Adelfo Cerame - Road to Wheelchair Championships: What Sitting in a Chair Teaches You About Isolation Exercises

Image 1: "Hey Dude! Those arms come from rolling around in the chair, right?

The time is flying by, it's almost June (just a few couple of hours left in May) and for Adelfo his next big day is approaching fast. After last weeks brief panic attack (see "Don't Let Red Flags and Banana Skins Stop You!), he is back on track this week and that despite the fact that he has a hell lot of work to do that is not related to working out or dieting... or writing his weekly blogposts on the SuppVersity, of course. Usually you would think that sitting in a wheelchair does make all that more complicated and troublesome, but as you will see in this week's installment of Adelfo Cerame's Road to the Wheelchair Championships, sitting in a wheelchair can also have certain advantages, even when it comes to building a better physique!

The overlooked advantages of training in a wheelchair

I don’t get approached much, but when I do, the majority speculates that I have attained and maintain my physique from pushing my wheelchair around. I assume many people will think that I would expend more energy than the average able body person, and get my fair share of low intensity cardio on a daily basis, due to being and moving in a chair throughout the day, but I am neither sure that this is actually the case (assuming that the aforementioned person is not the average obese couch-potato), nor do I believe that the actual act of moving around in the chair has much of anything to do with my ability to achieve and maintain the physique I have.

In a wheelchair or not, it takes dedication, consistency and balance to be able to achieve the physique you want. I’m no exception to the rule; I still have to diet and train just like everyone else. There’s no magic pill or in my case magic wheelchair, that will get you your results.

With that being said; it was brought to my attention the other day by one of my training partners, that I must really get a good isolation when I do my exercises, just for the fact that I cannot use my legs as a leverage.  I paused and thought about it... and yeah, being in a wheelchair does have some training advantages. At least, as far as upper body development and strength are concerned. I think some of the more or less involuntary, since obligatory isolation movements, I do for certain body parts did and still do contribute to my size and strength gains; and what's more, I believe able persons, like you probably are, could benefit from some of them, as well!.

Image 2: Let's face it guys, THIS can't be the result from rolling around in a wheelchair all day, right?

Due to being paralyzed from the waist down, the isolation may come more "naturally" (whatever that may mean in this context), but there is nothing that would hinder you from emulating it and grasping similar benefits from

• not planting your feet/ legs on the floor and thusly having less leverage and a less solid base, when doing exercises like bench presses
• not curling or pushing (down) from your legs, when you do biceps curls or triceps push-downs
• not being able to bend over like crazy and compensate with your legs, when you did actually sit down to counter exactly those compensatory movements that will hinder you to isolate a certain muscle group as for example during single-arm DB side laterals

Don't get me wrong I am not even accusing you of "cheating", it is totally normal for your body to try to make it as easy as possible for you - or in this case, the "target muscle" - to lift the weight. When an object is too heavy to lift with your lats alone, that little extra kick with your legs will help you the inertia and allow you to complete the rest of the lift.

The unstable bench is probably not ideal for maximal leverage, but a means to isolate the pecs

Simlarly, on a bench press, people will start arching their backs like crazy (something that obviously will require leg involvement), whenever the load gets to heavy to be lifted properly. In some cases this may be the conscious application of a lifting technique, for 99% of the average gymrats, however, it is simply an instinctive reaction of your body to a load it feels your chest, front delts and triceps (the major muscle groups the flat bench press should activate) won't be able to lift, without a little help from your legs that would put them in a favorable position.

Image 3: This is how I feel every time I get under a flat press bench *lol* As you can see, able people must lift their legs, so they can isolate the chest, and when you isolate a muscle, you stimulate and target the area much more efficiently - at least on a pound per rep base.

Now, it goes without saying that, in my case, this mechanism, or rather its practical realization are no longer operating, since most of the connection between my brain and legs is out of whack. When I do a flat bench exercise – it’s not that my chest, my delts and my tris are unable to make things easier for themselves by signaling my brain to use the legs to position my body differently, I will also have to accommodate for the lack of stability (to the left and right) able people derive from planing their legs firmly on the ground. If you still don't get where this is headed to, check out the image 3.

To isolate or not to isolate? Is that a question, at all?

