Author Archives: Al Myers

One of the Hardy Folks who use the Dungeon

By Bill Clark

One of the hardy folks who use the dungeon-like facilities of Clark’s Gym to recuperate, recharge and keep Father Time at a distance, with or without a face mask, is Dave DeForest.

Dave turned 60 on February 3 and decided to join the elite ranks of those who, once past the age of 40, could earn a certificate for doing the number of different lifts to match the lifter’s age.

He geared up to do 60 different lifts. Then he was successful – with many efforts that would have been national records had “Lift Your Age” been sanctioned by the governing body that approves such events.

Dave with a 1,085-pound harness lift at age 60

Dave with a 1,085-pound harness lift at age 60

Now he’s building a neck-lifting harness to go after the national record in the United States All-round Weightlifting Association’s national heavy-lift championship, an event that was first held in Clark’s Gym 30 years ago. His goal is break 500 pounds at age 60 – a record for his age in the 95-kg. (209 lbs.) class.

Have you ever wondered about guys like Dave DeForest? Where do they come from, what drives them – and what are their ultimate goals?

Dave is an excellent example of a normal male who enjoys a hobby. He looks and lives and acts like your next-door neighbor – because he is just that. The only difference, his love affair (outside the family) Is lifting heavy things when others his age have different “big boy toys.”

Dave, to be honest, is not the “guy next door,” but he is the guy “at the next farm down the road.”

He grew up in Marysville, Kansas, a community famous for its black squirrels (they are still there), the youngest of three children.

He was a center and linebacker in football, “but not in the class of the Riggins Brothers,” he admits.

John and Junior Riggins were college football stars and John went on to lead the Washington Redskins to the Super Bowl XVII title and to a losing effort in Super Bowl XVIII.  His brother, Franklin (Junior), landed a big bonus contract with the California Angels, but vision problems limited his baseball career.

“They were from ‘just down the road at Centralia,’ and from a decade earlier, but every athlete in the area was compared to them – some of us not for long,” Dave admitted during a recent workout in the sauna of Clark’s Gym – which has no air conditioning and faces southwest.

“I also wrestled, but hated cutting weight and really preferred hunting and fishing on the Big Blue River to the wrestling world.”

Dave graduated from Marysville High in 1978, attended Kansas State for two years, then followed his heart to Lawrence and graduated from Kansas in 1982 with a degree in occupational therapy.

He married Kristy Ringen, who grew up in Beattie, a dozen miles down the road from Marysville, soon after graduation from KU and landed in Fulton – where Dave began 37 years as an occupational therapist at the Fulton State Hospital and Kristy taught junior high mathematics at Auxvasse Junior High for 31 years before retiring in 2014 to handle the family’s orchard business. Dave remains a part-time employee in the occupational therapy section.

Kristi and Dave of holiday in 2018 in Iceland

Kristi and Dave of holiday in 2018 in Iceland

In 1985, the DeForests bought 14 ½ acres south of Millersburg on Callaway Route J and planted 400 apple trees. They called the place “Cedar Wind Orchard,” because they love to hear the wind through the nearby cedars.

Along the way, they raised three kids – all girls, all scattered today, and all successful. Bridget Aldrich is a manager at Tiger Tots in Columbia; Lindsey Foster is a mechanical engineer in St. Louis: Ashley Pyle is an ophthalmology technician in Ft. Collins, Colorado. Lindsey and Ashley were both power lifters as teenagers.

Dave and Kristi now have three grandkids to keep them sharp, occasionally enlisting Dave as a baby sitter.

Kristi played softball for years and today is active as a pickle ball player. Both she and Dave love fishing the rivers for big catfish and recently landed a 45-pounder from the Moreau River just above where it enters the Missouri River.

They also pick most of the apples from the 400 trees at Cedar Wind Orchard. They share the orchard’s upkeep and the retail business. Dave says he has the responsibility of spraying the trees twice a year, but Kristi handles the sales and bookkeeping.  It works.

Sounds like a normal family, enjoying life, the quiet of the country and the grandkids.

So why weightlifting?

Let Dave explain.

“When I was in the seventh grade, my parents bought me a 110-pound lifting set from Montgomery Ward – a six-foot bar with one-inch plates. I loved it. I added plates and continued lifting through high school, working alone at home. No competition, just the thrill of lifting.

