B2D article with Dan John and the relationship between fitness and injury prevention

I just came across this post by MC on her blog begin2dig. In it she interviews Dan John and discuss a template for pressing power and references one of my training regimens.

Pressing Matters Part II - Dan John

In part one of this article MC and Dan discuss the relationship between physical fitness and injury proofing. Here's a quick excerpt.

"Training colleague Kira Clarke recently suggested that a coaching colleague has seen a correlation between strength and persistent well being. This is worth repeating so let me post it here, from Kira:
'My coach friend (Will Heffernan) has a simple test (and benchmarks) he uses regularly on his athletes (he adjusts them for different types of athletes, but these are his general guidelines)
Squat or deadlift: 2 x bodyweight
Inverted rows in 1 minute: 30+
Pushups in 1 minute: 50+
Pullups in 1 set: 10+
Bench press: 1.5 x bodyweight

In his experience, once his athletes hit these numbers (and ratios) their injuries drop significantly. And as they surpass them, he still likes to see lower/upper body strength numbers increase together, and the bodyweight numbers increase maintaining the ratio of approximately 5:3:1.'
[...]
He recommends the following for female athletes ...
deadlift: 2 x bodyweight...
pullups: 8+
pushups: 50+
inverted rows: 30+
bench press: 1-1.25 x bodyweight
(It's basically the same benchmarks he uses for 100kg+ male athletes)

He also shared the following snarky remark ...

'The biggest problem that female athletes suffer from is the low expectations of male coaches"


In college I often felt that my muscles were what held my body together through all of the wear and tear of playing volleyball. At the beginning of the season during triple days, we would practice 43 hours a week with 3 hours of lifting a week thrown in on top of that. With a 33" vertical, that much jumping and landing put a beating on my joints. My knees ached like crazy pretty much from September to June, but through it all, all of my tendons and ligaments stayed strong and intact.

College was the first time I had ever really lifted weights or been on any type of auxiliary fitness program. What I did have growing up, was playing outside. I skateboarded and rode my bike everywhere from the time I got up to the time the street lights came on. Every push off with the skateboard is basically a mini one-legged squat with one leg and mini lunge with the other. It also developed balance and muscular endurance.

Once in college, I fell in love with the muscle burn and the strength development gained through weight lifting. At our first max test session, my leg press max came out somewhere around 350 lbs. During one of our lifting sessions a month or so into the season one of my teammates noticed my relatively light weight and remarked half jokingly that I was "sandbagging it" or not giving it my all. This rankled me a bit. I went rogue and began piling on the weight. By the end of the season max test in May, my leg press max was calculated out to be 1280 lbs. I say calculated because they ran out of room to put weight on the machine, even after piling weights on top of it. My squat max went from around 150 to 400. I never truly lifted heavy in the squat because it felt like it was compressing the hell out of my back.

A test of my leg strength came later that year when a few friends and I were driving back along a pretty desolate portion of I-5 in the middle of the night. We took a wrong turn off the highway and ended up high centering the car on a mound of dirt. This was a time long ago, before cell phones were common, so we were on our own. It was a late '80s four door honda civic, not that big of a car. There was enough room, so I wedged myself under the front of the car with my back on the ground and feet on the bottom of the bumper, and after a bit of time was able to push the car off of the mound. I'm 5'10" and at the time weighed around 165 lbs.

This level of strength correlates with the standards mentioned in the article. My knees never felt unstable during any movement through five years of volleyball. Another factor that helped my leg strength and knee stability was my summer job. During the summers in college, I worked for the US Forest Service as a wildland firefighter. Every morning we would alternate between a 3-5 mile run or a 1-3 hour hike with a 40 pound pack. Hiking on the trails with a pack forced my legs to develop strength through different and varying angles and foot positions. Every once in a while my Captain would get this little smirk and a maniacal twinkle in his eye and billy goat it right up the side of the hill. His reasoning was that wildland fires rarely happen right along a trail side. We'd all fall in line behind him clawing and climbing our way to the top. In addition to this, we'd also practice 1-2 500' hoselays a day. A hoselay is where we extend lengths of hose off of the engine, one 100' section at a time, fighting fire as we go, in an effort to catch and cut off the most active edge of the fire. For this we would have an additional 60 lbs on our backs for 100 lbs total, and the Captain would usually find something so steep that we'd have to sprawl out across the hillside and/or hang on to the base of shrubs as we fought our way to the top, if we didn't want to go tumbling over backwards down the hill. All this while dragging a charged hoseline. All in all, a great way to develop a whole lot of usable and functional leg strength. I highly recommend it for any athlete.

