Brief, intense exercise benefits the heart > Bodybuilding talk with Iron Vic

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Study Shows Brief, Intense Exercise Can Benefit The Heart

“Short bursts of high intensity sprints–known to benefit muscle and improve exercise performance–can improve the function and structure of blood vessels, in particular arteries that deliver blood to our muscles and heart, according to new research from McMaster University.

The study, lead by kinesiology doctoral student Mark Rakobowchuk, is published online in the journal American Journal of Physiology. Regulatory, Integrative & Comparative Physiology. The findings support the idea that people can exercise using brief, high-intensity forms of exercise and reap the same benefits to cardiovascular health that can be derived from traditional, long-duration and moderately intense exercise.

The research compared individuals who completed interval training using 30-second “all-out” sprints three days a week to a group who completed between 40 and 60 minutes of moderate-intensity cycling five days a week.

It found that six weeks of intense sprint interval exercise training improves the structure and function of arteries as much as traditional and longer endurance exercise with larger time commitment.”

- McMaster University. “Brief, Intense Exercise Can Benefit The Heart, Study Shows.” ScienceDaily 4 June 2008.

Iron Vic Speaks

Mellowing with age?…Pilates Hater!…Desert Island Supplementation

Hey Vic,

You ain’t losing your “edge” are you? It seems like you haven’t launched on anyone in a long while. Are you mellowing with age? I know pompous morons pontificating about screw-ball ideas makes your blood boil.  I like that.  I always look forward to it when you get fired up and reduce some bonehead to tears with your irrefutable logic, delivered Smack Down-style. Too bad the Big Blue Swiss Ball pony-tailed dude lost your address.  Us no-necks here at the hardcore gym used to read out loud the Q&A when that weenie-ette tried sparring with you in print. You made him cry, you bad man! He probably had to enter some sort of counseling or psychotherapy after you finished bitch-slapping him around. That was one frightened metro-sexual. I know it ain’t good for your blood pressure - but it shore is funny as hell when you lose your mind in print. Here’s hoping some more irritating types appear.

Randy, Tulsa

Funny you should mention irritation. I just finished watching some “irritating types” on TV - ever seen an episode of “Work Out,” the Bravo TV show?  Have you seen this slice of lunacy? Workout is a fitness-themed “reality” TV show and I thought my head was going to explode watching Jackie, the fitness star, beat helpless fat people into the ground. Obese people seek her consul and guidance and this is where the viciousness begins: when Jackie trains fat people, somebody better be ready to dial 911 and tell them to send an ambulance. Jackie has become an overnight fitness sensation for no apparent reason. A “fitness guru,” she owns a “state-of-the-art fitness facility” in Hollywood. The place looks like any other fern-spa you’ve ever had the misfortune to train in.  The facility is average at best and Jackie is clueless at best. Aggressively ignorant, she uses a savage, brutal, sadistic and idiotic “fitness boot camp” approach. She takes incredible pleasure in driving people into the ground using a protracted protocol she herself couldn’t come close to performing. She loves to dish it out - but never ever participates. If someone were to subject her to what she dishes out with such relish, she’d keel over inside ten minutes. Jackie also has a squad of “elite fitness trainers” and they are equally clueless and moronic. They learned from Jackie.  Those who practice the true art and science of physical renovation seem to be edging towards extinction. The Jackies’ of the fitness world appear to be winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the general public.

Jackie’s screwball crew is uniformly clueless about how to obtain real results for regular people. What makes Jackie’s fitness show a complete abomination is that all the meanness and ignorance are paying off - handsomely! TV exposure rewards sadism mixed with fitness malpractice compounded with idiocy. The dumb-ass public assumes this dumbo really is a fitness guru! Jackie Warner is laughing all the way to the bank. The unending stream of ludicrous claims made by Jackie is nothing short of mind-blowing. She routinely proclaims, loudly and proudly, that her sycophant squad of clueless personal trainers constitutes “the finest group of trainers in the city.” Mind you this is Los Angeles, the epicenter of body worship, not La Paz, Bolivia or Glazier’s Edge, Alaska.  Her squad of sniveling sycophant sissies range from immature girls picked for their looks, to guys who couldn’t deadlift 300 - assuming they knew what a deadlift was.