“I was involved in intramurals at Kansas State, but didn’t touch weights again until getting settled at Fulton. I started lifting at home, then found the weight room at the Fulton YMCA and continued to train alone – really thriving on self-motivation.

“In 1994, I entered the Show-Me-State Games at West Junior High, my first meet since the K-State intramurals.

“You and Joe Garcia were in charge, so before the next Show-Me Games, I joined Clark’s Gym. I truly enjoyed the next few years, lifting in the Games and in national and international meets in the USAWA. I ran three open meets that drew the Midwest’s top lifters to North Callaway High and to Westminster College and was thrilled to win a silver medal in the world meet in Valley Forge, Pa., in 1997.

Dave with a 330-lb. squat at IAWA World Meet in 1997

Dave with a 330-lb. squat at IAWA World Meet in 1997

“I realized there was more in life than lifting and family responsibilities put lifting on the back burner, but not totally forgotten.

“So here we are today.”

At age 60, Dave is within range of what he did 20 years ago.

His best lifts included a 355 squat at 181 pounds; a 410 deadlift, 220 bench press, 1,275 hip lift, 1,600 harness lift, 590 neck lift, 850 hand-and-thigh, 600 leg press, 365 hack lift, 375 straddle lift, 390 two-barbell dead lift – all done before the age of 40.

Now, at age 60, he’s flirting with those same poundages.

His goal as a lifter? To beat those “bests” of two decades ago.

And Dave adds: “I love the excitement when my mind and my body come together, and I succeed in doing something I had not done before.”

And now you know why normal-looking family men lift weights.

Aging and Strong (Part II)

AGING AND STRONG

Part II: The Effects of Aging 

By Dan Wagman, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.

Ever since I got involved in all-round weightlifting I developed an interest in the aging and strength issue. This because of the age adjustment formula used and how arbitrary and capricious it appears to be. Still, just about anybody will tell you that as you age your performance declines. If this is true, to what extent might your strength decline? There are literally thousands of scientific studies on the topic of aging. As strength athletes our focus is on muscle. And with all those studies the human brain isn’t capable of determining the proverbial bottom line. For that reason, statisticians have developed a technique called meta-analysis. This method of data analysis allows researchers to input all sorts of information from an unlimited number of studies and on the other end come up with that elusive bottom line, such as whether your inescapable increases in age will make you weaker.

The Basics

The place to start is to develop an overall understanding of whether healthy non-athlete people lose strength as they age, then to ask what effects lifting weights might have. Some of the findings for non-athletes were presented in Part I.  But if you looked at all of the relevant research on muscle strength and activation between young and older people, then perhaps you could find out what the bottom line is. A group of researchers from Marquette University and the University of South Australia collaborated to find out.(4)

So how do you test an old muscle compared to a young one? The two most reliable ways are called the interpolated twitch technique (ITT) and the central activation ratio (CAR). Don’t worry, I won’t bore you to death with the details of these methods, but I do believe that you’ll find the basics of at least ITT interesting. What researchers do is have a subject, say a 25-year old, perform a maximal isometric contraction against an immovable object and take a reading on that muscle. Then, during that maximal contraction they deliver an electrical stimulation to that muscle’s main nerve. If additional force or activation is generated, that means during the subject’s own maximal contraction the muscle received inadequate neural input and thus contracted submaximally, and of course you can measure the difference. Then you repeat with a 60-year old and see to what extent, if any, the older person’s muscle contracts with less neural input. If that happens, then you know that aging could impact muscle activation.

There are, of course, other considerations to bear in mind, which is why the researchers set specific standards all of the studies had to meet to be included in their meta-analysis. Besides using only ITT or CAR studies had to look at young people between 18 and 35-years and those 60 and older, the study had to be published in English, only studies with the lowest bias risk were considered, etc.

A General View

As a whole, age made no difference in muscle activation capability in a healthy non-athlete population of men and women. As an example, 18 studies looked at the biceps with the age in the young people ranging between 19.9 to 30.6 and the older people between 69 and 84 years; 12 of the studies found no difference. Similarly, for the knee extension muscles 9 out of 17 studies found no difference; for the flexor group of the foot 9 out of 12 studies found no difference, etc.

