Isegoria

In More on Deadlifts, Art De Vany describes some old research on the strength of frontier soldiers and Indians:

I think back about the University of California, Berkeley anthropologist who did the testing of frontier soldiers and indians. Neither are likely to have done deadlifts as they might be done in a gym. Yet, both scored reasonable values relative to a more recent soldier or indian. And far better than a a modern male (who would be easily beaten by a male civilian of the time of the tests). Alas, the article is lost in time and I never could find it at the UCB library. I just recall the text from a book citation.

A truly strong person, who is generally strong not in the highly specific way that power lifters are, can usually do a double body weight dead lift. The Amerindians surely did not usually do anything like dead lifts, but they surely did a variety of things that gave them almost double the dead lift strength of frontier soldiers. Building structures, playing games, butchering and carrying food are among the things that would have contributed to their great strength. Don’t over look either the role of general fitness as a contributor to strength.

How might Plains Indians have built their strength? By dragging bison:

What they dragged were one ton bison out of pits they ran them into to kill them. I recall the story (the reference is back in a file I simply don’t have time to try to find) of 5 indians pulling bison out of a 10 foot pit they had run the animals into. They had lept into the pit to kill the animals. Then they pulled them out, somehow. Then they dragged them to a nearby butchering site to do the heavy work of butchering a large animal with stone knives and implements. Then they loaded the meat and took it to camp.

If there is a better exercise, I don’t know what it might be. Every major muscle group is engaged, trunk, hips, legs, arms, grip, back and shoulders. It combines dynamics and strength because you are moving the load, not just lifting it. Balance comes into play. There is maximal heaving to initiate movement of the heavy mass, followed by faster movement after initial friction is overcome. Then a brief rest and the process is repeated. They may have made as many as 100 of these sorts of movements over the course of their work. Each one a maximal effort, followed by a burst of speed and then a brief rest.

Given the amount of nutrition in a one or more animal kill, they would only do this sort of thing a few times a month. No more than once or twice a week. A great model of true power training.

Art De Vany reprints a letter from Mark Sisson on Steroids in Sports, explaining why the notion of a fair playing field is a farce:

Hard training raises EPO and hematocrit, but drug companies also make artificial EPO which does the same thing without training (intended medical use is for recovery from chemotherapy which destroys RBCs). Artificial EPO is banned. Now here’s the irony: research confirms that if you train at sea level and sleep at 14,000 feet, your body makes red blood cells at an impressive rate and amount. Several companies have developed expensive “altitude chambers” for home use where you can now train at sea level and then retire to your room for the night, simulating an altitude of 14,000 feet or higher. The end result is that you have, within the letter of the law, manipulated your own EPO to artificially raise hematocrit, yet using artificial EPO to do the same thing is punishable by a 2-year suspension. Talk to an endurance athlete from a developing nation with $2 to his name about THAT level playing field.

Muscular Christianity may have peaked a century ago, but at least one evangelical leader still clings to the notion. Pat Robertson says he leg-pressed 2,000 pounds:

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says he has leg-pressed 2,000 pounds. The feat is recounted on the Christian Broadcasting Network Web site, in a posting headlined, “How Pat Robertson Leg Pressed 2,000 Pounds.”

It’s a pretty stupid claim to make:

Clay Travis of CBS SportsLine.coms online magazine called the assertion impossible in a column this week, writing that the leg-press record for football players at Florida State University is 665 pounds less.

“Where in the world did Robertson even find a machine that could hold 2,000 pounds at one time?” Travis asked.

Perhaps — I’m being charitable here — his people thought the weight was in kilos and multiplied it by 2.2 to get pounds.

New way to treat obesity heralded:

Boosting oxyntomodulin limits appetite and raises activity levels at the same time — leading to speedy but healthy weight loss rates, a UK study suggests.