So, where does this leave me now? When I started playing rugby a few months ago and found out I'd be a forward in the scrums, my first instinct was to go running for my beloved leg press and hack squat machines. My livelihood as a firefighter depends on my staying healthy, despite any bumps and bruises I might take through rugby, firefighting or anything else. I want my legs and whole body for that matter, as strong as I can get them. But then, as I began to think about it, since working out with kettlebells and following "Convict Conditioning" and Pavel's program in "The Naked Warrior," I am much stronger through a full range of motion. With the leg press and squats my thighs were only going to parallel. With the pistol my body descends all the way down butt to heel. Plus, this also trains balance, functional movement, and body awareness, especially when performed with eyes closed. After using Viking Warrior snatch and push press protocols, I noticed that my body felt much more stable under load during a 52 story full gear stair climb. So, for now, staying the course, and continuing to work my way through these programs. Although, after getting all nostalgic writing this, you just might see me sporting a weight vest hiking and traipsing about trails of the Oakland and Berkeley Hills.

Rugby Sevens Tournament Prep

Friday morning as I headed off to work I was looking forward to playing beach touch rugby Saturday morning. I packed up my sand socks from beach volleyball, a change of clothes and for some odd reason grabbed my rugby cleats as well. I guess having them in my truck makes me happy. I'm very glad I did grab them. Once I arrived in San Jose, a quick check of my facebook page showed one of my teammates inviting everyone to come out and support the women's team on Saturday in Palo Alto. Last I had heard from the practice the week before was that the tournament was in Santa Barbara, meaning I would have had to take two full days off from work on short notice. I contacted one of my teammates and found out that the tournament was indeed on the Stanford campus again. Then began the scramble.

In the afternoon, in between calls, my crew was nice enough to make a quick run to a local sporting goods shop to pick up a mouth guard, socks, compression shorts and a sports bra. That took care of the basics gear wise, diet wise I chose to do a modified warrior diet. In the past, when I've done the warrior diet at work, it became very difficult when the evening meal was delayed due to calls. So instead, on Friday I pretty much carbo-loaded the whole day to prepare for Saturday. My meals were as follows:

Breakfast - Bowl of oatmeal with cranberries, honey, and a little bit of butter and salt

Lunch - 3 vegetarian chili dogs and a big bowl of fruit salad with yogurt

Dinner - Salad, big plate of spaghetti with marinara sauce and veggie patties

Desert - Small bowl of peach crisp cobbler with vanilla ice cream.


At dinner I was still full from lunch, but knew that I was going to be playing a full day on Saturday so I packed in as much as I reasonably could. The desert wasn't truly part of the diet, but my chief made it from peaches that my Captain brought in from his trees, and well to refuse would've just been downright rude.

I skipped my planned workout and only did CC to give my muscles a chance to be rested and fresh the next day. Also,I drank 3 quarts of water and that night I took vitamin D and magnesium in an effort to make whatever sleep I would get that night to be as restful as possible, and vitamin C to help my body use iron more efficiently and allow my red blood cells to carry more oxygen to my muscles.

I tried a little experiment as well. The Feb/Mar issue of "Fighting Fit" magazine just happened to be in my bag, so I gave it another quick read through. One of their articles mentioned a study where boxers were given a spoonful of baking soda dissolved in water prior to exercise. They found that the boxers landed more punches per round during sparring than when given a placebo. The theory behind this is that the body uses sodium bicarbonate to neutralize acidity including lactic acid build up. When lactic acid accumulates in our muscles, it causes us to feel fatigued. Therefore, preloading the body with bicarb should allow us to exercise longer before feeling fatigued. I had first thought of this years ago during the fire academy. Before our morning runs I'd take 2-4 Tums tablets in an effort to increase my body's alkalinity. I can't honestly tell if it helped or not. Same thing with Friday. I drank 1 tbsp of baking soda dissolved in a glass of water that evening. I'll have to set up a series of controlled tests to see if this has any effect on my conditioning and rugby performance.

