We’ve been working on this post for a while, but Life got in the way. (Alternate story: Dallas is better at starting projects than finishing them.)  Nonetheless, we’d like to talk about recovery. No, not economic recovery—though that would be lovely—but physiological recovery from the stressors placed upon us by our modern physical world.

Rest vs. Recovery

These two words, “rest” and “recovery,” have distinctly different meanings when applied to health, fitness or athletic contexts. Recovery can encompass many different behaviors and strategies, but it is fundamentally different than just resting.

Rest is simply the absence of effort or movement—the absence of exertion. Think taking a day off from exercise or sport, napping, chilling on the couch, rotting your brain with Jersey Shore or Lost reruns, and going to bed nice and early so you get adequate sleep. All of that is fine and good, but resting is only one small part of true recovery.

Recovery is the restorative process by which you regain a state of “normalcy”; healthy and in balance. (If your “normal” is not “healthy,” perhaps you should spend some time considering that.) Recovery is far more than just taking a day off from training. Genuine recovery includes adequate rest, but also must include the engaged, deliberate execution of a cogent plan to offset the (physical and psychological) cost of your training.

In his 2010 All Banged Up post, Dallas wrote:

“I see more sub-acute and chronic injuries resulting from inadequate recovery from exercise (especially with high-intensity programs), than resulting from an acute or traumatic incident. The primary fault lies with inadequate or improper recovery from exercise, not the type or intensity of exercise. (To put it another way, it’s not that you’re hurting yourself doing pull-ups – more often than not, it’s because you’re not properly recovering from those pull-ups.) I believe that a high-intensity exercise program is both effective and sustainable life-long only when combined with good nutrition and recovery practices.”

Merely taking a day or two off from exercise when you’re feeling overtrained (or All Banged Up) is, to put it bluntly, the slacker’s version of “recovery.” One of the many things that has been underscored during our training with Rob MacDonald of Gym Jones is that recovery requires just as much (or more!) discipline as training itself. Which means if you’re training hard, a case could be made that you should spend more time focused on recovery than you do on training itself.

Don’t have that much time in your busy, stressful life? It might mean a little less training and a little more time spent on recovery.

Still don’t think that’s really necessary? Maybe you just don’t realize how stressful your life really is.

Stress is Stress

Let’s review the biological concept of hormesis as it relates to recovery. Hormesis is an adaptive process that occurs as the result of a specific “dose” of a stimulus. In simple terms, you could summarize it as “the dose makes the poison” meets “what doesn’t kill you might make you stronger.” Hormesis describes the dose-specific response to a stimulus; whether something’s net effect is beneficial, harmful, or neutral depends on the “dose.”

Another way to put it is, “some is good, but more is not better.” Hormesis is at the core of our favorite refrain, “context matters,” and is reflected in our Whole9 Health Equation as the balance of Stress vs. Recovery. Why all the focus on stress?

During his recent Paleo(fx) presentation, Dr. Daniel Kalish said, “Psychological stress and physical stress are virtually indistinguishable in the body.” We wanted to give him a standing ovation for that. What does that mean, in terms of hormesis and our Health Equation? If you’ve got a ton of psychological stress, that costs you something. It costs you recovery capacity. It cuts into your reserves. In fact, being chronically psychologically stressed is probably more damaging than overtraining or under-sleeping, though those are obviously poor behaviors, too.

Think about your own life. Ask yourself if your “dose” of a stressor is appropriate for your context. There are lots of examples of stressors: intermittent fasting, high-intensity exercise, under-eating, cold showers or acute exposure to cold, caffeine intake, eating extremely hot peppers… the list is long.

A “stressor” isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but the application of that stressor in that dose in a context already saturated with a high stress load may be detrimental to your health.* If you’re a parent with an infant (and thus some degree of sleep deprivation/disturbance), a busy job, and some financial stress, do you think the net effect of getting out of bed at 5:00 AM five days a week to do high-intensity exercise is positive? Likely not. (If we just described your life, please… just stay in bed.)

*This is one of the reasons why we rarely recommend intermittent fasting to our consulting clients. Unsurprisingly, most of them are on the “too much” side of the stress scale, rating their daily stress at an average of 8 out of 10. These folks don’t have any “reserve” left to offset an additional stressor, which means adding IF on to their current health equation would do them more harm than good. IF may be a perfectly appropriate tool for other folks with different contexts, but it’s not for everyone.

Minimum Effective Dose

Exercise is an excellent example of hormesis in action. An appropriate “dose” of physical stress provokes a positive adaptation in your body (you get fitter), but dosing progressively larger and larger amounts of exercise can be seriously detrimental to your health.  Make no mistake – excessive training (or, perhaps stated more accurately, under-recovering) can and commonly does have serious health consequences. And what look like “reasonable” training for one person might be way more stress than a different person has the capacity to adapt to.

Clif Harski, among other Smart People we know, talks about the “minimum effective dose,” that sweet spot on the hormesis graph. This is where healthy adaptation is occurring, but you’re on the safer side of the stress curve, not revving at the redline day in and day out. In the case of exercise, doing none is pretty unhealthy, but doing too much is unhealthy too.

The real key is to find that sweet spot, where you’ll have optimal adaptation to the stressor without reaching the point of diminishing returns–or worse, when the exercise “takes” more from your health than it gives back. Like with other stressors, exercise is dose-dependent, and the appropriate dose for you depends almost entirely on you, your context, and your goals.

Are you Under-Recovered? Here are a few things to look for:

1. You used to be excited about going to the gym – not so much anymore.
2. Your performance (or lack thereof) is seriously stressing you out , and a poor workout ruins your day.
3. You’ve got chronic muscle soreness after every workout, and/or that lingering “shoulder thing” that just won’t seem to heal.
4. Your sleep pattern has become irregular.
5. Even though you’re in bed for enough hours, you never feel well-rested in the morning.
6. You need a Monster drink or three espressos to get fired up for your training sessions.
7. You crave carbohydrates (sugar!) more than you used to.
8. You’re getting sick a lot, or just can’t seem to kick that cold you picked up.
9. You’re training hard and “eating right” but that little belly just isn’t going away.
10. You’re actually gaining fat, instead of losing it.

Any of this resonate with you?

So how does all this connect back to actual recovery? In order to progress forward with health, there must be a relative balance between Stress (such as exercise) and Recovery. Otherwise, you’re writing checks your body can’t cash, eventually ending up beat down and “overdrawn.”

In case you’ve not experienced this eye-opening phenomenon firsthand, take our professional word for it: it takes a lot longer to recover from an overdrawn state than it took to get you there in the first place. Like paying off debt, it’s a prolonged and generally miserable process. We’re not trying to scare you – we’re simply sharing what we know in the hopes that it will save you some heartache. Take it or leave it.

Recovery 101

You don’t get fitter when you are training. Whether you CrossFit, or Zumba, or swing kettlebells, or run marathons… you get fitter when you are recovering from that training.

