Your Brain's Crossings

Major Bone and Vessels Crossings

Crossings of vascular channels by bone or other structures (arteries, intestines, ) are spots that require attention in strength training in order to enhance circulation to the terminal organs.

Like any hydrodynamic system, the flow of fluids follows the least resistance routes and are pushed by pressure gradient.

In the body, the blood vessels provide the least resistance highway for blood flow. The heart and muscles impart the pressure gradient that circulates the blood and lymph around the body. The bones provide the rigid support of the blood vessels under the crossings, from one region to the other. Thus, crossing from the chest to the neck, which constitutes the most crucial blood crossing in the body, requires the clavicles and scapulas to be anchored on the spine in such manner that permits the unrestricted blood flow to the brain. Here, at those bony crossings, strengthening exercises make all the difference between health and fitness, and weakness and wasting.



Strengthening The Crossings

In a last week article in the NEJM titled "A Sinister Development — A 35-year-old woman presented to the emergency department with a 2-day history of progressive swelling and pain in her left leg, without antecedent trauma", the crossing of the left iliac artery over the left iliac vein caused compression of the vein and blocked circulation to the whole left leg.


This diagram depicts the anatomy of crossing:



In the Clean, Front Squat, there are two major bone-artery crossing that require constant emphasis in order to advance the strength of lifting.

1- The Clavicle-Subclavian vein Crossing:

Racking the bar on the shoulders presses down the clavicles. The fallen clavicles crucify the Subclavian veins and numb the arms. When the weight is too heavy, the arm circulation is totally blocked and the shoulders have to give up, dropping the barbell to the floor.



2- The Radius-Radial Artery Crossing:

The overhand grip in the Clean ends by placing the radius bone (the outer bone of the forearm) over the radian artery at its elbow path to the forearm. A weak forearm musculature causes the arms to numb and fail to support the barbell in front squat.

Many bodybuilders opt to use the underhand grip to avoid that crucifixion, as shown above.



Today, Wed Jul 11, 2007 11:07 pm , I devoted a whole workout for the strengthening the crosses, thanks to the above article:

1- Declined bench presses: 10 sets, no counting 20, 50, 60 kg loads. I devoted 5 sets of 5 reps in 85 kg then 3 sets of 3 reps in 100 kg, then 2 sets of 2 reps in 100 kg. That should enhance the lower support of the clavicles.

2- I supersetted the declined bench with standing triceps presses, starting from 20 kg up to 50 kg, in 8 sets of 5 rep.

3- I supersetted the above two with abdominal sit-ups of 5 sets by 20 reps with twist.

4- I then moved to theseated front press and did 10 sets, 3 in 60 kg, 3 in 70, and 3 in 80 of 6 to 3 reps. And ended with 1 set of 90 kg in 2 reps. That felt great. Both that radial and clavicular crossing were now well strengthened.

5- I supersetted the shoulder press with weighted abdominal sit-ups on declined bench starting with 20 kg for 4 sets and 40 kg in 4 sets all of 6 reps. That was very invigorating exercise.

6- In thedeadlift, two fellows joined me. So I stayed light in 60 kg for 4 sets of 5. Then, solo, moved to 100 kg for 2 sets and 140 kg in 2 sets all in 3 reps.

7- Then I was invited to do dips in 4 sets of 10 and triceps again in heavy 80 bounds rope extension over the back.

Here is my reasoning:

1- Abdominal strengthening with weights in extensive number of sets enhances diaphragmatic support and respiratory muscles.
2- The Chest and Shoulder presses further enhance respiratory muscles and clavicular and scapular attachments.
3- The Deadlift strengthens the support of skull-spine structures (Trapezius and spinal erectors). That further supports the clavicles.
4- The seated front press and standing triceps presses strengthen the forearm crossings in the overhand grip.

ere is my reasoning:

Lift With Me

Learning how to lift weights beyond the age of 7 years is as demanding as learning academic subjects in elementary school. It would require many years of hard, and consistent labor, in order to implant the seeds of a new discipline into your brain.

