 ISSUE 27
Do you have questions about exercise or nutrition? Let grrlAthlete help you find the answer you’ve been looking for. Feel free contact us at grrl@grrlAthlete.com (or just hit reply to one of our newsletters), if we don’t have the answer, we’ll find someone who does.
grrl Motivation
 Your summer season is just around the corner, and there are only a few weeks left of quality physical preparation time. Athletes must be asking themselves if they have done all they can to prepare for their best season ever. Coaches must be searching out every resource to help their athletes be as strong, fast, powerful, and injury resistant as possible.
grrlAthlete.com and their team of North America's best strength coaches have completed just the book to help. The "Secrets of Female Strength and Conditioning" contains more insider tips for training the female athlete than you'll find anywhere else. It's the number one resource for coaches, athletes, and any woman wanting to get fit and improve performance!
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Do You Really Watch What You Eat?
You watch what you eat. You stay away from snacks when you watch TV. You don't eat fries or chips. Yet you just aren't reaching your goals. But maybe you did eat a couple of cookies before dinner each day this week. And you did have some ice cream a couple of nights this week because of the great spring weather. Don't worry. This isn't just happening to you.
A recent study showed that women who want to lose weight often underreport their daily caloric intake by up to 500 Calories! Inaccurate reporting occurred more often in women trying to lose body fat. So be honest with yourself. If you accurately record your food intake, you will have a greater chance of becoming a better athlete or losing body fat.
We recommend that you use the following website to accurately track your food intake. It's called www.fitday.com and doesn't cost you a thing. You don't need to show anyone your diet tracking on the website, just use it to accurately record the foods that you eat. You'll learn a lot about how much and what you are really eating!
At the same time, start to track your workouts and physical progress (either by taking photos or taking body measurements). Accurate tracking in all of these areas will help you determine the best ShapeShifting methods for your body.
Novotny, J., et al. Personality characteristics as predictors of underreporting of energy intake on 24-hour dietary recall interviews. J. Am. Diet. Assoc. 103:1146-51, 2003.
Real Core Training
 Stephen Holt was the winner of the American Council on Exercise's 2003 Personal Trainer of the Year award and the 1999 AllExperts.com Expert of the Year. He's also a three-time finalist for NSCA Personal Trainer of the Year and 7-time nominee for IDEA Personal Trainer of the Year.
Stephen is our resident expert on core training. He's written core training chapters for both grrlAthlete.com E-books (Click here to see the books) and is finishing up his own book devoted entirely to core training. Stephen was gracious enough to answer our questions on proper core training. This is only part of the information he provided. You will find the rest of the interview in a newsletter on www.cbathletics.com .
grrlAthlete.com: What are the most common misconceptions about training the abs and low back?
Stephen Holt
The abs and low back are the least understood area of the body in the fitness industry and in the general public. There're so many, but three myths stand out:
- Ab and low back exercises will magically melt away the fat in those areas.
- You have to lie down to work your abs.
- Spinal flexion exercises like crunches are vital for everyone to do all the time.
Trainers and general exercisers are amazed to find out that very few of my clients ever do crunches. "The Crunch" is probably the most overused, overrated exercise ever. As Stuart McGill points out in Low Back Disorders (which you've covered so well in recent issues of your newsletter) crunches are the exact same motion of your spine that most often leads to disc herniation. People would look at crunches completely differently if instead of saying "Let's do 100 crunches" we said "Let's get you 100 reps closer to a disc herniation."
Besides, we spend most of our waking hours in an upright position. Spinal flexion from the upright position comes from gravity, not a concentric contraction of your abs. So our abs never perform spinal flexion from neutral, so why do we spend so much time exercising them that way?
We need to spend more time training your abs to stabilize your pelvis against the internal forces from other pelvic muscles (especially your hamstrings, quads, and lats).
GA: Are Stability balls really the answer to core training?
SH
Oh, no. Stability balls certainly do something productive and, therefore, have a legitimate place in Core Training.
Instability naturally engages what's sometimes called the Lumbar Protective Mechanism. In an unstable environment (on a Swiss ball, balance board, Reebok Core Board, etc.), your core muscles naturally engage to try to protect your spine.
The shortcoming of stability ball crunches, however, is that you're still lying down and not truly working from your feet up through your spine the way you have to in the Real World outside of the weight room.