Being committed to recovery means that sometimes you don’t train hard, even if you really want to, and even if everyone else is doing it.

A commitment to recovery may mean that you take ice baths sometimes.

It means that when all you want is pizza and a beer, you choose a nutritious meal instead.

It means that you put away the computer/TV/smartphone/video game and go the heck to sleep.

It means that you spend some intimate time with your foam roller, lacrosse ball, stick, ice pack, or other self-care tool/torture device.

It means that you watch and learn from Kelly Starrett getting his supple leopard on.

It may mean that you seek out a reputable practitioner of your preferred therapeutic approach: massage, Rolfing, acupuncture, chiropractic care, naturopathic or functional medicine.

It might mean that you use your noggin’ and take a pass on a race or competition that really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of Your Life and Health.

It might even mean that you revisit your trip down Whole30 Lane.

“Aerobic” is not a dirty word.

If you’re passing on lower intensity, longer duration activity and exclusively working at a high-intensity, we think that’s a short-sighted perspective. For our clients, we recommend regularly spending at least a half-hour doing easy activity as part of your recovery practices. Riding the Airdyne, walking, swimming, or biking for 30-90 (long, slow, boring) minutes expedites recovery from hard training, improves metabolic efficiency (especially in folks on a low-ish carb, high-ish fat diet), and improves cardiovascular health.

Don’t confuse durations over a half hour with “chronic cardio” – the long duration, moderate-to-high intensity stuff that really nails you. To be clear, no one was ever harmed by a two hour hike or an easy spin on the bike with their kids. Keeping the intensity low is the key to recovery activities, and including some long, easy stuff in your routine improves health and recovery from hard training—which ultimately will improve performance in your higher-intensity sport or exercise program.

Regardless of how you choose to step your recovery up (perhaps, in part, by stepping your training down), it’s time. Summer’s activities are just around the corner, and if you play a sport, participate in outdoor pursuits, or simply like comparing your physical capacity to others (or yourself!), now is the time to invest in yourself. Now. Not tomorrow, or next week, or after a few more workouts. Now.

You owe it to your Future You not just to rest, but to recover.

Since founding the Whole9 in 2009, we’ve used “our 9” to address the multi-faceted nature of a healthy lifestyle with our consulting clients.  But after developing a great working relationship with Robb Wolf and attending several extraordinary nutrition seminars (including Robb’s), we decided to concentrate our public health focus on nutrition.  Since then, we’ve written extensively about nutrition’s role in a healthy lifestyle over the past several years, and conducted more than 70 Foundations of Nutrition workshops, spreading our version of the Good Food Word.

We “zoomed in” on nutrition to meet a need in the community for practical application strategies of various dietary concepts – and we were not alone.  Over the last few years as the Paleo/ancestral health movement has grown, we’ve seen hundreds of new Paleo blogs, recipe sites and communities created for the exclusive purpose of focusing on nutrition.  But now, we see a new need within our community – and it’s time for us to take a step back and remind our readers that health is a multifaceted concept.  Nutrition is, of course, a  foundational piece of any good health and fitness program – but it most certainly is not the only piece.

Frank Forencich made an astute observation about this same phenomenon in The State of the Meme, saying, “The problem with this (nutrition-focused) variation (of Paleo) is that it’s a fragment of a much larger story. And because it’s a fragment, it tends to get pigeon-holed with every other diet meme out there. This brings Paleo down to the level of pop health, where it loses its meaning and its power.”  He goes on to add that “Paleo” is so much more than either ancestral nutrition or ancestral movement patterns – and we dig his perspective.

Context Matters

So now, for us, it’s time to zoom back out. Of course, we’re not abandoning nutrition as the foundational factor of a healthy life. But our readers need to hear more about The Big Picture. We interact with thousands of people a month via email, workshops, Facebook, and Twitter, and what we’ve realized is that many folks have drilled so far down into nutrition that they can no longer see the big picture at all. 

People ask us about the lectins in tree nuts, the fructose content of half a pear, or whether it’s okay to eat the deer they shot if the deer may have been feeding on GMO corn. (True story.)  And in many of these instances, what we want to say is,  “It really doesn’t matter, since you’re only sleeping 5 hours a night and I can smell the cortisol on you from across the street.” So we encourage you to pull back a bit, do a little introspection, and try to see beyond any one factor (specifically, nutrition) to view the reality of your big-picture health and fitness situation.  After all, self-analysis is nearly as critical to genuine progress as dissent (but that’s a topic for another day).

Analyze This

We’re calling this graphical representation of an individual’s overall health “The Whole9 Health Equation” (at least until we have a stroke of genius and come up with something clever-er). Yes, it is simplified – Dallas doesn’t like complex math equations. Yes, there are important factors (such as age and quality social interaction) that are not factored in here. No, we cannot quantify this for you personally, as (again), context matters. Nonetheless, let’s tackle this thing.

We think of each individual’s health status like a “bank account”, to and from which you make deposits and withdrawals.  Like a bank account, your Health Balance is a product of Credits minus Debits. If you make more frequent (or larger) deposits than withdrawals, you accumulate “Health Wealth”.  And, hopefully not to take this analogy too far, that Wealth pays dividends down the road.  Conversely, if you overextend your resources (withdrawing more than you’re depositing), you’ll find yourself in the red – “Health Debt”.  Think about overdrafting your bank account – you can continue spending for a while, but at some point, you simply can’t spend any more, because there’s nothing left in the bank. (Needless to say, that scenario stinks.)   Are you with us so far?  Good.  Now here’s where we start talking about specific factors.

Recovery = Nutrition + Sleep + Specific Recovery Practices

Your diet, sleep and general recovery habits are all a part of “General Recovery” (health deposits or credits).

Nutrition is the biggest potential credit. That’s why we call it “foundational”. Eating adequate calories from nutrient-dense, anti-inflammatory foods on a daily basis will deposit huge credits into your health balance.  But your Nutrition factor can also be a negative integer, a debit. In other words, eating unhealthy foodstuffs can actually cost you – big. (Think obesity and chronic disease.)

Sleep matters. We make ours a priority – above exercise, reading, socialization, or even housekeeping. Dallas has written about this in Performance Menu, and we continue to emphasize this issue in our workshops and with consulting clients.  Nine hours of sleep per night equals big deposits.  Chronically under-slept?  Equally large withdrawals.  Sometimes, prioritizing sleep requires some radical revisions to one’s life. Pay now, or pay later.

Specific Recovery Practices include ice baths, contrast showers, specific mobility work (including foam rolling, lacrosse ball work or self-myofascial release), stretching, yoga, massage and other manual therapies, meditation, recovery (i.e. easy) training sessions, acupuncture, sex, napping, etc.  Your commitment to Specific Recovery Practices, to a large degree, dictates how quickly and thoroughly you recover from training, and ultimately can determine whether your training is productive or simply destructive.

