Survival of the Fittest

So … no one outside the Experience Life staff knows this yet, but former — and possibly future — karate world champion Elisa Au will be gracing our cover in June. Now you know, too. Shhh.

A little background: Au (pronounced “Ow” — go to town on that one) is the only American woman to have won a world championship, and remains the only person in the world, male or female, to win more than one world title at a single world karate championship. The only person in the world. Can you imagine being able to say that?

If you want to read more about her, check out the links here, here and here. (Highlight from the last one? She recommends people not try the fictitious “crane technique,” pictured at right, from the movie Karate Kid.) There are lots more articles about her, but I’ve grown weary of pasting the links. These days, she’s training in Chicago, where she owns and operates three martial arts schools with her spankin’-new husband, John Fonseca (no slouch himself when it comes to karate accolades — to see a video of Fonseca, click here).

I interviewed Au several weeks ago, and before we hung up, she promised to share her favorite workout on my blog. (A very, VERY big thank you to her for sharing!)

HERE’S THE WORKOUT SHE SENT ME over the weekend — if you try it out, please tell us how it goes in the “comments” section! I tried (albeit half-heartedly) to find photos or video demonstrations to go with at least some of the exercises below, but if you’re having trouble figuring one out, post your question(s) in the comments.

FROM ELISA:
I’ve chosen exercises from my training in karate and with my personal trainer, Corey Shackelford. These exercises do not require any equipment — they rely on your body weight for resistance and focus on the core muscles, which are most important for a strong body.

You can definitely start with less reps if the moves are unfamiliar to you. Or, you can add for reps and sets in order to challenge yourself.

1. Warm up! [For an article on the benefits of warming up and cooling down, see “Gradual is Good” from the March 2007 issue of Experience Life.]

2. Charlie’s Angels Lunges — Lunge sideways with your left leg, feet parallel, arms straight out and parallel to the ground in front of you (in a gun-shooting position). Twist your upper torso to the left so that your arms rotate 90 degrees, then back to starting position. Step up and repeat on right side. 10 reps on each side.

3. Burpees — Squat down and place hands on the floor, shoulder width apart. Kick your feet back into a push-up starting position. Bring feet back under you and immediately jump up in a star position (arms and legs all extended). Repeat 15 times. [For a video demo of how to do a burpee, click here.]

4. Arm Shuffles — Start in push-up position. Shuffle your arms so that your body moves clockwise like a hand of a clock. Try to keep your feet at the middle position as your arms move from 1 to 12. Do 2 times clockwise, 2 times counter-clockwise.

5. Superman — Lay on your stomach. Lift your legs and arms off the ground and hold position for 30 seconds to a minute. [For pics, see here.]

6. V-Ups — Lie on your back. Lift your legs and arms/shoulders off the ground to create a V-shape with your body. Lower your arms and legs without letting them touch the ground. Do 15 reps. [Pics here.]

7. Plank Positions — Place elbows/forearms on the ground, feet in push-up position. Be sure your shoulders are directly above your elbows so that all body angles are 90 degrees. Hold this position for 1 minute. Point right arm straight ahead, parallel to the ground. Hold this position for 20 seconds. Switch arms and hold for another 20 seconds. Repeat with extended right and left legs, each for 20 seconds. Lastly, extend right arm and left leg, hold for 20 seconds, then switch to other side for the last 20 seconds. You will total 3 minutes. [See a basic plank pose here. You got the rest through the description, right?]

For the next three exercises, use small pieces of tape stuck to the floor. Mark 5 points like the 5-side of a die. The outer points should be about shoulder-width apart on all sides.

8. Hourglass — Start on the bottom two points with feet shoulder-width apart. Jump to the middle point to bring feet together, then jump to the top points to get back to shoulder-width position. Jump back to the middle point, then back to starting position. Repeat 15 times.