The researchers found that across all muscles investigated (elbow flexors, wrist flexors, knee extensors, plantar flexors, and ankle dorsiflexors), with a total of 790 young subjects and 828 older ones, in 70% of them no significant age-related differences in muscle activation were observed and in 28% younger muscles were able to activate to a greater degree than older ones. In a general sense then, age would not seem to make a difference in a muscle’s ability to contract. But this represents a general analysis, not the actual meta-analysis.

Enter Meta-Analysis

Once the scientists applied the meta-analysis technique to sort through all the data points, a bit of a different picture emerged. What they learned was that voluntary muscle activation was greater in younger people than older ones. However, the difference was very small and the research team explained that this finding could be due to the muscle group that was looked at in different studies, how muscle activation was calculated in each study, the way in which the muscle was stimulated, and number of stimulations used.

In analyzing the number of muscle stimulations a study employed, if it was once there were no significant differences in the strength of muscle activation between young and old. If, however, the number of muscle stimulations were more than one, then the young people reached the level of significantly greater muscle activation over older ones. In looking at the different muscle groups, the scientists learned that younger subjects outperformed older ones in the plantar flexors, knee extensors, and elbow flexors but not in the wrist flexors and ankle dorsiflexors.

Interpretation

What this study of the studies found is that older, healthy, non-athletic people have, in the words of the researchers, “a reduced ability to maximally activate their muscle during isometric contractions.” One of the problems with this finding was, however, the large range of older subjects’ age from 60 to 84. As the researchers point out, “it is well known that the deficits in muscle function are accelerated in very old age (~80 yrs.).” This means that if you have a bunch of 80+ year olds along with people in their 60’s, the results might end up being skewed toward the muscle abilities of the 80+ year olds. Put another way, if you eliminated the 80+ year olds from analysis, then perhaps no differences between young and old muscle activation abilities would be found.

With that in mind I closely scrutinized all of the studies that found a deficit in older people’s muscle activation in an effort to ascertain at what age this might start to appear. The youngest age of the old group that displayed this deficit was 67 years. The vast majority of subjects were, however, in their 70’s and beyond.

Perhaps the most important consideration for the finding that younger muscle can activate to a greater extent than an older one is whether this difference is actually of any practical meaning. To put it in to a lifter’s terms, if you find that with 60 you end up lifting 100 pounds less than when you were 30, you might consider that meaningful. If, however, you find that with 60 you end up lifting 30 pounds less you probably wouldn’t consider that meaningful nor give it a second thought. After all, there are an infinite number of reasons for a young lifter to end up lifting 30 pounds less, too.

The researchers addressed this, though unfortunately not in a lifter’s terms. What they stated is that the loss in isometric muscle contraction force due to age was only “modest.” They therefore questioned the degree of meaningfulness of the overall findings. You also have to consider that the older subjects displayed a high degree of variability in muscle activation. In addition, multiple studies have found that when older subjects are able to practice the type of muscle contraction, they attain similar levels of muscle contraction as healthy young adults.(1-3,5).

So What?

That final consideration takes us in to the realm of people who lift weights. For those who don’t, the effects of aging are only moderate and don’t seem to make a noticeable difference until the late 60’s or so. This is most certainly a surprising finding, especially if you consider the issue of whole body disuse. If you’re a 30-year old healthy but sedentary person, then your years of body disuse has been about 15 years if you consider that even a non-athletic child and young teenager might get a little bit of exercise due to play. But that same sort of person who’s 60 has been sedentary for 45 years. If in that sort of person the effect of aging on muscle is only moderate, what might it be for someone who’s pumping iron religiously?

There are likely readers among you who will take this information as being exceptionally motivating, allowing them to make all this “getting older” talk disappear in a cloud of chalk as they prepare to crank out another set. But there will also be readers who’ll want to instead dismiss what they learned because it flies in the face of what they think they know. After all, everybody knows that as you get older, man or woman, your hormone levels decrease and that’s why you can’t be as strong as what you used to be. Part III will investigate.