Now, imagine that you were 12 years old, never learned how to read, write, or think literally. Then, imagine how formidable would be the task of getting you to decipher the secrets of the alphabets and numerals that afford literal folks the luxury of communicating by symbols. 

Lifting with me is, therefore, not a pleasant cake walk. It never has been except for very few people with very special gifts. 

 Most of those gifted students of mine came from the poorest and neediest families, which gave them the deepest appreciation for acquiring the skills of weightlifting. People with the least resources are truly too naive to tell that lifting weights would never make them rich.

Have you ever noticed that the most talented circus clowns sleep in tents, on deserted lands or cheap hotels? Like circus clowns, weightlifters enjoy the greatest benefits of being awesomely strong and healthy, yet least appreciated as professionals. They invest in their health, whereas a professional is required to generate revenues for enriching the employer. 

Even if you commit to the brutal demands of training for weightlifting despite the lack of any immediate financial gratification, and despite your advanced illiteracy in physical performance, you are faced with the demands for extraordinary creativity in order to overcome your addiction to laziness, indiscretion, and poor understanding of the nature of biological development of your physique.  You might have retained a great sense of the challenges of your early years of life and how you triumphed over many relentless challenges, both emotional and physical.  

Such retention of your past success might be the only hope for your potential to triumph in the future, lifting with me, in another chapter of your development and growth.  

In the immediate environment of in-person training, the governing relationship between the trainer and the trainee is no different from any human relation , where the two parties interact on emotional basis, rather than objective, rational one. An annoying, unpleasant, or unreliable trainee would lose the best chances of benefiting from his/her mentor, who would be rather seeking cheerful company than putting up with difficult encounters.  In the indirect forum of training through books, media, and other forms of remote communication, other untoward issues arise such as the lack of understanding of the distant parties of each other's motive. You would have hard time to emotionally attach to a remote mentor when your own relationships with others are founded on look, touch, and picking and choosing your acquaintances. 

If your experience has led you to develop deep appreciation for getting healthier, stronger, and smarter about  physical performance, you would have to strive to isolate your handicap and annoying ignorance from those who could lend you hand during your development and growth. Like a drowning victim who is being rescued by divers, you have to submit entirely to the hands of your saviors. In stead of being submerged under water, you are buried under tons of exercises, policies of training, and strict physical operations that affect your body and mind in a manner very predictable to experienced people other than you. 

All your taboos have to be crushed and new ones constructed in their place. If you believe that you should only be lifting weight to stay healthy and not become a champion, then no one would put up with your mediocre goal.

First, if you have never been a champion, you may not predict that you could not be one. Again, no one likes people with lame outlook on life.

Second, if you believe that you must have a definitive time frame for reaching certain landmark then you are in the wrong business because no one could predict when a genius would arise out of someone. Some people drag their feet in life like every ordinary others, yet the same people could be transformed to greater heights when opportunities trigger their hidden potentials.  

Having primed your brain to accommodate the new discipline, you are then faced with the true nitty gritty of the sciences of mechanics, physiology, and psychology. You have to learn how to reduce the number of exercises to the most practical limit that does not batter your psyche to despair.

You have to develop penetrating senses to what exercises could do good to your heart and lungs while maintaining progressively strengthening musculoskeletal frame. 

If you could quickly grip the fundamentals of picking the least number of the most effective exercises that maintain highly integrated bodily health, you then need to do the unthinkable of committing your remaining years of life to such new discipline of lifting, planning, and making decisions on many fronts of hard core sciences. 


My own growth and development were impacted by many fortunate events that kept me on the right trial, navigating between all sorts of adversaries. My greatest asset was my lack of ability to express my gut feeling when the urge kicks in. That gave me opportune time to test many new challenges before I would have avoided them from the initial outlook. Listening, waiting, and avoiding immediate reactions have enriched my life with many precious skills which many people lacked, out of their ignorance of how to acquire such skills or what to make of them.

Books I read on weight lifting, health, and the like.

