« Weightlifting is Dangerous Too | Main | Cherry Garcia: Peter Huber's Thoughts on Socialized Medicine »

A 12 Year Old Boy on Evolutionary Fitness

October 13, 2007 09:47 AM

A father who is dedicated to his son's health and fitness contacted me. His son is a talented athlete and trains hard to be the best football player he can be. The father knows a lot about training (and reads the blog regularly) and uses the best techniques to help his son train. When the boy hit 12, he began to gain weight and slow down. His foot speed dropped and his weight increased. They were both a bit frustrated and asked me what they should do. From what they told me I could see that they were over training. The boy was also going through a growth spurt and needed more rest and variety. He wasn't eating right either.

Because he was over training, his nervous system was dulled or perhaps even exhausted. The fall off in his speed was as much from nervous system fatigue as from the weight gain. And the weight gain almost certainly was from the insulin resistance fostered by the high level of stress hormones induced by over training. He was snacking on chips and eating too late at night as well.

I advised them to drop most of the sprinting and plyometrics and do one hard down hill run a week. The overspeed training would stimulate the nervous system to maximize muscle recruitment and would train the FT fibers to fire more completely. It would also increase his stride frequency, the most important part of speed. More rest would regenerate his neural responsiveness. I also suggested some strength training, which they do using bands that are easy on the joints and promote nerve firing through isometric contraction.

On the diet side, I suggested pure Evolutionary Fitness eating. They stopped his late eating and he eats nothing after 8pm. The chips and potatoes are gone and he mostly eats meat, fruit, vegetables and nuts.

In about 5 weeks or so he went from 139 pounds to 127. His waist dropped from 31 to 27. His speed has improved significantly. He is starting to show "cuts" in his musculature. He is more energetic and has even taken up tennis in addition to his football.

I often tell people that over training is the route to becoming fat and slow. It may seem hard to believe, but only because people seem to subscribe to the "body as machine" theory of fitness. Over training is so easy to do, most people don't even know they are doing it. And modern fitness advice promotes over training. It is the primary cause of injury and resignation to a life of poor health and fitness after the injuries pile up. More is not better and routine training is joyless and lifeless.

The last group of marathoners and triathletes who came here for the Huntsman Senior Games looked haggard and injured. I was in the crowd when I registered for softball and I did not feel as though I was in a group of athletes at all. They just looked like a bunch of old people.

· Evolutionary Fitness ~ · Sports

Comments

By the way, I was going to ask, what do you prescribe as an appropriate frequency for training? I know that we need some randomness and intermittency, but how often should we be training?

Posted by: Chris H [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 14, 2007 8:03 AM

Great post Art.

Thinking about the stress of overtraining, there has been a lot about stress in general in the research journals recently concerning its deleterious effects on the body. I noted some of this research below and also noted that this modern stress is not natural

http://conditioningresearch.blogspot.com/2007/10/stresstoo-muchthe-wrong-kind.html

Posted by: Chris H [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 13, 2007 5:45 PM

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?