CST Free Weight Exercises By Scott Sonnon

Here are a few recommendations for this week:
East Coast Muscle - Recently, Men’s Health Fitness Editor Adam Bornstein traveled all along the East Coast to check out several training facilities - one of which was Cressey Performance.  This blog post details his experiences and features a picture of one dead sexy guy named Cressey lifting [...]
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This one caught my eye because it was about High Intensity Exercise….so I thought Body by Science. Actually it is just another study on intervals.

Intervals - good for cardiorespiratory fitness but not necessarily for:

• lowering the subjects resting heart rate,
• lowering fat percentage or
• reducing the ratio between total and HDL plasma cholesterol.

Increasing total bone mass and lean body mass needs weight training.

Interesting material.

High-Intensity Training Vs. Traditional Exercise Interventions for Promoting Health

PURPOSE:: to determine the effectiveness of brief intense interval training as exercise intervention for promoting health and evaluate potential benefits with reference to common interventions; i.e. prolonged exercise and strength training. METHODS:: 36 untrained men were divided into groups that completed 12 weeks of intense interval running (INT; total training time 40 min a week), prolonged running ( approximately 150 min/week), strength training ( approximately 150 min/week) or continued their habitual life-style without participation in physical training. RESULTS:: The improvement in cardiorespiratory fitness was superior in INT (14+/-2% increase in VO2max) compared to the other two exercise interventions (7+/-2% and 3+/-2% increases). The blood glucose concentration 2 hours following oral ingestion of 75 g of glucose was lowered to a similar extent following training in the INT (from 6.1+/-0.6 to 5.1+/-0.4 mM; P<0.05) and the prolonged running group (from 5.6 +/-1.5 to 4.9+/-1.1 mM; P<0.05). In contrast, INT was less efficient than prolonged running for lowering the subjects resting heart rate, fat percentage and reducing the ratio between total and HDL plasma cholesterol. Furthermore, total bone mass and lean body mass remained unchanged in the INT group, while both these parameters were increased by the strength training intervention. CONCLUSIONS:: INT for 12 weeks is an effective training stimulus for improvement of cardiorespiratory fitness and glucose tolerance, but in relation to the treatment of hyperlipidemia and obesity it is less effective than prolonged training. Furthermore and in contrast to strength training, 12 weeks of INT had no impact on muscle mass or indices of skeletal health.

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Today marks the end of one of the funnest “eras” of my life.
Back on September 9, we officially kicked off the pro baseball off-season with Tim Collins’ arrival at Cressey Performance for his first training session of the off-season.  Coming off a great season that included a promotion to Double-A at age 20 and a [...]
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This article summarizes several experts view on gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time. It is possible if you schedule your eating pattern properly around your workout schedule.
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This is freaky. I must admit I wonder how “healthy” this is for the kid.

There are other videos that I can’t embed….but check out the kid’s physique in this one!

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At the recent Winter Olympics, Dutch speedskater Sven Kramer missed out on a gold medal because his coach, Gerard Kemkers, directed him into the wrong lane part way through the race.  Kramer finished the race with an Olympic record time - four seconds ahead of his nearest competitor - but was immediately disqualified because of [...]
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This one gets a bit boring, but check out his abs at 6:30

According to the note on YouTube,

he alternates 100+ press ups and 100+ ab wheel rolls every day. the result of 30 years healthy living and a daily dose of cod liver oil. legend!

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In 1993, I competed in my first World Games. It was quite intimidating to be among so many elite athletes, especially considering it was the Universiade: the Olympics for University athletes. I had trained like a madman, between 4-6 hours a day, had to drop 22lbs to meet my weight class of 163.5lbs, and was [...]
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Back in December, I was honored to be included as one of several speakers who presented at Ron Wolforth’s 2009 Ultimate Pitching Coaches Bootcamp.  As was the case in previous years, it was a great event that brought together a lot of forward-thinking minds from various roles in the pitching world.  Today, I’m happy to [...]
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Here is another one to think about with respect to the protective aspects of a low carb / primal / paleo diet (I know it is mice and we are not mice….but still worth thinking about):

Ketogenic diet slows down mitochondrial myopathy progression in mice

Mitochondrial dysfunction is a major cause of neurodegenerative and neuromuscular diseases of adult age and of multisystem disorders of childhood. However, no effective treatment exists for these progressive disorders. Cell culture studies suggested that ketogenic diet, with low glucose and high fat content, could select against cells or mitochondria with mutant mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), but proper patient trials are still lacking. We studied here the transgenic Deletor mice, a disease model for progressive late-onset mitochondrial myopathy, accumulating mtDNA deletions during aging and manifesting subtle progressive respiratory chain deficiency. We found that these mice have wide-spread lipidomic and metabolite changes, including abnormal plasma phospholipid and free amino acid levels and ketone body production. We treated these mice with presymptomatic long-term and post-symptomatic shorter term ketogenic diet. The effects of the diet for disease progression were followed by morphological, metabolomic and lipidomic tools. We show here that the diet decreased the amount of cytochrome-c-oxidase negative muscle fibers, a key feature in mitochondrial respiratory chain deficiencies, and prevented completely the formation of the mitochondrial ultrastructural abnormalities in the muscle. Furthermore, most of the metabolic and lipidomic changes were cured by the diet to wildtype levels. The diet did not, however, significantly affect the mtDNA quality or quantity, but rather induced mitochondrial biogenesis and restored liver lipid levels. Our results show that mitochondrial myopathy induces widespread metabolic changes, and that ketogenic diet can slow down progression of the disease in mice. These results suggest that ketogenic diet may be useful for mitochondrial late-onset myopathies.

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