Hi. My name is Joe and I'm a food addict.

Now you say, "Hi, Joe." Preferably in unison with a bunch of other people. Try to sound bored. Sip your coffee.

Food addict is a pretty poor term for what I have. In a trivial sense all humans are food addicts. Whenever we try to do without food we suffer withdrawal symptoms - it's called starvation. When someone claims to be a food addict in the non-trivial sense they really mean that they have strong impulses to overeat, or to eat foods that are not good for them or necessary for health. A better word for this would be compulsive overeater, but food addict sounds better in a society which treats addiction as a disease - we sound like victims of an illness, not just people with poor self control.

Food addiction in this sense is a subtle and powerful affliction. I don't think that any food addict experiences impulses to overeat as strong as a heroin addict's need to use or an alcoholic's need to drink, but the impulses are still much stronger than can be understood by people who aren't food addicts. I mean, it's not just that candy or chocolate or cake taste good - I feel a real need to eat them, under certain circumstances, and find it almost impossible to stop eating once I start.

There are other difficulties specific to food addicts. It's hard to go cold turkey on food. Like I said, starvation and all. You can go cold turkey on the problem foods - I doubt anyone ever got fat on steamed fibrous vegetables and lean cuts of meat, so you could go cold turkey on the problem foods, like anything with a high glycemic index. But it's so seductive - just one bite of pizza, it won't do any harm, right?

Another problem is the kind of social pressures you get with food. I mean, my mother in law has never offered me a needleful of heroin at the end of Christmas dinner, but she has offered dessert. I am frequently in situations where perfectly normal people expose themselves to foods that I shouldn't ever eat, like pizza, cookies, candy, chocolate, and cake. I suppose this problem is shared with alcoholics, in the sense that they are probably often tempted by alcohol at weddings, parties, social functions, but I have to say that I bet I see a lot more simple carbs available than alcohol.

There are also some insidious ideas that make it a little bit harder to go cold turkey on bad foods. One is the "Cheat to Lose" diet/ idea. It's written by a guy named Joel something... (google it if you care) who sounds very smart and has a really wonderful New Jersey accent. He basically claims that while dieting your leptin levels drop, and with it your metabolic rate, which means your body will burn fewer calories. By overindulging periodically, and he means eating a bunch of cookies or ice cream or pizza, things with lots of carbs and fat, you reset your leptin to pre-dieting levels, speed up your metabolism, and actually wind up leaner in the long term.

Does this work? I'm not sure. It makes sense. Suppose eating an extra 1500 calories once a week boosts your metabolism so that, on average, you burn an extra 250 calories a day. Eat 1500 extra - (7 X 250 extra burnt a day) = 250 calorie per week deficit. Suppose those extra 1500 calories boost your metabolism by 400 calories per day. Bigger deficit. Suppose you could get the same boost by "cheating" by only 1000 calories. Assume that not all of the extra calories actually get absorbed - you might be creating an even more beneficial deficit.

On the other hand, suppose you pack in an extra 3500 calories on that cheat day. You might not be better off. Or suppose that like me, you're a food addict, and you use the cheat day concept to justify overeating for three straight days (I'm sick, all right?) Then... not so good.

There are other reasons to think a planned, periodic cheat day might be good. Some people find it easier to stick to a restrictive diet if they "promise themselves" some sweets or pizza or whatever. You know, "I'll be good, but on Sunday I'm eating a whole pizza and a pint of Ben & Jerry's!" I find that I have mixed success with this approach. Planning to overeat on Sunday tends to make me overeat on Saturday as well, then Monday and maybe Tuesday (I'm eating a whole pizza tomorrow, so half a pint of ice cream tonight won't be so bad...) It's not rational, but that's the point I'm trying to make - food addicts don't make rational food choices. That's why we're addicts.

On the other hand, it has seemed to me in the past that cheating once in a while on a limited basis has helped me lean out.

Two conclusions. First, some people will find the planned cheat day to be liberating, while for others it will lead them into big problems. You have to figure out which you are.

