I Believe in Crystal Light Because I Believe in Me

Truer words were never spoken:

“The Crystal Light Aerobic Championship is the best aerobic championship because it’s considered the Olympics of aerobics and it makes me the best among my peers.” – Peter Dale



I wonder how much money they had to pay Alan Thicke to host this competition.

(Source: Best Week Ever)

Friday's Workout

Strength Skill:

• Weighted Pull-Ups

I managed fine with a 45-pound weight vest, but couldn't quite get my chin over the bar after loading it up with 50 pounds (about 40% of my bodyweight). Dammit.

Metcon:

Tabata:

• Max rep 53-pound overhead kettlebell swings
• Max rep Abmat sit-ups

Then:

• Max rep double-unders in 2 minutes

Result: 178 total reps (swings + sit-ups) / 32 double-unders

The Tabata protocol consists of 20 seconds of all-out, maximum effort work, alternating with 10 seconds of rest. Typically, one does eight rounds. For the workout today, this meant doing 20 seconds of max rep kettlebell swings, followed by 10 seconds of rest, and then 20 seconds of max rep sit-ups, and another 10 seconds of rest. And immediately doing the sequence again, eight times in total. Once this is done and you're gasping for air, you try to crank out as many double-unders as possible in two minutes. Total workout time: Just 10 minutes.

Believe it or not, this was incredibly fun. I love Tabata intervals. They're efficient, intense, and flexible enough to accommodate just about any kind of exercise -- from sprinting and jumping to squatting and pressing. The Tabata protocol's been shown to be super-effective at increasing anaerobic capacity and VO2 max, assuming you're pushing yourself as hard as you can during those 20 second bursts of energy. Plus, it's more effective for fat loss than long but low-intensity training.

Barbarella's Back!

Jane Fonda is 72! And she's releasing new workout videos!

Assuming you haven't sustained crippling injuries from years of Fonda-esque aerobicizing, I'm sure you can't wait to get reacquainted with your pastel tights and leg warmers.

A Revised Myth

The New York Times reports that according to a new mathematical formula used to calculate a woman's maximum heart rate, women who are trying to push themselves hard during exercise can actually push a little less hard:

[R]esearchers at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago announced a new formula for calculating a woman’s maximum heart rate, a measure commonly used by athletes to pace themselves and monitor their progress. In a study of nearly 5,500 healthy women, scientists discovered that a decades-old formula for calculating heart rate is largely inaccurate for women, resulting in a number that is too high.

The news may be a vindication to many women who have struggled to keep up with lofty target heart rates espoused by personal trainers and programmed into treadmill displays.

The commonly used formula subtracts a person’s age from 220. But based on the data collected in the Chicago study, the right formula for calculating a woman’s maximum heart rate is a little more complicated: 206 minus 88 percent of a woman’s age.

The findings are significant because many runners, cyclists and other exercisers obsessively monitor their heart rates by taking their pulse and rely on the old formula to gauge the intensity of the workout. The typical goal is to stay within 65 to 85 percent of the estimated maximum heart rate, depending on whether the athlete is trying to build aerobic capacity or increase endurance.

But the new study shows that for women, the number typically derived from the standard formula is far off the mark. Using the old formula of 220 minus age, a 40-year-old woman would achieve an average maximum heart rate of 180 beats per minute. That means her pulse should stay around 153 beats per minute during her workout to achieve a target heart rate of 85 percent.

But based on the new calculation, the same woman’s average maximum heart rate is 171 beats per minute, meaning her desired target heart rate is just 145 beats per minute, 8 beats a minute slower than under the old formula.

But if you're someone who's "obsessively" checking your heart rate during your workouts, you know you can stop, right? Constant monitoring of your heart rate is unnecessary. If you exercise regularly, you can judge how hard you're pushing yourself, and can instinctively ramp your intensity up or down accordingly. Unless you're: (1) completely new to exercise and want to get a baseline sense of how hard you're working, or (2) a highly-specialized athlete doing some very specific training to gain a particular (marginal) boost in performance, your heart rate monitor's just a high-tech distraction from your workout.

Besides, as I've mentioned before, the "target heart rate zones" posted on treadmills and elliptical machines are utter bullshit. (Want more on this subject? Read this and this.)

So in the end, what does the new formula for calculating women's max heart rates tell us?

Not too much.

Buy a Jump Rope. It's Cheaper.

I'm sure you've seen ads for the $15,000 ROM Four-Minute Cross Trainer in airline magazines and in the back pages of Men's Journal (not too far from the P90X ad). I read a review of it in Time Magazine a few years ago, and it wasn't exactly glowing. Still, it seems like it'd be a perfect fit for Paleo / Body by Science enthusiasts who favor brief, intense, infrequent workouts. But does the ROM really deliver? Here's a recent take by Outside Magazine:

There are two sections [of the machine], one for your upper body and one for your lower. The first works like a stationary rower: You push and pull on chrome handles that move like oars. A flywheel design automatically adjusts the resistance, so the harder you try, the harder it becomes -- sort of a sweatier version of a Chinese finger puzzle. The other part of the machine is basically an extreme stair stepper, requiring you to mash up and down on a pair of foot pads. Most devotees do lower body one day and upper body on another. I did both. 

Yes, it was quick and it hurt. But because of the machine's automatic resistance, using the ROM is a little bit like going to college—you get out of it what you put in. And how many people are willing to row at the level of exertion required to make a four-minute workout the only exercise they need? I, for one, couldn't get very excited about the prospect. 

My main beef, though, is that Quick Gym [a chain that gives members access to ROM machines for $35 per month] reinforces the idea that exercise is a chore, like picking up dry cleaning.

Really? Because my main beef with the ROM machine is that it costs more than the per-capita gross national income of Spain.

Oddly enough, the most favorable mention of ROM I've come across was in Vanity Fair and written by Christopher Hitchens, of all people. And here's the extent of his praise: "[T]he ROM people warn you that you may gain a few pounds in the first few months of use. The best I can say is that, even though I had just given up smoking, I didn’t add any poundage to my 190 starting weight."

Still, my all-time favorite line about ROM comes from EveryJoe.com: "Visit Fastexercise.com and order a free DVD or VHS [about ROM] for those that have 15 grand to blow but still have a VCR."

Really???

According to a recent study, "[o]ne in five of us has inherited 'unfitness genes' that mean no matter how often we pound the treadmill, we'll still be out of puff."

Researchers from 14 institutions around the world asked more than 600 people to take up cycling and tracked subsequent improvements in their aerobic fitness. This involved measuring the amount of oxygen they took in, an indicator of the heart's ability to pump blood and one of the best predictors of a long and healthy old age...

By peering into the volunteers' DNA, they found 30 genes that affect oxygen uptake and showed that differences in 11 of these genes closely correlated with changes in aerobic fitness after cycling. Around one in five of those tested had a combination of genes that meant their oxygen uptake hardly changed, despite weeks of fast pedaling.

'The change in aerobic fitness was so small you could miss it,' said researcher James Timmons.

I suppose this is good news for 20 percent of the people who are looking for an excuse to quit Insanity.