In summary, sub-par Nutrition, Sleep, and Specific Recovery Practices have the potential to massively impact your Health.  (Duh.)  How rapidly this occurs partly depends on how fast you’re “spending” those resources with Physical Stress (PhysStress) and Psychological Stress (PsychStress).

Total Stress = Physical Stress + Psychological Stress

Physical Stress (PhysStress), for most of us, is structured exercise or participation in an actual sport. For some, working a manual labor or highly physical job (construction, firefighting, etc.) would also qualify as physical stress.  But for folks whose primary physical effort is deliberate exercise, there are several factors that determine the amount of PhyStress: intensity, frequency, and volume.  

Intensity refers to how hard the activity feels to you, and how hard your heart is working.  Frequency is how often you are experiencing this physical stress – twice a day, three times a week, etc.  Volume means the amount of work you complete in each training session – whether you lift a particular weight ten times during your session, or one hundred times.

Each of these factors work together to determine physical stress – notice they are all multiplied in the equation. That means in increase in one has the potential to dramatically affect the total of your PhysStress.  You can do short-ish high intensity stuff sometimes, or long and hard stuff occasionally, or long, low intensity activity daily – but not daily high intensity training, or large volumes of moderate intensity training, or (god forbid) both.  Unless you’re a professional athlete, of course, in which case you value performance over health. Most of us don’t fall into this category.

Psychological Stress (PsychStress) can come from a variety of sources, and can be pretty insidious. It could be job-related stress, family/marital stress, anxiety and phobias, unresolved childhood trauma, low self-esteem, guilt, etc. This stuff runs deep. But if you carry things (i.e. “baggage”), it costs – daily, monthly, and annually. The kicker here is that a complete lack of PsychStress doesn’t make a very big deposit into your Health Balance – but its mere existence can make gigantic withdrawals.  Do your best to deal with this stuff head-on, even if it sucks. Some things are actually out of your control, and that has to be okay, too.

In summary, how much of your Health Balance you can afford to “spend” (i.e. the total of your PhysStress and PsychStress) depends mostly on the size and frequency of your deposits (i.e., how much effort you’re putting into Recovery – nutrition, sleep, and specific recovery practices). 

Note:  Before you even ask, no, we cannot quantify this for you.  We can’t say an ice bath is worth 10 health dollars, and a two-a-day training session costs you 20.  You know why?  Because context matters.  Your specific lifestyle and health status play a crucial role in how much you deposit or withdraw from your Health Balance with any given factor.  For example, an evening of dietary off-roading may cost a lean, insulin-sensitive person 10 health dollars, but it may cost an overweight, autoimmune-suffering person 100.  This equation requires you to self-analyze, and determine which factors have the biggest effects on your own individual Health Balance.

Some Health Balance Examples

Some factors detract enormously from your balance. For example, the short-term sleep deprivation that normally accompanies a new baby takes a pretty serious toll on a person.  In this example, you are not able to make large deposits to your balance, even if you’ve backed off of hard training, and are still eating well.  It’s like taking a big pay cut for a few months – your spending habits have to change.  However, what you’ve done up until this point makes a big difference.  If you have a large Health Balance “savings”, you can make it through this situation relatively unscathed.  However, if you’ve been living paycheck to paycheck, barely covering your withdrawals, an unexpected life situation like a new baby will absolutely break you.  Still with us?

A nutritional strategy like intermittent fasting (our favorite example) might be just the right amount of “stress” to drive a positive adaptation in one person’s body, causing the overall effect to be positive. But in someone else, that additional stress only further taxes an already-overstressed system, and may actually detract from their Health Balance. Of course, every person’s scenario is unique, which is why no one can state definitively that IF (as an example) is universally good or bad.

Figuring out your individual context can be tricky, especially when you are both the least qualified person to accurately assess your “stuff”, given how close you are to the subject matter – but also the only person who has all the information about your own context.  But with our big-picture approach, some practice (and perhaps some guidance from a professional), you’ll be able to better evaluate your own overall health balance, and create a solid plan to keep you in the black.

Is Your Health Balance Off Balance?

All too often, we see people struggling to figure this stuff out – really struggling, working hard. They’re committed to making changes, to progressing, to improving… but they’re either overvaluing/undervaluing some factors, or completely overlooking one or more pieces of the puzzle. Admittedly, it’s not easy, but we’re hoping that this post will prompt some more honest introspection. Here are some examples of genuine-but-misguided efforts to improve health:

• Looking for a nutritional solution to a lifestyle problem, such as attempting to offset the effects of chronic stress by cutting out fruit or nuts, or trying a new PWO whey protein.

• Being frustrated with your “plateau” (performance, weight loss, whatever) and doing more of what got you this far.  “If high-intensity training helped me lose 20 pounds, then more of it will probably help me lose those last 10.”   All of those factors (Intensity, Frequency and Volume) multiply to create a potentially astronomical PhysStress product before you even realize it.

• Being so wound up about sticking to the Whole30 guidelines that you actually create more stress for yourself. Folks, the Whole30 is a self-awareness tool, not a hazing.

• Over-exercising to manage your stress.  Sometimes you need to suck it up, buttercup, because being an “exercise addict” is not a flag you should proudly fly – and will put you into Health Debt faster than you can say, “I’ll rest when I’m dead.”

• Being over-stressed and under-sleeping, but still cutting calories to try to lose that stubborn belly fat. (One word: cortisol.) Don’t underestimate the power of sleeping more and stressing less on body composition.

• Grappling with “that shoulder thing” and looking to your physical therapist/chiropractor/acupuncturist to magically fix it instead of taking a week (or two!) off from the gym to focus on nutrition, sleep and bumping up your Recovery.

Any of these sound familiar?  Don’t beat yourself up if you’ve been working hard in all the wrong areas – the thing that counts is that you’re willing to work hard.  Looking at the big picture is difficult, and takes practice – and sometimes, a template (like our equation) to help you figure it all out for yourself.

Taking Care of YOUR Health Balance

We hope our Health Equation has cued some critical and honest self-analysis, and helped you think about factors outside of nutrition as they apply to your health and fitness. Given that each person’s context is different, we’re not able to make blanket statements about how much or how little is appropriate for you, but we bet that if you stop and think about it, you will probably be able to intuit a reasonable direction to head.

In the coming months, we’ll be talking a lot more about context, non-nutrition factors, and (hopefully) a sane way to combine these things into a life that is deeply enriching. If you leave with just one concept, please remember: context matters.  Drop feedback, questions or thoughts about your own Health Balance to comments.

There Is No Free Lunch

Trouble is, things don’t work like that.  If there were a valid shortcut to optimal, well-rounded, big-picture health and fitness – don’t you think we would have heard about it by now?  We sure haven’t stumbled across it.  (And we live this diet and fitness stuff.)  The truth is, there is no such thing as a free lunch.  There is efficiency.  There is intelligence in programming.  There is concentration of focus, absolute dedication, fierce determination… but everything that’s worth doing requires – demands – that you work your tail off to get there.

