Strength baseline this week!

The next six weeks of programming will be focusing on increasing strength. We will continue doing conditioning, but will be paying particular attention to getting everyone stronger.  Research increasingly supports that strength derived from resistance training (lifting weights) is the #1 predictor of survival from disease, accidents, cancer, etc., and will increase your quality of life as you age.  Strength is the foundation of everything else for fitness.

In order for us to be able to train people safely and effectively, and to avoid injury, we need a baseline from EVERYONE this week. If you are injured (or prone to injury) you can still participate, but you must let a coach know so we can scale appropriately.

Appropriate scaling might just be a PVC pipe...

The purpose of a baseline, just like in medicine, is to see where you are NOW so we can compare it to you are in the FUTURE. We will be collecting all the information this week, and calculating everything off of that.  We're not so worried about you going as heavy as you've ever gone in your life, but need to see where things stand today so we can help you make progress over the next six weeks (and beyond).

Workouts for the next six weeks will be based on a percentage of what your baseline is this week. This will help you to adjust intensity appropriately, and reduce the risk of injury.

At CrossFit there is a progression towards intensity:

1. Mechanics: Doing the movement correctly
2. Consistency: Doing the movement correctly repeatedly
3. Intensity: Increasing speed or weight for the movement.

We want to make sure that we can help you figure out #3 through this six week cycle.  Your optimal level of intensity will be based of your baseline -- not just guessing, but actually testing where you are right now, and then carefully programming a progression to appropriately increase intensity (weight).

If you're worried about injury, this baseline is especially important so that we are working off of actual data, rather than a guess.

Benefits of Strength Training

Below you'll find a list of journal articles from The British Medical Journal (BMJ), and other sources if you want to get into the science of why resistance training (lifting weights) is so important. The blog postings listed also include references if you want to follow up on that, and we've printed out some of the key articles and hung them up on a clipboard in the gym for your convenience.

Some of the benefits include:

• Increase bone density (especially important for women)
• Increased ability to survive (illness, injury, cancer, etc.)
• Higher quality of life (better able to do routine tasks) 
• Less likely to get injured in other activities

All of this has to be coupled with good habits, especially mobility work, good diet and lots of sleep. Appropriate warming up, mobility work on specific areas, and an appropriate cool down are all important -- so be sure to come in early if you need to!

Here is a great summary:

And before you ask: at present there is absolutely no solid evidence that strength training—or any other exercise or dietary program—will substantially prolong our life spans. But the preponderance of the scientific evidence, flawed as it is, strongly indicates that we can change the trajectory of decline. We can recover functional years that would otherwise have been lost. There is much talk in the aging studies community about “compression of morbidity,” a shortening of the dysfunctional phase of the death process. Instead of slowly getting weaker and sicker and circling the drain in a protracted, painful descent that can take hellish years or even decades, we can squeeze our dying into a tiny sliver of our life cycle. Instead of slowly dwindling into an atrophic puddle of sick fat, our death can be like a failed last rep at the end of a final set of heavy squats. We can remain strong and vital well into our last years, before succumbing rapidly to whatever kills us. Strong to the end. 

--Jonathon M. Sullivan, M.D., Ph.D., Attending Physician and Associate Director of the Cerebral Resuscitation Laboratory in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Wayne State University/Detroit Receiving Hospital in Barbell Training is Big Medicine.

Selected References

Here are just a few links to some of the articles and posts on the science. Most will allow you to click through to the full text if it is not a direct link to a PDF:

• Association between muscular strength and mortality in men
• Skeletal muscle strength as a predictor of all-cause mortality in healthy men.
• Chronic resistance training activates autophagy and reduces apoptosis of muscle cells
• Barbell Training is Big Medicine
• Benefits of Olympic Weightlifting
• Increased Bone Density: Strength Training For Life
• Strength, But Not Muscle Mass, Is Associated With Mortality in the Health, Aging and Body Composition Study Cohort
• Muscular Fitness and All-Cause Mortality: Prospective Observations