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24 Motion is Great Joint Lotion - Dr. Lou Fierro Apr 17, 2017

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You might recall in our last episode, Adam shared the very intimate details of his lifelong struggle with lower back pain and how he's conquering it by combing slow motion, high-intensity strength training with a positive attitude. Here in episode 24, we get into some of the psychological aspects of a negative diagnosis, such as a lower back problem, and how that diagnosis alone can prolong an illness or injury. Conversely, we'll share some interesting data that supports the notion that a simple attitude adjustment can change the course of your rehabilitation towards a faster recovery. Dr. Louis Fierro who is a chiropractor and works with the InForm Fitness Active Rehabilitation program joins Adam Zickerman to offer up his suggestions and solutions for those experiencing back pain. Below is a link to the book Adam mentioned in this episode: Foundation: Redefine You Core, Conquer Back Pain, and Move with Confidence: Below is a link to the article Adam mentioned in this episode: http://bit.ly/FoundationRedefineYourCore A Rational Approach to the Treatment of Low Back Pain by Brian W. Nelson, MD http://www.medxonline.com/pdf/rationalapproachtotreatment.pdf Don't forget Adam's Zickerman's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution. You can purchase Adam's book in Amazon by clicking here: http://bit.ly/ThePowerofTen To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you to give this workout a try, please visit www.InformFitness.com. At the time of this recording we have locations in Manhattan, Port Washington, Denville, Burbank, Boulder, Leesburg and Resten. If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com. For information regarding the production of your own podcast just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.com Transcription to this episode is below: Motion is Great Joint Lotion Louis: People get diagnosed, and then they go into this sick syndrome if you will as Adam described and their anxiety levels go through the roof. They're told to take [Inaudible] and medication and immobilize, rest, don't actively engage and really here at InForm Fitness, it's the opposite. The patients are clients with the clients and taught to enthusiastically actively engage in not only an exercise program of high-intensity, but a healthy lifestyle. Tim: InForm Nation, good to have you back with us here on the InForm Nation podcast. 20 minutes with New York Times bestselling author, Adam Zickerman, and friends. I'm Tim Edwards with the InBound Podcasting Network and a client of InForm Fitness. You just heard the voice of Dr. Louis Fierro, he's a chiropractor who works with Adam in the InForm Fitness Active Rehabilitation program. Now in this episode, Dr. Lou as he's affectionally called, will offer up his suggestions and solutions for those experiencing back pain, much like Adam has. You might recall on the last episode, Adam shared the very intimate details of his lifelong struggle with lower back pain, and how he's conquering it by combing slow motion, high-intensity strength training with his attitude. Here on episode 24, we get into some of the psychological aspects of a negative diagnoses such as a back problem, and how that alone can prolong an illness or injury. Conversely, we'll share some interesting data that supports the notion that a simple attitude adjustment can change the course of your rehabilitation towards a faster recovery. Joined as always by Sheila Melody, the co-owner and general manager of the Burbank location, and Mike Rogers, the general manager of the Manhattan location. Here is the founder of InForm Fitness, Adam Zickerman. Adam: I read this article a couple of years ago which really resonated with me, written by some doctors that treat lower back problems, non-surgically, the way we're actually doing it here and the way we recommend people do it, but it's not just a physical program of exercise that he was talking about. There was another aspect about people getting better, and that was the mental side of it which I found really interesting. For years and years and years, people kept telling me you've got to do something about your back. Every so often you're getting these spasms, you've got to get some MRIs and some interventions, like surgical type of interventions. At the very least, get injections into the facets of your spine, all these techniques that I was very resistant to because in my mind, my back problem was a temporary thing that I had to solve. I didn't really believe that I had a back problem, I thought that there were some muscular things that weren't being dealt with and putting me into spasm, it wasn't a structural thing with my back, I was convinced of that, and therefore I never accepted the fact that I was somebody with back problems. Obviously when I had a spasm I had to accept the fact that I had a back problem, but the chronic pain that came and went from a one to a four, back to a one, I was just saying I need to do something in a nonsurgical way, I just haven't figured it out yet, and then the article talked about that. He was saying that a lot of patients, they fall into this sick role when they're told they have a back problem and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and now they have a back problem, and they just accept the fact that they have this back problem, and there's a huge psychological component to this. I realized that one of the reasons why I wasn't debilitated long term is because I never accepted the fact that I had this back problem and it's because of that nonacceptance if you will that I am where I am right now, but my attitude towards this whole thing is what I'm saying is what got me through this and there are a lot of people that kind of feel when they have a back problem, that's it and you rely on these surgical methodologies because there's no other way to fix it. Even though they have MRIs that are less remarkable than mine, so Dr. Lou Fierro, chiropractor that works out of our studio here in Manhattan and is involved in our active rehabilitation program and uses some of our equipment to help patients, is here with us today and I want him to talk about this idea that people play this sick role when all of a sudden they're told by a doctor that they have a back problem. Do you find that to be true? Lou: Absolutely, and you shared this article with me several months ago, and I thought the title said a lot [Inaudible: 00:05:10]. Adam: Brian Nelson, exactly. Lou: A rational approach to the treatment of lower back pain, and after I read it, I said this is really a proactive approach and that's the model we've always taken. Whether we had an elite level athlete, a professional athlete, a weekend warrior, the de-conditioned mother that's caring for kids that have so much anxiety when they're given an MRI and shown the results of a herniation, and the reality is if we took 100% of the population and gave them an MRI, specifically in the lumbar region, about 82% studies show, there would some shape or form of a degenerative change or a herniation between the ages of 22 and 65. Only about 30% of that population has a subjective complaint to follow and mirror that objective finding, so people get diagnosed and then they get into this sick syndrome, if you will as Adam described, and their anxiety levels go through the roof. They're told take [Inaudible: 00:06:02], take medication, immobilize, rest, don't actively engage, and really here at InForm Fitness, it's the opposite. The patients are educated, the clients are taught to enthusiastically actively engage, not only in an exercise program of high-intensity, but a healthy lifestyle. Once they're shown that I can BLT, bend, lift, and twist, and not exacerbate my condition, now I can walk up a flight of stairs. I can care for my children, I can be a good spouse. They just really decrease in their pain threshold, and inflammation in their body, because there have been studies to show that inflammation is not only caused by poor diet, overactive activities, but by stress levels. Cortisol — Adam: Lack of sleep. Lou: Side effects of medication, so I don't know the exact date that I first met Adam, but once I really saw the program that they were doing here, I kind of had to look twice at it and I realized wow, he's onto something. He's onto something more than most medical doctors have doing for the last twenty-five years. Tim: He's the guru, I keep telling you. Lou: I think as recently as last week in [Inaudible: 00:07:56], I said Adam you've got to come in here, I've got a patient that actually had a three level laminectomy and she's got rotational scoliosis in her back, and she has had nagging, nagging pain. I cannot remember [Inaudible: 00:08:13] may be the medication she's on, but without that medication, it's hard for her to function. I said you know what, we're going to throw her on the MedEx machine here, lumbar extension machine. This is after I did a little bit of what I call white knuckling, trigger point release into one of her spinal muscles that was contracted. Put her on that machine, she stood up, and she said I'm pain-free. Holy crap, I'm pain-free. Adam: It's like one of those evangelists that touch you. Lou: I said to her listen, marching orders are go leave now, live your life, don't do anything out of the ordinary, and she says I'm going to see my trainer tonight that's going to come to my house. I said you never told me you had a home trainer, what do you do with the trainer? She started demonstrating rotational chops, high force activities, high load activities, high back torque, loading the spine in ways that really aren't necessary. So she said do you mind talking to my trainer, I said not a problem. So I spoke to her and I have a patient the person and trainer may listen to this podcast, which is all cool but anyway. I spoke to the trainer, and I said let's just remove certain of those BLTs for right now, no bent over single arm rows and just keep it very linear, very static if you will. She was feeling good and I didn't want to say don't train at all because I didn't want to impede on her lifestyle. She came back in today, and she had discomfort, and I said when did the discomfort start? She said from the time I left you guys all the way up until I had my training session, I was pain-free, and then after my training session, it started to exacerbate again. I'm going to give a little bit of a time out, I don't know how comfortable I am giving this admission from her testimonial today because I don't want to offend her trainer. Anyway we put her back on that machine today, and once again she felt phenomenal. So this machine, essentially what is allows someone to do that is in an active back spasm or even or has a neurological deficit from a disc compression, locks down the pelvis in such a way that when you actively extend, the only muscles being engaged and being recruited are the lumbar and rector, and even some of the deep spinal rotators have to engage in straight extension. So it allows for a term that I like to use, instead of traction it's called decoaptation, where it's a joint segment that's being lengthened without cavitation of the joint. Adam: So for those of you that don't speak science, what he's saying here is that by fixing the hips in place and by doing a back extension but pushing yourself back, you're actually opening up the spaces of the vertebrae which gives you relief. Lou: On the note, it also gives kind of a self-massage into those spinal segments. The only time — I'm starting to question some of the traditional medical research, the only time where they say don't put a patient into extension is if they have facet arthrosis or facet arthritis, degeneration of the joints. Lately, I've kind of taken Adam's approach a little bit and said I'm going to test this, and I'm put a patient or two on there with facet arthrossi as diagnosed by a radiologist and confirmed by a surgeon, and they came out of it feeling better. So it goes back to my principle of motion is great joint lotion, and if we can actively engage a patient, not passively. The difference there is passively is the therapist is moving the patient, actively is them moving themselves and us assisting as a coach, making sure they're in the bio mechanical correct position. They feel better, not only from a physiological point of view, but from an emotional and social wellbeing. I can do this, I can exercise. Guess what, we do that for two or three sessions and then we move them to a leg press. As you mentioned earlier, I don't remember who said that they were struggling with it but then you just altered your position and you were pain-free. Adam: The leg press actually — I don't want to give the leg press a bad name, the leg press is actually very good for the lower back because it's strengthening your hip extensors which are your glutes. Those primary moves are also very important to work, matter of fact one of my mentors, Rob Francis told me that it's very important. Once you start doing some lower back extensions and you're starting to feel that relief, that it's important to start doing some of the major hip movements like leg press. Mike: Dr. Lou you can add onto this. There are probably sometimes, like if you wanted to do a leg press, there may be some conditions or just a status that a person is in, a client is in, where they're just not ready to perform a certain movement pattern and I guess the low back machine can prepare you for a leg press, or manual therapy of some kind. Is that what's necessary sometimes? Lou: Absolutely. Even when we had the patient in today, she was saying that she was getting some burn in her quads while doing the back extension. Adam: There's some static contraction in there. Lou: Exactly, but it's just a progression physiologically but it's also a progression mentally where hey, I just did that pain-free. Not only pain-free, I'm not in pain anymore therefore I'm going to do something else, and there have been many times where I've had a patient that's gotten acute lower back exacerbation. We get them through the back extension pain-free, and you say you know what, you're going to do one of the safe chest presses here. I'm going to add that in, what does that have to do with their back? Maybe not a lot but everything to do with their psychological profile about themselves, and years ago, I'm trying to remember the first time. I don't think I've ever shared this with Adam, but he actually probably knew. In 2002, I had opened up a rehab facility as part of my practice, and around that time I had a really bad, acute lower back condition and it was in the summer, and mine came — it was actually on a tractor. I was cutting my lawn, and the tractor went into an old kind of stump hole, it went down, I went up, and we met somewhere in the middle. It created an avulsion fracture on my left hip, and some secondary lower back issues. I went to see a doctor and they said take an epidural, have these pills, I didn't want to do that. I wanted to let my body heal, and I was in such excruciating back pain one morning that I said I'm going to get up and do some deep knee bends, and I did and it immediately increased my range of motion. So I started testing on patients, I started having patients who ha…

