Have Belt, Will Travel: Using Injury information to inform your programming

Another quick video on how to think about injury information for athlete training.

Personal Training Gear I Use

Here is a simple list of equipment I bring with me when traveling in my gym bag. Aside from bringing my training log. These are my thoughts aside from always packing a few t-shirts, workout shorts, and a pair or two of sweat pants since frequently my knees will not like me when they are cold.

Sweat bands – This is to minimize the sweat from lifting getting on my hands and messing with my grip along with leading to greater skin loss. I don’t use wrist wraps since I don’t have problems with my wrist strength or pain there. Any pair here will work, but some have pockets, which can be nice along with make sure you launder them since they can start to smell given enough times wearing them.

Altra shoes – I have comically big feet for how tall I am not, both in length and width (13 wide). Due to this most shoes are not that comfortable for me and when I discovered these shoes when at a conference I have been wearing the brand ever since. They are zero drop and wide toe boxed so my feet enjoy them. https://www.altrarunning.com/shop/mens-shoes-gym-training

Hook Grip Knee sleeves – These are light and mostly cloth knee sleeves that you can wash. They don’t tend to stink like rehband knees sleeves (or any other neoprene knee sleeves) and fold up much smaller. https://www.roguefitness.com/hookgrip-knee-sleeves-2-0?gclid=EAIaIQobChMItpvtt5_M5wIVQtbACh0D_QWxEAQYASABEgKOQ_D_BwE

Athletic Tape – I keep a short roll of athletic tape in my bag incase I start bleeding from my hands, shins, or whatever else I might bounce off of to keep the blood off of the bars and other people but still allow me to keep training. Not all brands here are equal, you want the ones that are meant to stick to skin and have more of a cloth like texture.

Straps/Chalk – I will bring a small plastic container with chalk or some lifting straps. This is for my grip when doing heavy pulls and some of the Olympic lifting. Some gyms don’t allow any chalk so that is why I keep the straps with me. I’m a fan of short straps that are easy to put on and take off like these: https://www.elitefts.com/eliteftstm-old-school-orange-wrist-straps.html

Ear Plugs – I often don’t train to music and don’t like what is on when I am in a lot of gyms. As much fun as it is to hear about various sports ball teams and what the bar scene was like last night, I’d rather not waste the bandwidth hearing any of this. Therefore, I put in some simple foam earplugs and get after it.

Optional

Heavy Dip belt – This is sometimes left behind, but useful when you are planning on doing weighted dips or pullups. You can always hook your foot through the handle of a kettlebell or you can hold a dumbbell between your legs, but I prefer to use a dip belt especially over the later. My dip belt is from Spud (https://www.elitefts.com/spud-inc-dip-belt-black.html), I would suggest one that has a thick strap and nylon is going to be much more comfortable than thinner leather belts.

Lifting Belt – For heavy squatting and deadlifting a good lifting belt can be a great investment. When you are training when on the road you might not always have access to the best equipment so going heavy enough where you need a belt might not be a good and safe decision to make. I bought my belt a long time ago from Inzer and it has held up well. I would suggest buying one that is at least 3” wide all of the way around and a thinner diameter gives less support, but it also can be rolled up tighter to take up less space when traveling.

Z Bones  – These are wireless headphones that use bone conduction for sound. This way you don’t have to have your ear plugged or covered by conventional headphones. I do like the wireless aspect so you don’t have to worry about your headphone cord getting ripped out by your lifting, and the cost is here is not bad. https://zpods.io/products/zbones

Past you, Present you, and Future you

When working with my students I like to try to get them to think about their life from a different perspective. We constantly think about the past, the present and the future. It is easy to talk about delayed gratification and how it is important, but I think having them place themselves in that position helps make it a bit more real. What I do is introduce them to thinking about the idea of the past self, present self, and future self.

Their past self, likely did a number of things that they are happy about which brings them to the current moment. Their past self also probably messed up a number of things which they are also paying for. There is nothing they can do to change the decisions of their past self, but it helps frame the next ideas.

Their present self is them in that moment. This is the only one they can actively control, but seeing the effects of their past self allows them to think a bit more about what their present self can do to make things better for their future self.

The future self is the one that has to live with all of the repercussions of the choices that the present self is making and what the past selves have already done. A number of my students get wrapped up in to the FOMO pressures and constantly look at social media. Likely their choices to spend all of this time with divided attention and spending energy on things that don’t really add any value to their life can make things worse for their future self.

When I talk about this and I ask them to think about things that their past self did which was both good and bad. Once they have some simple examples in mind I ask them what are they doing right now that their future self would not be happy about? Are they poorly managing their money? Are they not taking care of their body? Are they not developing themselves professionally or interpersonally?