9. Figure 8 — Keep your feet together the entire time on this one. Start at the bottom left corner. Hop to the middle point, then to the upper right point. Continue on to the upper left point, middle, bottom right, then back to the beginning at the bottom left. You have made a figure 8. Repeat 8 times this way, then 8 times the opposite way.

10. Around the World — Stand on the middle point with one foot. Hop to the bottom left point then back to the middle. Continue to the top left then return, top right and return, bottom right and return. Repeat in this clockwise position 5 times, then 5 times counter-clockwise. Repeat with other foot.

11. Cool-down and STRETCH!

~Elisa

My friend Kathy (strange to call her anything but “Sausage” — aren’t rugby nicknames great?) pasted a link to this CrossFit workout in a comment she left in response to my last post.

She says, “I just read the article in the mag on [the Tabata Protocol] … never thought 4 minutes could be so painful until I met a workout called ‘fight gone bad.’”

Indeed, I would not want to meet this workout in a dark alley.

Originally designed for mixed martial artist B.J. Penn, with the metabolic demands of ultimate fighting in mind, “Fight Gone Bad” is an intense, five-minute weightlifting, plyometrics and cardio circuit that’s repeated three times, with a one-minute break between rounds (just barely enough time to be able to breathe again … sort of). So, 17 minutes total. If you live that long.

After watching the video of the workout, I can see how the first five minutes could do you in. And I have yet to make it through one four-minute Tabata round on the treadmill (although I have muscled through it on the stationary bike now). But still … does anyone else want to work out right this minute?

It looks like you can rig up a similar circuit at nearly any gym (that is, you don’t have to be at a CrossFit facility) as a way to build your work capacity without courting your slow-twitch muscle fibers — fast-twitch types, rejoice!

UPDATE: As I was perusing the workout and exercise list at CrossFit.com (some really amazing stuff there), I came across a Tabata version of the “Fight Gone Bad” workout! See the video here (complete with music from Culture Club).

A few weeks back, my friend Angie proposed that a group of us do the Leprechaun Run here in Philly this past Saturday.

Without really digging into the race description — aside from noticing that the proceeds benefited the Special Olympics — I agreed. I saw a “5” and assumed it was a 5K.

I was wrong.

A couple days before the race, as I was filling in my entry form, I noticed that, in fact, the race was five MILES — not kilometers — long. Oops? Considering my longest cardio session since I’ve gotten back into fitness has lasted 23 minutes (and 37 seconds), I found this bit of info quite alarming.

But the other option was a two-mile walk and, well, there was pride to consider. I mean, I could run five miles if I wanted to … I’ve just never wanted to before. Right? And anyway, wasn’t I supposed to be building up my aerobic base?

I think it’s worth noting here that Stubot (of Pull-Up Challenge “fame”) declined the race invite, replying “Distance running isn’t really appropriate rugby training, so I don’t want to weigh myself down with the wrong muscle fibers. I don’t even know what that means, actually.”

Ah, prescient Stubot.

While I slogged through the race in just under an hour, in the future I will arm myself with one of the following two excuses. I mean reasons. OK, excuses — but they’re good ones.

Legitimate Excuse No. 1: Sprinters don’t need to build an aerobic base.

Literally the day after I sent in my race form, Vern Gambetta, director of Gambetta Sports Training Systems, blogged about the notion of “Building an Aerobic Base” as it relates to sprinters.

There, the pretense I’d been laboring under mocked me. His first sentence sums it up: “For some strange reason, the myth that you must build an aerobic base for sprinting still lives.”

Hold up — that’s a myth?! That myth is the only reason I signed up to do five miles. (That, and to benefit the Special Olympics, of course.)

It was my understanding that I was still in base-building mode, which all types of athletes have to muster through at the beginning of a program, and that later I’d be able to switch over to more fast-twitch-focused workouts.

But no. To drive the point home, later that same day Gambetta posted “More on ‘Aerobic Base,’” with detailed support from Jack Blatherwick, PhD, the conditioning coach for the NHL’s Washington Capitals (not to mention former conditioning coach for the U.S. Olympic Ice Hockey team, including the 1980 “Miracle Team”).