The Secret

You want to maximize health and achieve optimal fitness?  We’ll tell you exactly how to do it. 

Eat foods that makes you healthier, every meal, every day. Eat foods that makes you less healthy infrequently, if at all. Eat just enough to support activity levels and goals.

Exercise. Work hard. Harder than you are now. But more importantly, work smart. Too much volume, intensity and frequency is just as bad as too little.

Recover. Devote as much effort to recovery practices as you do to training. This is not optional. Most fall miserably short in this category.

Sleep 8-9 hours a night, in a cool, dark room. Make time for this. You can get away with less, but only if it’s summertime.

Manage your stress. Deal with it in a healthy fashion. Stress will undermine all of the above.

Do this, day in and day out, for years and years and years, as consistently as you can.

We Don’t Do Shortcuts

If you do these things, as often as you can, as consistently as you can, for as long as you can, you will be healthy.  You will be fit.  And your body composition will reflect that.  Trouble is, that’s not anywhere near as much fun as the promise of a shortcut.  And it’s nowhere near instant gratification. 

But anything worth doing is worth doing right.  And when it comes to your health, “right” is the only way you should consider.  So we won’t offer you fads, false promises, or miracles.  We’ll just tell you what you need to do to earn your 400,000 hour body, not just today, not temporarily, but forever. 

We’ll be expanding on these concepts – how to “put it all together “- in future posts.  Because while this stuff is all pretty simple, it certainly isn’t easy.  Stay tuned.

This is the first post in our Kill Your TV series, designed to help you navigate your television-less existence for the next 30 days. (You didn’t think we’d spring it on you and then leave you hanging, did you?) Today’s post is all about helping you through the first week without your beloved plug-in drug – and filling those hours with something meaningful.

While it may seem obvious to those of you who have been without cable for a few years now, we’re here to present the rest of you Kill Your TV participants with 174,203 (almost) things you can do with your life instead of watching TV. (We’re also giving you links to products we like in our newly opened Amazon store, to help get you started.) Take back those hours this month and do something productive, fun, enriching or restorative. Like what? Glad you asked.

Improve Your Training Performance

• Stretch
• Perform self-myofascial release
• Go for a recovery walk/bike/swim/paddle/row
• Read training-related books or articles
• Do some skill work
• Practice yoga
• Update your training logs
• Get a massage
• Take an ice bath
• Connect with your trainer or fellow gym-goers
• Lay out your short-term and long-term training goals
• Get acupuncture

Improve Your Sleep

• Go to bed earlier
• Read a book
• Take a hot bath
• Have sex
• Develop a pre-bed routine
• Prepare clothes/food/work for the morning
• Buy and install black-out curtains
• Read Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar and Survival
• Read Dallas’ sleep article in Performance Menu

Improve Your Nutrition

• Prep and cook food for the week
• Try a new recipe
• Visit a local farm or market
• Clean out your pantry
• Take a cooking class
• Prepare a new vegetable
• Read a cookbook
• Make a weekly meal plan
• Find a new nutrition book
• Sign up for a CSA
• Host a dinner party

Improve Your Family Time

• Call or visit a family member
• Play a board game or cards
• Read a book together
• Go outside and play
• Cook dinner together
• Help your kids with their homework
• Take a family walk after dinner
• Plan a family trip or vacation
• Have a date night with your significant other
• Work on a puzzle
• Do a craft project
• Write a letter or send a card
• Organize family photos
• Plan a party or an event

Improve Your Household

• Train your dog
• Finish that project that’s been half done for 6 months
• Clean something
• Organize something
• Start a garden
• Mow the lawn
• Plant a tree or flowers
• Have a yard sale
• Start a compost pile
• Wash your car
• Send stuff to Goodwill
• Get your oil changed
• Do laundry
• Go through stacks of papers and mail

Improve Your Fun and Play

• Pick up a new sport
• Go rock climbing
• Learn to swim
• Go for a bike ride
• Have a picnic
• Play with a slackline
• Play boccee
• Play ball with your kids
• Climb a tree
• Have a block party
• Throw a frisbee
• Go for a hike
• Nap in the grass
• Go to a local baseball game
• Shoot some baskets

Improve YOU

• Take an adult education class
• Get a pedicure
• Plan your dream house
• Go to church
• Volunteer
• Learn to knit
• Write something
• Take an art class
• Browse your local bookstore
• Get involved with your neighborhood
• Get involved in local politics
• Finish your will
• Join a book club
• Meet with a financial advisor
• Organize your business receipts
• Take yourself out for dinner
• Go to the dentist
• Test drive a car you can’t afford

What Will YOU Do?

Okay, so we don’t quite have 174,203 things… but this is a darn good start. And we bet you can come up with even more ideas to fill those TV-watching hours. So what will you do instead of watching television during the month of May? Submit your best ideas to comments.

For other articles in our Kill Your TV series, click here.

The ice bath has long been used by professional athletes, long-distance runners and athletic trainers, but isn’t something your average gym-goer would think to incorporate into his or her recovery practices. For the weekend warrior, softball league participant or three-times-a-week exerciser, a post-workout ice bath probably sounds a little hardcore. And to some degree, it is – there’s nothing fun about sitting in a tub full (and we mean FULL) of ice for 15-30 minutes. But the recovery benefits far outweigh any potential short-term discomfort, and the effect it has on recovery is why we’re sharing our experience with you today.

Cool Science

The logic behind ice baths relates to the muscle damage that results from hard workouts. This damage is actually a good thing for our fitness. You train hard, which creates microscopic trauma to muscle and connective tissue. During your recovery period, those “microtears” repair themselves just a little bit stronger than they were before. (Say it with me, kids… you don’t get fitter while you are training, you get fitter while you are RECOVERING from training.)

But the damage done during a hard training session also produces muscle soreness and inflammation, which can interfere with subsequent training. Ice baths temporarily constrict blood vessels and decreases metabolic activity, which reduces swelling and tissue breakdown. And immersion allows controlled, even constriction around all muscles, effectively blunting microscopic damage that you may not even feel. (You may hit the tub to relieve sore quads, but your calves, hamstrings, and hip/knee/ankle connective tissues will all gain the same benefits.)

The second advantage involves a physiological reaction provoked by the large amount of muscle submerged. After the initial shock of the ice-cold water, the body responds with vasodilation – a rapid circulation which flushes the damage-inflicting waste from your system. Once out of the bath, the area warms up again, and new blood rushes in to help the healing process.

Ice Me, Please

Many benefits of an ice bath are localized to the immersed area. (You’ll get some anti-inflammatory benefits systemically, but the real goal is to target the stressed muscle groups.) If your workout was a shoulder smoker or a general conditioning session, an ice bath won’t hurt, but where this particular recovery tool really comes in handy is when you’ve got specific muscular stress in an area you can actually immerse in the icy water. (If you’ve worked an area you just can’t cover in ice, you might want to consider a contrast shower instead.)

