Arthur De Vany's Evolutionnary Fitness

[Fred]

Le site est intéressant, il y a aussi une interview sur testosterone nation:



Ce gars dit pas mal de choses intéressantes, en gros notre mode de vie, notre alimentation et même nos activités physiques sont mal adaptées par rapport a notre génétique qui est celle de chasseurs cueilleurs.

Par exemple les bodybuilders sont trop fréquemment en phase d'anabolisme, pour les marathoniens c'est l'inverse, trop fréquemment en phase de catabolisme.

[Kza]

Cest super interessant!! Ya des points plus ou moins discutable mais y a pas mal a retirer de cette philosophie je pense!! J'adhère sur pas mal de gd principe de tt facon!!!

[Plasma]

Génial Fred ! Merci beaucoup pour ce lien !

[Fred]

intéressant:

"This Body is Not Made for Sports
September 7, 2005 07:39 PM

Lest you think Mr. Afghanistan is a model, let me say that I think and the research shows that a body builder-type of body is not made for sports. Or life in my opinion. It is OK as an asthetic experiment, but it is not functional or healthful.

I could write a Top Ten Reasons Not to Be a Pro Body Builder entry as I did for marathoners. They share a lot of similar problems, most of which are related to over-training, mineral depletion, excess carbs, altered and unhealthful hormone profiles.

All the problems come down to the same thing; nearly everyone who participates in competitive sports (or glamour contests) is over-trained. I think modern life has enough stress in it and I fail to see why someone would load the stress of over-training on top of it. I know why people do it. It is because they think that more is more and they are goal oriented. They think of the body as a machine too. They want to be recognized. Their genes want to reproduce and are sending them down some path that may be weird. (But, the blonde over there might like it.)

So, what about a body-builder body for life or sport? Do body builders reproduce at a higher rate than accountants? I take that back because a lot of body builders are accountants judging by the way they count sets, calories, protein and all that.

It turns out that body builders have muscle fibers that reflect the high volume work they do. Though they have mass, they have slow reaction and relaxation time in their muscle fibers. Translation: SLOW.

Why this is so is not hard to see. Many sets of any exercise translate into an oxygen signal to the genes. So, the genes express muscle fibers that are suited to oxygen. These are ST fibers and FTa fibers.

They also carry a lot of mass because that is what wins contests. But, in life it doesn't work out that way. Mass slows you down. Add that to the translation of high rep routines into gene expression in primarily slow muscle fibers and you get a slow person, not suited for sports.

Add in all the other poor practices (insulin injections, high glycemic "gainer" supplements, GH injections, maybe some steroids too, demineralization and dehydration to get into contest form) and you have someone who is not all that healthy. Recreational body building to build muscle mass and strength carries some cost. Taking it to the competitive level is a risk to health.

Of the many body builders I have seen in my time I would say most have a puffed look when they are not flexed. It is like an actresse's lips filled with collagen. That is from high rep sets and high volume. They produce poor quality muscle. Not fast, not strong. The best looking bodies are on those who do high intensity training. Low sets, fairly low reps, short work outs, heavy weights. Plenty of rest in between.

There is a reason for the difference in the muscle quality. High rep, long work outs build ST and FTa muscle. High intensity, short work outs, and ample rest build FTb/x muscle. Stronger, leaner, tougher, faster. It shows. Look at Mike Menzter or Dorian Yates to see quality, strong muscle. Strong and fast muscle has a quality that is better than any amount of puff. It is healthier too. Compare Marius Puzinofsky or power lifter Cash to any body builder but Yates and see what I mean.

But, then again, it is a beauty contest and tastes are not stable or explicable in functional terms any longer. They once were in the evolutionary context, but non-linearity has taken them to a strange place in modern body building."

[Fred]

un autre article très intéressant:

Injury and High Intensity
August 25, 2005 09:40 AM

Fong asks such an important question. I have taken it from the comments to post it here.

"I hope you can expand your theories on fitness to include injury prevention when training fast twitch muscles. While I note the usual advice of "warm up-stretch" and "do not play in pain", I hope you can look into why and how this type of injury occurs for everyone no matter how careful.

