Another One Bites The Dust

I started this piece in the middle of January, and the title was supposed to refer to 2023 being well and truly over. As February wraps up with a leap-day no less and this article is still unfinished, the title is probably a more accurate description for another failed new year resolution biting the dust; I guess I will not be publishing every two weeks in 2024…

Back in 2020 when the first German lockdown was announced, I used my last gym session to do one rep max (1RM) tests for the classic lifts: squat, bench press, deadlift and overhead press. In principle, I think this is a great idea as way to keep track of progress (or decline) over time. I’ve been doing it ever since and gradually refining the videos.

Unfortunately, I have not developed an effective archival process that matches my training diligence. The 2021 video is lost, never to be seen again, and 2022 I had to recover by scraping (sans audio and reduced quality) from an Instagram post.

There is a lesson here. In the era of endless photos of food and video clips of every mildly interesting phenomenon hitting us from multiple channels, I need an effective archival strategy for the things that actually matter! AI and semantic search help a bit with face recognition, object detection, geo-location etc., but in the end I need a process to routinely preserve the valuable stuff and delete the dross…

My 2023 1RM results were pleasing vs. 2020; I continue to get stronger, even as my middle age progresses :-).

In my professional life at year-end I am obligated to write up successes, disappointments and next year priorities. It is often hardest to write up the disappointments, but that is usually the most valuable part of the exercise, so I am repeating that exercise for my inner caveman

Successes

Getting this blog off the ground finally is win for me even if my posting speed is slow. It took time to learn my way around WordPress, create efficient images, develop a structure and a style, but now I have it and I like it! I expected to learn some tech and refine my writing. I did not anticipate the level of introspection that writing these articles has driven. I am finding that to be the biggest value from the work I put into this.

I learned to sharpen knives. And I learned to really use YouTube as a tool to acquire skills. I always wanted to be able to sharpen knives and now I can! I rule!

I joined the German Drug Free Powerlifting Federation and competed in a national powerlifting competition where I met some cool people and had a lot of fun doing something I love.

In the year of Generative AI, I got pretty deep into using MidJourney to generate AI Art. My original intent was to create imagery for this blog, but my AI Art has spun off into its own Fantastic Voyage – check out @caveman_musings on Instagram!

Being able to generate interesting, relevant art on demand is a phenomenal ability that previously was the preserve of a small group of talented artists. It is already impacting how I communicate and I think new models for storytelling will evolve from it.

It is fascinating how new uses for AI keep cropping up. The Metric VBT app I use for powerlifting uses visual processing to detect the movement of the plates, track the bar path and record the velocity of each lift.

Macro Factor, which I use for food logging can now read text-based nutrition panels and accurately extract all the data – this stuff was fantasy not very long ago!

Disappointments

The real disappointment of 2023 was my almost continual injury status, starting with an Achilles Tendon problem that kicked off in February and then a knee injury from September.

The Achilles thing stopped me bouldering with Daughter Number 1 and took months to resolve. I at least managed to parlay that experience into an inaugural blog post.

The knee problem impacted my performance at the October powerlifting competition and I missed two of the three squat attempts because I did not go deep enough. A more insidious side effect is that I stopped running for three months, with the corresponding weight gain and loss of cardiovascular fitness. (My Garmin watch gleefully reports my average VO2 Max and a “fitness age” that is irritatingly close to my calendar age.)

In the end, life is really a slow “death by one thousand cuts”. Individually, these injuries are not a major problem but if they drag on, accumulate, and interfere with maintaining overall fitness, they are a slippery slope – and I feel I lost a lot of traction last year.

The immediate task is to get off the injury bandwagon before other elements of health (blood pressure, aerobic fitness, …) are impacted. Then I need to implement behavioural changes to stop them recurring.

Injuries are either the result of a specific act of stupidity (AKA an accident), or an accumulation of poor behaviors that build up to some critical breaking point. The human body is amazingly good at tolerating poor behavior and accommodating abuse with workarounds…until it isn’t.

With both of these injuries I was unable to clearly and categorically identify a specific stupid act. I suspect that there may be some bad movement patterns that I need to rewire, but mostly I think the two real problems are 1) my weight, and 2) I do not invest any time or energy in mobility. These issues need to get addressed now.

I don‘t think there is much new to be said about weight loss.