If you’ve got a Jacuzzi tub and can submerge your entire body in the ice bath, you’ve got more “ice me” options than those of us with a normal bathtub. (It’s also a hell of a lot tougher to submerge yourself in, though – that ice-cold water over your chest is quite a shock to the system.) If you’ve just got a normal-sized bathtub, it’s going to be darn hard to completely submerge your upper body. In that case, use the ice bath primarily after what Rob calls, “mother-smucking leg day”, like heavy squats, sprint intervals, or the mountain of wall-ball, slam-ball, Airdyne calories and bear crawls we did last week.

Our Experience

About a week into our new training regimen, we were instructed by Rob MacDonald (known around Gym Jones as “Maximus”) to jump into an ice bath after a particularly “meaningful” session. Despite Melissa’s hesitation, when Rob tells you to do something, you do it, no matter how unpleasant. Which is how, 20 minutes later, we found ourselves lugging five bags of ice (50 lbs. in total) into the bathroom, cranking the tub water to cold, dumping in the ice and hitting the tub.

The first few minutes were so unpleasant, we’re hesitant to describe them here for fear you’ll all stop reading. (Please do not stop reading.) You can’t breathe. You think you might actually die. You think, “This CANNOT be healthy.” It makes your brain scream that something is seriously Not All Right with your body. But soon, your breathing steadies, your legs and torso go all red and numb and it’s really not that bad. No, really.

We traded off in five minute segments the first time, accumulating 15:00 in total. (Since then, we realized it’s easier just to get in and stay in, doing all our time at once.) Getting out of the bath was a challenge since we couldn’t feel our legs, but we quickly dried off, hobbled over to the couch, threw on some warm clothes, made some hot tea and shivered our way back to a normal body temperature.

The next day, we were amazed at how good we felt. The comparison between our first workout there (rough, no ice bath) and this workout (even more rough, plus ice bath) was astonishing. Our legs were mildly sore, but not destroyed. We were able to squat and run the next day with no problem at all, in fact, and went back to the Gym two days later ready to hit it hard again. In just one session, we had become ice bath converts.

The Chilly How-To

Ready to get started? Assuming you’ve got a standard bathtub, here’s our prescription. Grab three to five bags of ice – that’s 30 – 50 lbs. in total – from your local grocery store, convenience store or gas station. (More ice than that is overkill and can actually further damage muscles, and any less isn’t going to be cold enough.)

Next, you’ve got some pre-bath prep to take care of. Grab several towels (one for the bathroom floor, one for you, and possibly another small towel for behind your shoulder blades and/or to rest your elbows on in the tub). We always bring a chair into the bathroom, because it’s hard to stand for a few minutes after you get out. In addition, you may need someone to talk you through it the first time around – the chair, some good music, your favorite magazine or book and a friend willing to watch you suffer all come in handy.

This next tip is really important, especially for the men. For the love of Peter (and your Pauls), keep your underwear on. Ice cubes directly on your special parts will make the experience so much more unpleasant than it already is, and your legs get JUST as cold whether you’re wearing undies or not. We’ve also heard of folks wearing shirts and wool hats while soaking their legs, which may also help stave off shivers. On that note, make sure you’ve got some warm clothes at the ready – wool socks, warm pants and a warm sweater will help you bring your body temperature up faster post-bath. Finally, grab a watch or a timer of some sort, because you’re going to want to stick it out for at least 5:00 at a time.

Now you’re ready for the big show. Fill your tub with cold water – COLD, not luke-warm. Remember, the temperature of your tub will rise steadily with your body heat. Make sure the ice is crushed and not in giant blocks, and dump it all in. Now get in. Right now, don’t think about it, don’t hesitate… just get in, all the way, RIGHT NOW. Don’t give your brain a chance to rebel, because if you balk here, you might not ever get up the nerve to get in.

Now, breathe. Just breathe. We promise, you are not dying. You’ll have to fight your body’s “flight” mechanism for the first 2-3 minutes, which is why having a friend with you is such a good idea. Let them talk you through it, focus on your breathing, and just… sit. It helps to have your toes out of the water – we rest them on a 6” foam roller at the bottom of the tub, but if you’ve got neoprene socks, you can wear those too. It also helps to lean back against the wall, loosen your death-grip on the side of the tub and do your best to just RELAX. Eventually, your breathing will return to normal, everything from your belly-button down goes numb, and it’s actually pretty tolerable.

You’ve gotta stay in for at least 5:00 this first time around – but shoot for a solid 15:00. Dallas will sometimes soak for up to 30:00, but that’s about as long as you should stay in. The benefits don’t continue forever, as muscle and tissues will eventually tense up when exposed to that kind of cold for too long. The first time, we read scientific journals to each other to take our minds off the cold, but at this point we just hang out in the tub with a book or magazine until the timer goes off.

The Post-Bath Wrap-Up

When your time is up, be really careful getting out of the tub – if you’ve done it right, you won’t be able to feel your legs. Immediately get out of your wet clothes, dry off completely, and put on your warm stuff. Do whatever you can to warm up – move around, don’t sit still – but resist the temptation to jump into a hot shower right away. Let your body warm up naturally, and allow that swift rush of blood to continue the recovery process.

Another word of caution – expect to shiver for twice as long as your bath. That means you’ll be shivering – really shivering, teeth chattering and everything – for 30 minutes following a 15 minute bath. (So don’t plan on making any business calls or leaving the house for a little while.) Finally, a cup of warm tea or soup will help this process along, and make you feel more comfortable while you’re warming up.

So there you have it – our guide to the ice bath. Try it after your next front squat 5×5 or track repeats and let us know what you think. Got your own ice bath tip or trick? Share it in comments.

**This is a revised version of the original Buttercup post, originally written for the Urban Gets Diesel blog.**

The subjects of rest, recovery, over-training and injury are hot topics in any health-minded community.  Debating, “Should I rest or push through it?” is never-ending, and a quick Google search, message board scan or poll of the coaches in your gym will provide you with rationale to back up whatever decision you choose to make.  A while back, a popular fitness message board entertained this discussion, with one participant writing, “It always seems to me that pain and discomfort are inevitably handled the wrong way by most people. Either you are like most of ‘us’, and you’re really tempted to (and often do) train through it.   The (other) kind of people…are the kind that use pain or discomfort as an excuse to give up the program all together. So why is it that we all deal with discomfort in different – but wrong  – ways?  Those that need rest often don’t take it, while ‘they’ use it as an excuse to throw their hands in the air and give up.”

What the author was proposing is that both groups – the hard-core, elite athletes and the recreational, less committed exercisers– handle over-training in the opposite fashion. “We” push through the pain, even when severe, while “they” choose to bail under only mild duress. From this, it sounds as though the motivation for both sets of actions – pushing through and bailing – are polar opposites. Upon thinking about it further, however, we propose that both groups are, in fact, doing the same damn thing.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

People naturally choose the path of least resistance. For the non-athlete, a little bit of pain (usually in the form of delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS) is an easy excuse to abandon their program altogether. For those who aren’t committed, aren’t motivated, aren’t excited about hitting the gym, skipping their workout (or a week of workouts) requires the least amount of effort, and is quickly justified to themselves and others. “Better safe than sorry” is far easier to tell yourself than, “Suck it up, buttercup”, despite the fact that moving around is often helpful for general muscle soreness.