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23 Exercise - The Cure for Back Pain Apr 10, 2017

Show notes

As the Founder of InForm Fitness' Power-of-10 Workout, Adam Zickerman makes the claim every day that InForm Fitness offers the safest, most efficient strength training program around. But Adam has a confession for InForm Nation. Adam suffered an injury while exercising that resulted in acute, knock-you-on-your-butt, back muscle spasms. You can imagine Adam's dilemma as to whether or not he should fess up or cover up his recent injury. Hear the whole story in Episode 23 beginning with the surgery he experienced as a child, the details of his injury, and how he seems to have found a cure for his lifelong ailment. Click this link to read Adam's story at INFORM INSIGHTS: https://informfitness.com/back-spasms-exercise/ Pick up Adam's Zickerman's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution. You can buy it in Amazon by clicking here: http://bit.ly/ThePowerofTen To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you to give this workout a try, please visit www.InformFitness.com. At the time of this recording we have locations in Manhattan, Port Washington, Denville, Burbank, Boulder, Leesburg and Resten. If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com. Join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question. The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3. For information regarding the production of your own podcast just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.com The complete transcriptions for this episode is below: Tim: And we're back, InForm Nation! Glad you're doing us once again here for episode 23, on the InForm Fitness Podcast. Twenty minutes with Adam Zickerman and friends. For those joining us for the very first time, let's go around the horn and introduce everybody. I'm Tim Edwards with the InBound Podcasting Network, and a client of InForm Fitness, and joining me here in person at the InBound Studio is co-owner and general manager of the Burbank InForm Fitness location, Sheila Melody. Sheila, nice to see you three dimensionally instead of 2D via Skype nowadays, thanks for joining me. Sheila: Yeah, this is fun! Tim: And still in boring old 2D through the magic of Skype is general manager of the Manhattan location, Mike Rogers, and the founder of InForm Fitness, New York Times bestselling author, Power of Ten: The Once a Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution, also affectionally known as the guru, Adam Zickerman. What's up fellas? Adam: Hey. Mike: I've never called him the guru. Tim: No, ever? Mike: I'm going to start calling you that now, matter of fact, the guru. Adam: Mike was booking some guests on one of our podcast episodes, in his letters he writes, and he refers to me as his boss. I meant to talk to Mike about that, saying boss. Refer to me as your — I don't know — Tim: Your superior. The boss, the founder, Adam. Adam: Your colleague and the founder of InForm Fitness. Mike: You're going to go there, okay. You're going to wish I said boss next time. Tim: Alright well the boss has been having problems with his back, or at least he has in the past, and here in episode 23, we're going to refer back to a blog post of yours Adam from June of last year, 2016: Back Spasms From Exercise, which we'll have a link to in the show notes of course if you'd like to read them. In the blog post Adam, you offer up a confession, and you mention a back injury that you suffered as a kid. Now we'll get to that confession in just a moment, but let's start with the injury you suffered; what caused the injury, back many, many decades ago? Adam: Yeah I was a teenager, and I don't know exactly what caused the injury. I think it was a combination of sports and being active, but I also had this weird obsession about jumping staircases, and when I think back on my childhood life, I really think that my back injury was from trying to jump down ten stairs or fifteen stairs. I started to keep increasing the amounts of stairs I could jump. Tim: I did the same stuff, I really did. Mike: You probably hit your head one time and that's why your memory is — Adam: I do remember where it manifested itself. It could have been the stairs — when the back problem happened, I didn't feel it right away. It was during actually a basketball game, I was a point guard, and up until that point I was a pretty good point guard. At this particular game, I couldn't cut to my left. There was no pain, I was just very slow cutting to the left, and the ball kept getting stolen from me at mid court, and my father who was watching the game was like, and my coach and everybody was like, that's very unusual for Adam to get the ball just taken from him like that, every time he brings the ball up. It was that night that all of the sudden the back pain started. Now I've been saying for years that I think it was the basketball game that hurt my back, but very likely it was probably something before that that led up to it, and I'm thinking that crazy idea I had about jumping off of staircases. Tim: So 35, 40 years ago is when this probably began. Adam: Yeah, the symptoms were numbness in my right leg, radiating down my leg. I couldn't bend at all, I couldn't bend at my waist at all. I couldn't sit for more then a couple of minutes without the pain, I had to stand or lie down. Tim: As a kid. Adam: I was a kid, and the back of my leg was in a lot of pain and numb at the same time, my calf was numb. To this day, there is slight numbness to my slight calf compared to my left calf. I can feel some sensation, but it's definitely dulled; to this day, it's never recovered, so there's probably a little bit of nerve damage back then. Mike: So did you go to the doctor and find out what exactly happened? Adam: So we go to a doctor and remember I'm eleven, and when you have these symptoms as an adult, right away they say let's look at the back, but as a child, the last thing they were thinking about was a nerve compression of a herniated disc. So they were looking for everything else, including tumors of the spine. So there was a point there where I was meeting with oncologists and getting tests at NYU at New York University Medical Center. The tests for everything but a herniated disc, and when they eliminated all those things, they said could this kid have a herniated disc, and they performed a procedure called a myelogram. Which is a crazy procedure where they inject a dye into your spinal column, and they turn you upside down on a table, literally upside down, and let the dye kind of go down the spine or really up the spine, and when they see the fluid, this dye that they inject into your spinal column. When they see that dye deviate to the right or the left, that's where the herniation is, and that's how they were able to determine disc herniations back in the day, in the 70s. They still do that procedure but much less so now. So a myelogram is more or less an archaic methodology now, MRIs have pretty much taken over that. So when they saw the fact that I had a disc herniation, they were like holy cow, and I had surgery. I had surgery by a neurosurgeon, the surgery is called a laminectomy, and in part of the spine vertebrae, there's something called lamina, and the lamina was removed to pretty much reduce the pressure that was being pushed against it by the disc, pushing a nerve into the lamina. So they took away the lamina, no more pressure against the nerve, and the pain went away, but there was a compromise there. There was a structural compromise done when you remove structure from your vertebrae. So ever since that surgery, I've been able to bend and I've been able to