How does something that hurts so bad, feel so good?

Posted on February 7, 2012 by

The 3rd Door's newest trainer, Manuel Mendoza

According to Manuel Mendoza, 8 minutes of competing on the rower felt worse than running a 10K.  He would know, as Manuel, 3rd Door’s newest personal trainer, is a veteran in the field of running and competing in triathlons.  In fact, he lost 30 pounds over 5 years by running, swimming, biking, and of course, watching his diet.  But Manuel is now hooked.  After one month of Rowing Club at The 3rd Door, Manuel blew away all expectations and completed his 2K (as a lightweight) in 7:58 minutes.  Look at his photo—now there is a face of a satisfied man.

There were several personal bests met, records broken and medals awarded to the 30 members of The 3rd Door Rowing Team who participated in the 2012 Peninsula Indoor Rowing Championships on Sunday, February 5th.   According to Sargon Benjamin, the pain is bearable because you are competing right next to your buddies with all of your team cheering you on.  That can’t be easy for him to say, having earned third place in the Men’s Open with a time of 6:31.  And can you imagine how Allen Czerwinski felt, at a time of 6:26, which earned him second place?  Ouch!  Allen says that the pain is somewhat easier to take knowing that the only person who beat him is a college kid.

Pictured from left: Sargon Benjamin, Allen Czerwinski , Emeric McDonald

So why do we all feel so good?  Rather than the endorphins answer you are probably expecting, I’ll tell you our secret….Emeric! How do I describe our dear “Master Rower” Emeric McDonald?  Let me give you one example of his dedication to our team–he can still tell you, down to the second, what my time was at the 2011 rowing competition. In fact, he could spout off the times of every one of our participants and probably their practice times too.  As a competitor, there is no replacing the feeling of stepping to the starting line and knowing that you have been properly trained for this minute and that you have a fail-safe strategy to get you through the race with room to “pour it on” in the last 200.

Emeric’s dedication is infectious.  On Monday nights (and an occasional fill-in on Wednesdays and Saturdays) Allen shares his expertise with us, using great patience and experience to guide us through Rowing Club.  I’m not surprised that he was the captain of his college track team.  If you stay with a class long enough, rowing gets into your blood and you, also, will become a loyal cheerleader for the team.

Pictured from left: Jocelyn Doe and Lesley Martin

Ready.  Attention.  Row. I take off, steady, careful to keep my pace at 2:17, maybe a bit faster but never going above 2:20.  My buddies “Jo Row” and “Glowe Row” are on my left and “Row Row Rox” is on my right.  I can hear Allen guide Rox through the nine minutes—bring it up, keep it there, you’re doing great, now you can go faster (V, no, this is not a porno script).  My legs are burning, my arms are slightly numb.  Emeric is right behind me, urging me on, counting out the strokes.  The pain is dampened by my confidence that I am in the right place, at the right time and that my family is there. THANK YOU EMERIC MCDONALD.  You have many fans at The 3rd Door (and in the general rowing community as you can see from the photo).

If you are reading this and you are not rowing at The 3rd Door, what are you waiting for? Stop by and try out one of our Rowing Club or Circuit Rowing classes.  I guarantee you that if you don’t give up in the first month, you will be hooked.

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Why We Are Doing Push-Ups at The 3rd Door by Dianne Giancarlo

Posted on February 6, 2012 by

I remember the first time I read the NY Times headline in March of 2008: An Enduring Measure of Fitness: The Simple Push-Up. It reminded me of watching Jack LaLanne when I was a child, in his stretchy slacks and ballet slippers, executing the perfect push-ups on my folks’ black and white television set. Could the push-up still be relevant today?
I read on, through to the end where the author, Tara Parker-Pope, reports:
“Based on national averages, a 40-year-old woman should be able to do 16 push-ups and a man the same age should be able to do 27. By the age of 60, those numbers drop to 17 for men and 6 for women. Those numbers are just slightly less than what is required of Army soldiers who are subjected to regular push-up tests.”

I’m the kind of person who figures that national averages are for the weak. They are practically irrelevant to me—maybe just a starting point. Like a client long ago once said to me when I asked him how he managed to keep looking so great at his advanced age (ok, he was maybe mid 50’s then, but to my 30-something he seemed old). Irwin replied, “Dianne, when I step on the machines at the gym and they ask me to input my age, I always say ‘29’”. Bingo, I never looked back. I adopted that plan for myself figuring that if I at least aim for the fitness level of a 29-year-old, then falling in the middle of a 29-year-old pack will be pretty good at any age.

