|
Alright Quaranturnt Crew, Last day on back pain (unless anyone has any burning questions you want me to address!). I learned A LOT about backs a few years ago when I herniated a disc and couldn’t find anyone educated enough to help me fix it properly. I followed advice to a T and that got me in a worse position than when I first got the injury - seriously, my friends at my first job only knew me as the guy who stood or laid down 100% of the time. Zero sitting. It’s a cool reputation for sure. The first step to recovery is always just to rest until you’re out of triage - exactly what the triage/distress state is depends on the injury, but for most soft tissue things (read: non-bone) won’t last more than a few days. From there, everything got better when I focused on 1) maintaining healthy movement and 2) improving stability. Healthy movement means sitting would have been ok, as long as I kept changing positions frequently. The same goes for you, sitting isn’t evil… sitting 10 hours a day is. And btw, standing isn’t the solution either if you’re doing it 10 hours a day. “Your best position is your next position” is what my favorite PT once told me. So keep moving, go for walks, light runs even if you’re not in much pain. Workout for sure, just don’t go crazy until you have some good stability and control built up. Improving stability = strength + good positions. For backs, that means a lot of core work. “But it hurts when I do situps!” Ya well, read day 14 and don’t do situps if your back hurts. Do internally static core work and keep good position by lightly squeezing your glutes, tightening your abs just a tiny bit, and rotate your hips by pushing your…pelvic region up and forward. This will straighten your spine and relieve the pressure you’ve built up in there. Finally, when we do hamstring work Saturday, be sure to keep this posterior pelvic tilt. Over time, you will build a subconscious habit in standing safely. You’ll build kinesthetic sense in understanding of your body’s position. And you’ll regain control over your body. Today’s IG post was particularly fun to make.  
0 Comments
Quaranturnt Crew, First off quickly, I’m sorry basically every one of you is getting a Gmail warning saying that I am spam… I promise I’m not spam. I hope I’m not spam… Please keep marking me as not spam! Ok back to back pain. So your spine is a chain standing on top of itself with muscle and lungs as rubber bands and balloon holding it together. If that sounds dubiously supported to you, you’re pretty much right, but know that this does actually work pretty well unless we screw it up. How do we screw it up? With persistently holding bad positions. Most people who are standing for a while end up falling into anterior pelvic tilt, aka a forward rotation of the hips. I’ve mentioned this before, but here’s a picture to remind you.  See how the hips are tipped forward? Due to how the spine connect to the hips, this leads to the spine being pulled forward too. But you’re not leaning forward, so your spine then has a harsh bend in it at the lower back...yes, right where it’s hurting these days hasn’t it? This leads to people saying things like -> “today was so bad I couldn't even sit in a chair and spent all day on the floor working in a childs pose 😞”. This hip/spine dysfunction is why you enjoy child’s pose and bending forward a lot to get out of this pain. You’re simply rotating your hips back to correct for the spine smashing you’re typically doing. But it only helps short term because you go right back to that spine-smashing position a minute later. How do you fix this properly? Tune in tomorrow to find out! Here’s the IG post.   Hey Quaranturnt Crew, One more takeover! This one is with my friend Mason. I met him at the gym so he’s one of the first people I talked to when I got started with this whole Quaranturnt thing. Even though we can’t be together, we can still share our love for iron through emails. He is athletically pretty insane: he can squat almost 400 pounds, he deadlifts 2x what I can, and he can shoulder press almost 25 pounds! Here are some glamor shots of him, including one of his team at Wodapalooza in Miami (remember when we could go places?).
Today is all about that peach! Throughout the workout, think about using your glutes to move. Finish each rep with a tight squeeze! Remember to keep your core tight to prevent stressing your lower back. Mason shared a 🌞Good Thing 🌞too!  Ok now, get a backpack, load it up with as much weight as you can: 20 lbs (~24 soda cans, or ~12 water bottles) for most of you. Use bags of rice, laundry detergent, or cans of food to go heavier! Some of the movements are here in the IG Post.   Hey Quaranturnt Crew, You know that “Hello Darkness My Old Friend” song? Ok, well cue that because I’m going to talk about back pain. Basically everyone deals with this at some point in normal situations, but these days so many people are basically not moving anywhere that we’re only getting closer with our dark old friend and it’s an increasingly abusive relationship. You try to remedy the pain by lying on the floor in a desperate child’s pose, you feel like you always need to sit down or bend over in weird ways to feel better. Maybe you need an expensive chair. Maybe you need some ice packs. Or maybe you need to think about the foundational structure of how your body is supported. Your body is a bunch of limbs attached to a chain that is standing on end. The chain links would crumble into a pile except they’re all stacked onto each other and held up with balloons and rubber bands. Seriously, this metaphor works - chain links = vertebrae, rubber bands = muscles, balloons = lungs. If you introduce a kink in that chain, then you are just asking for this structure to break. Tomorrow we have another feature from one of my good friends, but the next day and the day following, we will dive deeper into the structure of your back and how to improve the state of your spine health! Here is the IG Post.  Hello Turntest of the Quarantiners, I hope my rant yesterday on why I want to share this was entertaining. Again, share with friends and I’ll be grateful. Can you believe this is the start of week 6? I started this right about when we went into quarantine, which means we’ve been in this for almost 6 weeks. I honestly have a hard time believing that. Have you figured out your new routines? Have you built your new structure? If you’ve struggled to figure out a good way to live in this new world, reach out. To me or to someone else, because adapting is how we’ll stay resilient in this. But for now, take 🌞Good Thing 🌞 to hopefully brighten your day a little bit. It’s a slightly different type of good thing than usual.  Here is the IG post.  Gooooood morning Quaranturnt Crew, A few of you asked why I’m asking you to share this with your friends. Am I trying to make money out of this? Do I expect to achieve some sort of fame? Definitely no, and I’m pretty much as famous as I expect I ever will be. I’m doing any of this and asking people to share for 3 reasons:
