How To Feel A Whole Lot Better For $13 Bucks

This is something you are almost certainly missing from your workout and something will not only make your workouts more effective, but also MUCH safer.  This is one of the single most important ways to permanently increase flexibility and mobility, improve the speed of your recovery, increase the range of motion that you can correctly do an exercise through, and get rid of all of those little (or big) little aches and pains.

With the exception of traumatic injury – like getting hit by a car, most joint pain is the result of repetitive/overuse issues.

Like if you sit for 8+ hours per day, your hips are flexed (the thigh is closer to your torso).  The muscles that flex your hips spend that whole time in a shortened position – they get thick, tight and knotted up.

There is something called “reciprocal inhibition” – that is if the muscle on one side of a joint is tight, then the tight muscle will inhibit the muscle on the opposite side of the joint.  Like, if you flex your bicep (curl your arm), your tricep (back of arm) must relax enough to allow this to happen.  Without reciprocal inhibition, you couldn’t move, you’d just tighten up everywhere and spasm on the floor.

So, the hip flexors are in the front of the hips, and the hip extensors are in the back of the hip – better know as your butt (glutes).  (My favorite technical term is “Gluteal amnesia” coined by Dr. Stuart McGill.)

So, if your butt doesn’t work very well, then something else nearby has to pick up the slack.  That is usually your lower back and/or hamstrings.

In most activities – sprinting, squatting, etc. your butt is supposed to move your thigh behind you.  But, if your rear is not in gear, then your low back/hamstrings do more than they should.

Do this a hundred thousand times (there’s 1,500 steps in every mile, so, it doesn’t take much walking, or, even worse, running, to get a lot of bad reps), and you will officially have a problem.  Problems with your back and/or with your hamstrings feeling like they are going to tear (or actually tearing/pulling) when you try to sprint, etc.

Undoing that process BEFORE you workout is KEY to injury prevention.  Otherwise you are simply making whatever was tight even tighter, and you are reinforcing bad movement patterns that will eventually come back to bight you in the ass.

A great example of this are ACL tears.  In the US, we have about 150,000 of them as a nation.  The interesting part is that 105,000 are non-contact, that is, they were not the result of getting hit or an accident; they happened when somebody was running forward and decided to change direction and then, POP, there goes the knee.*

*Griffin, L.Y. et al. Non-contact anterior cruciate ligament injuries: risk factors and prevention strategies. J Amer Acad Othro Surg, Vol 8, #3 (2000)

How do you tear something that is as strong as this high carbon steel wire** (actually, the wire in the picture below) tear by changing direction?

‘Cuz it’s been beat up over and over again (the glutes don’t stop the thigh from rotating in if the glutes are weak, so the ACL decelerates internal rotation of the thigh) and is now very weak.  Sure, you need it reattached, but reattaching it won’t prevent the next one.

(Injury prevention should be your #1 priority by they way.  ‘Cuz, otherwise you are saying that you are willing to hurt yourself in order to lose fat, gain muscle, etc.  Unless you get paid a few million bucks a year to play a sport, that is a bad trade off.  If you get hurt, it takes a long time to recover and all progress must come to a screeching halt.  A lot of the benefits of foam rolling and corrective exercise will be evidenced by what doesn’t happen.)

*Average ACL tensile strength of 2160N from this paper.  The above steel available here.

Why Stretching Is Not Enough, Or Even Your First Choice

If I gave you a pair of jeans out the dryer that came out wrinkled and asked you to “stretch ‘em ‘till they’re flat”, you’d tell me that this was a stupid request and that you need heat and pressure (like and iron) to get these jeans to get flat.

The foam roller is like an iron for your muscles.  You won’t get the wrinkles (knots, trigger points) out with stretching.

Go tie a knot in a rope and then pull on it (stretch it).  How long will you have to pull until the knot comes out?  Right.  It never will.

(Actually, if you stretch a muscle with a true trigger point in it, it will respond by getting even tighter.  That is very painful FYI, but, if you roll it first, then you can then do an effective stretch.)

Good, short video explanation with visuals.

How to use your “portable massage therapist”

Watch me roll ½ of my upper body and ½ of my lower body in literally 3min, so, there’s no good reason for this to consume more than 8-10min, unless you dilly-dally.  And, you can absolutely get everything on your body very well in 6min.

The music is awesome.

Where to get Rollers, Etc.

I get all my stuff from PerformBetter.com

Most people will do fine with the 1 foot long, round black roller.

You may want the longer, 3 foot roller.

You can also get sticks or tiger tails from Perform Better

I get my lacrosse balls and softballs from Amazon.com

FREE FOAM ROLLER – the big, fancy $25 roller at that!

I have a 3 foot long, black foam roller sitting in my office taking up space (I’ve got a bunch at work, and 2 in my living room, so I don’t need this one at all), and I’ve been trying to think of some kind of contest to give it away, but have come up with nothing so far.

So, does anybody reading this Blog have any ideas as to a good contest to give this away?  (Obviously it needs to be commensurate with the size of the prize, so a small-ish activity.)

Post your ideas as comments.

Would You Like A 2^nd Shot At Getting $200 in Cash With No Strings Attached?