Second, cheating may help you lose weight faster, but that doesn't mean it's the healthiest way to eat. Given how good calorie restriction is for the health of animals I think that the dieted state - lower leptin, slowed metabolism, etc. - may not be great for short term weight loss but it might be better for your health. Just a suspicion. That insulin surge and re-setting of hormonal levels and metabolism that you get from those cheat days might not be good for you.

If you're a martial artist and a food addict prepare for a lifelong battle against the creeping advance of bodyfat. Fat slows you down. Being slow gets you hit. And if you're wondering why I'm writing this post today of all days, remember that yesterday was Halloween. I ate something like 75 chocolate bars, peanut butter cups, boxes of dots, and god only knows what else last night, and so help me I might do the same thing again tonight.

Do as I say, not as I do.

Osu.

I am always interested in what goes on that makes people fans of some athlete or team or another. Obviously, a lot of people will support the team representing the place where they live or where they grew up. With individual sports its different. Who should you root for in Formula 1? You could pick the guy from your country, if Scott Speed were still driving, but rooting for Americans in F1 is pretty boring (there's like one guy every decade, and they haven't done well since the 70's).

I end up rooting for guys for several reasons. I like people who are decent sportsmen - a guy is rude or does things he shouldn't, I'm likely to root against him. I like guys who have personalities, in interviews and so on. I'll also often find myself rooting for a guy who has had bad luck in the past (mechanical breakdowns, etc.) - hence my joy at Kimi Raikonnen winning this year's world championship.

What about MMA fighters? I like certain styles. I prefer standup, so I root for strikers. I like guys with aggressive styles. I remember really liking the way, for example, George St. Pierre went after people in his fights - very active, always attacking. I like unorthordox styles because it's fun to try to figure out why they work or how I'd counter them, which is why I really like Chuck Lidell. And I'll root for a guy with cool tattoos, if I've got nothing else to go on, because I like tattoos. If I wasn't deathly afraid of needles I'd be covered in them.

I wanted to dislike Quinton "Rampage" Jackson from the first interview I saw with him. He made some off the cuff joke about needing a win so he could pay for all of his kids - with no mention of a wife, so presumably these kids are from different women and not from a nuclear family. I'm an inner city high school teacher and I'm very much against the children out of wedlock, multiple partner thing, I mean REALLY against it, so I didn't want to like him. Then he beat my hero Chuck and took the title away, and I was sad.

But...

In the leadup to his fight with Dan Henderson Rampage said something very cool. When these guys are interviewed about upcoming opponents they always say the same stupid crap - I'm going to knock him out, I hate the guy, it's going to be a war, etc. Not Rampage. He said, "I don't like the guy - I love the guy." (Actually, he might have said "I love him," so don't sue me if the quote is slightly off). Apparently they're friends. Rampage said nothing but respectful things about Dan, but also said that in the ring he'd be all business - which he was. I mean, I get that he was trying to hurt Dan in the ring, that's the job, but he didn't act like an a$$hole before the fight.

I've listened to quite a few Rampage interviews and quotes and I can't help but liking the guy. When he's being serious he's all class, all respect, and you can't deny his fighting ability. And his jokes are usually at his own expense, not the other guy's, which shows someone who's pretty comfortable with himself. He really comes across as a decent guy, to the extent that I doubt he could be faking it.

I sometimes wonder what I'd say in those interviews (not that I'd ever make it in MMA). I'd love to see a guy get interviewed and have it go something like this:

Interviewer: "How do you think your next fight will go?"

Fighter: "Against (fill in name)? Oh, I just hope I don't get knocked out in the first minute or so. Have you seen that guy fight? He's awesome."

Or this:

Interviewer: "Who do you want to fight next?"

Fighter: "I want the easiest fight they'll pay me for. None of these top guys - they hit hard and hurt people. I want the title, but I really hope that the current titleholder fails a drug test or something so I can get it without fighting him."

It won't happen, but I'd enjoy listening to something like that.

Think about what you're a fan of and what it says about you. It's kind of interesting.

Happy Halloween. Don't wear your gi as a costume. Don't let your kids wear gis as a costume. If you see the neighbor's kids wearing a gi as a costume, beat the crap out of them (no, not really).