The Wall Street Journal sizes up ‘slim’ shirts:

But slim fits — called everything from tailored to modern fits by manufacturers — aren’t just for slim guys. Some are cut roomier on top to accommodate men who are muscular — or just bigger — in the chest. We compared 10 slim-fit shirts with 16-inch necks and found that chest measurements varied by as much as five inches. Some tapered from wide shoulders to narrow waists, while others had straighter, boxier cuts, including some with relatively wide waists. Some could be worn only by truly thin guys.

Their Best for Big Chest and Narrow Waist:

Arrow’s fitted shirt, with a 49-inch chest, is the widest on top and among the narrowest at the waist, where it measures 42 inches.

For a 16-inch neck, a 49-inch chest is pretty big — but so is a 42-inch waist.

By ancient Greek ideals, a 16-inch neck would go with a 43-inch chest and a 30-inch waist.

Fruits, Veggies Not as Vitamin Rich as in Past, Says New Data:

Fruits and veggies aren’t what they used to be, new data suggests.

Of the 13 major nutrients found in fruits and vegetables, six have declined substantially, according to a study by Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University of Texas at Austin.

Using data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Davis concludes that recently grown crops have shown decreases of up to 38 percent in protein, calcium, vitamin C, phosphorus, iron and riboflavin when compared with produce from past decades.

What accounts for this negative trend? Like any other competitive industry, farmers’ attempts to drive up profits have led them to use new techniques to increase production, Davis said. The faster-grown fruits don’t have as much time to develop the nutrients.

‘Farmers get paid by the weight of a crop, not by amount of nutrients,’ Davis said. He called this the ‘dilution effect’: As fruits and vegetables grown in the United States become larger and more plentiful, they provide fewer vitamins and minerals.

Some of the new year’s Hottest Fitness Trends:

• The newest offering at Crunch Fitness Gyms across the U.S. not only makes their female members look good in high heels, they make them exercise in them. Recently introduced, ‘Stiletto Strength’ classes consist of a 30-minute routine of Pilates and strength training, with the last 15 minutes spent strutting around in 3-inch heels.
• At Equinox Fitness, new offerings include a sword-wielding class called Forza.
• At Clay Health Club in New York City, members can tighten their abs with an Indian dance called Masala Bhangra.
• In Bikram yoga studios, clients follow a series of yoga techniques in a room of 90 to 120 degrees.

You’re Never Too Old for Dodgeball shares some more fitness trends:

• Chelsea Piers’ 25,000-square-foot gymnastics facility advertises the largest adult gymnastics program in the country, attracting both first-timers and professionals. Classes are split nearly evenly between men and women, instructors said. Participants hail the sport’s almost meditative effects, but the regulars’ sharply defined muscles point up other benefits.
• The Seattle-based group Underdog Sports offers adult leagues for elementary-school staples — dodgeball, kickball and flag football.
• The Sports Clubs Network — which has 135 U.S. health centers — offers hip-hop dance, a ballet workout and “urban rebounding,” exercises on miniature trampolines.
• The ballet class offered by the Sports Clubs Network, the NYC Ballet Workout, can be done at home, too. Since it was created in 1997, more than half a million copies of its videos and DVDs have been sold, along with 100,000 instructional books.
• With the influence of the
  Winter Olympics and the Fox TV network show “Skating with Celebrities,” figure skating is becoming particularly popular among adults.

No one ever accused Steve Sailer of being politically correct. Welcome to the Winter Olympics:

Yes, I know lots of you couldn’t care less about figure skating, but from a human biodiversity perspective figure skating is hugely instructive because it is that rare sport (assuming it is a sport) that appeals more to women than to men and to gay men than to straight men. It is the exception that proves a lot of rules.

The Figure Skating Powers That Be have announced that they are going to try to make their sport’s judging more objective by giving credit for each move on a degree of difficulty scale. There’s only one problem with this. Figure skating, as we know it, is essentially about being a princess, not a jock. The more they make it more of a sport like gymnastics and less of an art form, the less feminine it will become and thus the less feminine its champions will be. The danger is not so much that skating will crown as winners more burly women like Tonya Harding, who are strong jumpers, but then so was Charles Barkley. No, the risk is that skating will be overrun by more pre-pubescent girls like Tara ‘The Human Drill Bit’ Lipinksi, the 15 year old who took the gold in 1998 with her high-RPM jumps.