Exercise, Fitness, Nutrition Hyper Fitness: 12 Weeks to Conquering Your Inner Everest and Getting Into the Best Shape of Your Life  

Pilates  

30 Essential Yoga Poses: For Beginning Students and Their Teachers

Health Home Workout: WORKOUT Bible

50 Ways to a Healthy Heart (Thorsons Directions for Life]

Basic Routines For Massive Muscles: Beef-It Training Secrets

Yoga: The Path To Holistic Health

Bob Greene's Total Body Makeover: An Accelerated Program of Exercise and Nutrition for Maximum Results in Minimum Time

The Ultimate Body Book: 4 Weeks to Your Best Abs, Butt, Thighs, and More!  

12-Minute Total-Body Workout

Weight Training Made Easy: Transform Your Body in Four Simple Steps

The Edge

Be Your Own Personal Trainer

Total Body Plan: Men's Fitness

Four Way Burn: The All-in- One Training Program for: Stronger Muscles, More Flexibility, Improved Posture and Balance, Increased Energy and Power

The Naked Warrior

Making the Cut: The 30-Day Diet and Fitness Plan for the Strongest, Sexiest You

Bodybuilding 101: Everything You Need to Know to Get the Body You Want

Encyclopedia of Muscle & Strength

An Introduction to Olympic- Style Weightlifting

Getting Stronger: Weight Training for Sports

Men's Health The Body You Want in the Time You Have: The Ultimate Guide to Getting Leaner and Building Muscle with Workouts that Fit Any Schedule

From Scrawny to Brawny: The Complete Guide to Building Muscle the Natural Way

Kettlebells: Strength Training for Power & Grace

Mark Anthony's Once-a-Week Workout:

The Revolutionary New Program to Transform Your Body in 12 Weeks

100 Days of Weight Loss: The Secret to Being Successful on ANY Diet Plan

Stretching, 20th Anniversary

Weightlifting, Olympic style

Getting Stronger: Weight Training for Sports

You: On A Diet: The Owner's Manual for Waist Management

Men's Health Better Body Blueprint: The Start-Right, Stick-to-It Strength Training Plan

The Whitaker Wellness Weight Loss Program

The New High Intensity Training: The Best Muscle- Building System You've Never Tried

The Truth

Lean, Long & Strong: The 6- Week Strength-Training, Fat- Burning Program for Women

Muscle Mechanics - 2nd Edition

The Complete Book of Isometrics: The Anywhere, Anytime Fitness Book

Complete Book of Core Training: The Definitive Resource for Shaping and Strengthening The Muscles of the Abdomen, Hips, and Lower Back

Pilates and Yoga

Body for Life for Women: A Woman's Plan for Physical and LIFE Mental Transformation

Eat More, Weigh Less: Dr. Dean Ornish's Life Choice Program for Losing Weight Safely While Eating Abundantly

5-Factor Fitness  [Theatrical Release]

ABSolution: The Practical Solution for Building Your Best Abs

Strength Training for Women

The American Physical Therapy Association Book of Body Maintenance and Repair

G-Force: The Ultimate Guide to Your Best Body Ever

The Complete Book of Abs for Women: The Definitive Guide for Women Who Want to Get into the Ultimate Shape

Weight Training for Dummies

Explosive Power & Strength: Complex Training for Maximum Results

Arnold's Bodybuilding for Men

Classic Weight Release

Super Joints: Russian Longevity Secrets for Pain- Free Movement, Maximum Mobility & Flexible Strength

Relax into Stretch : Instant Flexibility Through Mastering Muscle Tension

The Abs Diet: The Six-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life

Get with the Program

Strength Training Anatomy

Getting Stronger: Weight Training for Men and Women (Revised Edition)

Explosive Lifting for Sports

The Ultimate Weight Solution: The 7 Keys to Weight Loss Freedom

The Weightlifting Encyclopedia: A Guide to World Class Performance

Powerlifting

The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding

Core Performance: The Revolutionary Workout Program to Transform Your Body and Your Life 

