Thanks!
by Jonathon Sullivan
The third annual Strength Science Review.
Article
Thanks!
Thank you for preparing and writing this article. It is refreshing to read critical analysis by someone knowledgeable in the field.
Hot shit, Herr Doktor. As always, packed with awesome turns of phrase:
"I conclude, based on this fairly weak data, that “a moderate level of PNF could profitably be skipped altogether with no negative effect and a highly beneficial increase in available training time.”
I read through this review with great pleasure, mostly in learning about anatomy and physiology I hope to understand passively, without the intent to master. When I finished one pass through the review I did ask myself what I had learned that I might tell a student, beyond "If you train with barbells, rest and eat, you will get stronger." I had two replies to that question. First, I should consider asking a student whether he or she takes statins - and lots of yuppies do, for anxiety, as well as geezers for blood pressure. Second, I wouldn't be playing a doctor on tv to point out that barbell training engages with muscle and fat as glands that signal activity throughout the body. Thanks!
Am I the only one who was thinking this;
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This is fantastic, as always. Thanks!
Page 13's link to the Inflammation article has an extra period that breaks the link, just FYI.
I was mistaken to say that yups take statins. I was thinking of beta blockers. The point remains that I don't want to play doctor but I do want to alert a student to well-established insight about the body in training. Today as I think about reading the review yesterday I have been wondering what my wish list would be for points to be cleared up by a long-term, large-population study that both probed null hypotheses with double-blind protocols and produced persuasive epidemiological observations. First, is progressive barbell training an intervention with unique qualities? When Sullivan looks at a patient with metabolic syndrome and thinks, "If I could get you under a barbell I could change your life?" is that different than thinking "If you would stop drinking soda pop and walk to the tv set it would change your life?" Obviously, these reviews trend toward a yes to that question but if we could run any studies we wanted as long as we wanted on as many people as we wanted, what would they be? If we had five points we would be comfortable printing on a poster and putting on the wall of a gym where we were recruiting geezers to lift for health purposes, without an MD in the house, what would they be? I am sure you all are far ahead of me on this. I offer this reflection as part of my study. Thanks for the work -
Great read. Thank you.
I went back to the other bench biochemist I read who works as a physician and writes literature review. The take-away from the career of Nortin Hadler, a rheumatologist here at UNC, is stated in the final edition of his last scholarly book, Occupational Skeletal Disorders (2005). He now restates his message in a series of books for the public. Maybe the most relevant to this forum is his Stabbed in the Back (2009). Nortin points out that we all must suffer and die but none of us has to be a patient or a litigant. We may rather choose to cope. He praises exercise faintly but he doesn't know much about it. It seems to me that barbell training for strength is a deliberate intervention in coping skills with measurable results. So, reading Jonathon Sullivan's literature review this year I became excited toward the end when he seemed to be heading toward saying that a novice progression could become a prescribable, reimbursable intervention for say metabolic syndrome, like getting a scrip to go see a pulmonary therapist. That sounds great to me. But it also sounds like turning an opportunity for someone to increase their coping skills into a dependency, a degradation of their ability to suffer and die with style. See what I mean? Aren't you glad you have a medical anthropologist reading this stuff? Anyways. Thanks again for an intellectual highlight of my year. Reading the literature review and thinking of Sullivan in his two clinics have greatly helped me as I stand around my Crossfit gym waiting for others to realize we all need to know what we are doing.