Jackie is a woman whose fitness philosophy apparently is rooted in prison camp methodology.  Her “boot camp approach” should more accurately be called “chain-gang” training. Her strategy is to overwork then underfeed clients. She proclaims arrogantly, “My Boot-Camp method is the wave of the future.” Jackie loves to conduct boot-camp clinics; she calls off one absurd free-hand exercise after another, like an auctioneer. She declares her exercise auctioneering technique “revolutionary.” I watched with revulsion as this Queen of Mean made completely untrained, pathetically out of shape, morbidly obese fat people start off their first ever workout by running in place, “Lift those knees high - HIGHER PEOPLE!” Bam! Right out of the gate it was the workout from hell; a regular Bataan Death March masquerading as cutting-edge fitness. Meanwhile obese people nationwide are watching this garbage and thinking, “Wow! I need to beat myself up in the gym then starve myself to make gains.”  The physical torture is administered to the pathetic with relish and gusto and Jackie’s boot camps routinely end with fat folks keeling over, falling down, becoming alarmingly flushed; left gasping and out of breath, throwing up, fainting, crying out in pain or just plain crying. Folks routinely sustain injuries but to Jackie’s way of thinking, every war has casualties.

One obese lady, 100 pounds overweight, starts throwing up from over-exertion and heat exhaustion. She had been forced to run and run quickly across a ball field. She wanted to quit but Jackie grabbed her by the arm and began tugging her for 50 more yards. The obese lady became woozy and began vomiting into a trash can while clutching the rim for support. Jackie was dismissive, blowing off the obvious danger signs by intoning to the ever-present camera, “Don’t worry or be concerned. She’s fine! Her body is just expelling toxins.” This is the very definition of fitness malpractice. Oscar Wilde once said, “They speak with the easy assurance of the blissfully ignorant.” As does Jackie in between mindlessly beating the hell out of completely untrained fat folks. People prime candidates for heart attacks or strokes, people who have done nothing more strenuous than flick the remote control or walk to the refrigerator, are suddenly told to run in place or sprint at top speed to an object fifty yards away then sprint back. Done with the sprints, Jackie would order the group to drop and start doing pushups. “Now let’s do sit-ups for a full minute!” she would then bark.  For the next 40 to 60 minutes the obese are made to perform an endless series of lunatic cardio exercises. Jackie never participates in these brutal slaughter-fests. She couldn’t hang. She continually screams fitness platitudes. “I am going to BREAK THEM DOWN - I am going to see WHO REALLY WANTS THIS!” I had thought that the ultra-sadistic Jillian, the personal trainer from Hell on The Biggest Loser was the worst personal trainer I had ever seen on TV. Jackie is making me reconsider my incompetence rankings.

As you can see, I am not mellowing it’s just that as of late the readers of the PPP are asking intelligent questions and I haven’t seen fit to unleash just to unleash. If you want to have some laughs - check out the various reality TV fitness shows; see what is passing for cutting-edge instruction. The sad part is obese people nationwide are thinking that this lunacy is the way to transform. I almost forgot to mention: after Jackie and Jillian beat the fat people stupid, they then starve them to death! These two are menaces to society.

Mr. Steele,

Why are you so down on Pilates? I know many women my age who have really toned up their bodies using this ancient system. Pilates is designed to provide the user a dancer’s body - not the over-muscled body that you champion and most women find completely unattractive.  I for one do not want to develop the massive muscles you seem to advocate.  So lay off Pilates - it works as well for women as that barbell stuff works for you men.