Just as you have personally experienced, almost everyone who is active in sports and exercise will eventually experience a painful injury that may set them back from exercise from weeks to years.

Unlike repetitive-type injuries that come from slower workouts which have a more graduated and repeated feedback signal - high intensity workouts
injury happen quickly and often without any signs to easy off during workout. These include strains, tears, pulls even heavy cramping.

This "sudden injury" nature of high intensity workouts may even be THE limiting factor and darwinian filter - allowing someone like yourself to fully express your genes while "ordinary" folks exercising in the general same way would have long ago suffered enough injury to modify their workout to a lower intensity.

My own anecdotal experience is that high school athletes performing at state level are often not fit for combat vocations in my country's conscript army because of a muscle-skeleton injury received during sports. The funny thing is that they continue to compete at the state level despite their injury."

My incomplete thoughts on this...
Read More »

First, a little about incentives. There is, of course, a volitional aspect to how much one can do when injured. What would disqualify a military conscript from service has a lot to do with the willingness of the person to enter service. Thus, what would seem to keep a conscript out of the service might be a relatively minor injury; one that a motivated athlete might easily work through.

Now to the topic. I can say personally that I have had only one injury from my training as I moved into the higher intensity work. That was a torn biceps tendon. I ignored the inflammation, which was caused by mechanical friction or impingement of the tendon in the shoulder. The impingement was caused by a prior, not very good surgery. Inflamed tissue is weak; remember inflammation is like a process to increase the permeability of tissues, so it weakens membranes and connective tissue.

Sudden movements are extremely taxing on tissues, particularly tight or weak tissues. I know at least three people who tore a tendon in the thigh from slipping on ice or walking down hill. President Clinton did it too. You are more apt to be injured this way than training at what is called high intensity in my experience.

In reading the literature one finds there is no consistent definition or measure of high intensity. In aerobic work it is measured as percent of VO2max or watts. In weight lifting it is often measured as a percent of maximum weight, the so-called RM (1 repetition maximum). You can also see it measured as total work or volume. Fong is adding to this list the onset duration of the force generated; that is the time or degree of acceleration in the beginning of the movement. This might also be called "jerking" the weight when it is done improperly.

There is also the problem of integrating the work load over a longer period of time; a rep, a set, a work out, a week, a month and so on. High intensity might be measured by the volume over a longer time period. Or by the peaks and valleys. The complexity of the pattern. And so on. Clearly, high intensity cannot only refer to what you do in the gym or in your work out routine.

This is too complex to tackle here, I am dealing with it in the book. But, I do have a few guidelines that I use.

1. No sudden onset of force. Start smooth at the beginning of a movement and then accelerate through part of the movement, but not to the end. In other words, smoothness at the ends of the range of motion. Acceleration in between and at different parts of the movements on different days.

2. I do not take a percentage of my max wattage or my max weight. I don't know what any of these are, except that all the cycle machines seem to peak at 600 watts, so that is my max. Too many people get hurt trying to do a max lift; I never do this.

3. Keep the volume down. Fatigue is a primary cause of injury. Forcing a depleted muscle through another rep is just asking for trouble. There are no phosphates left in the muscle; this is a protection measure to avoid injury. Listen to the message. If, over a period of days or weeks, you find your blood pressure drifting upward you are way over doing it. Each work out should feel good and lower your blood pressure, with a slight elevation of your pulse during the post-work out period.

4. Don't count repetitions. Go for the burn and then stop. Your core body temperature should rise also. Both are signals of good hormone drives. It is your hormones that you are altering in the workout.

5. You want to push hard enough to ascend the fiber hierarchy, but going beyond that is of small value. That is, trigger all the fibers from ST to FTa to FTb/z. Then stop and move on to the next exercise. High volume training causes a convergence of muscle fibers composition: ST moves toward FTa and FTb/z moves toward FTa. So, you become an FTa sort of person. Pretty good, but not good enough for me. I go after FTb/z and that requires less volume.

6. You might expect that I have a slightly different perspective on intensity. I do subscribe to the complexity of the movements as a measure of intensity. Intensity is involving the most muscle volume you can engage in a movement. So, intensity, to me, is more about the total muscle volume in a movement, than straining hard. I never, ever strain; I work out hard, but that is a matter of tolerating the lactic acid a bit.