play all my sports, and I've lived a fairly normal life. However, probably ten years into post surgery, I would start getting back spasms. These horrible, horrible, bring you down to your knees, can't move, and if you move, you go into another spasm. It's almost like being hooked up to a car battery and every time — you sit and you're kidnapped, and every time you say something wrong, they hit the switch and you're shocked. That's what a back spasm is, where there is sometimes I would be suffering spasms and if I tried to move out of my position, I would go right back into position. It was just nonstop spasm after spasm after spasm, and this can go on for hours. They're excruciating, it's literally like being shocked. Sheila: It sounds like torture. Adam: It's very painful. Tim: And this is something you experienced in your twenties now? These back spasms. Adam: I've been experiencing those from my twenties up until now. Mike: I've seen Adam over the years about half a dozen times, during the workday, they kind of come out of nowhere. I don't know if he worked out earlier that day or whatever, but I've seen him have to go down to the ground and put a tennis ball, just lay down on a tennis ball and stuff like that. Adam: Those are for the good ones. Sometimes they got so bad that I would literally get nauseated and want to vomit, and it's just relentless, it doesn't go away. The only thing that makes it better is time. A couple days on my back, it finally starts to subside. I also take Flexeril, which is a muscle relaxant, and that seems to take the edge off when things are really bad. Alright so that's the history. Tim: Let's fast forward a few years now, right, because Adam, let's jump to the confession now. I'll tell you, if I'm listening to this and I'm hearing you, Adam Zickerman, the founder of InForm Fitness, suffering from back spasms, my first question honestly is, well did that happen as a result of high-intensity strength training? Adam: No, definitely not. Although I've tweaked it during workouts, the confession that you're referring to, this blog that I wrote, I was doing leg press, and I was pushing myself. I set a new weight, it was a new seat setting that put a little bit more strain on my back apparently. I was training myself and probably my thought went somewhere else, and my hips lifted a little bit, and all they have to do is lift a millimeter, and bam, I felt something. It wasn't the spasm, but I felt something, I was like oh boy. Usually, you feel something and it just progressively gets worse, and I know I'm in for it. Sometimes you feel that pain, I've been dealing with this for so long in my life, you feel that initial pain and you say to yourself, okay, five more hours from now, I'm going to be on my back. I've got to get my ass home, put that ice pack on, and hope for the best. Of course, it comes, it does come, and it came this last time, and this was less than a year ago. Tim: I remember we recording some podcasts last year, and you were really struggling with your back during one of those episodes that we had. So this happened, that's your confession Adam, in your blog post was — Adam: The confession is here I am, exercises quote unquote guru with a bad back. It's like being an obese nutritionist or something. Mike: They're out there. Adam: I interviewed one, not to change the subject, but somebody came looking for — making some nutrition referrals and she was overweight, I was like come on. Tim: So here you are, again like we said, founder of InForm Fitness, on one of your machines. You just lost focus, and maybe one of the mistakes you made I guess was training yourself, and someone not watching you as closely as all of the trainers at InForm Fitness do with their clients, and this happened. So there's that confession. So since this incident Adam that you mentioned in your blog post, have you had any back spasms? Adam: No I haven't, and I think there are a couple of reasons for it. One reason we'll talk about now, and another reason we'll talk about in another episode of our podcast. Mike: Real quick Adam, is this the longest period you've gone without a back spasm? Adam: This is — I'm approaching the longest period I've gone without a back spasm right now. The last five years, I've been getting about maybe two or three back spasms a year, now it's been about a year since I had one. When I was in my twenties, I only got one a year. The difference between when I was in my twenties and recently was they came more often, and they healed a lot slower when I got older. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I would get one, a couple of days later, back to new. Now, been lingering, my wife has been saying, wow Adam, it just seems like your back is always hurting now, always crooked. Even when I wasn't in spasm, my posture was just off, and there was always this like — I would say, I would give it a 4/10 in terms of pain, just ongoing. So I was always feeling something in my back at a level four, spasms are a ten plus. When I'm about to go into spasm, sometimes there's an eight and seven, and I can work. I can go into work with an eight and deal with it, and I kept saying this is muscular, this is neuromuscular, this is not structural. I know my body, I know an MRI is going to be what they say in medicine as remarkable, it's not going to show much of anything, but of course, because they were lasting longer and becoming more frequent, I was like what do I have to do lose? Go get an MRI, what's the big deal? So I got it, and I got it about a year ago, and it showed some slight herniations, grade one vertebrate slippage, but there are MRIs out there that show a lot worse, and the patient is asymptomatic and they don't have any back problems. And there are people that don't show anything that have severe back problems, so my MRI was basically unremarkable, and it didn't indicate anything major that would be causing all of these spasms, let's put it that way. So I was frustrated, I trained people day in and day out with safe exercise, and I strengthened their lower back, and there's that expression that cobblers' children don't have any shoes. I have to — here's another confession, I was not doing my back exercises that I keep imploring my patients or clients to do, to do that regular back extension, back strengthening exercise, and I wasn't doing any follow up type of work like pelvic tilts, hip thrusts, things that could create movement of that hip and lower back area. I was working all the time, I was sitting, I was commuting long commutes, and I really wasn't doing what I thought I should be doing. I just couldn't take it anymore, after the MRI came back and showed that there was nothing to really write home about, I said you know what, I've just got to start taking care of myself. I was doing all of the major exercises, the leg presses and the chest presses and all of the things that guys like to do, but I was ignoring the lower back. So I've been doing that regularly now, absolutely regularly for the last year, and I have to say especially in the last four or five months, I am, well, for the first time since I was in my twenties, I can say that I don't feel my back anymore. I don't feel that thing there that's been following me around like a black cloud. I have literally no pain in my lower back, and it hasn't been this way for quite a while now, knock on wood, because it can come at any time, but I don't remember the last time that I could say that I have no pain in my lower back. Sheila: And would you say consistently? Adam: I was at a three or four for months at a time, I can keep it at a three or four. The one long airplane ride or car ride and I'm back…