Image 4: For your isolation movements, you want to pick muscles that are lagging and exercises that work for you. For me a lagging body part are my rear delts and the rear delt cable fly is the exercise, of which I feel that I get the best contraction in this part of my body.

While some people will tell you that "isolation does not even exist" and that all your efforts to train a certain muscle group in isolation were futile, my take on it is slightly different. Allegedly, when you do compound exercises, heavy pulling and pushing, this will always involve a whole host of muscles / muscle groups. Take my EDT training split for example; there’s not a single of those "fancy isolation exercises", as critics like to refer to them, involved - just basic compound movements: Hard, heavy and intense!

Still, there are benefits in some isolation movements, in my opinion and I think Dr. Andro would have to agree on the fact that the addition of a couple of well-chosen isolation exercises (keep in mind, well-chosen implies that you pick those exercises that work for you, not for Adelfo Cerame, Dr. Andro, or Jay Cutler), when executed with proper form and intensity can provide advanced trainees with the additional accentuated training stimuli neither a "compounds only"- nor the average muscle mag "do every biceps isolation exercise known to man in one single session and repeat that ten times"-workout. 

Muscle groups and exercises for isolation

As I have already stated before, your exercise choice will be based mainly on on your personal preferences and goals - with the latter having priority before the former: You would, for example not do tons of hammer DB hammer curls on a preacher bench, if your brachialis was already bigger than your biceps. On the other hand, you would maybe chose standing calf raises on one of those funky machines over doing them freely, if you feel that you are getting a better contraction on the machine.

Video 1 (click to watch): Here’s a clip of me training rear delts. I don’t really do much for my rear delts, since they are constantly getting hit when I do chins, DB rows, and seated back rows (Adelfo Cerame. 2013).

As a rule of thumb, the smaller muscle groups usually benefit most from isolation work. For me, those are the side and rear delts, so so much my front, though; for one, my front delts are already in pretty decent shape and for two, they get hammered with almost every pressing movement you do. It would therefore not make sense for me to do additional isolation work for them. For the side and the rear delts this is, as I said, differently, and with the usual trial & error (no, you cannot avoid that completely ;-), I have found that for me also due to being in my chair, two exercises work particularly well:

1. DB side laterals – Gripping one side of my chair, I lean towards the other, so that I can balance the weight of the dumbbell in my hand, then I grip the wheel and do the raises, probably similar to the way you do them. While you could possibly use other muscles than your delts to help yourself out and cheat the DB up, though, the rest of my body is pretty much occupied with keeping me stable so that I get a very decent contraction in my delts - and only in my delts ;-)
2. Bent over reverse cable fly’s – I've been through basically every rear delt exercise you can possibly do, I believe, and it was by no means easy to find one that works for me. Either I cannot do them at all, or they don't really isolate the muscle, the way I want them to. What I did find works pretty well, though are the bent over reverse cable fly's (see video 1). And again, not being able to rock to the left or to the side from the legs, must not necessarily be a disadvantage here.

Now, as you can see, this are two, I repeat, TWO, isolation movements for muscles you can actually isolate. Many of the intitially mentioned guys who speculate that it must be my wheelchair due to which I build those "great arms", on the other hand, will be "hitting" their chest, their biceps and some also their triceps "from every angle" in hope for "full development" - I am using quotationmarks here, because I've heard that time and again and usually the laughable results speak for themselves... in other words, isolate where it makes sense, but stick to one exercise per muscle and max. two exercises per muscle group; do only a couple of sets and focus on form and contraction - everything else is just a waste of time.

Will Sex Before a Competition Hamper Your Performance? And How Estrogen, Cortisol, Quail and Muhammad Ali Could Help Us Answer This Existential Question

Image 1: At least in his later life, Muhammad Ali could hardly be considered a "bro". Notwithstanding, he was 100% convinced that having sex the night before a fight was a total no-go.

I you are a bro, or frequent one or many of the pertinent boards, the question whether or not sexual intercourse with yourself or your partner will have beneficial, neutral or negative effects on your performance in the gym, and more importantly your gains and endocrine system probably is not news to you. Even in case you do not belong to either of the former categories, I am sure you will have heard about Olympians or other athletes refraining from the previously mentioned exchange of bodily fluids on the day, if not during the whole week, let alone weeks before a competition. Now, as chance would have it, I stumbled across an interesting study that was conducted by a group of researchers at the University of Liege in Belgium (it goes without saying that Liege is in Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium, right? ;-) that may not be able to provide direct evidence for or against pre-competition sex, but could at least help us to shed some allegedly dim light on the hormonal changes that occur in your brain, when birds and bees finally meet (Dickens. 2013).