7. Finally, I like to pay attention to the most I do in a day or in an hour and the least I do. I want a lot of difference between my highest intensity and my lowest intensity activities. If I sleep well and deeply and have a good strong movement of some kind in a day, that is a really good day. Another way to think about this is in terms of METS, a measure of how far your maximum energy expenditure is above your resting metabolic expenditure. I call this metabolic headroom. It is a measure of how far from equilibrium you are. When there is a large difference between the most you can do and the least you can do, you are living far from equilibrium. When the two are equal, you are dead. Exercise capacity is the best predictor of longevity in a model that controls for a variety of other measures.

My favorite picture of a powerful, free, far-from-equilibrium creature is the dolphin. Powerful and smooth swimmers who have so much FT fiber that they leap far above the water for the pure joy of it. Their playful leaping is probably an adaptation that lets them engage their FT fibers often enough to keep them powerful, but playfully and intermittently so they are not injured. If they did high volume leaping, their FTb/z (or even wilder type) fibers would degrade into more ordinary FTa or even ST fibers.

What is the meaning of RM, sets, or reps to a dolphin? Or to a hunter-gatherer? Both are known to follow a power law in their activities; they can't help it because they are part of the natural world. So, a playful, burst/rest intermittency is the natural way to live and train.

Training is a lot like playing for me. When I finish here I am going over to the field with my 8 pound medicine ball. I throw it as far as I can and then run after it and do it again. I build to maximum throws gradually. And I vary how fast I run to pick it up (not all that far at that weight). I vary how I throw it: underhanded, overhanded, side ways and straight up over head. Its fun and a great full-body work out. I'll take my visiting granddaughter with me and we'll play at this.[/i]

[Maximus]

Super article Fred. Ce gars a développé une philosophie d'entrainement et de vie bien particulière qui semble sage et équilibrée, en témoigne sa forme à 68 ans.

J'aimerai bien voir ce qu'il conseille niveau diète, à part le fait de créer des périodes de faim et de ne pas faire trop de repas.

The best looking bodies are on those who do high intensity training. Low sets, fairly low reps, short work outs, heavy weights. Plenty of rest in between.

J'en connais un qui va être content
N'empèche que depuis que j'ai adopté ce type d'entrainement avec le doggcrapp je me sens beaucoup mieux qu'avant.

[Fred]

Au niveau de la diète, c'est plutôt du "paléolithique" donc pas de céréales, pas de soja etc...mais plutôt de la viande, des fruits, des légumes et des bonnes graisses.

En ce qui concerne l'entrainement, selon lui il doit alterner des phases très intensives et peu intensives. Le marathon, le jogging etc.. sont de la daube car selon lui nos ancêtres et même les quelques chasseurs cueilleurs qui existent encore, ne chassent pas leur proies en joggant, mais en marchant, et sprintent au moment d'attaquer la proie. Donc quelqu'un qui veut améliorer sa condition physique, doit travailler en "intermittence".

De plus il signale que la VO2 max a été testée chez certains nembres de tribus vivant toujours de la chasse et que leur niveau était le même que celui des athlètes de haut niveau en endurance.

Il insiste surtout sur l'aspect psychologique, émotionnel que doit apporter l'entrainement: il faut se faire plaisir avant tout, et éviter de tout quantifier, calculer etc...

I don't live like an agriculturalist and I don't do factory work in the gym, like so many body builders do.

Bon il y a peut être des infos a prendre avec des pincettes, mais De Vany a l'air d'avoir énormement de connaissances et avec la condition physique qu'il a pour son âge, il y a de bonnes choses a prendre dans ce qu'il écrit!

Un dernier article sur les fibres musculaires ( ses articles se lisent facilement je trouve):

Fiber Types
June 5, 2005 11:32 AM

This web site Athletic Quickness summarizes a lot of good research on the training of the FT fibers. It supports the ST exhaustion techniques that I have used for many years and is the foundation of my Hierarchical Sets. They use a slightly different technique from mine to move up the fiber recruitment sequence. They use isometric contraction which, if extended for a period of time, exhausts the weaker ST fibers and then successively recruits the two versions of the FT fibers as the contraction is maintained. This is the ST dropout process that I have used for so long. Curiously, they do not use eccentrics, which are well-known to preferentially recruit FT fibers by reversing the muscle contraction sequence which is usually ST to FTa to FTx. Eccentrics reverse this sequence.