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22 The Secret Life of Fat with Dr. Sylvia Tara Apr 03, 2017

Show notes

The secret to losing 20 pounds? You have to work with your fat, not against it. Here in Episode 22 on The Inform Fitness Podcast, Adam Zickerman and his team are joined by biochemist and author of The Secret Life of Fat, Dr. Sylvia Tara. Dr. Tara explains how you can outsmart your body fat, with cutting-edge research and historical perspectives to reveal fat's true identity. Once you understand it…you can beat it. For The Secret Life of Fat audio book in Audible click here: http://bit.ly/TheSecretLifeofFat_IFF_Podcast To purchase The Secret Life of Fat in Amazon click here: http://bit.ly/TheSecretLifeofFat_Amazon Don't forget Adam's Zickerman's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution. You can buy it from Amazon by clicking here: http://bit.ly/ThePowerofTen To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you to give this workout a try, please visit www.InformFitness.com. At the time of this recording, we have locations in Manhattan, Port Washington, Denville, Burbank, Boulder, Leesburg and Resten If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com. Join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question. The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3. For information regarding the production of your own podcast just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.com The Transcriptions for the entire episode is below: 22 The Secret Life of Fat Tim: Hey InForm Nation, thanks for joining us once again here for episode 22 of the InForm Fitness Podcast, twenty minutes with New York Times bestselling author, Adam Zickerman and friends. I'm Tim Edwards with the InBound Podcasting network, and a client of InForm Fitness, and after some time off, excited to finally get back behind the mic with our team. Let's start with Sheila Melody, the co-owner and general manager of the Burbank location. Sheila, nice to see you again. Sheila: Hey Tim, great to be back with everybody again! Tim: It's been a while, and the rest of our team as always, still joining us via Skype from the Manhattan location in New York City headquarters for the InForm fitness empire. General manager Mike Rogers and the founder of InForm Fitness, Adam Zickerman. What's up gents, good to see you again! Adam: Hey guys. Mike: All is good. Tim: Adam, in your book Power of Ten: The Once a Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution, you described the three pillars necessary to achieve maximum success with the slow motion, high-intensity strength training system. For those who are just joining us for the first time, Adam please remind us of those three pillars. Adam: Exercise, rest, and nutrition. Tim: And nutrition. We spent a lot of time on this podcast discussing pillar one, exercise, and our special guest today also joining us via Skype, will allow us to dive deeper into pillar number two, which as you just mentioned Adam, is nutrition. We're pleased to welcome our guest who has a PhD in biochemistry and is the author of The Secret Life of Fat, Dr. Sylvia Tara. Glad to have you with us today. Sylvia: Great, thank you. It's terrific to be here. Tim: All four of us have spent the last couple of weeks digesting this book. I think Adam and Mike read the book, and Sheila, we listened to the book via Audible. It really helped us all change the way we look at fat, which I know is the point of the whole thing, but before we get started, Adam, I know you were the one who introduced this topic to the team here. What is it Adam that made you want to bring Sylvia on, to discuss The Secret Life of Fat? Adam: Well it was back in 2007 that I read this Scientific American article, that was called, if I remember correctly, What Fuels Fat, and it was then that I saw that Scientific American article that I realized how complicated fat is, and how complex it is. It was the first time that somebody had referred to fat as an organ, and then, recently, I'm listening to NPR and there's Dr. Tara talking about this book, which I thought the title was amazing. The Secret Life of Fat, and it reminded me of back in 2007, ten years ago, about this article I had read in Scientific American, and I was like oh my god. I had forgotten all about that, I've got to get this book and read it. You did such a great job, Dr. Tara, as far as breaking down such a complex subject and making us understand, quite honestly, how difficult it is to understand fat and we're in the personal training business, high-intensity exercise business, and all of our clients, most of them, are struggling with fat loss. I thought maybe we can use your book to prompt conversation and be honest with our clients and basically tell them what the facts are. What to expect when it comes to battling the bulge. Mike: What they're up against. Sylvia: That's a great idea, and that's also why I decided to go and do all this research, because I'm one of those people who has a lot of trouble managing weight. I always gain weight very easily, even as a child, I packed on pounds much easier than my friends who ate candy and ice cream all day long, and as I got older, it just got worse. Some of my old tricks stopped working, I had all these tricks in my twenties where I could take weight off pretty quickly if I had to, but then after having two kids, after launching a career and getting very busy, being stretched and traveling, my old tricks weren't working anymore. I went on a number of diets, there's always this new diet, and I tried a number of them every year, and sometimes they would work, they would work temporarily. Sometimes I could even gain weight on some of these diets, and I'd worked with personal trainers too, and they're all really — just [Inaudible: 00:03:59] their dogma, they have a certain philosophy they follow and one of them is you have to eat enough calories to lose weight. They were always stunned at how little I actually had to eat, and even then, I wasn't skinny, so I was about to go on yet another diet; I think paleo was all the rage and I said let me try this, and I started reading about just how complicated it was and I thought you know what, forget it. I said before I go on even one more diet, I'm going to understand everything there is to know about fat. I'm a biochemist by training, and if anyone can understand fat, I can. So I read everything, I think I pulled over a thousand articles out of the scientific literature, I read them all, and I talked to over fifty thought leaders, leading researchers around the world about this, their cutting edge research on fat. What I was finding out, which was so interesting, so astounding; it turned out that fat wasn't anything I thought it was, it's not just a reserve of calories, it's not just holding energy, waiting for us to use it. It has a whole life of its own underneath there. It can fight back when we try to lose it, it controls our thoughts about food, it controls metabolism. It can divert blood supply to itself, it's doing all these really strange things. It's as if it's another person inside of you, and if you're not equipped, if you don't understand what fat really is, you're just about bound to keep going on diets and regaining and regaining. The diet industry tends to make you think you're doing something wrong. If this diet doesn't work for you, it's really simple to follow, and then it's your fault; surely you're not staying on it, surely you're not adhering, and that's not the case. Having people feel that guilt isn't helping them, it's causing frustration and then it's leading to binging, it's leading to depressed feelings and things like that. So I