Osu.

Want to get in shape for basketball? Play basketball. You can run sprints and lift weights until the cows come home, but you'll probably get beaten on the court by somebody who just plays basketball. There are two general reasons for this. The first is that the person who plays basketball will presumably develop greater skills than the person who lifts weights or runs sprints. The second is that the conditioning the player will receive will be exactly the kind of conditioning you need to play basketball, whereas the conditioning you get from weights or running might be different.

Want to get in shape for fighting? Run windsprints. Lift weights. Play basketball.

The two questions above look the same, but there is one important difference. In theory you could get in shape for sparring or fighting by sparring or fighting - clearly the training would be sport specific - you don't get more sport specific than practicing your sport. There are two reasons I don't think sparring should form the core of your sparring conditioning program.

The first reason is injuries. I'm not talking about trips to the emergency room injuries, I'm talking about the dings and bruises that you get from sparring. For example, we had a pretty good sparring workout this past Saturday (it was promotion day in our class). I fought a lot and had a great workout. But Sunday I couldn't straighten my left arm, I had multiple lumps on my arms and shins, and my hips and back were extremely tight from the kind of overuse I can only put them through while under the effects of serious adrenaline surges.

None of these were real injuries, but they were enough to curtail my training on Sunday. I used the foam roller for a while and by Monday I was nearly fully recovered, and other than some bruises I'm fine now (it's Tuesday). The thing is that if I depended on sessions like that to stay in shape I'd have to repeat the session today, or tomorrow at the latest. I'd walk around all the time with dings and bruises and light joint injuries. As things stand now, we fight every other week for an hour to an hour and a half. That's plenty of time to fully recover between sessions. If we did it three times a week do you think we'd still remain injury free? I suspect that those little dings and bruises would quickly mount to things more serious.

I'm reminded of stories about Muay Thai fighters. These guys fight a lot of bouts in their careers. I've heard (and this might be wrong) that they don't spar very often, depending instead on rigorous training, because when they spar they take too much damage.

The second reason not to spar yourself into shape is that doing skill development while you're tired is not the best thing for the skill. If you do a lot of fighting while you're slow and fatigued you're training your body to move the way it does when you're slow and fatigued. I'm not saying not to ever do this, but I suspect it shouldn't form too large a chunk of your training. Which means you need to develop your endurance doing something that isn't fighting, so that when you do fight you get the neurological adaptions you want.

In my limited experience people who spar more often tend to be teenagers, or they go easier (lighter contact, slower speeds), or they spar less intensely - spar a bout, then watch some other guys do a bout, but not nonstop fighting. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I think that especially people who are older or have had injuries or who aren't inherently durable will do better getting in shape with some other activity and treating sparring as a skill development, not a conditioning development, session.

Now, I have benefited from occasional sessions like last Saturday's, and sparring to one's physical limits on occasion is very good for "topping off" your cardio. I just don't think it's a good idea to use this as the meat of your training regimen, no matter how much fun it is.

There's at least one other reason not to depend on sparring for your conditioning. Getting a good sparring workout requires a number of partners with the appropriate skill levels (I would say at least close to being as good as you). Some people have access to communities of partners like this - if I trained in New York, where my style is based, I'd always have more partners around than I could hope to work through - but most of us are in smaller schools and just can't count on getting enough people together often enough to make sure to always have enough partners. Could you get a good workout sparring just a couple of people multiple times per week? Maybe, but I think you'd get bored with each other, and fighting bored is not a good idea.

One last point. Exercises you do on your own are more controllable in the sense that you can strictly vary the pace, intensity, and effort put into it. If you're doing snatches and you want to do 6 in 20s, you do 6 in 20 s. If you're feeling good you can just move up to 7, if you're tired drop to 5. If you're sparring the pace will often depend on the other person's ability and conditioning and how they feel that day. If you're fighting someone who's tired or weaker than you, you could just push the pace and pound the crap out of them for the sake of getting a good workout, but I'm not sure that's entirely ethical. Plus, you might find that you have a hard time getting people to train with you.