July 1, 2010 Viking Warrior, Kettlebell Partner Passing, Indian Clubs, Bouldering, Rugby Day

Thursday proved to be a very full, very fun day. I started off the day getting off shift with Viking Warrior 36:36 snatch protocol, 12 kg, 20 reps, for 10 work sets, wearing my SCBA mask.

Next I met up with Mike again to practice some diagonal crossing patterns and Indian club work. I had previously only thought of Indian clubs as a great tool for shoulder mobility, but Mike showed me several drills for wrist and hand mobility. Mike's 1 lb clubs felt much more fluid than my 2 lb clubs. I found an antique set of 1 lb Wilson clubs on ebay and can't wait to try them out when they arrive.

Once we had worked out, it was time to go play. We drove to Castlerock state park to do some bouldering. Climbing outside felt very good, regardless of the mosquitoes. Something about getting out in nature instantly has a very good effect on me. Sometimes I have to make more of an effort to remember the the climbing gym is a tool to get outside more. We spent the afternoon working a problem in the Magoo's section of the boulders. This is one of my favorite things about bouldering; hanging out with friends and figuring out different possible ways of climbing a problem. Hopefully we'll get to climb together again soon.

Afterwards, around 5 pm, I drove back up to Oakland. Something about that drive has a way of sapping the energy right out of me (yes, the drive, not the 9 hours of working and playing before hand). We had a few runs after midnight the night before and it was starting to catch up to me by the time I got home. After going back and forth a bit on whether I should go to rugby practice, I asked myself what I'd do if this was my very last day on earth. The answer became very clear. Besides, I had to test out my new go-fast cleats. I took a 20 minute nap and headed out to practice, and was very glad I did. It was good to be with the team again. We practiced passing patterns, defense and then put it all together in a few games of touch.

All in all this turned out to be a great day.

June 30, 2010 3 Minute Workout

The day before, as a precursor to the freestyle partner passing, Mike taught me a 180 crescent swing. He then taught me a more dynamic plyometric version of this swing. It got my heart rate up in a hurry and got me thinking of a new workout plan. For a while I've been trying to develop a good program to meet the conditioning demands of rugby 7s. The exercise demands this exercise placed on me felt very similar to the sprint conditioning test from the Grizzlies tryout. Therefore I decided to incorporate this into a similar template to train my active recovery.

I used a 12 kg bell and performed 20 seconds of plyometric crescent swings immediately followed by 40 of regular two handed swings. I did this for three rounds with no break in between for a total of three minutes. This proved to be a pretty challenging workout. The three minutes felt even tougher than the 4 1/2 minutes I made it through for the Grizzlies test. This makes me happy. My ultimate goal with this plan is to work up to 3 sets of 10 minutes with a 1 minute break in between. This should cover a 7s championship match with two overtime periods.

Workout June 29, 2010 Viking Warrior and Kettlebell Partner Passing

Tuesday as I was getting off shift I got in 17 rounds of 15:15, 8 reps w/ the 12 kg bell. I added in my SCBA mask to help prepare for the Trans-America building full gear stair climb coming up on the 19th of this month.

Afterwards I met up with Mike Castrogiovanni for another session of kettlebell partner passing, a video of which can be seen here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6U4qDodptM

We reviewed some of the techniques from previous sessions such as the basic two handed pass with a flip, and then one and two bell progressions. Afterwards we progressed into the freestyle techniques. The applications that this has for sports are almost limitless. In one session, we trained strength, cardio, redirecting forces, situational awareness, reading body language, agility and balance. I'm very excited to see how this affects my rugby game, and am very eager to train up a few teammates to have a few practice partners.