They also point to the findings now supported by much research that the FT fibers are the "default" setting for muscle. This is something an evolutionary perspective would tell you and which I have understood for a long time. Anaerobic metabolism came first, well before aerobic metabolism. For a very long time, there were living creatures but no oxygen, so anaerobic metabolism was the foundation of all other forms. At first, oxygen presented a crisis for living organisms to whom it was highly toxic. It still is, which is why our bodies have so many antioxidant defenses.

The oxygen energy crisis was solved when organisms incoporated mitochondria into the cell. This little furnace is able to use oxygen to make ATP through the Krebbs Cycle. The result was a big gain in energy efficiency, but at the cost of damaging free radical production. The mitochondria are susceptible to free radical damage (ROS) and eventually decline in production. This mitochrondial insufficiency is a major factor in aging.

I prefer to be a primarily FT sort of person. It promotes athletic quickness and is expensive because FT fiber is so energy inefficient (6 to 8 times less efficient than aerobically adapted ST or FTa tissue). So, I stay lean and quick even though I eat quite a bit, which helps to make me well-nourished. I don't get the mitochondrial damage from excessive use of the aerobic pathway.

I get plenty of rest and train intermittently so that even my FT fibers tend to be more of the fastest FTx type than the FTa type that is prevalent in body builders who do high volume training. This exploits the "overshooting" process that results in greater expression of FTx fibers. I am not bulky either because I do not do the volume that increases the mass of my FTa fibers. So, I am quick and powerful, not bulky and merely strong.

Power Law training exploits all these features of muscle plasticity and energy systems.

[Kza]

Cest vraiment interessant!!

[Herve Picard]

ce serait mieux en francais

[Maximus]

Au niveau de la diète, c'est plutôt du "paléolithique" donc pas de céréales, pas de soja etc...mais plutôt de la viande, des fruits, des légumes et des bonnes graisses.

OK merci. Moi aller à la chasse et à la cuillette alors, ramener pigeons et rats des villes pour tribu

[Fred]

Encore un article intéressant, il ne faut pas hésiter a consulter son site tout les 2 jours il y a un nouvel article.

Sports and Spines

Take a look at a vertebra some time. It has a vertebral ring with compressive bone inside, with an elastic ring of spiraled bone on the outside. Between the vertebrae are the disks that most people think takes compression loads. Then there is a neural arch behind that protects the spinal cord. Behind the arch is another set of levers and joints. The levers provide points for muscles to stabilize the spine. The joints hold the vertebrae together.

All this is held together like a stack of interlinked washers by the muscles of the back, trunk, and abdomen which are ringed around the spine and pull like guy wires to keep the column upright. The spine is loaded through compression which is necessary to stabilize it. And it is subject to shear forces that try to push it apart laterally.

Every sport loads the spine, the spinal stabilizers, and the mobilizers because nearly all sports movements drive force through the hips and into the ground.

Different sports challenge the spine in different ways....
Read More »

1. Sprinting calls for rapid leg flexion to lift the leg and then drive it forward. This loads the psoas muscle which transfers this force as compression to the spine. So, sprinters get very sore backs when they run hard. They have to monitor the total number of sprint cycles too, or they will damage their back from the total volume of compressive load.

2. Joggers and long-distance runners also use the psoas as a leg flexor, but the total load of each stride is less than a sprinter bears. Yet, the total loading is high from the number of repeated cycles. Overload is either from a peak effort, or from repeated cycles of less than peak effort. The spine can fail with either. I do note that many marathoners tend to have a crossed pelvis with the upper part back and the lower part forward. These indicate a neural pattern from an injury and leads to a hamstring dominant and weak gluteal extension of the leg drive and an over reliance on hip extensors.