So you can imagine how I felt when I read that an AVERAGE 40-year-old woman should be able to do 16 push-ups (Tara is referring to the “men’s kind”). Shoot, if a 60-YEAR-OLD WOMAN IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO DO 6 PUSH UPS, where does that leave me, 51 years old at the time, and barely able to punch out 5 decent men’s push ups?

So I’ve practiced my push-ups over the years. I am drawn to articles touting the benefits of push-ups as I struggle to increase my number to 16. I actually made it to 20 at one point, which happily coincided with a trip to my friend, Susan’s, (“FBI Susan”) 50th birthday party where, after way too many rum punches she challenged me to a push up duel and, as if that were not enough, a pull up contest from the pool where we both found ourselves, fully clothed and sopping wet at some time late enough in the evening that Charlie had gone to bed, tired of the breast beating performances.

We chose the push-up as the first challenge of 2012 at The 3rd Door as a reminder to our members that we are all good enough to compete with a 29-year-old (even you 25-year-olds out there). Fitness does not have to mean being able to walk 18 holes just because we no longer make it to the ski slopes by 8:30 am. We are still strong –but we are wiser.
We are challenging all of our members to blow away the average. For women between 40 and 60, can you get to16 push-ups? For men it’s 27. And for every decade under 40 or over 60, add or subtract 10. That means that our 20-something female members are shooting for 36 and Lottie is shooting for negative 14 (may we all be working out at The 3rd Door in our mid 80s!). Men in their 30s should shoot for 37 (Curtis, you have some work to do….). Make sure you are using the proper form. Ask any of our trainers for tips and have them do lots of examples for you (Amanda is swearing at me now). By the end of February we hope to have a blackboard full of our achievements.

The simple push-up. A simple reflection on fitness and life.

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How to Avoid Weight Gain This Holiday

Posted on November 9, 2011 by

Read time: 1 minute

If you’re a client or member of The 3rd Door, then you already know how much we encourage the use of a simple and inexpensive pedometer, which gives instant feedback on our accumulation of daily physical activity.

We’re not saying that being physically active is all we need, but the lack of it is devastating to our health and works against our effort at body weight management — even if we formally exercise.

To be clear, formal exercise is highly beneficial on many levels, but it is only part of the overall equation. Frequent and continuous physical activity (moving around) all day contributes significantly to 24-hour calorie expenditure, often adding up to more spent calories than a typical exercise session.

Also, frequent and continuous physical activity stimulates the normal blood flow that maintains a normal metabolization of sugar and fat, nourishes the cells of the body, and (according to latest evidence) may help in preventing some cancer.

Imagine sitting all day and compromising the normal flow of blood to the cells of the body. Intuitively, you can tell this is bad news.

Get yourself a pedometer, and get up and move a little more… especially through the holiday season when body weight tends to creep.

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Exercise Capacity and Longevity, or Why We Love Rowing

Posted on October 12, 2011 by

Read time: 3 minutes

As you walk into our private fitness center, the first thing you notice is that we have no other exercise machines than the numerous indoor rowers. For such a simple machine, it offers the biggest bang to improving health, body composition, and overall exercise capacity.

What Does Exercise Capacity Mean to Us?

A long-term study of well over 6,000 people (published in The New England Journal of Medicine) concluded that exercise capacity has an inverse relationship with all-cause mortality.

In other words, the greater our exercise capacity, the better our longevity. In fact, exercise capacity is a stronger predictor of mortality than that of established risk factors such as hypertension, smoking, diabetes, etc.

Rowing and Exercise Capacity

We didn’t decide to offer rowing classes just to be different. As people who have witnessed loved ones being changed and restricted by advancing age, we knew that our mission was to offer efficient ways for people to improve health and maintain youthful function for years or decades to come, while possibly increasing longevity.

Indoor rowing works multiple muscle groups, stimulating the blood-trees of the upper and lower body… and, yes, the middle, too. Rowing utilizes large range of motion, making it more metabolically expensive. You also work through all energy systems. We don’t do just “aerobics,” or just “lifting”; nature does not discriminate between the two.

The rhythmic, cyclical and predictable nature of rowing also encourages an active trance, which helps to improve mood.

The self-selected pace (though with guidance and encouragement from the coach) eliminates anguish. The monitor on your rower gives instant feedback so that you’re always connected to your effort, and that inevitably leads to greater motivation for increasing challenge at appropriate levels.

With regularity, everyone improves.