Keep in mind your core muscles control the relationship between your rib cage and your pelvis. Any implement or apparatus - such as the floor, a machine, or even a Swiss ball - that in any way limits the movement of your rib cage or your pelvis will always limit the work your abs have to do.
GA: You also wrote a chapter on core training for grrlAthlete's fat loss book ShapeShift and you mention the connection between flexibility and core training and posture. Can you expand on that as well?
SH
This is the perfect follow-up to the Fitness-Exercise-Nutrition question and answer. Very clever!
Tightness and weakness go together. One muscle becomes tight because the weakness of an "opposite" muscle allows it.
I put "opposite" in quotes because you'll get in trouble thinking of muscles coming in neat little antagonistic pairs like most textbooks tell us. A prime example is that lats and abs aren't usually thought of as antagonists, yet your lats anteriorly tilt your pelvis and your abs posteriorly tilt it. Your lats and hamstrings are antagonistic in the same way.
Posture starts with your pelvis. Everything else falls in line (sorry for the pun) from there. And the position of your pelvis depends on the relative tightness and weakness of the muscles attached to your pelvis.
Again, find out exactly what's tight. Stretch it. Then strengthen your core muscles and teach them to do their job better.
GA: Crunches, full sit-ups, or neither?
SH
Trick question. It all depends on what you find in the assessment.
If assessment shows the rectus abdominis to be weak, that person may need crunches. This is rarely the case, though, since the average active person has done tons of crunches already.
If the assessment shows the psoas to be weak, that person may need to do full sit-ups. Again, most athletes have hip flexors that are already strong and typically too short relative to their other pelvic muscles.
Generally speaking, you don't have to do either to make your abs better at what they have to do.
GA: And the magic bullet for getting a six-pack is?
SH
It's being lean all over. Direct abdominal work has virtually nothing to do with it. A quick peak at a National Geographic will show you people who are lean yet have never done a single crunch have abs that show.
GA: What role does heavy weight training and abdominal bracing have for core training?
SH
Any time you lift a weight over your head and still keep proper posture, you're using your core.
GA: Research suggests that low-back endurance is the key to a healthy back. How can one improve their low-back endurance to maintain a healthy back?
SH
Modern research does show that it's endurance, not strength, of your low back that's the key to injury prevention.
More important, it's not enough to do high reps of back extensions. You have to build up the endurance of your low back muscles in three planes of motion.
I use exercises that involve back extension throughout the session as opposed to some trainers who only use the official "Back Extension Machine" as their only back extension exercise.
In a typical workout, my clients do a lot of dumbbell and cable-based exercises that involve squatting and bending, so that inherently increases low back endurance.
GA: Thanks for such a thorough interview.
Please visit Gray's site at www.functionalmovement.com.
GA: Are there any common "ab exercises" that are more detrimental to the core than beneficial?
SH
The most ridiculous one is the leg lift or flutter kick - especially when you put your hands under your butt.
This motion is Hip Flexion. Your abs are (concentrically) spinal flexors. Your hip flexors are the muscles that perform hip flexion (duh!). So call this a hip flexor exercise, not an ab exercise.
As I mentioned before, one of the functions of your abs is to stabilize your pelvis while your legs are moving. When you put your hands under your butt, you're taking away from that responsibility of your abs to stabilize you. Your hands are doing the stabilizing.
So not only are you doing a hip flexor exercise and calling it an ab exercise, you're making your abs work even less than they normally would by cheating with your hands.
If you want to make this more of an ab exercise, however, get your hands out of the way and do it while maintaining a neutral spine at all times. Good luck.
Again, don't just think "abs," think "spine." Keep in mind what's safe for your spine and let that guide you in your selection of ab exercises.
GA: Any closing comments?
SH
Like I wrote in the books (and I'm currently writing in my top secret core training book), the key to a better performing core is to forget about your six-pack
Muscles are there to work, not necessarily to look good. Of course we all want to be more physically attractive, so go ahead and do a little rectus abdominis focused work if you must. Just keep in mind what your abs actually have to do for you to enhance your performance, then set your exercise priorities accordingly.
Stephen Holt, BSE, CSCS, PES
"the top dog of the fitness industry" - eFitness.com
StephenHoltFitness.com
GA: Thanks Stephen.
As mentioned, the remainder of the interview will be available at www.cbathletics.com.
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