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Monday there was an accident at a friend’s gym, with a power cage I am not used to. When I racked the bar with a relatively light weight, therefore, no equipment (120kg), the left side of the bar slipped from the support. I didn’t see that and proceeded to get out from under the bar. The bar twisted my knee and immediately ruptured my anterior cruciate ligament.
My physician – the one I trust my life with and treated other absurd injuries I had – said that this might not compromise my performance this year, even in squatting and deadlifting. The ACL stabilizes rotational movements. I’ve been reading a little about this and there is a lot of material on squatting and ACL. I think I trust my physician better, but there’s a lot to take into account.
From March 29th up to April the 10th I have been away from the Gym with a weird virosis. It started on a Sunday night, after a somewhat stressful business meeting. The previous Thursday and Friday had been strength test days and they were amazing: I had surpassed my prediction on a sub-maximal effort test.
I might have failed to supplement correctly post-workout, which is true; I might have not fed well Saturday, which was my birthday celebration; and the Sunday stress might have wrapped it up.
Anyhow, I had never been sick this long before, never had joint pain as I had now and never lost so much STRENGTH (not only 8lbs of muscle mass, measured by bio-conductivity tests).
I recently found myself without a well defined competition schedule after another one of those unbearable federation desintegrations that so often take place in Brazil. Coincidentally, I happened to be reviewing the chapter on periodization on my permanently-edited (I must make myself stop this) book on powerlifting.
I read Issurin’s paper on block periodization and it appeared to me that he addressed important issues as applied to powerlifting and strength sports in general. More to the point, the idea that it is more productive to limit the number of motor tasks being trained in each block, taking into account their retention up to the last block within a certain meso-cycle makes a lot of sense.
We handle potentially dangerous tasks concerning Central Nervous System responses. Every top powerlifter I know has had a nasty encounter with CNS overtraining. Another aspect of our preparation to be taken into account is the retention efficiency of task. Issurin’s idea that mixed training strategies overwhelm the athlete’s organism (in our case, I would say it overwhelms our CNS) explains much of the poor results we get when insisting on complex, extremely varied multi-task protocols.
I decided to plan my last meso-cycle according to these principles, in what I saw appropriate for powerlifting, and achieved interesting results. We’ll obviously have to wait until a next competition to verify this.
In November, Brazilian Food and Drug agency, ANVISA, proposed a bill according to which, if approved, supplements will be only be sold, under prescription, to high performance athletes. The agency established a period (that ends now, in January 13th ) for “public consultation”, during which the “public” may let their opinion known through e-mail, fax or letters to specific official addresses. This decision has been almost secret, having received practically no attention from the press.
On a first look, it might seem just another act of utter incompetence coming from a government that placed Union leaders in technical positions, instead of properly educated and experienced personnel. Looking closer, however, other agendas become evident. For about two years the Drugstore and Farmacy lobby has been putting pressure (and gaining ground) on the government in order to restrict the commercialization of certain products such as creatine and BCAA, on the grounds that their consumption may be harmful.
The insipient supplement industry and commerce have been unable to counter-act the huge Drugstore lobby, believed to be backed by the Pharmaceutical industry.
The other side of this picture is government corruption, combined with a Stalinist authoritarian hyper-regulative approach. Unfortunately, our local Stalinists have not inherited the opportunistic view of the original ones concerning high-performance sports.
Most Brazilian athletes come from underpriviledged segments of society. They would never have the resources to pay regular visits to nutritionists to get prescriptions for their supplements.
If ANVISA wins this war against the supplement industry, supplement retailers and athletes, it will take years to re-introduce again a scientifically sound and modern approach to nutrition and sports performance.
The official links to the facts above are the following:
Strength sports are still a lot about pushing the athlete through the stress curve. As a competitive powerlifter and researcher, I have been looking at this subject from inside and out. From the inside, there are two distinct approaches to achieving the “special maximum strength” observed in certain meets: the extreme stress-driven performance, with a lot of screaming, hitting and other means of enhancing alertness and stress response, and the focused approach. The latter is less common.