Rowing and Exercise Capacity

Exercise capacity simply means your ability to produce physical work. The greater the intensity of physical work, the greater the energy cost. This energy cost is called the metabolic equivalent of task, or MET.

If sitting at rest is 1 MET, then walking increases it to 3.5 METs, while bicycling at 12 mph increases it to 7 METs. Greater exercise intensity results in higher levels MET.

Rowing is an efficient way to work at and achieve higher MET levels, all while in a safe environment and under your own control.

MET and VO2Max

VO2Max is the maximum volume of oxygen your body uses to produce work. During oxygen use, fat also gets burned (like fuel and air mixture). When the physical work exceeds your body’s ability to use oxygen, your body crosses over to anaerobic metabolism, in which muscle glycogen becomes the dominant fuel.

This point of “energy cross-over” determines your VO2Max, where your body cannot use anymore oxygen and begins to rely on glycogen.

When you increase your work capacity, or MET, you also raise your VO2Max. This leaves you to burn more air and fat for the physical work you’re doing, before crossing over energy substrates to muscle glycogen.

If you’re seeking great general fitness, improved body composition, and positive health (and potentially longevity), then forget gimmicky and costly testing and assessment of “where your VO2Max lays” (this data doesn’t change the exercise prescription for most of us, except maybe for Lance Armstrong who’s at the top of rare human performance). Instead, just start exercising to increase your work capacity.

Indoor rowing is an excellent way to increase this work capacity, and thus your VO2Max.

Cellular Vitality

Within the cells of your body are tiny units called mitochondria, the power centers for oxygen and fat utilization in a process called cellular respiration. Essentially, this is the process of life.

By increasing your exercise capacity (work capacity), you also increase the process by which cellular respiration (using oxygen and fat) become more robust. This may be the association to longevity. It certainly is to health and weight management.

It so happens that indoor rowers are uniquely wonderful machines on which to achieve greater exercise capacity. They require full-body work and full range of motion. They’re rhythmic and predictable, thus mood elevating. They’re predictable, helping to diminish anxiety and to eliminate stress.

We believe in indoor rowing for all of these wonderful reasons, but as a group that cares about our community, we believe in indoor rowing because they are an accessible activity for all kinds of people at all levels and in all physical condition.

Below are pictures from our outdoor rowing event at our 1st Year Anniversary get-together. Enjoy, and we’ll see you at The 3rd Door.

Emeric prepping rowers

Music, fun, and sweat

Emeric always emphasizes: "If you don't have time to warm up, you don't have time to workout."

In the heat of action

Rowing is for everyone

Members and friends, in Rowing Circuit class

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The Latest and Greatest

Posted on September 20, 2011 by

Almost all exercise machines will provide an activity far superior to what a couch can do. Having said this, many claims made by the manufacturers of these machines serve to prey on the uninformed, effectively spreading more misinformation to create a population of missinformed consumers. Nothing bothers us more.

In this video featuring the Jacobs Ladder, likely produced by the company itself, you can see the claims made with grossly inaccurate soundbites.

Click on the video section at 1:10 to hear their claims of benefits. And below are point-by-point analyzed.

Jacobs Ladder video promotion

The claims in red:

“It puts the user’s back at a 45 degree position, therefore placing the spine at a more neutral position.” 

A 45-degree position has nothing to do with a neutral spine, which can be achieved at nearly any angle. It’s a meaningless claim.

“Since the user is in a positive climbing motion, the Jacobs Ladder workout has very little impact on hip, knee, and ankle joints that are susceptible to wear and injury.”

Impact has nothing to do with increased wear and injury, as the body is designed to withstand and thrive on impact (it’s bad technique in any exercise that predisposes the user to injury). Impact is an important stimulus to musculoskeletal and joint health, and the removal of normal impact can result in diminishing health and integrity of these structures. If this 1980s myth were true, then we need to remove dancing, walking and most form of natural, earthly movement from humans.

 “The ladder rungs are spaced 12 inches apart, forcing the user to use a full range of motion.” 

12 inches of limb movement is hardly full range of motion, so this claim is an outright lie. Here are normal values in range of motion for the hip:

Hip flexion: 120 degrees
Hip extension:  30 degrees
Total range of movement: 150 degrees

Hip Abduction:  45 degrees
Hip Adduction:  20 degrees
Total range of movement:  65 degrees

Hip internal rotation: 45 degrees
Hip external rotation:  35 degrees
Total range of hip rotation:  80 degrees

The shoulder joint, naturally more flexible than the hip joint, has even greater range of motion. I won’t go into how false the claim made in this video is in regard to the shoulder joint, but you can click here to see for yourself that a “12-inch ladder spacing” fails to achieve a range of motion value anywhere close to what the shoulder joint can and should achieve in exercise.

