I thought I'd take a few minutes and set out my overarching philosophy on training and diet.
I take a somewhat unusual approach to training and physical development - particularly based on my background.
My approach?
Low tech, minimalist, simple.
I say this approach is "unusual" because, in virtually every other area of my life, I'm a complete technophile. If it's new and cool and slick I'm all over it.
So, why low tech, minimalist and simple when it comes to training and nutrition? Easy, because our bodies are really quite primitive and simple. This is an idea that runs throughout all of my training and nutrition thinking and I'll repeat it often. Depending who you ask, we've been around - as a species - for about 2.5 million years. That's in our current form, walking upright and with our nice big brains. Depending who you ask, that's also how long we've been omnivores - that is, eating a combination of meats and plants on a regular basis.
That's right, the "technology" that is our bodies is a few million years old. Our bodies are miracles of evolution, but they are very primitive, simple and low tech.
I want to digress here for a minute, because I want to differentiate between seeing the body as a "simple and primitive" system overall and the complexity and high tech nature of fields like nutrition, biochemistry, medicine and sports conditioning. I spent years studying engineering, chemistry and biochemistry and eventually emerged from college with a BS degree in chemistry. I took all my cool new knowledge and went into the pharmaceutical industry to do early stage drug discovery or "biotech" as it's known. Like every other scientist in that type of field, I was fascinated by the seeming unlimited complexity of biological systems. Different feedback loops, hormone production, enzyme inhibition, gene expression, metabolic pathways. It was like an endless playground where you can keep exercising your thinking process (science types REALLY like to do this) and reducing things down into finer and finer and finer detail.
Of course, this was all made even cooler because I was also working as a sales consultant in a vitamin and supplement store part time. How cool was it to know all the minute details of how a lot of the supplements worked on a biochemical level? I thought it was pretty cool at the time and, on some levels it still is. There's a problem with this approach, though - and it's a problem that runs through virtually all of medical and nutritional science and, to a lesser extent, training science.
The body is a single, living breathing, thinking, feeling human being! You could even go so far as to say there's a completely unquantifiable and indefinable "spirit" in there as well. I believe that one of the great follies of science and medicine during the last century, and this one so far, is the further fractioning and isolation of metabolic events in the body. Yeah, if someone is anxious or depressed or their blood sugar is bouncing all over the map throughout the day, you can use certain chemical compounds (otherwise known as medications) to force that particular system in the body to do what we think it should. But, the body is "malfunctioning" for a reason. And the "malfunction" is one that has served and preserved us for millions of years.
But, again, the current approach is to look at each system in complete isolation and regulate it with some kind of chemical or medication. Current mainstream approaches do virtually nothing to look at the system as a whole and treat the person.
Science isn't completely to blame for this approach though. It was made profoundly obvious to me during my years selling supplements in a retail environment that the great majority of people out there want the easy approach. They want the pill and don't want anything to do with radical lifestyle or diet changes. Many don't even want effective training methods. They'd rather waste years doing the same training program - with no results - and then spend a few hundred dollars a month on supplements to "break through the plateau."
I think I need to emphasize here that I'm not anti-science or anti-technology by any stretch of the imagination. What I am against is treating the human body as a collection of isolated, unrelated systems that can be tinkered with and tweaked individually - as if we are smarter than millions of years of evolution.
What I propose, in terms of nutrition and training, is to look at the body as a whole and treat it as such.
One of my favorite weight training authors, Stuart McRobert, has some great practical examples of this approach in most of his routines and training recommendations. He's particularly fond of the squat and the deadlift and tends to center all of his routines around one or both of these movements. Why? Because squats and deadlifts impact the entire system. They aren't isolation exercises like curls or cable pushdowns. Steady poundage progression on squats and deadlifts - "the big basics" - results in overall weight gain, increased metabolism and a fantastic to the body's anabolic processes. This is the training version of "treating" the body as a whole system. You can ask anyone who knows anything about real training what's more effective at building real size and strength, heavy squats and deadlifts or isolation exercises. Heavy basics are ALWAYS more effective.
I think this is one of the fundamental principles behind the effectiveness of kettlebell training. Kettlebells train the entire body as a system - muscles, balance, joints, timing and hormonal and cardiovascular systems. When you think about it, this is exactly how our systems would have evolved to be trained. In our primitive days, we would have engaged in various activities that would have taxed all of our systems to varying degrees. Hunting, fighting, climbing, carrying. Our body systems evolved to be trained as a whole, not as isolated systems.
Adam Farrah is a Personal Trainer and Freelance Writer for Mixed Martial Arts, Kettlebell Training, Weightlifting, Bodybuilding, Power Lifting and Nutrition. He serves Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts and the online and internet community.
Adam's blogs are alphanolimits.blogspot.com and adamfarrah.blogspot.com.
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