If so, then click here.

What If Low Carb Is Wrong? Does ASP Prove That Insulin Doesn’t Matter and That Its Calories That Really Count?

So there I was on the forums of t-nation.com answering questions about my recent interview piece with Gary Taubes when I started to wonder if this low-carb thing was legitimate after all.  “Have I been giving bad advice the whole time?  Should I just be telling people to ‘eat less and exercise more?’  But that’s never worked…  What I do now works like clock work… But all these posts keep telling me how ‘retarded’ me and Gary are…’”, I worried to myself.

What’s not authoritative and intimidating about being insulted over and over again by anonymous people on a forum?  If they can type it on a forum it must be well researched and true!  Right?

I did come to my thin-skinned senses eventually, BUT the folks on the t-nation forums did leave me with one question that I wasn’t entirely sure about:  Is ASP the overlooked flaw in low-carb dieting?

There were a lot of posts saying in effect: “What Tuabes and the rest of the low-carb community don’t like talking about is a little compound called acylation stimulating protein (ASP) which stores dietary fat in the fat cell with ZERO rise in insulin levels.”

I started doing some digging and found statements like these in peer reviewed research (I’m paraphrasing to make them readable and concise):

#1.  “ASP is far more powerful than insulin in stimulating the creation of new body-fat.” (1)

#2.  “ASP is released in response to an oral fat load.” (2)

Did I Get Served On A Forum?

I started really getting into ASP research at about 10pm on a Saturday night, and by the time I found the above statements in peer reviewed research I started sweating and my stomach was twisted up in knots.  I tried to let it go and hang out with my fiancé, but I just had to know – “What’s the deal with ASP!?  Is this something the debunks low-carb?”

So I spent the next 6 hours combing everything that I could get my hands on about ASP, and every time a paper made on of the above statements (#1 & 2 above) I noted the paper they cited.  (By the way, my biochemistry textbooks were no help at all.)  Pretty soon it became clear that those two statements were pretty much built off of two papers published in 1989:

•    Statement #1 above was pretty much built off of a paper titled “Purification and characterization of acylation stimulating protein”, but let’s call it “ASP trumps insulin” for this article.

•    Statement #2 above was built off of a paper titled “Metabolic response of acylation stimulating protein to an oral fat load,” but let’s call it “ASP is released in response to fat, not carbs.”

Does ASP Trump Insulin?

For the “ASP trumps insulin paper” the researchers grew fat cells in cultures (outside the body).  It is true the addition of ASP REALLY accelerated the creation of new fat (triglyceride) – it was faster than insulin.

HOWEVER, both the ASP and the no-ASP cultures had insulin and carbs added to them.  So the water is very muddy:

Could the ASP be a way in which insulin accelerates its activity?  Maybe the super deadly combo a high-fat and high sugar meal?  Maybe the only thing to learn from this study is that frosting is more fattening than candy?  Why not test ASP without insulin and carbs if your goal is to see what the difference between them is?

Or, for that matter, why not just test ASP in actual people instead of cultures? (1)

Is ASP Released In Response to Fat, Not Carbs?

For the “ASP is released in response to fat, not carbs.” The “lipid meal” or “oral fat load” that was used to induce the ASP response was cream + one tbsp table sugar (sucrose) + one tbsp nonfat dry milk.

That mixture is 25% carbs by weight!  So, that really doesn’t tell us anything at all.

Why not just have people drink olive oil or melted butter instead of cream plus a bunch of sugary stuff?

Take It Home Gary

I shared my research with Gary Taubes and he had this to say:

“Nice to know you’re suitably obsessed Josef.

“One thing to keep in mind in all this is the need to explain the observations, not just work with possible mechanisms that can’t explain anything. So one of the observations is weight loss on a high fat diet — the Atkins diet.

“So if ASP was good at sequestering dietary fat away in the fat tissue without carbs being needed, why would people lose weight when they ate an Atkins diet?

“Another observation we’re trying to understand, as I point out in lectures, is the obesity in poor populations eating low-fat, high carb diets. So there ASP would be irrelevant. Now if we had obesity in populations eating low-carb, high-fat diets, that would be telling and a reason to invoke ASP, but, as far as I know, no such populations exist.

“So maybe ASP plays a role in obesity in rats that are fed high fat diets, but we’re not all that interested in rats.”

Epilogue – Falling Asleep At A Wedding

My obsessive researching kept me up ‘till 4am, but I had to be up at 8am to workout, shower and be at a friend’s wedding the next day.  I couldn’t put off my workout and sleep in because I had deadlines to meet that night.  So, while everyone else was watching the cake cutting and dancing, I passed out, face down on the table.  Even though I woke with drool on my cheek I felt a lot better.

Josef Brandenburg is an award winning Washington, DC weight loss expert and author of The Body You Want.  He specializes in helping normal, busy people create the bodies they want in the time they actually have.  You can pick up a FREE copy of his new CD “Why ‘Eat Less and Exercise More’ is The Worst Advice Ever” right here.

References

#1.  J Biol Chem vol. 264, Jan 5, 1989, p.426-430

#2. J lipid res vol 30, 1989 p. 1727-1733