After you gain experience with training, however, you’ll know the difference between DOMS and over-training, being beat up and being injured.   Where you go wrong is ignoring that difference, and continuing to train through more serious conditions. See, YOUR path of least resistance is for you to ignore the pain, weakness or illness and simply push through it.   Wait, hold on… that doesn’t sound easy!  That sounds like you’re toughing it out and taking the harder route.  Sounds like it, maybe… but it’s not.  Your path - ignoring the signals your body is trying to send you and pushing through anyway - is easy for two reasons.

Your Path of Least Resistance

First, by pushing on (even when you know you shouldn’t), you can then maintain your Training Plan. The alternative  is to take an unscheduled rest day (gasp!), and deal with the consequences of having to abandon The Plan. So you will ignore pain in your shoulder if it’s push jerk and pull-up day, because, well… it’s PUSH JERK AND PULL-UP DAY. And if you miss that, then when are you going to make up that workout? Because you can’t skip deadlift day. Or squat day. Or met-con day. Maybe you could do two workouts on Saturday, but even you know that doesn’t sound very Smart. So given all of these competing, confusing, seemingly unsolvable issues… it is easier just to stick to The Plan and train through the pain.

Just as significant is the fact that unplanned rest can be even more mentally taxing than your physical training. Spontaneous and unwelcome days off can wreak havoc on your constitution. We heard one gym-goer describe it like this: “Often (extra rest) can far surpass actual physical discomfort or pain. I know I need to rest, but my brain says – you are a wuss, you should just suck it up and do the workout, all the cool kids are doing it”. Successfully making it through an unplanned rest day is, for most, an exercise in mental discipline. You feel weak, lazy, chubby, slow. You feel like a quitter, a slacker, a tourist in FitnessTown. And that little voice inside your head can be pretty persistent… which makes it even easier to just say, “Screw it, I’m going to the gym anyway”.

But look… that course of action is no different than the other side of the coin, where the non-athlete would abandon the entire week’s efforts because of one day of discomfort.  The “difference” is often erroneously perceived because it appears as though you are so dedicated that you can will yourself to train through anything. But pretending your over-trained, injured or sick status simply doesn’t exist is taking the lazy way out… and in essence, no different than giving up entirely.

You Don’t Get Fitter By Training, Right?

Improvements in fitness don’t come while you’re training… they come while you are recovering from training.  And just like your actual exercise, recovery is an active process, and requires serious effort. You have to devote time and energy to my recovery – you have to get enough sleep, eat enough high quality food, drink enough water, stretch, foam roll and care for your muscles. You can’t just sit back and expect it to happen all by itself – yet that is what you are trying to do, every time you decide to blindly follow Your Plan despite being over-trained, ill or injured. So the next time you’re thinking about taking the lazy way out, remember this – your recovery deserves just as much attention as your physical training, and demands just as much mental discipline. Which means that, “Suck it up, buttercup” may just need to be the mantra for your next REST day, too.

alternate working titles:

Why We Don’t Do SDHP

or:

The Second Dumbest CrossFit Exercise

By Dallas Hartwig, MS, PT

Confession: I am a terrible  CrossFitter – I have never done the sumo deadlift high pull (SDHP). Yes, really. (I’ve never done Fran, either, but that’s a story for another day.)  My first exposure to the SDHP was more than five years ago, in a CrossFit.com prescribed workout complete with instructional photos. The physical therapist in me immediately recoiled at Nicole Carroll’s demonstration.  First, the movement itself (not just her particular demonstration) more closely resembled a jumping upright row than any sort of explosive, high-powered “core-to-extremity” movement.  But my greater professional concern?  The position at the top of a SDHP very closely resembles this clinical picture of a shoulder impingement test.  Except with an even more stressful shoulder position. (???!!! Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.)

Over my last few years of clinical PT practice, I’ve had several colleagues call me to ask, “I know you do CrossFit. I’ve recently seen several patients who were injured doing CrossFit. What’s this all about?”  I was quick to defend CrossFit’s exercise program, carefully explaining some of the concepts of intensity-driven adaptation, core-to-extremity movement patterns, and moving-large-loads-long-distances-quickly.  I hoped my explanation of CrossFit’s methodology would assuage their concern about this new breed of exercise.

But in every case, I also asked which CrossFit movements the patient was doing when they were hurt. Two quickly emerged as the Usual Suspects: the SDHP and the kipping pull-up, movements relatively unique to CrossFit’s prescribed training routines. (I’m not going to talk about the kipping pull-up in this post, although Melissa has written on that here.)  Hearing my PT colleagues describe a SDHP (hilarious, by the way) totally explained the injuries they were treating.  Because truthfully, 94.72% of  SDHPs that I’ve seen in the 4^th or 5^th round of Fight Gone Bad look nothing like core-to-extremity, hip-driven movements.  They look like inconsistent, poorly executed, discoordinated jumping upright rows.   And let me tell you what an upright row really looks like, to a physical therapist.

The Hawkins-Kennedy impingement test (pictured above) “pushes the supraspinatus tendon against the anterior surface of the coracoacromial ligament and coracoid process” (reference).  Translation:  This is a test for supraspinatus tendinitis and the resulting subacromial pressure and inflammation that typifies impingement.  In even more simple terms, this position jams your most commonly injured rotator cuff muscle between two bones. Just like the top of a perfectly executed, loaded SDHP. (No, that doesn’t sound good to me, either.)

Now, I understand that the SDHP is supposed to be a “core-to-extremity” movement, and that the upward movement of the bar should be driven primarily by the hips, less so by the extension of the knees and ankles, and even less so by the upward pull of the arms. (This is what they said at my CrossFit Level One cert, anyway.) But in reality, if there is any degree of discoordination due to improper attention to form, the complicated neurological pattern of the movement, or plain old fatigue (all wickedly common factors), there will realistically be a significant amount of arm pull at the top of the movement – arm pull in a compromised, internally-rotated position. I make the case that repetitive, high-velocity movements that require an awkward, mechanically-disadvantageous position on every repetition are simply asking for an injury. In other words, I like my supraspinatus, and prefer that it not be violently and repeatedly jammed into my scapula.

Given the inherent structural dangers posed by the movement and the propensity for the “80% perfection, 20% slop” advocated by CrossFit to quickly devolve to 50/50 or worse, I posit that you should attempt to obtain optimal fitness without doing SDHPs.  Though I guess you couldn’t be a very good competitive CrossFitter if you dropped them.  (Ask me if I care.)

So, you ask, what should I do instead of SDHP?