The physical difference between a little girl and a woman is basically body fat. Women have higher body fat percentages than girls (more body fat is bad in just about any sport not involving massive heat loss like English Channel swimming or Iditarod dogsled mushing). And their weight is distributed farther from their vertical axis (i.e., they have T&A). Recall how skaters spin faster at the ends of their routines when they pull their arms in. It’s basic physics. The same applies with T&A. A womanly beauty like Katarina Witt could never attain the RPM necessary to jump like the stick insect-like Lipinski.

Gymnastics has been overrun by pre-pubescents for years (e.g., 14 year old Nadia Comaneci in 1976). That’s why they had to set a minimum age of 16 for Olympics ‘women’s’ gymnastics. Unfortunately, that just means girls try to delay puberty with dieting, exercise, and drugs, with God-knows-what long term health effects.

Ultimately, womanly grace is awfully hard to quantify, but we sure know it when we see it. It would be sad to penalize that in the name of making skating judging more objective.

In Drug Test, amateur cyclist and professional journalist Stuart Stevens describes his experiment with performance-enhancing drugs:

My plan was simple. I would train as I always do — about 15 to 20 hours a week — while taking various supplements under Dr. Jones’s supervision. I started in January 2003. In eight months, I intended to ride the 1,225-kilometer (761-mile) Paris-Brest-Paris bicycle race, a once-every-four-years sufferfest that’s popular among amateur ultracyclists. I would first have to qualify by completing a series of 200-, 300-, 400-, and 600-kilometer rides within certain time limits. The PBP was a quirky event, a ride rather than a real race, with no prizes, no ranking of finishers, no doping controls. So if the drugs helped me, I wouldn’t be knocking anybody else down in the standings. And since this was a monster ride — which I’d have to complete in less than 84 hours — it would serve as a real test of my augmented self.

Here’s what a little human growth hormone did:

After a few weeks of the HGH, I began to notice subtle changes. My skin started getting… better. Sun blotches that I’d had on my arms for a year faded away. One morning I woke up and a scar on my forehead — which I’d gotten from a mountain-bike endo two years earlier — was more or less gone. Even though I was training like a madman, I looked more rested. Younger. A little fresher.

Then I started to realize that my eyesight really was improving. I’d been thinking about getting glasses to read fine print on maps, but now there was no need. The glasses I used for night driving stayed in the glove compartment, unused, unnecessary.

A 200-milligram injection of testosterone and a pump vial full of Testocream didn’t do much:

I walked out of Dr. Jones’s office smiling broadly, then waited for a werewolf surge. And I waited. But the truth is, I didn’t feel much of anything. No irresistible bursts of lust or rage, no particular feelings of omnipotence. That afternoon I went home and celebrated my newfound energy and aggression with a long nap.

When he added EPO (erythropoetin) two weeks later, he felt the difference:

“You have to be careful with this stuff,” Dr. Jones warned after explaining the routine: three injections a week of 1,500 IU each. I was expecting a lecture on the dangers of thickened blood, but he meant something else: he wanted me to take it easy while racing, lest people catch on.

“One of my bike racers who isn’t really a climber went on a training ride and dropped the best climbers on his team,” he said. “They were like, ‘Um, what are you taking?’”

It wasn’t cheap — $2,000 for ten vials totaling 100,000 IU. At my prescribed dose, each vial would last two weeks. Before the first EPO shot, my base hematocrit level was 43.8 percent, well below that magical 50 percent disqualification level. That seemed like a reasonable goal — hematocrit levels high enough to be bounced from the Olympics. Sweet.

The morning after I took my first dose, I woke up with a strange headache, a very distinct kind of pain that I would come to associate with EPO. It defied all manner of ibuprofen and aspirin but gradually went away.

Within three weeks, my hematocrit level had risen to 48.3. By this time, my testosterone levels had shot up to 900 nanograms per decaliter, from a previous mark of 280. (My starting level was just below normal.) My HGH had increased only slightly, which Dr. Jones found unusual. He upped my HGH dosage to 1.2 IU a day, speculating that the long hours I spent training might be keeping the level down.