The point is that the Jacob Ladder works the body in a restricted range of motion while many other methods and modality can achieve much greater range of motion while still providing the same or greater musculoskeletal and metabolic demand.

“The close-chain motion of the upper body recruits core stabilization muscle groups to simulate function and to provide strong exercise in the rehabilitation of the back, shoulder and lower body injuries.” 

The concept of close-chain mechanics here is miss-used. The motion is actually a combination of open- and close-chain, but the true definition in each also depends on load and what’s occurring at the other end of the kinetic chain, the feet. This is just meaningless mumbo jumbo to confuse the consumers into thinking something magical is happening. Any exercise, done in the right phases of recovery and with appropriate technique and proper progression, can provide a powerful rehabilitative tool. Effective rehabilitation involves many important variables such as, isolation, isometrics (non-motion-producing), isotonic (motion-producing), integration, multi-planar motion, variable acceleration, and variable load patterns.

In other words, the Jacobs Ladder is only one tool for rehabilitation, and probably not the most efficient tool, nor the best method for ”core” stabilization — as there are numerous other exercises and methods requiring only basic equipment that can accomplish almost all of the above variables.

“The unit is self-paced, ensuring that the user is neither underworked or overworked.”

Almost any exercise can be self-paced. That’s just inherent — it’s like claiming that an apple is cholesterol free. The consumer is more sophisicated than this… yet a desperate consumer seems to hear magic in these claims. (We don’t want desperate consumers, we want informed consumers.)

“…The Jacobs Ladder (is) an excellent tool for training athletes, aerobically or anaerobically.” 

I haven’t seen an athete that must climb a ladder for any duration, but yes, the Jacobs Ladder is an good way to train the aerobic and anaerobic systems. There are, however, numerous superior methods that train the same systems to the same intensity but also provide significantly more adaptable variables, such as multiple planes of motion, selective speed of movement, real-life acceleration, greater range of motion, greater metabolic output, and a list of others.

“The Jacobs Ladder… raises the user’s heart rate into the target zones faster than almost any other cadio piece on the market today.”

It’s not a matter of “cardio pieces” or machines that raise the heart rate quickly but a matter of individual output of the exerciser. Raising the heart rate can be achieved with an 8-pound medicine ball, a kettlebell, or just the body weight alone. It’s a matter of knowing what to do. One certainly does not need a $4,000 machine for which you’d have to wait in line forever to get your turn at a health club. There are more accessible exercises and methods that offer superior physiological effects, for much less footprint and dollar amount, and possessing greater movement freedom.

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Exercise and The Fountain of Youth

Posted on September 14, 2011 by
Read time: 1 minute
 
 
October’s theme will be Exercise and Fountain of Youth. By raising your exercise capacity (the ability to do more physical work in a certain period of time), you raise your VO2Max. And a large, longitudinal study published in New England Journal of Medicine in 2002 shows that those with higher VO2Max tend to live longer lives.  
 
Here’s the interesting and highly relevant message for Soul Blast and for circuit Rowing class, or even for the exercise challenge (stay tuned) we’ll have in October: 
 
Studies show thatyou can increase your VO2 max by working out at an intensity that raises your heart rate to between 64 to 94 percent of its maximum for at least 20 minutes three times a week.* The American College of Sports Medicine recommends this strategy also and says that those with a high VO2 Max will likely also have a lower resting heart rate, lower blood pressure and lower risk for chronic diseases, as these are also positively correlated with being fit. Just something to think about the next time you’re going through our standard warm-up protocol while looking at the Soul Blast exercise prescriptions for the day.
 
* For general guidance, here is the heart rate range you can aim for while exercising:
Age 35:  118 – 173
Age 45:  112 – 164
Age 55:  105 – 155
 
Best,
Johnny
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The Only True Fountain of Youth

Posted on September 7, 2011 by

We all have our own motivation to exercise (losing weight, improving recreational ability, looking good naked); but we at THE3RDOOR cannot emphasize enough the importance of exercise in keeping ourselves young.

Here’s a NY Times article discussing how exercise counteracts the effects of aging. Nothing you haven’t heard, but worth a clear reminder.

I guess that, no matter what our goals for exercise are, eventually we all have the same goal: not to be affected by the onset of age.

Stay active. Exercise.

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