Osu

What are beach muscles? It's an old term used in bodybuilding magazines for muscles that might look good at the beach but don't contribute much to overall strength or fitness. The point was that you could train to look good by working these muscles without really making significant changes to your overall strength (depending on the article this was considered either a good thing or a bad thing.) Which muscles are beach muscles? Think biceps, upper pecs, anterior delts, stuff like that. Definitely not lower back, legs (any part of the lower body), glutes - the muscles that really make you strong.

Now plenty of good exercises will develop your "beach muscles." Add 200 lbs to your deadlift and you're going to get bigger biceps. But exercises that focus solely on beach muscles, like maybe concentration curls, aren't going to do much for your functional strength or your martial arts ability.

So if you're doing hour after hour of concentration curls and dumbell lateral raises it might help you look good in a T-shirt but it's not going to make you very strong or very fit. In fact, it might make you less fit, in that if you're doing that in addition to more functional exercises, like pullups, deadlifts, swings, snatches, or many others, those beach exercises might lead you into overtraining. If you're doing concentration curls INSTEAD of deadlifts, well, then, you're not developing anything that will improve your martial arts. And in a small way, bigger biceps that don't come along with bigger glutes, adductors, abductors, and hamstring will actually slow you down by increasing your mass without increasing the force you have available to accelerating your body (although, to be honest, your chances of getting noticeably heavier by building biceps are pretty small).

Does this mean that I'm saying not to do arm exercises? Yes and no. Concentration curls shouldn't be the focus of your training. Like I said, isolation movements focused on beach muscles won't make you strong in the way a martial artist wants to be strong (I am not talking here about injury rehabilitation or correcting strength imbalances - that's another story).

But...

We're all human. Many people, if not most people, like to look good. And let's face it, having bigger biceps is part of looking good for many of us. If you are the kind of person who looks in the mirror every morning and hits a bodybuilding pose, then gets a shot of motivation from seeing new lines and bulges where you didn't used to have any, then what's the harm? Add a few sets of concentration curls or whatever to the END of your workout, after you've done your useful stuff. Just don't confuse what you're doing with functional (useful) training - say to yourself, "I've finished my real training, now it's time for my cosmetic workout." Think of concentration curls as the health equivalent of Botox injections. A little indulgence to your vanity.

If anyone in your dojo gives you a hard time about it (and in most cases they won't - they'll wonder why you bothered with the deadlifts to begin with), remind them that having bigger arms might help you avoid a confrontation one day - people are less likely to pick fights with people who look strong.

Osu

I've been sick for like a full week. When I'm sick my training goes out the window (which it kind of has to), but so does my diet, which is counterproductive in many ways (eating sugar is kind of immunosuppressive, so it certainly won't help you get over your cold faster...) I have no excuse. I will try to do better the next time I get sick.

On the plus side, I found an interesting blog. By the way, when I say "I found..." anything I mean that I found a link to it on one of the other blogs I read. I rarely remember where it came from (I read about 55 blogs regularly), so I don't always give credit where it's due, but I can assure you that it doesn't belong with me.

Anyway, check out All Fours Fitness. A bunch of bodyweight exercises done on, you guessed it, all fours - basically variations on crawling around the floor. Pretty interesting.

Someone - I think it was Conditioning Research, but I forgot and I can't check it right now (damn filter at work!) - posted an article that states that static stretching done alone (with no other exercise) can produce a fitness response. Basically, if you can't do any real workouts, like maybe if you're sick, some stretching might help mitigate the detraining response. Worth a try, right?

Remember, there's nothing wrong with static stretching unless it's before a workout or you're already overly flexible at that joint (you don't always want to be more flexible - more flexible means less stable. It might be counterproductive, from an injury prevention standpoint, to have contortionist - level flexibility, especially if you haven't done strength training throughout the ranges of motion).