think once we just educate ourselves on fat, what it is exactly, why it's so hard to lose, the better equipped we are to stay very persistent. So knowledge is power, and in this case in particular, I think just having that knowledge helped me stay on something. It also helped me not just follow siren songs, like with the new diet fad of the year, let me try that. It's like now I've got it, I know what works for me now, I can tailor my own diet. I really just felt empowered, and hopefully, some of that is what I'm trying to do with people. You don't have to follow my diet that worked for me, and I did something pretty extreme in my own experience to get off weight, but you can tailor something to work for you, depending on what you need psychologically, biologically, and for your lifestyle as well. Adam: That's a great introduction, and so while we're talking about your quest to find out exactly what fat is, why don't you explain what exactly is fat, and why is it called an organ? Sheila: Like I said, fat, the way we think of it is like this blubber. It's like this excess, greasy yellow stuff, and it's funny because I have this plastic model of fat, and when I show it to people, their first reaction is like ew, that's disgusting. We just have this whole image of what it is, but it's doing so much more tha n just sitting there as this greasy, yellow substance. It actually produces hormones that our body depends on, and these are hormones, mostly only produced by fat. So you can think of fat as not just a reserve of calories, it's an endocrine organ, like your adrenal cortex, it's like your thyroid gland, it's like any other endocrine organ we have. One of these hormones is leptin, and leptin has vast influence all over our body, I mean you'd be shocked at how much we defend on our fat for this hormone. Our brain size is linked to healthy fat, our brain size and the way we think, cognitive abilities even, is linked to an adequate supply of leptin which comes from fat. Our reproductive organs, particularly in women; if we get too low levels of fat, or if we have defective fat that's not producing leptin, we can't reproduce. Then there's bones, bone strength is reliant on fat as well. Even wound healing, this was really interesting, that leptin binds within our veins and so people that have anorexia or, again, defective fat, they don't heal as quickly. We're just at the tip of this, I think leptin was really in the 90s when it came out, and we're just discovering more and more how important it is in our body, and how much we're dependent on our fat for good health. One of the things too, is that leptin, because it does control our mind to some extent and it controls appetite, when we lose a lot of fat, like say 10% of our body weight, it has a big effect on us. Actually, our appetite will go through the roof, so leptin is released from fat cells, it goes into the blood, and it binds to the hypothalamus region of our brain, and there's an appetite center there. So with lower levels of leptin after losing quite a bit of weight, we actually get very, very hungry, we're driven to eat. So our fat in a way is controlling itself, it's driving us to actually come back. It will also lower our metabolism, so skeletal muscle during exercise, 25% fewer calories is what we'll end up using, and 15% fewer during rest. So overall, you need 22% fewer calories after you've lost about 10% of your weight or more, compared to someone who has never lost weight. So to make that a little clearer for people, if someone is 150 pounds and they've been at that weight naturally for a good part of life, compared to someone who has lost 20 pounds, who was 170 pounds and lost 20 pounds to get to 150 pounds; the person who has lost weight to get to 150 will have 22% fewer calories than someone who is naturally there, and that's because of the effect of lowering leptin, and the reduction in metabolism we get. So a diet is not just for six months, this effect I just talked about, higher appetite and lower metabolism, it's been studied for six years, it's seemed to last for six years. I think it can even last longer, I've talked to some people who have lost weight and they say they still feel like this, they still have to eat a lot less. So don't pick a diet for six months, pick a diet that you're going to stay on for years and years, that you like. It works with you, works with your lifestyle, works with what you like to eat, and in having its effect, it's helping you lose weight. Just knowing that I think has helped people a lot. I know my editor, when he read my manuscript for the book, he actually lost 15 pounds because he actually understood fat. He knew what was going on, he understood why he was hungry at night and all these other things, biochemically what fat was doing, and it's just helped us all persist a little bit more. Tim: Dr. Tara, for our audience, of course, they're listening to the InForm Fitness Podcast because they participate with this high intensity, strength training system through Power of Ten. Let's talk about exercise for a minute, and tell us how fat is affected with high-intensity strength training, like we do at InForm Fitness. Sylvia: There's a bunch of things, so what we can do really to get smarter about fat and how we manage it, is it's one thing to not just manage it and be able to persist for long periods of time because we now understand fat, but you can start using hormones to your advantage. One of the hormones that's been talked about all the time is insulin, lots of books on insulin and fat, and making sure we have low sugar. We're not provoking too much insulin because insulin helps store calories into fat tissue, and that's all good and fine. Two other hormones to know about, one is growth hormone, that's a great fat burning hormone, and we get less of it, we have less of it as we age, and so one thing is that it peaks at night. So what you can do is extend that overnight fasting part, and that will actually extend the release of growth hormone, really important as we age. Testosterone is another great fat burning hormone, and that also decreases as we age. Now high intensity interval training is good for a number of things: one is that is associated, exercise in general is associated with the release of growth hormone and testosterone, so some strength building exercise is good for growth hormone and testosterone, and even jogging is good for both hormones. Then [Inaudible: 00:11:32] is another hormone fat releases, and this is a hormone made by fat, and it actually helps clear our blood of triglycerides and put fat, circulating fat into fat tissue where it belongs. High-intensity interval training three times a week is associated with some of these hormones as well, and it decreases visceral fat, and so how I think of it is that you're really affecting your hormones when you do HIIT. You're increasing some of these fat-busting hormones, you're helping get adiponectin, and you're reducing your visceral fat. I think it's one of the reasons that works very well, because when you think about it, you're not exercising for long, you're doing it for a short period of time but extremely intensely, and that's affecting your hormones and how your body is reacting to it. It's a great trick, I think, to just help remove stubborn fat. Sheila: I was so inspired by your book Dr. Tara because I totally related to your personal story, and I'm middle-aged, and I'm suddenly going what in the hell is going on here? So it was really nice, even being in the fitness business, being a personal trainer, being involved in all of this for my entire life basically, so I was very encouraged by your story, to make some changes a…

