Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow

Your on the road of recovery that's great.

Hamstrings are so delicate. I've found stretching is so important especially for older guy like me.

Paul, your in my prayers.

Here is what is interesting. You are 15 lb lighter than me, yet you can bench press 115lb 12 times essentially untrained, followed by 9 times more. I had to work for a month to be able to do 3x5 with only 105 lb. I did notice as well that during Elders Quorum moves (when some younger men from our church get together to help somebody move), the average male even in your weight division outlifts me, not to speak of the average man in my weight division. Another detail is that my hands are clumsy below average for a guy. For a while I've thought this was just from being a light guy that does not do much with his arms, but later I began to wonder if there is more to this. There are plenty of light guys that run and do not do much with their arms that will outdo me in both the arm strength and arm/hand coordination. In fact, just about everybody I know. And I also wonder if and how the roots of this problem affect one's ability to run. I suspect it is something of neurological nature, somehow the signal does not travel right into the arm/hand region.

I don't think not being as strong in the arms has anything to do with neurological issues- I think it is just differences in upper body strength/muscle amount. Neurological issues would manifest themselves in other ways (not strength). Stength is one of those things where there can literally be a difference of 4x or more between people, even without much training.

Paul, keep at it and keep working, I'm looking forward to running together in a few weeks.

Sasha - I am actually a little bit depressed about my bench press. In college, my workout used to be 1x15 @ 135, 1x12 @ 145, and 1x10 @ 155. My max was 205, and my body weight was 132 at the time. I don't think it's neurological at all. I worked at bench press 3 days/week throughout the year from age 15 to 22. As a result, I can usually just pick up and do it. This year is the weakest I've ever been age 16. So it's a result of hard work, and probably also some genetics.

And for the record, good bench press did not (and does not) convert over to real life whatsoever. I am virtually useless when it comes to moving large, heavy objects. I am usually the worst guy around for loading a moving truck.

The stetches I do more focus on my hips and glutes really opened up my hamstrings. I think they would really help you. I was going to try to explain how to do them but it really didn't make scense.

Josse - one of the stretches I have just started doing really gets into the hips and glutes. Basically I stand up and put one leg onto my bed so that both the outside of the ankle and outside of the knee are flush against the surface, and so that leg below the knee is oriented parallel to the front of my torso. Then I lean into the stretch a little bit. Kind of hard to explain, I agree. :-). But it does get pretty deep in there. My hips are definitely tight, especially my left one.

Jon:

Have you ever seen the difference of a factor of 4 on a bench press in two lean untrained individuals of the same height, weight, and gender?

Paul:

If you weigh only 132, and have average arm strength, you will not be a match for the average male that weighs 160 when it comes to lifting heavy objects. However it is reasonable to expect that you will do OK when compared with individuals of your own weight and upper body training levels.

I have actually done quite a bit of upper body training through my entire life. As a teenager, I estimate I did pull-ups and press-ups (for lack of the exact term, you do those on parallel bars, hands on the bars, support yourself just with the arms, go down, then up) after about half of my easy runs. At the age of 17 I worked out with weights for about a year three times a week. Since then, I have done upper body training of some kind in occasional spurts lasting anywhere from a couple of months to a year.

There is something odd going on with my arms, though. Perhaps not pathological as far as a doctor would be concerned, but odd nevertheless. One interesting occurrence. When I was serving an LDS mission, our zone leaders (two missionaries in charge of a group of 12), got to know some martial arts instructor who showed them how to break a slab of stone with the strike of a hand. He claimed it could be taught to anybody regardless of their strength level. So they brought some stone slabs to our training meeting for a presentation, and instructed us on how to do it. 11 young missionaries out of 12, 10 elders and 1 sister attempted the task. All elders except me succeeded right away. The sister, who had been a hurdler on the BYU track team, could not do it at first, but finally figured it out. Her companion never tried. I tried as hard as I could, but still could not do it. Not sure what this shows, but interestingly enough those results correlate with what I see when it comes down to doing work that requires some hand dexterity - I do much worse that the average male, still worse that an above average female, and a bit better than a clumsy female.

Yes that sounds like what I do but I lay on the floor and do it. If you ever make it down this way or sometime when I come that way for a race I need to show you what I do.

For some reasone I am not being sucessful at e-mailing you my pics. I e-mailed other some at the same time I did yours so I don't know why they didn't make it to you. Puzzeling.

Sasha - good story. I wouldn't worry about it though.

Josse - I'll be swinging through the I-15 corridor later in February, maybe we can set something up if I am still ailing. Regarding the photos, try emailing them to Sasha, and then he can email them to me. I have unlimited storage capacity, so it may be a spam-blocking issue instead. Another idea is to try putting the photos in a zip file and emailing them to me that way.

Josse - go ahead and send the pictures to me.

Paul - the arm issue is not too much of a concern as I can still perform my regular tasks that involve hands more or less OK, although I do wish it did not take me forever to replace a broken HDD or motherboard, but fortunately I do not have to do this more often than once a year. And I do wish I could spend only 10 minutes doing things like installing a lock instead of an hour. But I can do computer work instead and pay somebody else to do those things, so not that big of a deal.

What I have wondered about though, is if neurologically deactivated hands/arms possibly wreak havoc in the nervous system in general which in turn would make you run slower. What leads me in that direction of thought is that there was a brief period in my life when my arm strength/coordination had caught up to the average for my age/weight/height and was perhaps even a bit above, and at that time I was also running much higher quality times for my age/size (3:03.8 1000/10:18 3000 at the age of 12.9, 5-0 height). I suppose I could test that now by finding a way to activate my arms/hands, but it has not been easy. They have not been very responsive to what I've tried - maybe I just have not tried consistently enough. Here is an idea - a punching bag. Worth a try, if anything, at least some entertainment.

When I was lifting consistently two years ago I was bench pressing 220. The key factor is developing a strong upper body, and lifting consistently to develop more upper body mass to increase the amount of weight you can lift.

Since I haven't touched a bench press in about two years I would be surprised if I could bench press 120 pounds.

Sasha- no, probably not a factor of 4 in 2 untrained individuals. But there could be. I'd be curious to study it.

One note- just comparing strength vs weight can be a bit skewed, too. For example, you have more muscle mass in your legs than most runners your size. Therefore, if you weigh the same, you must have less mass elsewhere, such as upper body muscle. Just an idea.

We kinda hijacked Paul's blog, here.

You may as well hijack it. Nothing else going on here.

Kory - I am curious if you are right. When you are around a weight room, see how many times you can bench press 120 lb.

Jon - you are right about optimally trained runners my size. But an optimally trained runner is a rare species that merits an inclusion into the list of endangered wild life. Less optimally trained runners, and non-runners in particular will have plenty of fat to compensate for the extra weight in my quads.

Sasha, your analogy between "press-ups" and bench press is not fair. Bench press mainly targets both the pectoral muscles as well as the triceps. Although you get somewhat of a workout on your triceps when you do press-ups, if I understand correctly what you were explaining, a press-up from parallel bars actually works the serratus anterior, which is just below the latissimus dorsi. The best comparison would be push-ups, and even then you are still only using a percent of your body weight as resistance. However, your comment about neural activation is quite interesting and sounds like a worthy discussion. Perhaps that could tie into your "x factor" discussion.