Good Reads 4/18/11

Matt Perryman recently wrote about patience in the game of strength training.  In this blog post he attempts to redefine “progress” for the sake of sanity.  The noob in the weight room can bank on weekly gains in strength and even size.  As experience under the bar accumulates though and you venture closer to your genetic limits, whatever that might mean, framing how you look at success in the weight room makes a heck of a lot of sense.  Matt offers up some very sage wisdom here.

The starvation mode caused by excessive cardio?  That’s what Tom Venuto discusses in his most recent article which you can read here.  It seems that many of today’s exercisers become a tad neurotic when it comes to volume and calorie intake.  Slash calories as low as possible while ramping up exercise volume to the moon and I’ll get the best of both worlds, right?  Wrong.  I can’t explain how many times I’ve had women email me asking for help with their plateaus who were training for a marathon while eating 1200 calories.  Tom does a great job explaining why this simply isn’t The Way.  Energy availability matters!

Anthony Colpo isn’t subtle when he wrote Why Most People are Overweight, Out of Shape & Likely to Stay that Way.  Rightfully so, too.  It gets tiring telling people to focus on what we know – the basics – all the while they’re out throwing their money at con men in hopes of a quick fix.

I reviewed Jamie Hale’s book, Should I Eat the Yolk, back in October.  It’s a fun, easy read that dispels a lot of the myths that plague the fitness industry.   He covers this topic in the book, but he also wrote about Is Bottled Water Safer Than Tap Water on his site, which is an eye-opening read.

In this article, James Krieger answers the question, Why Is It So Easy to Regain Weight?  In reality he’s really doing some investigation into what many of my readers label as the “starvation mode.”  He explains how a reduction in basal metabolic rate might not be the primary culprit at play in adaptive thermogenesis.  Instead, a reduction in non-exercise activity thermogenesis may play a greater role.  Put differently, people who lost considerable weight were expending less energy than what would be predicted given their weight simply because they were moving less.

Lyle McDonald is one of the best writers out there in the fitness field in my opinion.  Most of his articles and all of his books go into great detail about the topic he’s writing about.  Amusingly, one of my favorite articles of his has to do with “subordinating” the finer details to the fundamental principles.  This is something you always hear me harping about – “You’ll get most of your mileage out of the basics so focus on them.”  Lyle’s Fundamental Principles Versus Minor Details is definitely worth a read.