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21 Return of the Prodigal Client Mar 27, 2017

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After 9 years of slow motion, high intensity, strength training at InForm Fitness in Manhattan, client Hence Orme decided to change up his workout and leave InForm Fitness. After a year and a half away Hence decided to come back. Why did Hence leave Inform Fitness in the first place, what type of exercise program did he do, and why did he come back.? Join InForm Fitness founder, Adam Zickerman and Hence's trainer Mike Rogers for their interview with The Prodigal InForm Fitness Client. To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you to give this workout a try, please visit www.InformFitness.com. InForm Fitness has locations located in Manhattan, Port Washington, Denville, Burbank, Boulder, Leesburg, and Resten. If you aren't currently near an InForm Fitness grab a copy of Adam's book, Power of 10, The Once a Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution, click this link to visit Amazon: http://bit.ly/ThePowerofTen Adam breaks down the three pillars necessary to achieve maximum benefits of this workout along with simple to follow exercises you can do at home or in a gym near you. If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com. You can also call the show with a comment or question. The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3. To produce a podcast of your own just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards a tim@InBoundPodcasting.com The transcription for Episode 21 - Return of the Prodigal Client is below: __________________________________________________________________ Adam: Well Hence, welcome to our show. I'm very excited to have you here. Hence: Thank you, it's great to be here. Adam: The reason that I'm excited to have Hence here is because he is a client that started here many years ago —Hence: 2006. Adam: 2006, was here for many years. He's experimented his whole life with exercise, and then he took a hiatus and he started experimenting with some more things after here, and now he has come back. Then Mike said to me, guess what Adam, Hence is back and I said oh great, and Mike started to tell me what you've been doing Hence, and then what led you to come back. I was like wait, wait, don't tell me yet, let's get this fresh on our podcast, because I think a lot of our listeners would appreciate to hear about your journey. How you came full circle so to speak. Mike: I was enormously excited when Hence came back — I think it was about three months ago. He started in 2006, in September, and ten years, we're enormously proud to have clients have been here for that long, and I just looked on the system, 351 sessions you've done with us over that time. Hence: Is that right, wow. Mike: That's an incredible thing, and once a week, it's actually — it averages, over the eight and a half years, it's about forty-one sessions per year, which is… that's pretty good, it takes into account vacations, time away for business trips or something like that, but yeah, it's been really exciting. Adam: Let's start the beginning, like what brought you here in the first place, back in 2006. Hence: Sure, I think to start off with, Adam is right that I've been interested in exercise and fitness and health for a very long time, and have been training since I was a teenager, mostly weight lifting and running, and along the way, have done a fair amount of reading and research, and going back to 2006, at that point in time, I was doing a lot of running. Or at least a lot of running for me, somewhere in the range of 25-35 miles a week, and I had ramped up to that level pretty quickly, and what I was finding was that, at the age of, I guess at that time 42, 41 actually, a lot of little things were starting to break down. Nothing major, but the running was starting to take a toll, and I was starting to notice, for example, that I was having trouble walking the stairs up out of the subway. It was starting to bug me, so my family and I were on vacation in San Diego, so I was out of New York, I was out of the routine, and I could get a little time to think. At the time, I happened to just be leafing through the local San Diego magazine, and they profiled some local trainers. One of whom focused on high-intensity training, and I called her up and just said tell me about what you do and can I come train, and she did, but said I'm sorry, I can't train you while you're here, where do you live? So I told her that my family and I lived in New York City, and she practically jumped through the phone at me and said oh wow, well Adam Zickerman is the one that I follow. You should read his book and you should go talk to him. Adam: I forgot that story. Mike: I looked it up on the sheet, I was like oh San Diego. Hence: It was a really random occurrence, so I read the book, it made sense, and at this point I really started to say to myself look, I've been pushing running for me, in my context, fairly aggressively, and it's having some negative results that I didn't anticipate and I certainly don't want. At the end of the day, I don't want to run so much I can't walk. Mike: Did you have a goal in mind when you decided to start running aggressively, 35, 40 miles a week? Were you going to do a marathon or something? Hence: I was never really thinking about doing a marathon, I was thinking about being able to run maybe a fast 10k or maybe a half marathon. Mike: Did you feel like you had to lose weight at the time, or you wanted to lose weight at the time? Hence: No, not particularly, that wasn't really in the parameters at that point, but the negative effects were really starting to pile up and so I said alright, I'm going to do something different. I'm going to go cold turkey, I'm going to stop running. I talked with Adam, we had a great conversation, what he said made a ton of sense and so I made a big leap, a big experimental leap and said alright. I'm done with running for now, and I'm just going to train once a week at InForm. The results were fantastic. Adam: I remember you telling me that you just gave up running cold turkey. Mike: I remember it too. Hence: I did, and I like running, I'm not somebody for whom running was — or even is a chore, I still like it, but I had to balance that versus the wear and tear that I was accruing. So I stopped, and started training once a week, very high intensity. It required something completely different of me which is to be highly focused for a short period of time and with really no possibility of oh okay, if I don't give a hundred percent, I'm going to train in another couple days anyway so it really doesn't matter. I really had to focus, and over the next several months, all my running aches and pains went away, which is fairly predictable. If I just stopped running, I'm sure a lot of those aches and pains and issues would have resolved themselves, but I did get stronger… Mike: Did it make sense to you immediately that the idea of a once a week workout was going to be effective, or did you actually have to take a leap of faith into that? Hence: There was definitely a leap of faith. I had done enough reading, not just Adam's book, but some other authors, to have the seed planted that maybe we all have been taught about high frequency exercise is really not the whole story. There's a lot of damage that can be built up over time that is understated from higher frequency methods of exercise, but I still had to make that leap, and again, I came to InForm as an experiment. Adam: How long did that experiment last? Hence: The initial phase of the experiment really started in September of '06, ran for about nine months where I really did nothing other then train once a week at InForm. I did no running, I did no weight lifting. Adam: What was your conclusion after the nine months? Hence: My conclusion was that it was just shockingly effective. The aches and pains from running went away, my ability to climb stairs came right back, I got a spring in my step again. Certainly got stronger, and sort of the most counterintuitive finding for me was that I lost weight. Now when I was running, I wasn't thinking about my weight, I hadn't weighed myself in a long time, but I did what I think happens to many other runners which is because I was running, call it 30 miles a week, I thought I could eat everything. When I finally stepped on the scales, I was pretty shocked at how heavy I had gotten. What happened over the next nine months is because I was only training once a week, I couldn't deceive myself that oh you're going to click off six miles tomorrow so you can go ahead and eat that extra piece of pizza or cake. I couldn't fool myself that way, so my diet improved and I don't remember the numbers right off the hand, but I did start to steadily lose weight. Which was an unanticipated benefit, and clearly just all around felt better. Mike: I was looking at his consult form, and what he put down for his regular dinner was PB&J sandwich and ice cream. Adam: Did that change too, did you change your eating when you started working out? Mike: Well first of all, this is New York so it's a very glamorous lifestyle, so this is dinner in New York. Mike: Hence is a portfolio manager, pretty busy, schedule. Hence: Pretty busy, not unlike most people, but pretty exotic and elaborate meals. Certainly, my diet changed, and I attribute it to finally, in my early 40's, coming to understand that you cannot out train a bad diet, and by decreasing the frequency of training, I couldn't deceive myself that I could just eat all I wanted. So that was an unanticipated benefit of moving to a high frequency, or high intensity, lower frequency form of training. Adam: Okay, so you had the nine-month experiment and then you were here for many years after that, so the experiment was over. You were kind of convinced and you stuck this out, you did it for once or twice a week, so I'm dying to know. When you left, what did you do? Hence: I didn't just say I'm out. I continued to do a fair amount of reading and research. What I was really doing was experimenting with something else, so reading McGuff, very helpful, learned a lot. I also learned to start to read some of what people had been writing about regular, old school weight lifting. The power lifts, dead lift, back squat, bench press. I though their claims were interesting — Adam: You're talking all free weights? Hence: Exactly, so Olympic bars, and I thought the claims of the school of thought were interesting. That these exercises are very functional, and if you think about it, there really isn't very little that doesn't revolve around a squat or a deadlift, or an overhead press or a bench press in one way or another. So I thought well this is interesting, and it seems to make some sense. Going in, I thought there were some issues that I would have difficulty with, such as barbell on your back, or lifting a barbell off the ground, and there's also just the time involved, because this method of exercise, the free weight training method of exercise does demand several days a week. So these were issues that I knew going in, but I was interested in the so-called functional benefits of this form of exercise. For some period of time, period of weeks I believe, I did some weight training away from InForm. Then I'd come to InForm and do my normal workout. Mike: I remember, you were splitting it up a little bit. Hence: I was splitting it up, and I was not going to learn what I wanted to learn by doing that, so I said alright. Let me take a break from InForm, let me see what I can learn in the free weight world and so I did. I was cognizant of the risks, so I made sure to learn how to do the more dangerous exercises the right way, really did invest quite a bit of time. Mike: I remember that I didn't even discourage Hence. I loved our conversations, I loved the exploration. It really forced me to even evaluate and think about all the other ways of doing things, and I remember just encouraging you to just be very mindful to what you were doing in regards to range of motion… I remember when we were working together and you were doing your workouts independently and coming into InForm, and you were showing me how you were doing some squats with weights, and you were going really deep into it. I said I'd be very careful about going that far down, almost where his butt was below the level of his knees. Hence: Like sumo wrestler low. Mike: Exactly, and I was like I need you to be very mindful about doing that because it could be — you're going to an extreme range of motion with a lot of resistance and those are usually what causes those breaking points. Adam: It's hard to bite your tongue, because when you hear somebody say that they're going to do a dangerous exercise safely, that's like — you know what I hear when I hear that? When someone says that, to me, it's like saying I'm going to play Russian Roulette safely. There is no safe way to play Russian Roulette, you are eventually, or could eventually, get hurt and regardless of how careful you are — only because, the nature of let's say a barbell squat is you have this long lever with weights at the end of it, being supported by a structure, a skeletal structure, a spine in particular. If you go to the left or right a little bit too much, it's all over and it's just hard to defend against that long term that you can get away with that. There's no reason to do it if you can get the same effect of an exercise like that from a leg press or something where you don't take those kind of spinal risks, but I'm digressing. Hence: Right, well what I found from switching over to free weights is that the exercises are very effective. I felt like I definitely got stronger in some really basic movements, I learned how to squat, I think about as safely as one can, and I learned how to deadlift actually quite safely, and I enjoyed the movement of those exercises. They were pleasant to do, but — and I was able to progress and move the weight up and all that, but over a period of — I guess it was a total of about eighteen months, I got to the point where I had gotten more capable of lifting heavier weight, but to the point where I really believed that I was starting to get to a tipping point. Where yeah, I had gotten stronger and yes my technique was pretty good, but if I were going to get stronger from there, I was going to be taking some risks. It really took me that long also to really understand that even as the weight got heavier and even as my technique stayed pretty solid, that I could not generate the intensity safely that I wanted to achieve. I would feel like maybe I have another — Adam: What happens when you have a barbell on your shoulders and you're reaching muscle failure? Mike: Or after you've failed on let's say, doing dumbbell flys, how do you safely put those weight down? There's a lot of different scenarios. Adam: So you didn't have a trainer Hence? Hence: Well I did early on just to get the technique right, but then I was really training myself. It became really clear that there were times when I might have, let's say, half a rep left in me but I had to rack the weight, just for safety's sake. After getting — I never really got injured, I got a little tweaked once in a while, but I never got truly injured. Certainly witnessed a couple things in the gym that were a little disconcerting, but never myself got hurt, but after I got to a certain level at the major exercises, it was just really clear that I just couldn…

