Yesterday I tried out my Vibram FiveFingers during my weight training session. The program focused on hip-dominant exercises and the workout looked like this:

A. Hang Cleans (Activation and warm-up), 30 to 50% of 1RM, 3 reps, 4 sets
B. Deadlifts, increasing the weight for each set to potentiate the CNS (ramping), start at 50% of 1RM and going up to my max weight for the day, 2-3 reps, 6-10 sets
C1. Romanian Deadlifts, ramping, start at 60% of 1RM, 5 reps, 5-6 sets
C2. Lying Leg-curls, ramping, start at 60% of 1RM, 5 reps, 5-6 sets
D1. Weighted Pull-ups, ramping, start at 60% of 1RM, 3-5 reps, 5-6 sets
D2. Barbell Curls, ramping, start at 60% of 1RM, 3-5 reps, 5-6 sets
E1. Weighted Pull-ups, 70-75% of 1RM, max reps, 1 set
E2. Barbell Curls, 70-75% of 1RM, max reps, 1 set

First off, you do feel very light on your feet and you can sense an increase in mobility and grip, especially around your toes. Doing some light and explosive Hang Cleans felt unusual but good at the same time. After getting my nervous system into gear, I started my main workout with deadlifts. This was my third deadlift workout since 2005, so I’m still a bit rusty – and I’m currently a lightweight at 165lbs and 4.9% body fat.
During my deadlifts I could feel my feet working to maintain my balance. When I reached my eight set, where the weights were close to what I did for two reps during my last workout, I felt some fatigue around my toes. Last time I did two easy reps with 363lbs. This time I did one rep at 363lbs and went for another single at 374. I barely made it. My conclusion is that you should not use your FiveFingers for heavy lifting at the gym before you have got used to them and strengthen your feet by wearing them for a couple of weeks (doing some sprint work or other demanding activities).
The rest of the workout was a breeze and the standing barbell curls actually went really well with three reps at 154lbs.
For now, I’ll stick with my flat weightlifting shoes for my heavy lifting and use my FiveFingers for sprinting and miscellaneous outdoor activities.

 
I’m always on the lookout for smart and innovative training, rehab and therapy gear. Since I’m slowly getting back into things after some serious health problems last year, I decided to try out the highly recommended Vibram FiveFingers shoes. I’ve been thinking about getting them for over a year now, so I finally put in an order.
The FiveFingers are designed to emulate the feeling of being barefoot while increasing balance and agility. With its five individual toes, the shoe allows your toes to separate and flex naturally, providing better stability and grip. It will also strengthen your foot and lower leg.

In short, it’s like an open sock with a breathable stretch mesh that wraps your forefoot, separate toe slots and a flexible performance rubber sole (see pictures below).
The Vibram Five Fingers are excellent for most outdoor activities as well as sprinting, fitness training, MMA and weight lifting.

I ordered my pair of FiveFingers KSO last Tuesday and received them by carrier 7.30 this Monday morning. That’s pretty quick considering that I live in Sweden. To try them out and work them in, I did some easy jogging to warm up, followed by some interval sprinting. At first, I thought they would feel kind of awkward, but they actually felt great and had a natural fit from the moment I put them on. Walking, jogging and sprinting felt great. The next test will be in the weight room on my hip-dominant workout day where I focus on deadlifts. Will they feel and perform better than my flat weightlifting shoes? Well see…

The most important part though, is the natural fit and how it helps and supports your body. At home I’m always barefoot, but sporting barefoot outdoors you’ll probably cut yourself silly on some junk people throw away just about anywhere. Also, most gyms will not allow you to lift weights while being barefoot.

Combining the FiveFingers with some trigger point therapy and your knees, hip and lower back will without a doubt be a lot happier. If you’re interested, check them out at the Vibram website.


The Vibram FiveFingers from above, just before doing some sprinting.


From the side.

 
I’ve received a few requests to post my upper- and lower body training program (in full) that I initially used during the start of OLB II. As I mentioned in the first OLB blog, I’ve been using upper- and lower body splits with undulating periodization for years with great success on my clients – and it’s one of my personal favorite ways to train. The particular program I used this time is a simple 2-split with four workouts a week that I devised back in late 2002. It utilizes muscle group pairings in a “alternating set” fashion alternating (undulating) between heavy and moderate workouts. It also contains a few pointers to how to progress with the help of training blocks (meso cycles). The original program (released to some clients in May 2003) can be downloaded here:
2-split_4w_undulating.pdf (Adobe PDF 6.0)

This is a rant.

I’ve touched this subject several times since the late 90’s in articles, forum posts and seminars. But since I see people quoting unrelated or flawed studies on daily basis at various forums, it’s still as relevant as ever.

So, what’s my beef with studies? Well, for starters:

• Most studies are performed in an unlikely environment, not applicable in the real world
• Most studies are performed on an exclusive group of people, and the results cannot be transferred on to other groups
• Most studies has too few participants to get any noteworthy data
• Most studies are too short to show any significant data
• The interpretation of studies is multiplex with many potential pitfalls (just take a look at journalists and their sensational conclusions)
• Studies are constantly contradicting each other, which leads to another big point…

According to Greek epidemiologist John Ioannidis’ mathematical model, a well-designed study (with no professional bias) has an 85% chance of being right, while a poorly designed study with researcher bias has a 17% chance.
After breaking down all the research data he collected between 1990 and 2003 he concluded that 50% of all published research is probably wrong.