 

References

  1. Hunter, S., et al. Recovery from supraspinal fatigue is slowed in old adults after fatiguing maximal isometric contractions. Journal of Applied Physiology 105(4): 1199–209, 2008.
  2. Hunter, S., et al. The aging neuromuscular system and motor performance. Journal of Applied Physiology 121(4):982–95, 2016.
  3. Jakobi, J. and Rice C. Voluntary muscle activation varies with age and muscle group. Journal of Applied Physiology 93(2):457–62, 2002.
  4. Rozand, V., et al. Age-related deficits in voluntary activation: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 52(3):549-560, 2020.
  5. Rozand, V., et al. Voluntary activation and variability during maximal dynamic contractions with aging. European Journal of Applied Physiology 117(12):2493–507, 2017.

 

The Life of John Carter

By Bill Clark

Twenty five years ago, Harrisburg’s John Carter was on the top of the weightlifting world, then he disappeared only to resurface in recent months at Clark’s Gym – still the guy to beat when it comes to the world of chain lifting.

A quarter of a century ago, John, now 61 and looking as trim and fit as he did in 1988 when he first showed up in Clark’s Gym, compiled such world class marks as 3,405 pounds in the harness lift; 2,805 in the back lift; 2,525 in the hip lift: and 2,000 in the Carter Lift, named for him because few others in the lifting world even attempted it.

In his first meet back in 20 years, just before the corona virus pandemic hit, he took the title in the meet named for his main adversary of three decades ago – the Steve Schmidt Backbreaker Pentathlon. Steve was on hand to officiate.

John Carter about to complete his 3,405 pound harness lift. Note the position of his left hand .

John Carter about to complete his 3,405 pound harness lift. Note the position of his left hand .

And just who is this John Carter?

Let’s say he’s a survivor.

John was born November 28, 1958, the son of John Jerome Carter, Sr., and Delores Carter. He attended school at Harrisburg from the first through the ninth grades, but left school at age 16 never to return.

His dad was a heavy equipment operator and John wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps. By the time he was eight years old, he was operating his dad’s bulldozer and soon thereafter was driving a car around the area.

At age 12, he took the family car to town, ran out of gas at the courthouse and approached life from a different angle for years to come.

In his junior high years, John showed his athletic ability and his strength by setting the school records in the shot and discus and playing basketball, but he also was plagued by discipline matters.

In the seventh grade, he took issue with a classmate in a gym class and went to fists, as he was wont to do on too many occasions then and later. In the fight that followed, John’s punch missed the opponent’s head and he hit the wall behind, breaking his arm in six places and shattering his wrist.

John had a powerful punch, but not well-directed.

The injury almost cost him his athletic future. He had to have plates inserted in the wrist that left it fixed in place without flexibility – and a four-month stay at Boone Hospital. Fortunately, it was his left hand. The plates are still there.

Even to this day, the injury hampers his mechanics as a lifter and golfer that requires modification of leverages and style, but not with final results.

When John reported to Harrisburg High to start his sophomore year, he was told his hair was too long and after a battle with administration, he left school three years short of graduation to get into the construction world at age 16. The bulldozers quickly followed.

John then began a journey through life that was filled with twists and turns. He spent two years at MFA Feed and Supply, worked concrete for NuWay Construction, was in a concrete footing business with two partners for three years, moved on to work on the development of Cedar Lake for Terry Sapp, supplemented his income by cutting tobacco for Henry Lamb, the “Tobacco King,” married, had a son, Jason (who is his best friend), divorced, then moved on to work for Columbia Public Works, retiring, after 23 years, in 2002.

He spent much of his career on the seat he loved the most – handling a bulldozer and heavy equipment. He still enjoys that role. He has owned Carter Construction since retiring from the city – which coincided with John’s fade from the world lifting scene.

John about to shoulder a 375-pound personal record Steinborn lift. Note the left hand position.

John about to shoulder a 375-pound personal record Steinborn lift. Note the left hand position.

THE CARTER SPORTS WORLD

One of the personal losses that came with being a high school dropout was leaving behind his love of competitive athletics.

He soon joined a Looper League softball team, then spent the next 20 years as a slow pitch softball player.

“My career ended when I blew up at an umpire’s call and he threw me out of the game and said: ‘Don’t ever come back out here.’ The umpire was one of my friends at work, Bill Crum. I never went back.”

In 1982, he discovered bowling and was a regular on the lanes in Columbia for 20 years – good enough to carry a 190-plus average and add an 800 patch to his awards showcase. His high game was 297.