So maybe it looks like just a workout group, but to me it is so much more. This is why I’m asking to share, because it helps me get through and just maybe it will help someone else get through even better than when this all started. If you read through all that, then here, have this as a reward. And just imagine what it might be like to give this kid a big hug right now.  Here is the IG Post.   Hi Quaranturnt Friends, Continuing the growth push, please share with any friends who might be interested in this! As usual for Fridays, today we’ve got an active recovery day. I’ll be talking more about recovery in a few days, but if you missed my case for yoga in particular, check out my discussion on how yoga helps injury prevention, self-diagnostics, and kinesthetic sense on Day 20 (intro) and Day 21 (in depth). Today for the rambles, we’ve got one last day from Max. I’ll take back over tomorrow. Diet: Aesthetics vs Health Diet coke may not have calories, but will it affect how you look? There is a connection between health and performance, and performance is critical for getting the most out of exercise (read: building muscle and dropping fat). Keep in mind what your goals are…if you have performance-related goals, you may need to think about more than calories. If you do not have performance-related goals, thinking purely in terms of caloric intake vs expenditure will indeed make you shredded lean (Mark’s note: Just wait until we talk about the “If It Fits Your Macros” craze). To get further into shredtown, you might want to try TKO, CKO, 80% carb, and no fat, or a tried and true balanced diet with no processed foods. Personally, I try to eat a little bit of everything and focus more on my workouts than my diet. While eating “everything” (in terms of macronutrients), I try to avoid eating things that are bad in terms of how processed they are…ok, well I still have froyo from time to time, but I’d rather make my own scrape scrape of frozen mangos and yogurt (credit to Mark for both cooking the scrape scrape and coining the term); whole foods trump chemicals in my book. I even prefer milk vs protein powder…and yeah I know dairy is inflammatory, the casein protein leaches calcium, and the cows are pumped with hormones, but I’d still contend it’s better than a quest bar (and I love Quest bars). Before I leave you with the active recovery workout, I will just second what Max said: That man freaking LOVES Quest bars. I’ve seen him eat 2000 cal in purely Quest bars while we’re just chilling with Netflix. Linked Yoga Flow   Hey Quaranturnt Crew, Today we get more from the beautiful mind of Max Fredkin. To preface his discussion, I’ll say that muscle growth comes from 3 foundational stimuli: Metabolic Stress, Mechanical Tension, Muscle Damage. I’ll dive into these individual concepts and how they play out in Max’s training another time, but Max walks us through how he thinks about training. Enjoy his thoughts! Time Under Tension: The Science of Exercise Despite my discussion in yesterday’s post, science does exist, and you may already be eating well and exercising regularly; so let's dig into some fitness science. You may be wondering, do low reps with heavy weight get you mass whereas high reps with light weight give you definition? Is medium weight for hypertrophy and heavy weight for strength? What about building muscular power? There is a lot to explain here but let's start with the basics. Building muscle = quality time under tension; you must break down your muscle by any means necessary. Think of sand: gentle waves crashing onto boulders makes sand over long periods of time, but so does a jacked prisoner slamming a hammer into rocks one afternoon. It doesn't much matter how you get there, as long as you do get there. Increase the reps or increase the weight, you shouldn't care too much. “But Max, what about muscular endurance vs strength vs power output? There must be a difference!?” Keep your eyes on the goal: You want to maximize blood flow. In your training, think about squeezing the muscle at the top of each rep and feeling a stretch in the muscle fibers at the bottom. You will feel tightness as you work the blood into the muscle, you will see the muscles expanding, and you will become addicted to this bodybuilding sensation known as the “pump”. This is harder to do with heavy weight, but not impossible. In any case, you need to work that mind-body connection - really focus your mind on using the relevant muscle here - and always be in sync with how you are moving. This is maximizing the benefit from your time under tension.  Hey Team, I’m going to kick off a quick growth push this week, so I’ll put the sharing link at the top here temporarily. The links are : bit.ly/getquaranturnt, Instagram, and well, you're already on the website.  Now for today - So many of you told me how much you liked the takeover on Sunday that I had no choice. I found Taylor’s better half to take this one over - Max Fredkin.  This guy is an incredible athlete who has an incredible wealth of knowledge. I didn’t give him any specific request other than to build a “core” workout. The next few days we’ll be blessed with the ramblings from his beautiful mind. Take it away Maxie... Diet vs. Exercise: a new model Is diet 80% of how you look and exercise 20%? Or is it 50:50? How about we scratch the physiology and think of it as 100:100. It’s like when doctors start thinking metaphysically and begin to incorporate positive thinking or social context. Let us consider this bio-psycho-social model as one that may pertain to fitness…or for now let’s just add a caveat of psychology: I can almost guarantee you that if you start exercising, you will be more motivated, excited, and capable of eating well. Similarly, I bet that if you start eating mindfully or with some sort of plan, you will start wanting to exercise. The takeaway: if you want to look better, feel better, or perform better, science may be less important than any form of action. Maybe Nike is onto something. Today’s workout looks long but it’s lots of short bursts! Check it out on IG!    Hey Quaranturnt Crew, I’ll keep it nice and short today. Here’s another 🌞Good Thing 🌞.  And this has already proven to be true! California has saved $1 Billion in costs related to car accidents. And pollution levels are lower than we’ve seen in a very long time. Awesome silver lining! I messed up yesterday and didn’t actually link the IG post. Sorry, here’s today’s for sure though.   |
|
|
|
|