Five highlights of Blatherwick’s argument:

> For sprinters, of course the most important base would be speed — in concert with strength and power. It is a waste of time — and perhaps counterproductive — to train with long slow distances. Aerobic/cardiovascular fitness is essential for all young athletes, of course. The important question is how to acquire it.

> Regarding team sports that require skill and athleticism, the mistake made by many fitness coaches is to “compartmentalize” the training into separate workouts — aerobic endurance, anaerobic power, anaerobic endurance, skill, agility, strength, etc. etc. etc. Of course in a game, all of these attributes are required at the same time, so we should be looking for more ways to incorporate the various elements into “integrated workouts.”

> … anaerobic interval training is highly aerobic, and can be a more intense cardiovascular workout than what fitness gurus would call a “cardio” workout. College hockey players doing six weeks of dryland training composed of “anaerobic intervals” for quickness and power made greater gains in aerobic and cardiovascular measures than if they had trained with aerobic distances for the same period

> There is a neuromuscular consequence for everything we do — including endurance workouts. This means we are forming habits at all times — physiological habits that might be very difficult to break.

> … it is obvious we should rethink our compartmentalized approach and add “overspeed practice.” This means pushing the team out of their present comfort zone — to perform skills and make read-react decisions at a faster pace, using appropriate intervals. Then, as the training season progresses, increase the length of the intervals and total length of the overspeed practice. This approach certainly does not include long, slow distances, because “slow” is not part of the mission.

Legitimate Excuse No. 2: Doing nothing assists recovery just as much as doing “active recovery” (often a clever name for a long, slow run).

It might be a stretch, but there is at least some data to support this statement. As long as you are part of a small, elite population of athletes, that is (specifically, a young, female, elite soccer player). But sometimes, I think research is about hearing what you want to hear. (Hellooooo, placebo.)

Bryan Chung, MD, founder of the blog Evidence-Based Fitness, dissected the 2008 study “Neuromuscular fatigue and recovery in elite female soccer: Effects of active recovery” from the journal Medicine and Science in Sport and Exercise in his recent post “Rest vs. Active Recovery.” (Active recovery is performing submaximal exercise to promote recovery from intense training sessions/games.)

The study compared the recovery times of two groups of soccer players who played two games, 72 hours apart — one group did active recovery, and the other recovered passively.

Turns out the researchers didn’t find a bit of difference between the two groups.

While Chung noted plenty of flaws in the study, his bottom line was “… you can probably do whatever you like best, whether it’s sitting on the couch, or getting some active recovery in, feeling relatively assured that it’s probably not going to hurt you. [C]ertainly, this study draws attention to question whether active recovery, though theoretically sound, is actually any more beneficial than passive recovery.”

Yes! I’ve always despised — and skipped, in large part — the 30-minute “recovery run” the day after rugby games. (I really hope Martha Daines isn’t reading this post.)

And now, happily, I will continue to do so. If you take issue with that, see Excuse No. 1.

I think you can do just about anything cardio-related for one minute. You may not want to, but you just have to buck up, have heart, dig deep and git-’er-done. (Or so go the platitudes.) So four minutes didn’t seem like too big a stretch, especially when discussing a cardio workout in its entirety.

Ever since we published “The Tabata Tune-Up” in the March issue of Experience Life, I’ve been itching to try it. Big results in less time? I’m in — it just so happens I’m eager to hurry my progress along (within the parameters of training smart, of course). Sure, in the article we’re up front that it’s tough, but how tough could it possibly be?

Ah, well, yes. Post–Tabata cardio workout No. 1 — done on a treadmill at 12.1 mph, 2 percent incline — I’m here to report that four minutes can stretch on for some time. Especially when one’s vision is getting ever-so-slightly black around the edges.

I made it through two and a half minutes on Friday night, but I’m not (that) ashamed. Or rather, that’s not the end of it. Tabata No. 2 tonight.