational opportunity) as it does on talent and determination.

But what gets left out of all his examples is something that I think should carry equal weight: coaching.

Would a talented violinist with a strong work ethic but mediocre to lousy instruction make it as a concert violinist? My guess is no. Same with athletes. Lots of kids with phenomenal skill and gritty determination fail because they weren't taught the fundamentals at an early enough age. They put in their 10,000 hours on sandlots and playgrounds, but they practiced the wrong skills in the wrong way. Without coaching, they reinforced bad habits, and didn't incorporate the skills that would've allowed them to benefit from their natural talents.

Some of the examples in Outliers, like Bill Gates and the Beatles, leave out the element of coaching altogether. If these outliers truly were self-taught, then I have to think that their innate abilities matter more than their 10,000 hours of practice.

There are lines in the chapter that kinda-sorta address these two problems. This is on page 40:

Of course, this doesn't address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others.

And on page 42 he writes about how it takes a lot of support and encouragement for a young person to put in those 10,000 hours. It requires special programs, as well as some degree of financial sacrifice by the family -- your daughter can't be working at McDonald's if she's going to be a world-class violinist.

I see this with local gymnasts in particular. Their parents have to be all-in on the effort. Meredith's best friend is an elite gymnast who goes to bed at midnight because she has hours of practice every evening. (We discovered this when the girl came over for a sleepover -- she couldn't fall asleep, and her parents had to come pick her up in the middle of the night. Meredith was out like a light and didn't realize her friend had left until she woke up the next morning.)

Another reason I can't get Outliers out of my head is because of something it does extremely well. It explains perfectly why I have the career I have, and why it's no better or worse than it is.

Toward the end of the 10,000 hours chapter, he lists the birthdates of all the computer geniuses who became fabulously wealthy titans of modern industry and culture. All were born between 1953 and 1956. That was the perfect time for a computer-industry mogul to pop out of the oven.

I was born in 1957, at what I think was the absolute peak of the Baby Boom. No matter what I did, I competed with millions of Boomers trying to do the exact same thing. Journalism was a trendy career to pursue for a few years in the mid-1970s, and without knowing it was trendy, that's what I went into. (It's hard to stay on top of these things when you're in high school in Festus, Missouri, with parents who're so indifferent to your career that they never once ask about your test scores. To this day, I have no idea if I took the SAT or ACT -- I just remember signing up at the last minute, paying for it myself, and catching a ride to the test center with classmates.)

Once I'd decided to be a writer, I went at it as hard as I could. I took creative-writing classes while I was in journalism school (and, thanks to geographic luck, I could attend a top J-school without paying out-of-state tuition), took jobs where I worked long hours and got lots of opportunities to try my hand at different types of reporting and commentary, wrote comedy sketches and screenplays and fiction in my spare time, and finally attended grad school for creative writing.

By the time I entered my current career track, fitness journalism, in my mid 30s, I'd logged my 10,000 hours in multiple disciplines. I had more than 1,000 articles published, more than 1,000 pages of fiction, more than 1,000 pages of sketches and scripts and screenplays, and who knows how many thousands of pages of journal entries. That's aside from prolific correspondence, which I believe is a kind of practice -- the literary equivalent of pick-up basketball.

All that served to get me to the middle of the publishing industry.

The one thing I did that was vaguely outlier-ish, without really knowing it at the time, was that I got into fitness before it was an actual trend. I can't tell you the first time I picked up a barbell, but I'm pretty sure I started working out with my older brother's weight set when I was 13, which would've been 1970. And I never stopped for more than a few months here or there. So by the time I got a chance to work for a fitness magazine in 1992, I'd not only put in my 10,000 hours as a writer and editor, but I'd logged thousands of hours in the gym as well.

That gave me one comparative advantage: There weren't many trained and experienced journalists who wanted to specialize in fitness and exercise. Me, I was happy to specialize, once I realized the specialty existed, and once I saw the expanding opportunities in the field as a critical core of adults grew interested enough in systematic exercise training to buy books on the subject.

Obviously, I'm not an outlier. I'm a mid-list author who's happily employed and enjoys his work. Lots of books sell better than mine (as I've said, I'm just happy and flattered to see mine stay in print). But at least I now understand why my 10,000 hours didn't make me one.

So that's my take on Outliers: it's a terrific book, entertaining and thought-provoking, with lots of lessons for all of us about our own careers and the future careers of our children. My only quibble is that I don't think it gives enough credit to the importance of coaching for the ones who do rise to the top of their fields.

Tags: books , writing , media , publishing , journalism, outliers