Golf came next – in 1986. The game proved to be a real challenge. The shattered left wrist caused John to develop a different stroke, but he can still drive past the 300-yard mark. Golf has been a part of life for almost four decades.

In 1988, for a reason John cannot recall, he decided to take up weightlifting. Clark’s Gym had just opened and, after visiting other gyms in Columbia, he gave Clark’s a look – and immediately joined.

“I made the right choice,” he said recently. “The gym saved my life.

“When I was going through my divorce, the gym became the place I could vent my anger. More than once, I almost let my anger misdirect me, but I would detour to the gym.”

John was an immediate world class lifter. To meet him on the street or even in workout gear, he looks normal. He’s 5-11, weighs around 215, has surprisingly slender legs and trim middle.

Within a year, he had emerged as a world class lifter, winning both the national and world all-round titles in 1989 in Philadelphia.

In a four-year stretch between 1994 and 1997, he won the national title and added golds in two of the toughest strength tests around – the Backbreaker Pentathlon and the Zercher Memorial.

In 1995, he performed the difficult combination hip lift and squat with 2,000 pounds – a lift that carries his name. No one else has done half that poundage.

He is proud of  his gym record of doing a single workout (two hours long) of 1,821 reps in the hip lift with 1,100 pounds – a total workout of 2,002,100 pounds.

In 1992, he met Diane Stone and she led the family cheering section in 1994 when John won a Gold Cup in Cleveland, Ohio, by setting a world record in the harness lift. She is still his head cheerleader.

Then, in 2004, it all ended. The business was a one-man operation and time-consuming. As it grew, so did the distance between John Carter and Clark’s Gym.

On rare occasion, he would drop in, tell stories with the owner about days gone by, see if he could still do a 1,500-pound hip lift, then disappear for a few more years.

Late in 2019, he found that, at age 60, he had trouble with 1,000 in the hip lift – and the reality of aging shocked him into action.

For 60 years, he had been headstrong, defiant, living life head-on, willing to fight. He lifted weights with the same mindset. Strength meant more than  technique, and failure was not tolerated as a chance to do things different.

Diane and being a business owner had both helped him get control. Golf, too, had been a stabilizer. He could still hit the ball hard, but he had to master the other shots as well.

Now, back n the gym full-time since 2004, John is the teacher as well as the student. He has accepted the fact that, at 61, he is no longer 31, and that a harness lift of 3,405 will never happen again and that 2,405 is a more reasonable goal – and still a world record for 61-year-olds.

Last month, in an unsanctioned competition to do 61 different lifts at age 61, John exceeded the existing national records in over 50 events for the 100-kilo class in the 60-64 age group.

Welcome home, John!!

Aging and Strong (Part I)

AGING AND STRONG

Part I:  On Fairness and Common Sense

By Dan Wagman, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.

All-round weightlifting uses an age adjustment formula in an effort to essentially equate the strength performance of competitors regardless of chronological age. Upon applying this formula, competitors are ranked to determine overall competition placings regardless of age or division entered (a body weight formula is used, too). For adults, once you turn 40 you receive an additional 1% per year up until you’re 60, at which point you receive 2% for each additional year of life. A few years back one lifter stated on the USAWA forum, loosely quoted, “I won’t win anything until I’m over 40.” Another lifter told me recently how “embarrassing” it is to be out-totaled, yet be considered the winner due to being older.

Now, you might wonder how much of a difference age adjustments can actually make. You’d have to take the body weight adjustment out of the equation by looking at two lifters in the same weight class, one being less than 40, the other over 40. In doing so, at the 2019 All-Round Weightlifting World Championships one lifter was out-totaled by over 300 pounds, yet placed higher. As this example illustrates, in all-round weightlifting—a strength sport—a lifter’s strength can be less meaningful than his/her age.

 

Contemplation

There are several ways to evaluate the age adjustment. With the above example in mind, perhaps the most basic is to ask whether it makes sense and is fair. However, these two very basic questions will invariably lead in to the realm of science. Allow me to illustrate.