As an aside, let me say that many authorities (not me, though I have the same experience) question what the meaning of a "tight" muscle, which might be used as the conventional explanation for the crossed pelvis (a "tight" psoas and hamstring that tilt the pelvis). This is more an indicator of an altered neural recruitment pattern than of tight muscles. Stretching may be indicated, but more in a dynamic form that alters the motor pattern. But, in my opinion, it is better to go after the motor pattern that tilts the pelvis rather than to stretch the muscles, which is risky and does not really alter the neural recruitment which is the driving factor. Aside over.

4. Rowers have it worse than almost anybody. They row in the early morning so that they have smooth water. Big mistake. The disks are fully hydrated in the morning from the over night rest and the back is about 0.7 inches taller as a result of the thicker disks. This height is lost over the day as compression squeezes the liquid out of the disks. Rowers have among the highest rates of disk herniation because they flex the spine to reach for their "pull" on the oar when their disks are essentially swollen. Flexing the spine forward is the standard way to create a disk herniation and doing it when the disk is swollen is just asking for it.

5. Power lifters are more free of spine damage than might be expected from the loads they impose on their spines. It is technique that protects them and those with poor technique soon drop out. So, there is a survival bias (as my friend Nassim Taleb would call it) in that those power lifters who remain active there is technique that is protective. All those poor, damaged lifters who have dropped out are not in the sample and not counted in the damage calculation. (This is true of all the other sports too.)

A power lifter puts high compressive and shear loads on the spine. If they fail in the lift or damage their back it is usually a compressive load to the front of the disk or vertebra from flexing forward and using up the degrees of freedom in the forward spine movement. It is like "hitting the stops" of the joint movement. It is sometimes the disk that is damaged forward or on the upper or lower surface. But, it is often the central bone of the vertebra that forces the outer radius of the vertebra to tear. It turns out that compression is taken up by the central bone in the vertebrae and much less in the disks, which are incompressible liquid.

6. Gymnasts suffer fractures of the posterior parts of the spinal arch; the pars break at the joint area at the back of the spine where the spinal arch is held together. These are thought to come from repeated stress-strain reversals that come from full flexion followed by full extension. Think of a free-floor tumbling movement with a sharp flexion forward and then a quick extension upward and back, ending with a "fixed" landing in compression with an extension that flexes the spine in that cute Nadia position with the spine fully extended and the hands high and back. This appears to be a killer move, but one that is almost essential to good form in female gymnastics. That may be why female gymnasts suffer pars fractures and spinal spondylitic problems when competition is over and they fall out of shape.

7. Martial artists make sharp moves and take many falls. Sharp moves tend to put the spine against its movement stops and do a lot of damage. Falls are worse. Throws to the floor impose high shear loads on the spine from the side thrust of the throw and the peak load of the landing. Not for me. Repetition perfects style and damage.

8. Polo and other sports with high load falls. Well, you can put these things together and now see why a hard fall off a tall horse is not a good thing. Why a fall, with its high shear load tending to push the disks laterally as to shear the spinal cord, is bad is not just because it might cut the spinal cord. This is less likely than a bruise or compression load on the spinal cord that causes the neural cells to express the death program. Cell apoptosis is known to be expressed by virtually all the cells in the body when compressive loads go above a limit. Power lifters, in particular, beware. You can trigger cellular apoptosis in cells of the vertebrae.

All this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. High repetitive, weird, moves were not part of our world 100,000 years ago. Huge compressive forces, near physiological limits, were a signal that those cells should be recycled, hence apoptosis. I think many athletes are close to the apoptitic boundary of overload or over-cycling. I don't do it.

Too heavy and too often are not on my map of things to do.

[Fred]

Un condensé de son livre qui doit sortir prochainement:

[Fred]

J'ai trouvé un autre site intéressant qui regroupe des auteurs ayant dans l'ensemble la même vision de l'entrainement/alimentation etc..que De Vany, une mine d'infos:

[Maximus]

Merci Fred

[Sébastien]

Très intéressant! Merci pour ces liens Fred

[Plasma]

Je vais aller me déguster tout ça, merci Fred !

[Franck]

Super! Je connaissais DeVany mais le deuxième lien, merci pour le partage.

A+