Acting Captain Lessons Learned

I was Acting Captain all three shifts of last tour. Captaining is something that I'm called upon to do periodically. It's something that is definitely outside my comfort zone, but it's something that I'm required to do, so I will figure out a way to do it to the best of my ability. The main part about Acting as Captain that makes it seem overwhelming is there seems to be an incredible amount of information to learn, absorb and be able to quickly use to form a plan of action. As with other things though, that might initially seem overwhelming, the best way I've found to tackle them is just to get a foothold somewhere, break it down into bite size chunks and start methodically accomplishing it bit by bit.

This was the first time I've been called upon to act as Captain for three shifts in a row. While it was a bit daunting, it proved to be preferable to be randomly being called upon for a few hours here and there. Having more consecutive time in the seat gave me the opportunity to implement the lessons I was learning quicker, and thereby reinforce the learning process.

One responsibility of Acting Captain is navigating to the call. This is especially important because getting to the call can often set the tone for the whole call. To help learn the area I have been hopping up and figuring out the route anytime one of the rigs in the station gets a call, as well as driving the neighborhood when getting off work. Other things that have helped as well are learning to use all of my resources. I am a big fan of the printed maps that we have in the rigs. I like to be able to see the big picture of where we are going. We have GPS devices in the rigs, but they can be a bit temperamental and only show one turn at a time. When using the maps I also have to be aware that sometimes water stains or scratched areas on the map might obscure an address or street, some of the lettering is ridiculously tiny, all of the lettering seems tinier and blurry when driving en route to the call, especially at night, and once a little bit of adrenalin and tunnel vision kick in, it makes it all that much harder to navigate. The key here is to use all of my resources. Grab a run card from the file that shows the route from the station to the call's street. Find the location on the big wall map in the station before leaving. Show the engineers the route before heading out. Use members of the crew that are familiar with the area if there is any doubt to the exact location of the call. This last one is important for me to remember, because while I am ultimately charged with determining the route, it's still okay for me to ask for input from the crew.

Another lesson learned dealt with nutrition. My ipod was on shuffle the day before when an audio track from Dr. Mark Hyman's UltraMind book began to play. This track mentioned the importance of magnesium. He stated that the body uses magnesium to help it cope with stress. When the body is stressed, it depletes its stores of magnesium and they need to be replenished. Captaining is shall we say, a bit stressful for me. The first shift I increased my intake of magnesium and noticed feeling more relaxed and resilient. I'll have to research and play around with this further.

Call wise, there was a ton of learning that took place. We responded to 3 different type fires in 3 shifts. The first shift was the previously mentioned wildland fire. Lessons learned here mainly dealt with need to remain hands off, keep me head on a swivel, direct, and keep up constant communication with my crew. With my background in wildland, I'm very eager to jump in and help work. That's great as a firefighter, but can be a little counterproductive as a Captain. Communication, as always on the fireground as key. When we arrived on scene initially, several different members of the command staff were trying all give me different assignments on different radio frequencies, all at the same time. Here communicating to each of them my current assignment and the requests from the other officers on scene, and being patient while they figured it out among themselves seemed to be the best plan of action. At another point Division Alpha requested I walk the perimeter with him to get another set of eyeballs on the fire and our containment efforts. Next time in this situation, I will communicate better with my crew to make sure the know my assignment as well. Another item that will help with communication is my helmet. Captains' structure helmets have red reflectors on them, and the wildland helmets are completely red, while yellow denotes all ranks below Captain. I grabbed one of the other Captain's structure helmets at the beginning of the shift, but didn't grab his wildland helmet as well. This would have made it easier for the Chief's and overhead to pick me out on the hillside. Additionally, one other minor lesson learned was as I was hopping out of the rig making sure that I had both radios, they were tuned to the correct channels, and communicating with overhead, that I initially forgot to grab my gloves from structure gear and transfer them over to my wildland gear. This is a simple fix; I'll just have to get another set of gloves to keep with my wildland gear.

The second fire was a car fire in the parking lot of a mall. This is something that we had pre-planned and practiced just a few weeks ago. As we pulled up, the car was completely obscured by the thick dark smoke. One of the engines that responded with us and was first on scene, runs with a smaller wildland engine called a patrol. The patrol pulled into the garage in an attempt to quickly extinguish the fire. The lesson learned here was that the smoke was so thick that it actually caused the patrol's engine to stall from lack of oxygen. We extinguished the fire by laying a pre-connected hose from the other engine, and then extending off of it with one of our hose packs to reach the vehicle. If the fire had been on one of the upper levels, we would have had to extend a hoseline off of the tip of the truck's aerial ladder.