On the question of being sensible, let’s approach it this way; take a lifter who’s born May 1st and is 39 years old. She receives no age adjustments. However, next year, when she turns 40 she’ll receive +1% in any meet that takes place on May 1st or thereafter. So what happened to her on May 1st of the next year that makes her 1% weaker than what she was on April 30th? Most anybody you’d ask would likely tell you this is silly because aging effects are gradual and occur over many years, decades even. Clearly this approach lacks common sense. So what are the effects of aging on a human’s muscles? You can only answer that via scientific investigation.

Regarding fairness, take that same lifter who’s born May 1st and competing on that very day against a lifter who’s born May 7th of the same year. The former lifter will receive a 1% adjustment while the latter won’t. How could that be considered fair? One week older makes a 1% difference in performance? What if the second lifter was born on June 2nd, or December 14th? Would that increased difference in age now all of a sudden make a more noticeable difference in strength performance? And if the difference is actually 12 months or more, is the difference really 1% for every year? In an effort to be fair to all competitors, wouldn’t we need to know for certain that the aging effect starts with 40 and not 38 or 44 or 63? If we don’t know that, how can this be fair? Science can help us figure it out.

 

Why Science?

At this point it might be worthwhile to explain why I always turn to science in an effort to derive at answers regarding weight training. The most fundamental reason is that if your training isn’t based on science you’re wasting your time on one end of the spectrum and on the other, increasing injury risk exponentially leading to decreased performance and a shortened lifting career.

Aaron Coutts, PhD, distinguished professor in sport and exercise science from the University of Technology in Sidney, Australia, and the Associate Editor for the International Journal of Sport Physiology and Performance offers more detail.(2) In writing about the importance of turning to sports science he listed the following reasons: improved training and performance, reduced training errors such as injuries and inappropriate training approaches, being able to balance benefits and risks in decision making, and being able to challenge belief-based views with evidence.

These are certainly compelling reasons for turning to science. But all-round weightlifting already relies on science, so why not regarding chronological age, too? Our sport employs science-based doping control methods and certified labs to analyze urine samples. This, to ascertain if lifters are using drugs to enhance their performance and thus achieving an unfair advantage. So why not also use science when making a determination about how chronological age may impact strength performance and competition placing? Isn’t the singular concept of fairness reason enough?

 

A First Step in to Science

What evidence is there that due to aging a 40-year old is weaker than a 39-year old, or a 33-year old, or a 27-year old? What evidence is there that a 60-year old is 2% weaker than a 57-year old? Why not use 0.8% and 2.36%, or 3% and 4%? If you’re thinking that I’m being silly and perhaps even nitpicking, consider that precision is the name of the game in strength sport. If you did a 315-pound one-armed deadlift in the 198-pound class and so did another lifter in the same weight class, you’d win if you weighed in at 195.5 compared to the other guy’s 196. If that half-pound difference bears consideration, wouldn’t logic dictate that we would have to know with as much certainty as possible what the aging effects upon strength are?

Here’s what we know about healthy but otherwise sedentary people:(1, 3-6)

  • A woman’s loss of muscle mass is greater than a man’s, particularly once she passes 60;
  • Decreases in strength are only slight by 50;
  • At 60 decreases in strength are more pronounced in both genders;
  • For women muscle contraction speed starts to decrease by 40, speed of muscle relaxation by 50;
  • Magnitude of strength loss is inconsistent among men and women;
  • Degree of strength loss is different between muscle groups and individual muscles;
  • Women show a slower decline in biceps and triceps strength than men;
  • Factors associated with strength loss impact upper body muscles differently than lower body muscles;
  • Strength loss appears to be most dramatic at about 80 for both genders;
  • Strength declines can fairly suddenly reach 30% beginning at about 80;
  • Strength losses are not linear and plateaus are observed;
  • 87 to 96-year old men and women showed a high capacity for strength and muscle gain following a science-based high-intensity resistance training protocol.

So this is what’s generally seen in a healthy but non-athletic population. What should jump out at you is the high degree of variability in strength loss and the higher age at which it occurs to a meaningful extent. Also, this is information I picked out and can be potentially misleading due to personal bias, the different research methodologies used in the studies, etc. Therefore, in Part II I’ll present research to show what the proverbial bottom line is. Then we’ll move on to people like you—the ageless barbell benders.