Want to improve turnover speed for your snatch (and build important rotator cuff and scapular musculature)?  Work muscle snatches and tall snatches, demonstrated here by Catalyst Athletics. Want full-body explosiveness? Work your clean and jerk, the mother of large-loads-long-distances-quickly (minus the traumatic shoulder impingement). Need a metabolically-demanding core-to-extremity movement in your workout?  CrossFit, Inc., recommends subbing SDHP for rowing. (Repeat after me, “no, thank you”.)  Instead, I say you should sub rowing for SDHP.  If you don’t have an erg, do dumbbell squat cleans or dumbbell thrusters. Or take the time to learn a proper kettlebell clean or snatch. Or work your barbell clean, in any variation. I think those are enough valid, safe and effective substitutions, don’t you?

In summary,  there is simply no good reason to do sumo deadlift high pulls – and two very good reasons (your left and right shoulders) to skip them entirely.  Thanks for reading – I wish you and your supraspinatus good luck.  (And happy FGB!)

While in San Diego last week, Dallas and I the opportunity to speak with both patients and staff at Sharp Rehabilitation Center.  Sharp has been a leading provider of rehabilitation and physical therapy services for 45 years, addressing catastrophic injury with a team approach to wellness.  We were connected with the center through my brother-in-law, Ryan Baker.  The day after he graduated from high school, Ryan was in a motor vehicle accident, which resulted in a spinal cord injury. Ryan went on to college where he became active in adaptive sports. From his love of tennis came the inspiration to establish the first official Wheelchair Lacrosse team, based in San Diego but expanding to other cities across the country as we speak.  Ryan is also a founding member of the Sharp Rehabilitation Men’s Spinal Cord Injury Support Group, and is a peer mentor for newly injured patients.

Ryan asked if we could present a basic nutrition seminar at Sharp, to help educate both patients and staff about the important role nutrition plays in managing inflammation and recovering from acute injury.  On the afternoon of August 24th, we talked to a group of 25 patients, physical and occupational therapists, rehab engineers and doctors about the foundations of good nutrition.  Dallas spoke from his nine years of practicing PT experience, and talked about the role food choices play in everything from energy levels, sleep quality and managing body composition – something that is of special importance for those confined to a wheelchair.  He also discussed the role diet plays in recovery from injury, both in the immediate time period after the injury and in preventing further complications in the years to come.  I discussed simple and effective ways to make better food choices in everyday meal planning, and answered questions about how to implement these changes in a way that feels sustainable and balanced.

We received great feedback from the group, and hope to follow up with those who are taking on our Whole30 program as a jump start to new eating habits.  We want to thank the Sharp patients and staff for welcoming us so warmly, and give a special thanks to my brother Ryan for all of the work he has done to change the lives of others. Visit www.wheelchairlacrosse.com to read more about their groundbreaking lacrosse program, or become a fan on Facebook here.

by Melissa Urban, creator of the famous Urban Approach To Squatting Heavier™

We are literally still on the plane, returning from our whirlwind fitness tour of northern California. We were able to cram a ton of good stuff into just two and a half days, hitting both Kelly Starrett’s Movement and Mobility seminar and Robb Wolf’s Paleolithic Solution seminar over the weekend. We’ll catch you up with all things Robb later this week, but as I sit here on the plane all crammed into an awkward typing position, I want to talk a little bit about mobility, the reminders I took from Kelly’s seminar and the things I’ve learned about my own health and fitness from Dallas.

I’ve been very lucky to have a physical therapist as my trainer. I’ve been aware of my own mobility, um, shortcomings for years now. My shoulders are all messed up from years of working at a desk, my hips don’t like to turn out because of who knows what, and my feet and ankles are starting to get cranky after a decade of 3-inch heels five days a week. We’ve been addressing these issues one at a time, as a supplement to my normal training routine. He does some PT magic on me, sure, but none of his “fixes” will take unless I take the initiative to maintain my newfound level of flexibility and range of motion. I know unless I foam roll after a tough session on the rings, my shoulders are going to be angry for a few days, and I’m acutely aware that my ankles are much happier when I wear Sambas instead of stilettos.

And yet, even with my very own PT looking over my shoulder before, during and after every workout… I still don’t do enough mobility work. I should be stretching and foam rolling at home. I don’t. I should be taking breaks at work and mobilizing my shoulders throughout the day. I get too busy. I should take that evil lacrosse ball with me everywhere and jam it in my hip rotators at every available opportunity. (It’s right here in my carry-on bag, in fact. I should be doing this RIGHT NOW.) But I don’t, mostly because that one hurts too much.

Maybe if I did it more often, it wouldn’t hurt so much. As our good friend Donna Dyson would say… Aduh.

We train SO hard… and yet I’d venture to say that all of us have some sort of mobility e-brake permanently stuck in the “up” position. I observed that at Kelly’s seminar, when only 3 out of 60 people in the room passed a simple hamstring flexibility test. As I told Kelly later that day, “One thing I took from your seminar… I’m all messed up, but so is everyone else.” For me, my top priority e-brake is hip mobility. I have tons of internal rotation, but very little natural external rotation. If you’ve been to Kelly’s seminar, you’ll know that muscles generate the most power in the middle of their range… and practically no power at their end ranges, either maximally shortened or maximally stretched. So for me, the necessity of turning my toes out to accommodate my giraffe legs during the squat shortens my external rotators to that “end range” position. As a result, I can generate far less power coming up out of the hole.

From Dallas:  “The posterior chain muscles all work together when you squat. Hip rotators may not be primary movers, but they do function as hip stabilizers. Tight, weak stabilizing muscles in an exercise like the squat invariably leads to sub-optimal mechanics, which means you can’t generate maximum force, which means your squat numbers aren’t as good as they could be.”

And yet instead of working on tedious hip mobilization drills, I just think really hard about keeping my knees out when I squat. Want to know how well that’s been working?  SO well that my squat has been stuck at the same 1RM for, like, 6 months now.  Much like you can’t train your way out of a crappy diet, you also cannot willpower your way out of mobility restrictions. Of course, it’s not like my lack of external rotation is the ONLY thing keeping my squat numbers stagnant. Nutrition, training, sleep and other factors all play a role.  But even if those factors were all perfect, hip mobility is my e-brake. And until I fix that, my squat will never reach full potential.

I’d bet my Lululemon collection that each and every one of our readers has something funky going on with one movement or another – a limitation, a quirk in your mechanics, or straight-up pain when performing certain exercises.  And I bet the vast majority of you aren’t doing a damn thing about it, other than the Urban Approach To Squatting Heavier™ (i.e., spending an awful lot of time in the gym doing 5x5s with the e-brake on, wishing really, really hard that you could squat heavier).   So here is your call to action, people… and I’m primarily talking to myself here.  Start taking your mobility issues seriously.  Find a good PT, spend some time with a qualified coach, watch some videos and try some of your own movement and mobility tests.  Figure out what’s messed up, learn how those mobility issues are negatively affecting your performance numbers, and then commit to spending quality time every single day working on them. Sub out a training day for a movement/mobility/skill day, even.  Stretch, roll and mobilize your way back towards full range of motion, and let me know what that does for your squat, your press, your deadlift.  Best case – it fixes your mechanics, your lifts improve and you’re a stronger, happier person.  Worst case – you’re merely more flexible, with less pain and stiffness during full range of motion.  Win/win, people.

