Training strength

Over the past 14 and a half months I've been putting an increased emphasis on learning about strength training and trying to apply the things I've read to my training. Initially I started with the heureka moment that what I'd been doing was, to a great extent, just wasting time at the gym without any clue of what should be done and how stuff should be programmed. So, as appears to be the fairly common story online, I ran across Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength, and spent time learning the lifts, learning the program and learning the ideas behind building strength. At the same time I also started to increase the granularity of the data I was tracking from my exercises, and strength training is very nice as it allows you to follow with a relatively high granularity what your strength with respect to different exercises are and accumulating the data was relatively easy.

I recently also wrote some scripts to programmatically extract my training data from Fitocracy, which otherwise would have been a relatively tedious task (for those interested, the key words here are phantomjs and scraping the site). Having automated this, the next task is to start building up some dashboards for displaying the data to help give a more intuitive feeling for what has been going on. For now there is no neat interactive widget yet for that, but I did try out some rather rudimentary tests in Excel.

First off, the first diagram below represents the maximum weight used for an exercise at a given date in time and the 30 days prior to it. I should have filtered based on maximum weights for certain rep counts, but because there is a bit of flakiness and certain periods of not following the program exactly, I opted instead to use the maximum weight observed. This is a relatively good proxy as I don't progress to higher weights prior to being able to achieve five reps with the lower weight first. An additional thing to note is that the initial steep climb with the barbell squats isn't really as steep; having barely hit 120, I used a belt to get up to 130, so the first two peaks for the squats should in reality be lower. Asides from that all of the reps have been done raw with no belt or other weight lifting gear.

It should, I guess, be mentioned that adhering to the program turned out to be too much at times and hence the best I can say is that a followed the spirit of the program. :) To a certain degree, however, one can see the waves emerging as patterns in the training, which demonstrate the deloads at certain points and then the pursuit for newer records. The deadlifts illustrate this the best way.

I also ran across an interesting article on T-Nation, in which the author outlined some strength standards he had observed over the duration of his career. The standards had been structured as relative comparisons to a certain baseline. For instance, with a deadlift of X, his empirical observations would suggest that the person should be able to back squat 71.4% of the deadlift. So, taking the deadlift as a baseline and using that as a predictor for the other lifts and using that to scale the actual lifts, we're able to draw a picture of which lifts are relatively higher than they should and which lower.

Of course every individual is different, so strong conclusions can't really be drawn from these types of analyses. What they are, however, somewhat useful for are identifying if you have significant imbalances between lifts, which perhaps should be addressed to achieve a somewhat stable system. Imbalances tend to often be associated with decreased progress later on as well as potentially causing injuries or other problems.

What is apparent in my case is that the lifts where the main components stems from pushing, namely the press and the bench press, my long arms give me an inherent disadvantage, which is also apparent in that they are relatively speaking the weakest lifts at the moment out of the five lifts. That is mainly due to the recent advances made in deadlifting, which in turn mainly stem from some a-ha moments with my deadlifting technique. Also, the disproportionately strong squat as visible in the left part of the diagram wasn't in fact as strong, mainly because of the aforementioned use of the belt, which inflated the results a bit.

Going forward from this, I think that the current "fuckarounditis" of a program that I have at the moment, which is a very much bastardized Starting Strength routine has served its purpose of getting me acquainted with training with weights and the next thing is to move onto some other program. At the moment I have a feeling I'll be giving Bill Starr's intermediate 5x5 program a try for some cycles. But we'll see.

Ideas and execution...

This may be a bit of a beating-the-dead-horse thing, but one which again reared its ugly head today when I ran across my old boss, who had heard that I'd been hacking away at various products and services and forging my own interpretation of Quantified Self and whatnot. I'm one of the easiest people to get to engage in all forms of discussions on various different topics, and even more so when you hit some of the topics that I happen to be interested at the moment.

The problem with the brief discussion today was that it was not really a discussion. It was more of a "tell me what you are doing with these things", which itself wouldn't be too bad either as it's something that I actually like talking about. However, it is not a discussion if the other party does not contribute anything meaningful. In this case the main contribution was that "I have a great idea how to change this fitness/wellness field, but I won't tell it to you." Which sort of leads me to a second pet peeve of mine: ideas without execution are hallusinations (apologies for ripping that off, can't recall who said it)...

Over the years I've been involved in various things in the corporate world, the common thing I've observed is the completely misguided notion that it's the idea, or the strategy, or the whatever that is valuable and then when this intangible brainfart is reared, the job is done. Which sort of aptly explains why certain companies are in the situations that they are in. What I keep wondering is whether this is because of a fault in the thought process or because in fact it appears that not many people can or will bother to execute the idea. It's truly a pity, because the corporate world seems to kill the will to do something and in turn appears to incentivize people to not even try but to instead spend their time on more philosophical things, the merit of which is harder to assess without bringing them into the real world.

Genetic testing

Having casually followed the quantified self movement and admitting a general tendency common for engineers to be interested in measuring stuff, I decided to pull the trigger and order a laboratory tube for my saliva from 23andMe. Even despite the hight shipping and handling costs to Finland. Maybe more on that later, but one interesting thing arose already after talking about genetic testing and sequencing of DNA with various colleagues and friends: people, at least in my circle of acquaintances, seem to be very much against these types of things. Which is interesting, because on average the data set consists of relatively highly educated and seemingly intelligent people.

The most common argument, based on limited empirical evidence, appears to be that people do not want to know about potential genetic diseases. Fair enough, I suppose, but personally I don't think there can be too much harm in at least having a cursory overview of what the most common pitfalls may be. At least then I'll know which research areas to donate money to, if nothing else. But regardless, the probabilities are there whether or not I sequence a bit of DNA, and forewarned is forearmed. But I guess if a person is prone to anxiety, these things may cause elevated stress. Amusingly enough it seems that ingesting excess amounts of calories, avoiding any forms of exercise, etc., don't seem to cause stress. Who knows how to interpret all of this.

Anyway, I think there is a much more fundamental argument for giving some organic material for the researchers to sequence: for the first time in history we are getting to the point where genetic testing is becoming so cheap that theoretically everyone will soon have a chance for genetic testing. The possibilities that these could provide for scientific research are huge, and in a sense I perceive this to be one of the biggest drivers for why I should take part in these types of exercises: what I get out of these may be, at least for now, of limited significance, but contributing to what has a very high probability of being a significant breakthrough for humanity and what will very likely down the road improve life for all, I think I just have to do it.

Oh, and in 23andMe's case they offer nifty APIs against which to write code. Who could resist that.