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20 Author Bill DeSimone - Congruent Exercise Mar 20, 2017

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Adam Zickerman and Mike Rogers interview author, weight lifter, and personal trainer Bill DeSimone. Bill penned the book Congruent Exercise: How To Make Weight Training Easier On Your Joints Bill is well known for his approach to weight lifting which, focuses on correct biomechanics to build strength without undue collateral damage to connective tissue and the rest of the body. So, whether you are an aspiring trainer, serious weight lifter, or even an Inform Fitness client who invests just 20-30 minutes a week at one of their seven locations this episode is chock full of valuable information regarding safety in your high-intensity strength training. A paramount platform of which the Power of Ten resides at all InForm Fitness locations across the country. To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you visit www.InformFitness.com If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com. Join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question. The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3. To purchase Adam Zickerman's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution click this link to visit Amazon: http://bit.ly/ThePowerofTen To purchase Bill DeSimone's book Congruent Exercise: How To Make Weight Training Easier On Your Joints click this link to visit Amazon: http://bit.ly/CongruentExercise If you would like to produce a podcast of your own just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.com Below is the transcription for Episode 20 - Author Bill DeSimone - Congruent Exercise 20 Author Bill DeSimone - Congruent Exercise Adam: So there's not a day that goes by that I don't think by the way that I don't think of something Bill has said to me when I'm training people. Bill is basically my reference guide, he's my Grey's Anatomy. When I try an exercise with somebody, I often find myself asking myself, what would Bill do and I take it from there. Without further ado, this is Bill, and we're going to talk about all good stuff. Joint friendly exercises, what Bill calls it now, you started out with congruent exercises, technical manual for joint friendly exercise, and now you're rephrasing it. Bill: Well actually the first thing I did was [Inaudible: 00:00:43] exercise, but the thing is I didn't write [Inaudible: 00:00:45] exercise with the idea that anybody other than me was going to read it. I was just getting my own ideas down, taking my own notes, and just to flesh it out and tie it up in a nice package, I actually wrote it and had it bound it up and sent it off to Greg Anderson and McGuff and a couple others, and it hit a wave of interest. Adam: A wave, they were probably blown away. Bill: Yeah well, a lot of those guys went out of their way to call me to say boy, a lot of what I suspected, you explained here. But when I read it now, it's pretty technical, it's a challenge. Mike: There's a lot of, I think, common sense with an experienced trainer when you think about levers in general, and I think what you did in that manual was make it very succinct and very clear. I think it's something that maybe we didn't have the full story on, but I think we had some — if you have some experience and you care about safety as a trainer, I think you are kind of looking at it and you saw it observationally, and then I think when we read this we were like ah, finally, this has crystalized what I think some of us were thinking. Adam: Exactly. You know what I just realized, let's explain, first and foremost. You wrote something called Moment Arm Exercise, so the name itself shows you have technical — that it probably is inside, right? So moment arm is a very technical term, a very specific term in physics, but now you're calling it joint friendly exercise, and you called it also congruent exercise at one point. All synonymous with each other, so please explain, what is joint friendly exercise or fitness? Bill: It's based more on anatomy and biomechanics than sports performance. So unlike a lot of the fitness fads that the attitude and the verbiage comes out of say football practice or a competitive sport, what I'm doing is I'm filtering all my exercise instruction through the anatomy and biomechanics books, to try to avoid the vulnerable — putting your joints in vulnerable positions, and that's so complicated which is why I struggled with so much to make it clearer. So I started with moment arm exercise, and then I wrote Congruent Exercise, which is a little broader but obviously the title still requires some explanation. And then — how it happened, as for my personal training in the studio, I would use all this stuff but I wouldn't explain it because I was only dealing with clients, I wasn't dealing with peers. Since it's a private studio and not a big gym, I don't have to explain the difference between what I'm doing and what somebody else is doing, but in effect, I've been doing this every day for fifteen years. Adam: I have to say, when you say that, that you didn't explain it to clients, I actually use this information as a selling point. I actually explain to my clients why we're doing it this way, as opposed to the conventional way, because this is joint friendly. I don't get too technical necessarily, but I let them know that there is a difference of why we're doing it this way, versus the conventional way. So they understand that we are actually a cut above everybody else in how we apply exercise, so they feel very secure in the fact that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing, but I digress. Bill: Generally what I do is any signage I have, a business card, website, Facebook presence, all lays out joint friendly and defines it and kind of explains itself. I would say most of the clients I have aren't coming from being heavily engaged in another form of fitness. They're people who start and drop out programs or they join a health club in January and drop out. It's not like I'm getting somebody who is really intensely into Crossfit, or intensely into Zumba or bodybuilding, and now they're banged up and need to do something different. The joint friendly phrasing is what connects me with people that need that, I just find that they don't need the technical explanation as to why we're not over stretching the joint capsule in the shoulder. Why we're not getting that extra range of motion on the bench press, because again, they haven't seen anybody doing otherwise, so I don't have to explain why I'm doing it this way. Adam: Yeah but they might have had experience doing it themselves. Let's take an overhead press for example, having your arms externally rotating and abducted, versus having them in front of you. There's an easy explanation to a client why we won't do one versus the other. Bill: But I have to say I do not get people who do not even know what a behind the neck press is. Now in Manhattan is a little bit different, more denser. Adam: So for this conversation, let's assume some people know, or understand in a way what the conventional is, but we can kind of get into it. What is conventional and what's not conventional. So it's joint friendly, how is it joint friendly, what are you actually doing to make it joint friendly? Bill: Well the short answer is that I use a lot less range of motion than we've got accustomed to, when we used to use an extreme range of motion. If bodybuilders in the 60s were doing pumping motions, and then you wanted to expand that range of motion, for good reason, and then that gets bastardized and we take more of a range of motion and turn it into an extreme range of motion — just because going from partial motions to a normal range of motion was good, doesn't make a normal range of motion to an extreme range of motion better. And in fact — Adam: What's wrong with extreme range of motion? Bill: Well because — Adam: Don't say that you want to improve flexibility. Bill: Well the HIIT guys who would say that you're going to improve flexibility by using — Adam: HIIT guys means the high intensity training sect of our business. Bill: So the line about, you're going to use the extreme range of motion with a weight training exercise to increase flexibility. First of all, either flexibility is important or it's not, and that's one of those things where HIIT has a little bit of an inconsistency, and they'll argue that it's not important, but then they'll say that you can get it with the weights. That's number one. Number two, a lot of the joint positions that machines and free weight exercises put us in, or can put us in, are very vulnerable to the joints, and if you go to an anatomy and biomechanics textbook, that is painfully obvious what those vulnerable positions are. Just because we walk into a gym or a studio and call it exercise instead of manual labor or instead of — instead of calling it submission wrestling and putting our joints or opponents' joints in an externally rotated abduct and extended position, we call it a pec fly, it's still the same shoulder. It's still a vulnerable position whether it's a pec fly stretching you back there, or a jiujitsu guy putting you in a paintbrush, but I don't know, for most of the pop fitness books though, if anybody else is really looking at this. Maybe not in pop fitness, maybe Tom Pervis — Adam: What's pop fitness? Bill: If you walk into a bookstore and look in the fitness section for instance, any of those types. No offense, but celebrity books, glossy celebrity fitness books, but I don't know that anybody — and the feedback that I've gotten from experienced guys like [Inaudible: 00:08:26] or the guys we know personally, is — even McGuff said yeah, I never associated the joint stuff with the exercise stuff. Adam: Let's talk about these vulnerabilities that you're talking about and extreme ranges of motion. So we have to understand a little bit about muscle anatomy to understand what we mean by the dangers of these extreme ranges of motion. So muscles are weaker in certain positions and they're stronger in other positions. Maybe talk about that, because that's where you start getting into why we do what we do, like understanding that muscles don't generate the same amount of force through a range of motion. They have different torque potentials. Mike: And is there a very clear and concise way of communicating that to a lay person too, like we have practice at it, but in here, we're over the radio or over the podcast, so it's like describing pictures with words. Bill: The easiest way to show it to a client who may not understand what muscle torque is, is to have them lock out in an exercise. Take a safe exercise, the barbell curl, where clearly if you allow your elbows to come forward and be vertically under the weight, at the top of the repetition, clearly all of a sudden the effort's gone. There's no resistance, but if you let your elbows drop back to rib height, if you pin your elbows to the sides through the whole curl, now all of a sudden your effort feels even. Instead of feeling like — instead of having effort and then a lockout, or having a sticky point and then a lockout, now it just feels like effort. Adam: Or a chest press where your elbows are straight and the weights are sitting on those elbows, you're not really working too hard there either. Bill: Same thing. If you have a lockout — what's easy to demonstrate is when the resistance torque that the machine or exercise provides doesn't match your muscle torque. So if your muscle torque pattern changes in the course of a movement, if you feel a lockout or a sticking point, then it's not a line. If all you feel is effort, now it matches pretty evenly. Now here's the thing, all that really means, and part of what I got away for a moment on — all that really means is that that set is going to be very efficient. Like for instance, the whole length of the reputation you're working. It's not like you work and lockout and rest, all that means is that it's going to be a very efficient set. You can't change a muscle torque curve, so if you were just to do some kind of weird angled exercise, you wouldn't get stronger in that angle. All you would do is use a relatively lower weight. Nobody does like a scott bench curl, nobody curls more than a standing curl. You can't change the muscle torque curve, you might change the angle, which means the amount of weight that your hand has change, to accommodate the different torque at that joint angle, but you're not changing where you're strongest. If you could, you would never know you had a bad [Inaudible: 00:11:36], because if the pattern — if the muscle torque pattern could change with a good [Inaudible: 00:11:44], it would also change with a bad [Inaudible: 00:11:47], and then you would never know. Take a dumbbell side raise, everybody on the planet knows it's hardest when your arms are horizontal. Your muscle torque curve can never change to accommodate what the resistance is asking. Now if you go from a machine side raise, which has more even — like where those two curves match, that set feels harder because you don't have to break. You do a set of side raises with dumbbells to failure, if it feels — if it's a difficulty level of ten, of force out of ten, and then you go to a machine side raise and go to failure, it's like a ten, because you didn't have that break built into the actual rep. So the moment arms, knowing how to match the resistance required by the exercise and the muscle torque expressed by your limbs, that makes for a more efficient exercise. In terms of safety, it's all about knowing what the vulnerable positions of the joints are and cutting the exercise short, so that you're not loading the joint into an impingement, or into like an overstretched position. Mike: How different are these…. like thinking about limitation and range of motion on them, we mentioned that before and I think it's kind of adjacent to what you're talking about is — we also want to help people understand that if they're on their own exercising or there are other trainers who want to help their clients, and for our trainers to help our clients… troubleshooting, we know generally how the joints work, where the strength curves exist, but how to discern where those limitations are. Like you said before, that one of the things you do is you limit range of motion and get much more stimulus and muscle. Bill: I'm saying limit range of motion because that might be the verbiage that we understand and maybe listeners would understand, but it's really a lot more complicated than just saying, use this range of motion. So for instance, in a lower back exercise, say a stiff leg or dead lift, which, when I used to misinterpret that by using a full range of motion, I'd be standing on a bench with a barbell, and the barbell would be at shoe level. My knees would be locked, my lower back would be rounded, my shoulders would be up my ears as I'm trying to get the bar off the ground, and so yes, I was using a full range of motion. Adam: That's for sure. Mike: That can be painted for that description. Bill: It's also pretty much a disaster on your lower back waiting to happen, at least on your lower back. Adam: I've got to go to a chiropractor just listening to that. Bill: Exactly, but you still see it all the time. You see it all the…