Of the birds and the bees and how stressing the best things in life can become

To study the effects of stress and sexual intercourse on neural aromatase (remember: the enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen) and circulating stress hormones Molly J. Dickens and her colleagues from the Research Group in Behavioural Neuroendocrinology picked a very exotic model: The common quail. Now, despite the undeniable differences that (hopefully) exist between your sexual partner of choice and these shrunken chickens, birds, in general, and quails in particular have a long history as a supposedly accurate model for systemic effects of hormonal changes at the cerebral level and have been used, among other things to elucidate hormonal effects on appetite and food intake (Balthazard. 1998).

Significant other advisory: Don't take today's news so serious that you ruin your partnership. This is one of the SuppVersity posts with at least as much entertainment as informative value ;-)

The researches tested the nuclei-specific aromatase activity changes, the corresponding observable behavior, subsequent fertilisation rates and corticosterone (cortisol) concentrations of quail in a relaxed, non-stressed or an acutely stressed (15 min restraint) immediately prior to sexual interaction (5 min) with stressed or non-stressed partners. Quite a complex undertaking, and in all honesty nothing I want to think about for longer than by any means necessary, so let's get straight down to the nitty gritty ;-)

Figure 1: Cortisol levels in stressed and non-stressed male and female quail before (baseline) and after intercourse with a stressed or non-stressed partner (data adapted from Dickens. 2013)

As you can see in figure 1 the cortisol response of birds and bees, ah... pardon, male and female quail in stressed + non-stressed, stressed + stressed, non-stressed + non-stressed and non-stressed + stressed pairings was very differential. let's briefly go through some very realistic *rofl* scenarios, say you are a...

• Male weight lifter right before competition - In this case your baseline cortisol would be high (stressed), what would you do to keep that in check? Right you would have sexual intercourse with your hopefully totally relaxed girlfriend / wife. The stress reduction would be meager, but alas... there are different reasons to engage in this utterly human act (and did I mention that it is 100% paleo?)
• Male student who trains just for fun - Assuming that you are one of the slackers whose parents finance their studies (don't deny it, I know you, guys!) and who spend most of their time in the gym hitting on the girls, you better stick to just hitting on them, if you don't want to quintuple your stress levels. Although, let's be honest, the reasons you are not seeing any gains are probably not related to high cortisol levels, anyways ;-)
• Female 200m runner right before competition - With the big day right ahead your cortisol levels are skyrocketing, the worst thing you could do now, is make out with one of your male colleagues who is likewise totally stressed out. You better go home to your loving boyfriend or husband and spend some cozy hours with him to reduce your stress levels by -44% and decrease your not chance to jump the gun.
• Female leisure time gymrat: You are calm, you know you are sexy and have no reason to be stressed out other than your boring, non-stressed boyfriend or husband at home. And  while you would be way better off with the hectic postman (obviously only in terms of stress increases ;-), I am not sure if that could not have very enervating and thus stressing consequences *rofl*

I see, you are questioning the value of the practical advice I am putting out here? Well, let's see what others have to say on the issue, let's take Samantha McGlone and Ian Shrier, for example, in their review of the literature they explicitly mention that despite the fact that (McGlone. 2000):

[...] the results of these studies [there were obviously only three scientific ones published between 1975 and 1989], one might conclude that sexual activity the night before competition would not affect performance. However, each of the above-mentioned studies focused on the physiological effects of precompetition sex, which would only be expected to decrease performance if the activity led to exhaustion. Considering that normal sexual intercourse between married partners expends only 25-50 calories (the energy equivalent of walking up two flights of stairs), it is doubtful that sex the previous night would affect laboratory physiological performance tests. Remembering that the original hypothesis suggested that performance would only be affected through a change in aggression, researchers really should have measured variables that are affected by aggression (e.g., motivation, alertness, and attitude toward competition).