 

References

  1. Carmeli, E., et al. The biochemistry of aging muscle. Experimental Gerontology 37:477-489, 2002.
  2. Coutts, A. Challenges in developing evidence-based practice in high-performance sport. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance 12:717, 2017.
  3. Danneskoild-Samsoe, B., et al. Muscle strength and functional capacity in 77-81 year old men and women. European Journal of Applied Physiology 52:123-135, 1984.
  4. Hughes, V., et al. Longitudinal muscle strength changes in older adults: Influence of muscle mass, physical activity, and health. Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences, Medical Sciences 56:B209-B217, 2001.
  5. Landers, K., et al. The interrelationship among muscle mass, strength, and the ability to perform physical tasks of daily living in younger and older women. Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences, Medical Sciences 56:B443-B448, 2001.
  6. Paasuke, M., et al. Age-related differences in twitch contractile properties of plantarflexor muscles in women. Acta Physiologica Scandinavica 170:51-57, 2000.

The Guessing Game – Box Squats Part IV

 

By Dan Wagman, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.

THE GUESSING GAME – BOX SQUATS

Part IV: Train Smart

The purpose for writing this series of articles was to illustrate why what appears to be very sensible training advice, doesn’t actually deliver. As with all things in life, you should also view training advice critically. The first question to ask about any training recommendation is by what physiological mechanism it’s supposed to work. The box squat’s proposed mechanism seems sensible—on the surface. With but a modicum of understanding about a muscle’s contraction mechanisms, you’d have to raise your eyebrows just enough to want to dig deeper before spending valuable time and effort on an exercise with dubious claims. Those raised eyebrows would then have your finger scrolling through research on your smartphone and you’d quickly learn that based on knowledge dating back to the 1930’s, it’s unlikely that the box squat will increase your squat ability. To summarize, research specific to that movement reveals the following:

  • The way in which your muscles work to perform a squat are enhanced the least by the box squat;
  • Muscle activity in the regular squat is far greater than in the box squat;
  • The forces generated in the box squat are weaker than those generated in the standard squat;
  • Speed of movement in the box squat is inferior to that of the squat;
  • Joint moments of the lower back, hips, and knees are significantly greater in the squat than the box squat;
  • The joint angles of the hip, knee, and ankle are significantly different between the two exercises and finally;
  • The above indicates that the box squat lacks the required specificity to be able to enhance your abilities to squat more weight.

Warmups and a Work Set

Please note that there’s no specific reason for why I chose to investigate the box squat. I could’ve chosen from any number of training recommendations to illustrate why their proposed benefits are fictional. I simply wanted to create a perspective and illustrate an approach that you can use to evaluate whatever training advice you run across. At the end of the day, recognize that you’re a strength athlete who spends tons of time in the gym in an effort to become the strongest person you can be. That’s not easy. You’re also an all-round weightlifter who’s challenged with learning, perfecting, and becoming as strong as possible in different lifts for each meet you enter. That’s not easy. Considering how you’ve self-selected into an area of physical accomplishment that challenges you every time you step into the gym, I would argue that you trying to determine just the minimum—what’s fact and what’s wishful thinking regarding training—is much easier and will take you no longer than what it’ll take to go through your warmups and then your first work set.

There’s no way Paul Anderson could’ve had a quick look at the American Journal of Physiology to see what he could do to increase his already fantastic squat even more. In fact, most athletes back then probably didn’t even know there was research being conducted on human muscle in an effort to understand not only how it works, but how you can get it to become stronger. But today, you literally hold that information in the palm of your hand. The most difficult part for you is to sift through the nonsense and uncover information that’s based on measurable and evidence-based facts instead. To be honest, you have to take responsibility for what training advice you follow. If you find yourself getting injured and not able to make long-term gains anymore, even though you’re healthy, don’t simply write it off as being older than what you used to be, or some other equally silly and unfounded notion. Take responsibility for your training decisions, review them based on exercise science the best you can, and allow yourself to once again experience the thrill of breaking PR’s. Isn’t attaining maximal strength in your red matter worth some effort in your grey matter?

And so, what about the main problem at the core of all of this—increasing your squat overall and more specifically blasting out of the hole? You guessed it, that has been researched and you could experience huge gains if you applied that information. No need for you to stumble through the dark with silly advice put forth by any number of self-proclaimed training gurus. Put that grey matter to work and enjoy the process of learning, putting it to work in the gym, and breaking PR’s.

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