Bullet-Proof Abs Beyond Crunches

The Russian Kettlebell Challenge

Bullet-Proof Abs Beyond Crunches

The Russian Kettlebell Challenge

The South Beach Diet: The Delicious, Doctor-Designed, Foolproof Plan for Fast and Healthy Weight Loss

The South Beach Diet Cookbook

 

Body for Life Success Journal

Body for Life: 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strength

Body Maintenance and Repair

The American Physical Therapy Association Book of Body Maintenance and Repair 

by Steve Vickery 

Edition: Paperback 

Reliable academic information, few flawed presentations, January 30, 2005 

This book would have easily won rive stars nao autnors strived to respect the intelligence of its readers. Although the book mainly emphasizes body maintenance and repair, it presents extensive tips and exercises to do more than its title indicates. The major flaw with the book presentation is its authors' short-winded' style of sloppiness and poor research. The Table of Contents demonstrates the clear goals of the book in systematic and scientific manner. 

Chapter One, "The Back", also stresses that clear goal, by making the spine the center of attention of any physical rehabilitation and maintenance. Troubles start from Chapter 2 on, as follows. 1- In the first nine chapters, there is sloppy redundancy of "copy and paste" of paragraphs. You will read the same paragraphs on "rheumatoid arthritis", "arthritis", "spasm", "muscle tightness", "trigger points", "osteoarthritisTT, "rest", and so on, so many times as if you are reading the same chapter nine times in the same book. Even many of these chapters end with the same paragraph, with the word "mechanics". 2- Although the book graphics are scientific and serve the purpose of si mplification and clarification, some of the drawings are poorly labeled and poorly representative. 

The drawings of the hip anatomy in chapter 7, for example, do not show the hip abductors. Most of the drawings of posture and gait do not demonstrate the real dynamics of human body of scapular, spinal, or pelvic contours during motion. They are drawn by artists inexperienced in human anatomy. 3- Although most of chapters 10 to 17 are informative and concise, some of them are unnecessarily abbreviated. 

Chapter 13, "Body Weight", for example, is merely two pages. Chapter 12, "Body mechanics", is a clear proof on how academic writers misunderstand physical performance. The authors attempt to explain the proper way of lifting in a flawed manner that might skip the attention of nonlifters. For example, they advise bending the knees and elbows while lifting from the floor. They explain that that would prevent elbow overextension and back stress. The drawing in that chapter shows a man squatting on his toes with elevated heels. They also advise advancing one foot ahead of the other during squatting. The described process of lifting is flawed because of the following: 0) You should not bend your knees while lifting unless you have trained them to do so. Untrained knees could easily buckle during lifting and cause accidents. (ii) Lifting with straight elbows does not over-extend them because the gravity pulls downwards with the shoulders positioned over the elbows. overextension only happens when the shoulders and elbows are on the same horizontal level, like in lying-down chest flyer. (iii) Advancing one foot ahead creates asymmetric spinal stress. Lifting on evenly positioned feet guarantees symmetric spinal loading. (iv) The most important tips in the technique of proper lifting are the chest thrusting and spinal arching. These could obviate knee bending as in the "stiff-legged deadlift". 4- The exercises in Chapters 18 and 19, show the depth of academic understanding of human anatomy. The exercises are plenty and diverse and presented with scientific drawings that emphasize the main purpose of each exercise. The main flaw however, is the poor practical knowledge of the authors about real exercise. This is clear in the so many drawings that show people sitting and lifting weights. Shoulder shrugs, Biceps curls, jaw opening, neck exercises, and many others are performed while seated. Too many sitting exercises should have been done while standing in order to enhance overall physical balance and fitness. Lifting weights while seated is dangerous unless the person is highly trained to maintain lower back lordosis during loading. 