Now this is where brain aromatase activities come into play of which Trainor et al. report in a detailed review of the pertinent literature that "in most cases estrogen [in the brain!] increases the probability and intensity that males will engage in aggressive behavior" (Trainor. 2006) - surprised, right?

Brain aromatase, estrogen and the crunch question: "Sex or no sex before a competition?"

Now, what does that mean in view of the finding that the stress induced increase in aromatase activity was immediately reversed in the male quail (the changes in the female quail were less consistent)? I guess, it means Muhammad Ali who always insisted that sexual abstinence before an event was an absolute must was right - at least in a sport such as boxing which certainly depends on a decent level of aggression you do not want to compromise that by dumping down brain aromatase activity, would you? What? Oh, you would? Well, I guess me, too ;-)

References:

1. Balthazart J, Ball GF. The Japanese quail as a model system for the investigation of steroid-catecholamine interactions mediating appetitive and consummatory aspects of male sexual behavior. Annu Rev Sex Res. 1998;9:96-176.
2. Dickens MJ, Balthazart J, Cornil CA. Brain aromatase and circulating corticosterone are rapidly regulated by combined acute stress and sexual interaction in a sex specific manner. Journal of Neuroendocrinology. 2013. [Epub ahead of print] DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2826.2013.02340.x
3. McGlone S, Shrier I. Does sex the night before competition decrease performance? Clin J Sport Med. 2000 Oct;10(4):233-4.
4. Trainor BC, Kyomen HH, Marler CA. Estrogenic encounters: how interactions between aromatase and the environment modulate aggression. Front Neuroendocrinol. 2006 Jul;27(2):170-9. Epub 2006 Jan 10.

More Muscles For Old Chaps, Less Fat for Baby Boomers: The Age Specific Anabolic Anti-Obesity Effect of HMB

Image 1: Nutrition, exercise and most importantly the right mindset will always be the foundation of leading a long, strong and healthy life - irrespective of how many supplements you take - you cannot out-supplement a bad diet, laziness and a lack of motivation and determination.

The hype was, as usual, huge, when back in the day Beta-Hydroxy-Beta-Methl-Butyrate (HMB), marketed as the natural alternative to Deca (Nandrolone; update: thx to anonymous for the heads-up that it was not just Anavar, as I original thought ;-), hit the market. What was yet even bigger than the hype, though, was the disappointment of customers who felt ripped off; and that not without reason, because the early HMB supplements were not only touted to be as effective as the previously mentioned anabolic steroid, they were also sold at similarly high prices and low doses, of which every scientists could easily have told you that the one thing that would grow were the purses of the manufacturers.When the marketing bubble eventually burst, the (at that time) pretty expensive and incredibly disgustingly tasting (no way you put a working amount of that stuff into a tasty pre- or postworkout amount without ruining the taste!) supplement disappeared from the market, literally overnight. Today, HMB is, if at all, sold as a standalone in 250mg-500mg capsule form or 250-1,000g pouches from bulk suppliers and leads an overall miserable existence being perceived as a probably useful, but simply unnecessary metabolite of the contemporary "natural Deca", leucine.

HMB - More than expensive leucine for old folks!?

The astonishing results of a recently published study from Jacob M Wilson's lab at the Department of Nutrition, Food and Exercise Sciences at The Florida State University in Tallahassee do yet suggest that at least the best-agers among the SuppVersity students, beta-hydroxy-beta-methl-butyrate could derive  undeniable advantages from the almost forgotten leucine metabolite (5% of a normal dietary leucine intake from food sources are metabolized into HMB; cf. Van Koevering et al.1993, according to Wilson. 2013). In what was allegedly "only another rodent study" (before you start complaining, please acknowledge that as long as you don't have your rodents "work out", those studies usually elicit pretty accurate results), the scientists enriched the diets of twelve young (44 wk.), 6 middle-aged (60 wk.), 10 old (86 wk.), and 5 very old (102 wk.) male rats with ~500mg/kg body weight HMB per day, which, using the standard conversion chart (cf. "Ask Dr. Andro: What Are Human Equivalent Doses "), yields a human equivalent of ~81mg/kg or 6.5g for a person who weighs 80kg.