I’m not looking to shame them or make them miserable since all they are doing is trying to make their life in the future better with disregard for joy in the present. Instead, I am looking for them to think about what they can do to make their present and future self happier. This might be studying a bit more, taking up a rewarding hobby, etc.

So with your life what is your present self currently doing to make life better for your future self? What would your future self 10 years down the road wish that you had done? 20 years down the road? 50? Think about what you can do now to make yourself a bit happier not just now but in the future. Thanks as always for reading and have a great day.

Have Belt will travel: Training Goals working together

Arnold 2020 Notes

Here are my notes from the few meetings I could attend. They are very raw, but to me quite interesting. If you have questions about any of them please just leave a comment below.

Round table with Eric Serrano, Rick Collins, and George Tatolopolis.

TRT- in Europe hormonophobic about giving test. Even though it has been shown to help with diabetes, anemia, depression, and metabolic syndrome. Though happy to use SSRIs, Statins, and metformin which have far more negative effects on health.

The three androgens are DHT, test, and DHEA

Key to track not just labs, but also symptoms.

Test doesn’t cause heart disease – Being fat and sedentary causes heart disease and then dosing them up with test can make things go from bad to worse.

10 different ways to take test: pills, sublingual, patches, pellets, torches, inject, gel, cream, and so on.

Prostate cancer with low test can lead to really having no quality of life.

Test increases prostate levels, but not cause cancer.

PSA levels are bullshit and you need free PSA levels. Higher the free PSA the bigger the problem, get an MRI fusion not a biopsy to check it out.

Labcorp gives ranges, quest is exact need 2 tests below acceptable levels to get test.

Women have more test in their blood stream than they have estrogen.

PSA levels in women are related to athletic performance.

No baseline for what you were when young so not useful for figuring out hypogonadism. Example of an athlete with a total of 1400 and free of 50 then after concussion a total of 484 and free of 4.

Free is the important factor to know.

Hemoglobin below 18 use aspirin to help as a general blood thinner.

Test boost EPO from the kidneys

Also comes up through COPD values too

High hemoglobin caused one cop when shot to lose four pints of blood and still have a value of 17. Blood viscosity increase with dehydration and with diabetes.

Take 4g of fish oil per day between DHA and EPA.

Best way to increase iron levels is to take in iron with vitamin c on an empty stomach.

Measure the ferritin level and track symptoms with iron levels. Too high is indicative of iron overload.

Ferrous sulfate comes from rusted iron treated with hydrochloric acid. Use Protein based iron instead to increase levels

Women are on a monthly phlebotomy schedule so high iron levels are less likely.

3 genes are important for causing hemochromatosis genetically.

You can’t make dopamine or serotonin without iron.

Eat red meat after giving blood to help bring iron levels back up if you are concerned.

In order to get test with low levels you need to go 14 days without any dosing to then test with low levels and get the blood test confirming the issue. When you get the tests ran get your total test, free test, estradiol, DHT, SHBG, PSA, and CBC.

Levels are 100-200

CAG repeats predict response to test genetically. Large # of them and you need more test to have a real effect on the body.

Women have higher test levels than they have estrogen levels in their blood.(test is in ng/dl, estrogen is in pg/dl

Test urine periodically for the testosterone to epitestosterone levels. Normally is it 1:1 but can no be 6:1 and still pass a drug test. (fail when at that ratio or above). You can try to get a therapeutic dose exemption.

The entire BALCO investigation started with digging through dumpsters.

THG – called the clear, created by Patrick Arnold

Bioidentical hormones work and are likely the best way to go for TRT. Space out your doses over the week, one big dose can cause not just spiked test levels, but DHT, and estradiol.

Sub cutaneous injections work well the oil prep can cause more issues and oil deposits in some people. Long term oil is castor, can use cotton seed, sesame, and even MCT oil. Higher load more issues.

Organic and Pure on labels is a lie.

To decrease overall inflammation take 4000mg of EPA and DHA per day split evenly between the two of them.

Sublingual CBD can help with relaxation and pain for about 4 hours. Applying this to the skin can help. CBD treats symptoms; it does not treat the issues.

Hemp is not in the farm bill, but the FDA has not made CBD illegal yet in food, supplements, or as an ingredient.

CBD has come up faster than any other ingredient in recent research. Not sure what is going on there yet. What about issues with taking so much CBD you test positive for THC. THC is in your system for up to six weeks. WADA says CBD is ok, as does MLB, and CFL. NFL is not ok with it.

I then had to get ready to give my presentation, but this was great and the other speakers were awesome too. If you get a chance definitely attend since you get to hear about things that would otherwise never be talked about openly at most conferences.