With the help of a more experienced and accomplished lifter, I came to adopt the focused approach about a year and a half ago. We called it the “white chair thing”. Basically, I spent the moments preceding my turn to lift facing the back of an available white plastic chair, emptying my mind. It is hard to claim this is the one or chief reason why my performance leaped to another level, I broke a couple of national and continental records and visibly improved. There were other factors involved.
After this event, however, I started systematically searching for evidence in the literature. Besides a very old article from decades ago showing competent Olympic lifters performed mental rehearsal of their lifts in opposition to less competent ones, there was very little published material. The search brought me to martial arts techniques. That, however, is a whole different realm of encoded knowledge. I wanted to understand the concept and application of QIGONG training to strength tasks.
The only way to do it, it seemed to me, was to learn through practice. I spent one year (from November 2007 to October 2008) learning qigong in a tai-chi-chuan program. During this one year, I was frustrated. My performance was irregular, mediocre at competitions and my injuries were a real impediment.
About three weeks after I quit tai-chi-chuan, however, I started applying some qigong techniques in weight training. The results impressed me. I want to create a self-experiment on this and record my results. I haven’t been doing this the way I want.
I think I will create one entry just for exercise and progress log.
Let’s see where I get from here. All input is welcome.
Again it seems that between science pull and market push, innovation, in this case, came from the latter: try typing “prehab” or “prehabilitation” in any scientific search tool. You get very few results (to be precise, 7 at Pubmed). But Google it and you get 45.200 results.
A number of prehabilitation clinics have already taken advantage of the generalized perception among coaches and athletes that prevention is the key to performance. They must rely on their own clinical experience and feedback from patients, since Academia hasn’t provided a critical mass of empirical evidence yet.
I started doing prehab too late: technically, it was not prehab. It was just a more systematic approach to rehab, since my injuries had evolved to a point that I could no longer train or compete without excruciating pain. I don’t have to add that it has been a mediocre competitive year.
Prehab is about a special type of physical therapy intervention: monitoring the athlete throughout the competitive season. Early signs of injury are checked, a periodized program of injury prevention is developed according to the competition calendar and exercises and treatments are adjusted according to the athelete’s response.
I think I can only say that I am engaged in prehab now. I still feel my epicondylitis in both elbows, but it is improving. Not fast, but improving. We have slowly added new preventive practices to my weekly and daily routine and, if I stick to it, I am pretty sure I will get better.
All in all, prehab requires discipline from the athlete. Not easy, but a sufficient amount of love and commitment to your sport should do the trick.
Check this:
http://www.prehab.com/
Whatever it is, I feel like Jell-o. Maybe just a bad combination of work related stress, urinary tract infection and a lot of injuries. The fact is that I decided to give up training for meets this year, and this has been a relief. I’ve got to concentrate on writing and taking care of our Federation, translating SSA and GPC rulebooks and much more. And rest – man… I need some rest…
I’m back to work, training and going to meets. But the after-effect has been a strength deficit and loss of motor coordination in the left hand. I am not sure about the arm – triceps, biceps and certain forearm muscles seem to be less affected. I have less episodes of numbness in the last three fingers and I am already able to type. But the strength deficit beats me: I can’t figure out what’s actually going on. I am adopting quite heterodox strategies, such as writing, playing with small rubber balls and doing other weird motor tasks with my left hand to stimulate neural re-adaptation. I am not giving up reaching a real good mark on the deadlift this year, still…
For more than a week I have been struggling with an excruciating pain located primarily right under the rhomboids, migrating to posterior deltoids (like it were inside my armpit) and inner part of triceps. According to my physician, this injury was caused by an inadequate office arrangement, particularly a ridiculous kitchen plastic chair. Some months ago my office chair was broken. Instead of buying another one and checking for postural adequateness, I just grabbed the plastic kitchen chair and have been working on it ever since. Obviously, with the most inadequate posture, all hunched and contracted, elbows held high with permanently contracted upper back muscles and much more. About 10 days ago, the inevitable consequences showed up and I have this weird back pain irradiating to the tips of my fingers. They seem to be related to nerve compression at the T2 region, but it comes and goes. Other symptoms show muscle involvement and muscle relaxants help more than pain killers. Electro-acupuncture is really good and cortisone local application helped a little. I lost some control on my left hand and there is a measurable strength deficit on this side as well. It seems to be getting a little better, though. Yes: I bought a new chair.
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