Now, this is why I only cite well-respected and well-backed up studies in my articles and why I never jump on the bandwagon when some new contradicting and sensational study is being published.

However, I still skim trough studies and reports on a weekly basis. Most of it is not applicable in the real world, but now and then something interesting shows up. If it’s relevant I’ll do my own field testing and discuss it with other fitness professionals. However, most of the time those studies only validate what we have been doing for years. When it comes to the know-how, the research community is often years behind innovative trainers and coaches.

Now, in our field of training and nutrition – please don’t cite studies or draw your own conclusions from them unless you know exactly how to interpret research data and has less than several years of experience training people. Leave that to the experienced experts in the field.

Unless you’re an advanced and competing bodybuilder you probably train through your body twice a week or more; or at least you should.
When doing full body- or half body workouts, one important thing to take into consideration is unloading your spine. If you do barbell squats or deadlifts in your first workout, doing dumbbell split squats or step-ups in the second workout will make a huge difference in your recovery (since the load on the back is reduced by 50 percent). Also, since most of life’s activities occur unilateral (single limb), most people in general need to focus more on unilateral movements instead of bilateral (both legs) for their lower body workouts.

The other day I got a question about fat as fuel during moderate exercise from an elite cyclist. So, as a little continuation on my blog article “Carbs, Glycogen and Performance”, I will now go into the different muscle fuel sources and how fat can aid you.
When you’re at rest, about 60 percent of the energy needed to fuel your body is coming from fat, or more correctly, free fatty acids (FFA) that are circulating in the bloodstream. Now, these FFA comes from fat stored in cells in areas where you accumulate body fat. When you exercise at low levels (about 25 percent of your aerobic capacity), fat provides about 80 percent of the muscle’s fuel, with the remaining fuel coming from carbohydrates (and less than 5 percent from protein).
Now, of these 80 percent, most of the energy comes from the FFA in the blood. But a small amount is derived from stored fat inside muscle cells; the intramuscular triglycerides (IMT).

Usually, most people focus on glycogen, (stored carbohydrates inside muscle cells), when it comes to endurance performance. That’s okay if you were to live in the 70’s, but today that’s a terrible close-minded approach.
If we start at a low level of exercise and as exercise intensity increases, so does the usage of IMT to fuel the muscles involved. At about 65 percent of max VO2, IMT supplies about 25 percent of the energy needed for sustained muscle contraction. And then, as you finally approach 100 percent of your aerobic capacity, glycogen becomes the necessary and preferred fuel.
The problem with fat at high intensities is that it takes considerably more oxygen for muscle cells to burn fat than carbohydrate. Fat yields 4.69 calories per liter of oxygen, while carbs yields 5.05 calories. Even though the difference is only 7 percent, this 7 percent caloric advantage of carbs turns into a three fold faster energy production during aerobic metabolism in the muscles.
Therefore, we come to the conclusion that glycogen is absolutely needed once you precede 85 percent of your aerobic capacity. If your glycogen stores are empty, or if you run out of glycogen, then you will hit the well-know wall.

Now, we know that you can refuel with carbs during exercise. But you can only metabolize about one gram per minute. That is not fast enough to replace what is being lost during hard exercise. That is why athletes need to pace themselves.
So, therefore you’re forced to rely on fat as fuel, and thus you need to slow down since fat needs more oxygen to be burned.
Now, there is a way to slow down muscle glycogen loss and better your performance. You can do that by increasing your body’s efficiency at burning fat as energy and by increasing your IMT stores. This can be of great benefit to those of you that perform in extreme endurance events such as really long marathons and bicycle road races. In events like these you will deplete your glycogen reserves because you can not refuel as quickly as needed from energy- drinks, bars or gels.

A study performed in Switzerland by Michael Vogt showed that a diet of 53 percent fat for five weeks doubled the IMT stores without compromising muscle glycogen stores. So, a higher fat diet (from mostly poly- and monounsaturated fats) can definitely give you an edge in these scenarios.
It’s also known among coaches and athletes that a diet higher in fat and lower in carbohydrates promotes a metabolic shift towards fat for fuel (and thus sparing carbohydrates during exercise).
I’ve used this “higher fat” approach on several athletes with great success. I usually recommend a year-round diet of about 25 to 35 percent fat because of all the health and performance benefits. And if you’re a really hardcore endurance fan, you might give an ever higher fat diet a try for five to six weeks prior to a race and see how it works out.

One of many recurring questions I get concern the safety of working out in the morning. Speaking for myself, I love to lift weights in the morning. However, I’ve always recommended that you wait at least one hour before you do any kind of lifting, bending, or twisting after waking up.
While we sleep, our spinal discs fill with fluid, and this fluid will magnify whatever stress we put on our spine. Luckily for us that love to train early, the discs lose about 90 percent of its accumulated fluids within the first hour of rising. Therefore, if you wait at least one hour before training, you should be perfectly safe.

So, why not enjoy your mornings quietly with a pre-workout protein shake while doing some good blog reading?