I’m hoping my daily hip opening drills will slowly but surely release the e-brake and bring my squat numbers up. If a quick test is any indication, my ballet-inspired turnout improved by a solid 15 degrees after just a few minutes of stretching… a sure sign my hip capsule is open to change. I’ll keep you posted here and test my 1RM again in a month or two to see if my mobility experiment made a measurable difference in my stats.

Got your own e-brake to deal with?  Doing anything about it?  Confess your mobility sins here.

by Dallas Hartwig, PT, MS

client (klī’ənt)
–noun
1. A person or group that uses professional advice or services
2. A person who is receiving benefits, services, etc;  a customer

patient (pā-shənt)
–noun
1. A person who receives medical attention, care, or treatment

While treating physical therapy patients and training fitness clients, I find myself using similar approaches to teach people how to move. In the PT clinic, performing a movement, exercise, or stretch with correct technique can mean the difference between successful rehabilitation and exacerbation of symptoms, between progress and frustration. I see the same potential outcomes when coaching in the gym. Performing exercises properly and paying attention to the subtleties of the movement will determine whether my client sees an increase in physical capacity, or is plagued by injury (now, or in the future) as the result of the reinforcement of incorrect and unsafe motor patterns. As a coach, I’ve generally been known as a stickler for technique – just ask Melissa, who has been held back during many a session to focus on form before moving up in weight.  But given my professional experience, I’d rather err on the side of exceptional technique than prioritize maximal intensity at the expense of quality of movement.

We recently talked about the overuse of “sexy met-cons” in CrossFit gyms, but there’s a related issue when discussing high-intensity workouts.  That issue is the important role that form plays in your athletic development.  The “intensity is king” mantra preached at CrossFit’s Level One certifications is, in my opinion, used as a rationale (or an excuse) to train harder, but not necessarily smarter.  Haven’t yet been to a Level 1?  Here’s an excerpt, based on Melissa’s (and other attendees’) notes:

According to Pat Sherwood (who led the discussion on “intensity” at Melissa’s L1 in January 2009), “Unsafe is unacceptable, but so is perfect form.”  The instructor explained, “If you’re doing high-rep deadlifts and your back starts to round, that’s unsafe and unacceptable.  But if you’re doing that same set of deadlifts with perfect form on every rep, that’s also unacceptable.  You’ve either gone too light (in weight), or you’re not working hard enough.”   Sherwood explained that the ideal is referred to as ‘CrossFit slop’.”  The ‘slop’ ideal is often cited within the CrossFit community as 20% form degradation (compared to 100% perfect form). According to CrossFit theory, that’s the optimal balance of effort and safety.  “That’s where intensity lives,” Sherwood said.  “Technique has to be good enough to increase intensity, but you should never strive for perfect form.”

And here’s where I take issue with this concept of “intensity is king.”  In my experience, the 20% ‘slop’ advocated by CrossFit often devolves into a 50% slop in practical application, especially with longer length, high-rep met-cons. (Lighter movements, like those usually prescribed in a chipper workout, can almost always be completed any which way, even with form that makes your eyes bleed.)  I’ve seen patellar tendonitis from high-volume air squats, strained shoulders from shoddy thruster technique, and tweaked lumbar spines from high rep deadlifts pulled with careless form, all driven by the pursuit of  “intensity”.  Now, I like job security as much as the next guy, but what I’m seeing in my CrossFitting patients is bordering on the ridiculous.

As an example, I consulted with a local CrossFitter on her squat form a few months ago.  Her technique was seriously lacking, due primarily to a lack of skill work and quality practice.  She exhibited a severely rounded back, weight on the balls of her feet – heels off the ground, even! – and poor control of depth and speed.  It was not pretty, nor was it safe.  At the time, I stressed the importance of improving her squat technique and general strength before continuing to push hard on long, high-rep met-cons.

She recently contacted me for physical therapy advice, saying her knees had begun to hurt.  I asked about her last workout, and she replied proudly, “I did 1,000 squats for time”.  One.  Thousand.  Squats… I couldn’t make this stuff up, people. I can’t imagine how her fitness actually improved during that workout – but she did successfully reinforce sub-standard technique with 1,000 (!) repetitions of a critical foundational movement. And yet she was proud of being the girl that keeps her intensity really high, “ripping it up” at the gym… even though she was hurt.  At this time, I’d like to propose a spin-off of Jeff Martone’s famous quote, “If you’re gonna be dumb, you’d better be tough.”  Try this, CrossFitters: “You’re not tough enough to be that dumb.”

At the Whole9, 20% slop isn’t good enough.  As Melissa will tell you, you don’t get to move up in weight – or go faster – unless your form is really, truly solid.  (I use my “A-minus” grade as a subjective criteria – not perfect, but pretty darn good).  In addition, your “max effort” pulls will not count here if they’re hideous.  And don’t give me the  “in the real world, it doesn’t have to look pretty” argument, either.   Sure, I’ve seen 500 pound deadlifts PRs that look like question marks… but those strong dudes didn’t get that way by training with that technique.  That degradation in form is acceptable when it matters, like lifting a fallen tree off a family member, carrying an injured comrade out of harm’s way, or even non-emergency, one-time situations like competing in a lifting meet.  But folks, your everyday CrossFit workout is not that time.  Imperfect form in the desperation of an emergency or during a real-world, functional “test” does not justify that level of form degradation during your training.

When we train, our goal is to build the strength, practice good technique, and reinforce only proper movement patterns.  And despite what your ego may be telling you (go heavier, tough it out, rip it up),  I assure you that our approach will serve you well when it’s time to pull a max effort clean, some fast met-con deadlifts or give Grace a go.  Your technique will be solid, your times will improve and you’ll walk away from the gym stronger and fitter, instead of broken and hurting.  Still choose to operate with that 20% margin of “CrossFit slop”?  You can certainly work harder, produce more power, and maybe even be fitter than me with that approach. But you’re sure as hell going to be injured more often too. I have yet to hear a patient tell me, “Well, my shoulder has been hurting pretty bad for the last 3 weeks, but I sure am glad I cut 7 seconds off my Fran time.”  How hard can you train when you’re All Banged Up?  I’ll answer that for you, from personal experience – not hard enough to maintain the well-rounded fitness we seek.

Personally, I’d rather continue working with (smart, hard working) training clients instead of  (all banged up, but my ego’s still intact) patients. But ultimately, client or patient… it’s your choice.  Here’s my card, one way or the other.

*Photo credit:   That’s Kelly Starrett, physical therapist and founder of San Francisco CF, demonstrating common examples of  squat “faults” at an L1 cert in Flagstaff, AZ.