This reminded me of another call where I was higher classing a month or so prior. We got a rescue response call early in the morning for a vehicle rollover. We arrived to find an older model toyota pick up truck on it's side, with the engine running and a small fire sparking from the catalytic converter. The driver had fled the scene long before we got there. My quick thinking engineer grabbed a CO2 fire extinguisher and sprayed it into the undercarriage. The CO2 displaced the oxygen around the engine and effectively shut it off. Here was an instance where we were able to use the same principle to our advantage.

The third fire on the last shift also had quite a few valuable lessons. The beginning of this post discussed lessons learned navigating to the call, which in large part came from this call. In addition to this, once on scene after the fire as knocked down, the homeowner came barreling into the apartment complex, through the cones we laid down to block off the road, driving over our 5" hose and almost running over a few firefighters. Again, I've got to stay completely aware of my surroundings even with the simplest of tasks and when everything appears to be calm.

Three Legged Squirrel

Recently while visiting my grandma's house I noticed a squirrel running across the street. The first thing that caught my attention was that the squirrel only had half of it's tail. It wasn't until later that I realized that it was also missing one of its rear legs. This amazed me in that this animal was able to compensate and still move naturally and gracefully enough that I didn't even notice it's missing leg.

When I have any injury or a bit of stiffness in my joints, my body mechanics tend to change and become more rigid and less graceful. This opened my eyes a bit that I could make more of a conscious effort to move more fluidly in my daily life, concentrating on the areas that felt good, instead of the ones that ached or were stiff. I had been doing this for a bit during the conditioning portion of rugby practice, and noticed my body warmed up much faster.

This led me to think of the role of grace in athletics and longevity. When I was younger, I was bristling with energy. I was driven to push myself and run, jump, play and frolic as much as possible. It seemed though, that society at the time wanted me planted firmly on the sidelines, to be the cheerleader instead of the athlete on the playing field. The first time I can remember noticing this was when it came to wearing skirts and dresses to school in first grade. Initially I had no problem wearing skirts, not until I was told that I couldn't hang upside down on the monkey bars like the other kids, for fear of flashing my little bloomers to the whole school yard. In later years it began to seem that women's clothing prized form over function to the point where it was almost a conspiracy to hobble and hamstring function. The clothes were made out of lightweight, delicate frilly fabrics that couldn't stand up to the lightest bit of use. Heaven forbid that women's winter clothing would have enough fabric to actually keep a person warm, that would ruin the cute little cut of the garment. I tolerated the ballet lessons my parents enrolled me in so that I could take the more fun tap lessons. Then of course, there was the worse offender of all, the high heel. Here was something that was unstable, would use the person's body weight to force their toes into a painful little point at the end of the shoe, not to mention would lead to foot, hip and back problems later in life. None of that seemed like a good trade off, yet this is what society expected of me. That didn't sit too well with me. I began to focus solely on function, seeing any effort put into form and thereby gracefulness, as a waste of energy that could have been put into strength and speed.

Now, later in life, I'm seeing how form and function don't have to detract from each other, but can actually work together to create an incredible synergy. Grace is smooth, coordinated movement, which is inherently faster, stronger and beautiful. The book and DVD series "Kettlebells from the Ground Up" explained that the word calisthenics is derived from the Greek "Kalos Sthenos," meaning "beautiful strength." The ancient Greeks, who were some of the fittest athletes around, realized the need for gracefulness in their practice. As I played volleyball, I eventually unintentionally found a level of grace through practicing and refining my function. Now I'm curious as I take up a new sport, rugby, how putting a strong emphasis on grace from the beginning will affect my game. In order to do this, I've incorporated work with kettlebells, in particular the ballistic swinging movements, as well as indian clubs. Another option would be to take up dance. In a Time.com interview, football player Lynn Swann stated that his years of dance lessons in tap, jazz, and ballet had greatly helped his sense of balance, body control, rhythm and timing. Who would have thought all those years ago that sporting a frilly little tutu might actually help with my rugby game.