My 2023 injuries were all lower body. When running, the impact on the leg hitting the ground is some multiple of body weight depending on running speed. Every kilo of useless fat takes a disproportionate hit on the ankle, knee, hip and spine. The solution of course is to change diet and stop whatever behavior got you into trouble in the first place. If there is a truly authentic one word definition of the catchphrase “Simple. Not Easy”, it is “Diet.” I will be going back to my Paleoesque, high protein, low carb model.

Flexibility is an interesting one. While I love Power Lifting, it clearly focuses on small group of muscles, with only three competition movements and a handful of supporting exercises. Cavegirl teaches Pilates and will happily wax lyrical about all the deep muscles that control movement, posture, flexibility and balance. None of that stuff features in my normal training.

I‘ve done yoga classes over the years with a few different teachers. Yes. One or two hours of yoga per week will improve flexibility and balance over a few months. But I don‘t have any time or interest in the spiritual/mindfulness aspects of yoga. I don‘t need to visualize anything more profound than taking down a deer, making fire and protecting my tribe.

If you look at books on mobility, you get thousands of movements to explore. I understand that that there are one hundred joints (Pavel Tsatsouline, Super Joints) or maybe even 350 joints if you trust Google Search. These joints are moved by 650 skeletal muscles. And authors want to sell meaty books to justify the sticker price; “Becoming a Supple Leopards” taps out at 480 pages… Maybe less is more, but publishers do not expect consumers to pay top dollar for a pamphlet. All that’s fine but no normal person with a job and a family has an extra 24 hours per week to work on mobility exercises on top of all the other goals.

In the past I have experimented with a 5 day per week 15 minute morning routine. I found that Shoulder Dislocates and a bit of Sun Salutation One had a definite impact. But I could not make the routine stick. I kept wanting to add stuff – some chin ups or sit ups. Then a business trip cropped up and game over.

Priorities

Put all that together, and what do I want to achieve in 2024? Management Professionals will talk about SMART goals, which is fine but can miss the overarching strategic objective in the specific, timely and actionable.

My overarching strategic goal is to not get injured and be able to train effectively for my health, longevity and fitness

I believe that this boils down to avoiding stupid accidents (always a smart plan) plus:

1. Reduce bodyweight (fat)
2. Increase Flexibility
3. Identify and retrain any poor movement patterns

And here we hit the root cause for the delayed publication! What is a reasonable flexibility plan that I will actually stick to? Or put another way, what is the minimum that I can actually do, with close to zero hassle so there is no reason not to do it even when I am busy, travelling or otherwise distracted (and yes, I know if I want it bad enough I should prioritize it – if it was that easy I would have done it already!)

I stopped writing at this point as I drew a complete blank. I tried a couple of things that lasted maybe three days without any consistency or motivation…until earlier this week, when I was re-reading Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint.

Buried in the text under Law 4: Lift Heavy Things, Sisson discusses stretching. He argues against long and complex stretching protocols, suggesting instead that a deep bodyweight squat and hanging from a bar will, between them, deliver flexibility with minimal effort. You are never going to bend it like a yogi with just these two movements, but there are some compelling arguments for me to test this out.

First of course, these movements are aligned with my goals. I exactly do want to squat well, so performing a deep squat for time (start at 30 seconds and build up to 5 minutes) makes absolute sense to develop flexibility where I need it. (Duh!) Hanging from your arms is about as ape man as you can get, and recommended for shoulder health in Shoulder Pain: The Solution & Prevention 5th Ed. In addition to stretching your upper body, hangs will develop forearm strength which itself is correlated with longevity, and can be mixed with scapula raises to develop back and shoulder strength.

Squats require no equipment and can be performed anywhere. Hangs require a bar or branch which is normally available in every gym or playground, but sadly not in airport departure lounges or office buildings.

So two months into the year, I have finally got a plan for improving my flexibility: squat 30+ seconds per day and hang 30+ seconds every time I set foot in a gym or playground. I will work to build this up 30s per week until I am performing 3 minutes of each on a regular basis and see if there is any reduction in injury (correlation, not necessarily causation) or other positive benefits I can identify.

As a goal requires a clear success metric, I will define flexibility success as being able to kneel with my butt on my heels without any knee discomfort. I will discuss my fat loss regimen another time. Suffice to say that one benefit of spending more than six weeks writing this post, is that I can say it is working, and it is worth talking about…