I really want to know what's going through Chuck Lidell's head. He's lost two fights in a row. John Hackleman (sp?), his trainer, keeps saying that he's fine, that he wants to fight again, that he's training the same way as always. Huh? I mean, something's wrong, right? Let's hear it from Chuck himself. What's up? And why isn't Dan Henderson dropping to middleweight? Or Bisping? Anybody? Afraid of a little dieting, guys? (just kidding, in case I ever meet either of these gentlemen, who I'm sure could twist me into a little pretzel without a second thought).

Yeah, I love the UFC. With the Formula 1 season ending soon (go, Kimi!) I might even have more time to watch.

So one last thing. I've done this before, so listen well. When you detrain for whatever reason (legitimate illness, holiday, laziness, whatever) do a break in workout or two before going back to your old training loads. I think I've written this before - don't try to equal your last level of intensity right away. You'll just get sore and have to skip a workout or two. Do a modified, lighter workout or two to ramp back up to your full blown routine. Just an idea.

Osu.

I've read a couple of blog posts recently that made me think about martial arts technique.  Check out this post on koshi - it is about old Okinawan methods of generating power.  It starts out pretty straightforwardly, but by the end, the "advanced techniques," it makes relatively little sense to me.  Just what is meant by "internalized movement?"  What the hell is moving internally?  Your liver?  You're generating power with your appendix, your spleen, what?  I find it relatively easy to ridicule these notions.

Try out this post.  It uses language that is even more nonsensical to me, although it's all coming from a Chinese, rather than an Okinawan, source.  Same nonsensical stuff though - joints moving on their own, with no muscle action?  Opening and closing joints, stuff happening that wouldn't make sense to anybody even remotely familiar with an anatomy book.

When you approach writing like this there is among many of us an urge to dismiss it immediately and often with disdain.  I respect that urge, I really do, and I tend to participate in it.  But it might be useful to keep a few things in mind.

The first is that these people clearly do not know how to explain well what they are doing.  The tendon twisting post in particular makes no sense.  BUT the fact that they cannot explain what they are doing coherently does not mean that they are doing something wrong or that it is ineffective.  It is possible that their words just do not convey the reality of their techniques very well.

For an example of this, take acupuncture.  The qi channels that those needles supposedly open or whatever don't exist, but the fact remains that if you stick the needles in the right spots you can do wonders for people, especially in pain management.  Many doctors and Western trained people dismiss acupuncture because it's "backstory" makes no sense.  The fact is, however, that it works, at least for some things.

I cannot rule out the fact that either Mr. Gooden or Mr. Phillips or both have incredible skills in body mechanics and are tremendous martial artists based on the fact that what they say they are doing (opening and closing joints, twisting tendons, utilizing internal torque) is nonsensical.  I can rule out the fact that they are scientific thinkers, but that doesn't make them bad people or bad martial artists.  It is entirely possible that both these gentlemen can hit harder than me, fight better, and move more quickly. 

The second thing to keep in mind is that you have to maintain skepticism in the face of these kind of descriptions of body mechanics, especially because they make no sense.  Just as there are people who would immediately dismiss these guys as idiots, there are others who would gasp and pant and proclaim how cool they are and go find a tai chi class to attend immediately.  That's equally stupid.

I have a secret weapon here.  A person I trust completely happens to tell me that the theories Mr. Gooden is relating, at least, are potentially very effective.  So I'm convinced - but I don't expect you to be convinced by this story - I mean, come on, "a guy I know believes it..."

The only way we should take these guys at their word is if representatives from either camp came out and participated in some kind of objective testing.  I'd love to see someone Mr. Phillips endorses as a skilled instructor come out and hit one of those pressure sensing makiwara contraptions.  Let's see how hard he can really hit without involving his muscles and so forth.  Let's see Mr. Gooden break something, or hit a heavy bag, using internal torque alone.  

If you can get a 150 lb. tai chi instructor to hit harder than a 150 lb. kyokushinkai sensei then I'll believe there's something to it.  Until then, I have to regard any technique that can't be explained with real anatomical concepts, the way someone like Pavel Tsatsouline can explain things, with the utmost suspicion.

An open mind is a good thing, but if it's too open, all kinds of crap can get into it.

For now I'm just going to have to stick to techniques that I can understand.