Figure 1: Changes in body composition (left) and strength (right) during 16-week transition from young to middle age and old to very old age with and without supplementation in male Fisher rats (data adapted from Wilson. 2013)

As the data in figure 1 clearly shows this supplementation protocol (16 weeks, transition from young to middle aged and from old to very old) did not only prevent the decline in muscle strength, it had also pretty profound effects on the body composition of the aging animals. In case of the very old rodents, those effects were so profound (-56% body fat!) that it is questionable whether they were actually able to eat or rather metabolize enough food (food intake was not different) to accommodate for the +10% increase in lean mass.

HMB shuts down atrophic and ramps up myogenic factors, but why does it burn fat?

The late, but profound increase in lean mass in the very old animals (102wk) was brought about by a totally blunted increase in the "catabolic" Atrogin-1 signaling, the expression of which is so characteristic of aging skeletal muscle, and (and this is actually surprising) an increase of the "anabolic" myogenin expression that yielded myogenin levels which exceed those of the young (44 week) control group by +40%!

Although these changes in Atrogin-1 and myogenin expression can explain the anti-sarcopenic (=working against the age-induced decline in muscle mass) effects of HMB and would even suggest tat it is a very useful "muscle builder" in the elderly population, where similar amounts of leucine (7.5g) have hitherto not yielded not the desired results (Verhoeven. 2009), they do not explain the unquestionably profound effect on the total fat mass of the animals, which reached statistical significance during both, the transition from young to a middle age (HMB body fat change not significant vs. +49% body fat mass in control) and the transition from the old to the very old age (HMB body fat -56%, control -8% n.s.) and of which Wilson et al. say (Wilson. 2013):

To date, the underlying mechanisms that HMB exerts its effects on adipose remain to be elucidated. It may be that HMB directly increases oxidative capacity in myofibers, as exposure of cultured myotubes to the leucine metabolite increased palmitate oxidation by 30%.

If the latter, i.e. the increase in palmitate oxidation transfers to human studies, Skelton et al. observed in their in-vitro studies (Skelton. 1994, according to Wilson. 2013), was dose dependent, I would be interested to see studies on the effect of twice the amount of the 3.0g/day HMB per day that did already produce greater increases in lean and decreases in fat mass over the course of a four week resistance training program in a twelve-year-old study in young (Panton. 2000), as well as an eleven-year-old study in 70-year old individuals (Vukovic. 2001), in younger and older trainees, and sedentary individuals.

Something to think about

Also, what if HMB was in fact one of the rare cases, where "more" actually yields "more". I mean, wouldn't it be remotely possible that our body's ability to convert leucine to HMB is not just rate limited, but that the rate decreases with age (this would explain why leucine works much better in younger folks) and saturates, when a certain concentration of HMB is achieved (if that was the case even the 5% conversion could be questionable, because you could have an upper limit of say 500mg, which would be 5% of 10g leucine and just 1% of 50g)? The latter would mean that you could not produce more than x grams of HMB total per day and would imply that the "old natural Deca" could in fact turn out to be superior to the "new natural Deca" for trainees (and maybe even non-trainees) from all age groups - as long as the dosage was appropriate, i.e. beyond what your body would produce from dietary leucine.

References:

1. Panton LB, Rathmacher JA, Baier S, Nissen S. Nutritional supplementation of the leucine metabolite beta-hydroxy-beta-methylbutyrate (hmb) during resistance training.Nutrition 2000,16(9):734-739.
2. Skelton DA, Greig CA, Davies JM, Young A. Strength, power and related functional ability of healthy people aged 65-89 years. Age Ageing 1994, 23(5):371-377
3. Van Koevering M, Gill DR, Smith RA, Owens F, Nissen S, Ball R. Effect of β-hydroxy-β-methyl butyrate on the health and performance of shipping-stressed calves.Oklahoma State Univ Res Rep; 1993, 312-331.
4. Vukovich MD, Stubbs NB, Bohlken RM. Body composition in 70-year-old adults responds to dietary beta-hydroxy-beta-methylbutyrate similarly to that of young adults. J Nutr. 2001 Jul;131(7):2049-52.
5. Wilson JM, Grant SC, Lee SR, Masad IS, Park YM, Henning PC, Stout JR, Loenneke JP, Arjmandi BH, Panton LB, Kim JS. Beta-hydroxy-beta-methyl-butyrate blunts negative age-related changes in body composition, functionality and myofiber dimensions in rats. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2013 Apr 18;9(1):18.