Lie Detectors

Want to know your weaknesses? Spar.

No matter how much you are doing in the gym, you should also participate in some form of martial arts.  There is no magic formula, but MMA draws heavily from jiu jitsu with helpings of Muay Thai, boxing, and wrestling.  Take whatever is available.  Fighting is a lie detector.  You think you’re fit?  For how many rounds?  I approach CrossFit with a lot of intensity, but it is less intense than jiu jitsu sparring.  Not even close.  And the mat is the best place to expose weakness.  Your opponent is literally probing weakness to exploit.  Use that. 

I wanted so badly to show up fit enough to just astonish the black belts with my strength and skill, so prepared that I could just succeed from the beginning.  Well that… didn’t happen.  It has just been a series of humiliating failures, one piled on another then incrementally fixing them one at a time. 

Two examples: CrossFit doesn’t do a lot for the neck.  Weak necks are terrible for grappling, making it harder to do all sorts of things including avoiding getting choked out.  So before my 5 AM CrossFit I’ve added a lot of neck stuff.  I do a bridge half on the bench forward and back and am working on switching between the two on my head (not there yet) and do an armless headstand on the wall and (gently) roll it around. 

Another lie uncovered on the mat: I do 50 GHDs each morning, but manage to strengthen my lower core without really hitting the top.  Muay Thai hits to the diaphragm are less pleasant than I’d like, leading me back to some upper core work (mostly bands on the GHD with crunches instead of sit-ups, crunching high).  I want to be more durable than I am and nothing like Muay Thai for encouragement to put in the work. I’m sure that there are more humiliations to come.  I’m taking them one by one.  As Mark Twight says,

Find a problem, fix a problem.

Measuring is another lie detector.  Measure everything that you care about in fitness and life.  I do a monthly InBody scan to keep myself honest.  Is any of this making any difference in body composition?  Current results are in: percent body fat fell from 11 to 10% over the past month while I picked up 4 pounds of muscle mass, hitting 100 for the first time.  My basal metabolic rate is staying high and visceral fat level is staying low.  People talk about BMI a lot, but I have not found it to be nearly as helpful and relevant an indicator for my goals to be strong enough to lift the Dinnie Stones while fast enough to race up Ben Nevis.  It strikes me as crude relative to actually measuring muscle and fat. 

I don’t know how much to credit pharma for a bit of progress on muscle v. fat in August but one enclo study shows an average of a 5 lb lean muscle mass gain over 90 days on 25 mgs/day.  I’m 80% of the way there in terms of gains and still have half of the time to go.  Where to from here?  Aesthetically, would be nice to creep into the single digits of %BF while adding another 4 lbs of muscle over the next month.  It will take heavier lifting.  This morning was squats, pull-ups, and plank (my favorite way to begin the week) which went well despite some knee and ankle aches after long weekend trail runs but this first hint of progress inspires to go a bit heavier next time.