Full show notes at the publisher

19 Training Styles and Motivational Factors Mar 13, 2017

Show notes

In Episode 19 Adam discusses his biggest surprise in how the fitness industry has changed since starting InForm Fitness almost 20 years ago. Following the IForm Fitness protocol, Adam, Mike, and Sheila share some of their individual techniques for accessing their clients' goals and motivational factors.

To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you visit www.InformFitness.com

If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com.

Join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question. The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3.

To purchase Adam's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution click this link to visit Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Power-10-Once-Week-Revolution/dp/B00034P80K/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205178760&sr=8-1

If you would like to produce a podcast of your own just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.com

18 Exercise: The Truth is in the Science Mar 06, 2017

Show notes

Here in Episode 18 Adam, Mike, Sheila, and Tim discuss the Time Magazine article titled, The New Science of Exercise. Does the information shared in this article line up with the high intensity training that is offered at Inform Fitness? Perhaps the truth is in the science.

Click here for the link to the Time Magazine article: http://time.com/4475628/the-new-science-of-exercise/?iid=toc_080116

To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you visit www.InformFitness.com

If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com.

Join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question. The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3.

To purchase Adam's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution click this link to visit Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Power-10-Once-Week-Revolution/dp/B00034P80K/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205178760&sr=8-1

If you would like to produce a podcast of your own just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.com

17 Failure is the Only Option Feb 27, 2017

Show notes

What do you mean "failure is the ONLY option"? It's a hard concept to grasp, but we are talking about muscle failure. Reaching muscle failure safely is scientifically proven to build muscle, burn fat, and to assist in rebooting your metabolism.

In this episode, Adam Zickerman, Mike Rodgers, Sheila Melody, and Tim Edwards define muscle failure and how the expert trainers at all Inform Fitness locations can get you there safely.

To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you visit www.InformFitness.com

If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com.

Join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question. The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3.

To purchase Adam's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution click this link to visit Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Power-10-Once-Week-Revolution/dp/B00034P80K/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205178760&sr=8-1

If you would like to produce a podcast of your own just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.com

16 Born This Way with Fitness Model Jay Vincent Feb 20, 2017

Show notes

Want to look like a fitness model? Well, we have some bad news for you. No matter how hard or how long you workout, if you don't have the genes, it's not going to happen.

In this episode of the Inform Fitness Podcast, Adam Zickerman interviews Jay Vincent, who is also a high intensity trainer. Jay also happens to be a professional fitness model for popular athletic clothing lines such as Under Armor and appeared in small acting roles for Amazon.com. Jay's MuscleTech ads have been featured in many popular fitness magazines including FLEX, Muscular Development, Muscle and Fitness, FitnessRx, Ironman and more.

To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you visit www.InformFitness.com

If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com.

Join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question. The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3.

To purchase Adam's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution click this link to visit Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Power-10-Once-Week-Revolution/dp/B00034P80K/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205178760&sr=8-1

If you would like to produce a podcast of your own just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.com

15 Adam in La La Land Feb 12, 2017

Show notes

A couple times a year Adam visits the Burbank/Toluca Lake Inform Fitness location. During his visit to La La Land in the holiday season of 2016, we set up our podcast studio in the lobby of Inform Fitness for our first ever, live, onsite podcast recording.

Sheila Melody introduced us to all of the trainers at the Burbank location, including Tim's personal trainer Joseph Altamirano. Joe share's Tim's progress after working out for an entire year at Inform Fitness. We will also hear from several Inform Fitness clients who have benefited from The Power of Ten.

To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you visit www.InformFitness.com

If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com.

Join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question. The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3.

To purchase Adam's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution click this link to visit Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Power-10-Once-Week-Revolution/dp/B00034P80K/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205178760&sr=8-1

If you would like to produce a podcast of your own just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.com

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