The Russian Kettlebell Challenge

by Pavel Tsatsouline

Edition: Paperback

Deceitful and flawed analysis, dangerous practice , September 8, 2004 

(1) Contents: The book contains 143 pages of text, out of them are 16 blank, 36 pages of advertisement, the font is large, and there is a lot of white spaces. There is no index. All references are personal verbal quotations from professors, scientists, and doctors without exact date or location of publication, such as Professors Medvedyev, Anatoly Laputin, Yuri Verkhoshansky,Arkady Vorobyev, Matveyev, and Desbonnet. There are 15 references written in Russian that are hard to trace and only one unknown English reference by Supertraining. 

(2) The book starts by "Vodka at night, pickle juice in the morning, throwing some Kettlebells around between this hangover and the next one", page 3. I do not think that the author is aware of the danger of inebriation and risky vigorous activity. The author tries forcefully to revive an obsolete sport by citing a 1913 Russian magazine.

(3) The author cites the names of the legendary weightlifters such as Vlasov, Alexeyev, Leonid Zhabotinskiy, page 17, and states that Zhabotinskiy started lifting with Kettlebells without citing a reference or proving that they trained or competed in that Kettlebells sport. The author then advises weightlifters to use Kettlebells to enhance shoulder flexibility by overhead squat. What he does not know is that weightlifters have all tools for flexibility, strength, coordination, and endurance and would not listen to an outsider with unsubstantiated ideas. 

(4) On page 31, the author states: "How Kettlebells melt fat and build a powerful heart without the dishonor of dieting and aerobics". He explains that the fat loss power of Kettlebells is explained by the extremely high metabolic costs of throwing a weight around combined with the fat burning effect of the growth hormone stimulated by such exercise. He quotes Charles Poliquin for explaining that the more lactic acid produced during weightlifting, the more the growth hormone is produced. The produced growth hormone, he claims, melts fat. That false claim that weight lifting causes weight loss, without dieting or aerobics, shows how the author is overreaching. Lactic acid causes fatigue and must be metabolized by the liver in order for muscles to function efficiently. Because lactic acid is produced maximally during anaerobic activity, it hinders fat loss, which requires aerobic activities such as running. Weightlifters do not lose weight by lifting but by dieting and aerobics. With Vodka, the liver is impaired. If Kettlebells throwing is added, then more lactic acid would worsens the liver impairment. Thus, strength training and hangover do not go hand in hand as the author claims. Although, growth hormone mobilizes fat, it does so in bursts during maximal stress. Fat mobilization is optimum when blood glucose is low during extended aerobic work beyond 15 minutes of sustained activity. continued.... 

(5) The author makes another false claim that heavy impact causes joints to be relatively free from osteoarthritis in old age and attributes that to Drs. Verkhoshansky and Sniff, without stating the nature of the source. 

(6) The author makes another false promise that kettlebell training can lead to huge muscles if the trainee wishes, page 23. He makes an erroneous analysis on page 64 by first defining the force as F=ma then confuses that with the potential energy of dropping a 72 pounder from seven feet. Force and energy are two different things. On page 121, the author confuses ' intensity' for 'volume'. He cites the sport expert Voropayev for using the number of repetitions of a 32 kg Kettlebell of 50 as an index of intensity and extrapolates that to mean that 40 repetitions corresponds to 80% intensity, page 122. Intensity should refer to the weight and not the repetition. With fifty repetition and light weight, the Kettlebell could not induce the high tension of low repetitions and heavy weight. The author recognizes this fact in his book, Power to The People", pages 16 and 18. Thus, while the author promises his readers to use the Kettlebell in order to avoid Olympic Weightlifting which is elitist, he claims, page 16, and promises to achieve the same results with Kettlebells, he contradicts himself on the high repetition, low intensity principle that fatigues the muscles and precipitates trauma 

(7) Kettlebell drills are dangerous and even fatal as the author warns on page 49. Because of the eccentricity of the Kettlebell, it sits on the back of the hand on overhead lifts. The lifter in the photos on pages 14, 35, and 58 show serious scoliosis (lateral spinal curvature), which is very dangerous during lifting (causes spinal hernia and paralysis). The too many repetitions traumatize the shoulder, elbow, wrist, and spines.