Despite these measurements, I remained skeptical about all the drugs until March 29, when I rode an event along the central coast of California, the Solvang Double Century, at what for me was a fast and hard pace, finishing in around 11.5 hours. About ten hours in, it dawned on me that something was definitely happening. Sure, I’d been training hard, but I’d done enough of that to know what to expect. All around me were riders — good, strong riders — who looked as worn out as you’d expect after ten hours in the saddle. I was tired, but I felt curiously strong, annoyingly talkative and fresh, eager to hammer the last 40 miles. The last time I’d ridden 200 miles, I felt awful the next day, like I’d been hit by a truck. After the Solvang race I woke up and felt hardly a touch of soreness. I also felt like I could easily ride another 200, and I realized that I’d entered another world, the realm of instant recovery. I’ll be frank: It was a reassuring kind of world, and I could see why people might want to stay there.

When I checked in with the good doctor soon after the race, he wasn’t surprised about what I’d experienced. “With your hematocrit levels higher, you don’t produce as much lactic acid, which means you can ride harder, longer, with less stress. The growth hormone and testosterone help you recover faster, since you’re stronger to start with and recover more quickly. All those little muscle tears repair much more quickly.”

He shrugged. “It works,” he said. “It always works.”

It all started to make sense. Feeling like I did after the 200-miler would be a huge advantage in a long stage race like the Tour de France. I understood what five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil meant back in 1967 when he said, “You’d have to be an imbecile or a hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants.”

Back then, “stimulants” mostly meant amphetamines, which kept riders going through day after day of hard stages. The new drugs had the same rejuvenating effects but simply worked much better, without the crash and depression of uppers.

I began to adjust my training schedule for harder rides and less rest and I felt fine. It wasn’t a huge difference — I added about 10 or 15 percent more effort to my training — but had I been competing at a top level, it would have represented a major advantage.

When he added Deca, an anabolic steroid, he felt like he’d “grabbed on to a car moving at 60 miles an hour”:

Once I started the Deca, I didn’t even think about lifting weights. I wanted to get stronger, not bigger. Within two weeks, the pain I felt in my left knee after 100 miles or so — 100 was now just a standard ride — went away, coming back only on the most brutal hills. My shoulder felt much better. And then one morning I stepped on the scale.

Two hundred and nine pounds.

I was stunned. I’d never weighed this much. When I first saw Dr. Jones, I weighed 195, which was high for me.

[…]

“What’s the problem?” Dr. Jones demanded when I told him I was freaking out over the weight gain. He had me stand on a machine that measured body weight and fat. I weighed 207, but my body fat had dropped to 6.5 percent, down from 10 percent.

“Don’t give me this you’re-getting-fat crap,” he said in an exasperated tone. “You sound like some teenage girl. You’ve lost six pounds of fat and gained 12 of muscle. That’s why you’re heavier. And like I told you, the Deca supersaturates the muscle cells with fluid. That’s one of the reasons your joints feel better.”

When he got back from his ride in France, he quit everything:

For me, it would be a quality-of-life question, not a performance issue. If the HGH weren’t so expensive, I’d probably continue with it, at least until I had a good reason not to, like some new evidence that it makes you grow extra ears. (The side effects of HGH are reportedly mild — one is fluid retention.) If nothing else, it helped my eyesight, and I had more energy. Lately, I’ve been reading studies about how endurance athletes suffer from low testosterone, which leads to early signs of osteoporosis, so I’m going to continue to monitor my levels and, if they drop too far, consider boosting them with the cream.

With the EPO, even if somebody gave it away, I wouldn’t go down that road. Using it is too much of a literal and figurative headache, and if you get sloppy there’s always the danger of nasty results. And I would never touch steroids again, unless I had some specific medical need. It’s all just too powerful, too strange, and it’s hard to read a list of the side effects and not feel like you’re playing Russian roulette.