Roxanna, Washington State

Lady you have been lured and seduced by a system riddled with philosophic and practical flaws. Pilates is an inferior way to trigger hypertrophy. Show me any Pilates exercise and I will show you an Old School free weight exercise that will blow that particular Pilates movement into the weeds! First off, as far as I can tell, most of the rationale for Pilates is based on the fact that the founder, Joseph Pilates, “looked great” at age 58.  So what! Frankly, by today’s standards, (as any nationally-ranked master bodybuilder could attest) the physique Joe P exhibited at age 58 wouldn’t take 9th place at a regional level masters bodybuilding competition. The Pilates system dates back to World War I.

Pilates was formed by Joseph Pilates during the First World War with the proposal to improve the rehabilitation program for the many returning veterans. Joseph Pilates believed mental and physical health is essential to one another. He recommended a few, precise movements emphasizing control and form to aid injured soldiers in regaining their health by strengthening, stretching, and stabilizing key muscles. Pilates created “The Pilates Principles” to condition the entire body: proper alignment, centering, concentration, control, precision, breathing, and flowing movement.”

“Now you can enhance the benefits and transform your body - with the Pilates Sculpting and Fat-burning workout program. It’s fast, it’s fun and it works! Discover those long, lean muscles and the six pack abs you’ve always had - just three 20 minute workouts per week!”

The first paragraph is a description of the origins of the Pilates system; the second paragraph is representative of advertising Pilate’s uses. There is NO WAY doing Pilates for three 20-minute workouts per week will give you “six pack abs!” Period. From a scientific and physiological basis, this is impossible. At best Pilates is a watered down resistance program - how are you supposed to burn off abdominal fat doing slo-mo Pilates at a rate of (maybe) 10 calories per minute? Twenty minutes of Pilates might burn off 150 to 200 calories per session. Three weekly sessions would equate to (perhaps) six hundred calories and that’s over the course of a week!  This is the caloric equivalent of a single Big Mac.  How can three 20-minute workouts specifically and preferentially melt away the fat that lies atop the abs? How is this possible?

I saw another recent Pilate’s info-mercial wherein the Pilates Guru trainer lady had a trainee lie on one of the elaborate Pilates exercise devices and perform a lying lateral raise. The Guru pontificated how this particular exercise was “specifically designed to tone and shape the triceps - and if you are one of the millions of women cursed with excess fat hanging off the backs of your arms then this is the exercise for you!” Wow! How completely ignorant! The implication being that by doing a few sub-maximal sets of the lying lateral raise, somehow unsightly tricep fat will magically and preferentially melt away - by the bucketful! There is no way on God’s green earth that this particular exercise, a lying lateral raise, could even cause the triceps to contract much less contract so thoroughly and completely that somehow fat would melt, specifically the body fat that lies atop those saggy triceps. Pilates’ claims are physiologic impossibilities.

This kind of ridiculous claim, biologically impossible, completely undermines any credibility the Pilates system might have had. Show me any Pilates exercise and in ten seconds I will show you a free weight barbell or dumbbell exercise that will smoke any and all results gleaned from the elaborate, mystical Pilates exercise. Please stop with that ridiculous contention that you prefer Pilates because you don’t want to develop “too much muscle.” As if! As if suddenly, by training with free weights for a few times a week, for a few weeks, you would suddenly swell, hulk-like, into a muscled-up She-Ra. The danger of you getting too muscular is infinitesimal. Get a grip people! Pilates is just another watered down exercise mode aimed primarily at women who want a softer, easier, more user-friendly way to exercise; anything to keep from having to push and tug on those nasty, dirty, pug-ugly free weight barbells and dumbbells. The Russians used to say about communism, “We pretend to work and the government pretends to pay us.” I would adopt and modify that saying, “For those of us in the Pilates Army, we pretend to train and Pilates pretends to deliver results.”

Iron Vic,

What, in your opinion, is the best single Parrillo Supplement? If you were marooned on a desert island and could only take a single supplement, what would it be? Let’s assume you had fresh water, fish, pineapple, mango, spiny lobster, plantains and coconut - if you could have a crate of one Parrillo supplement, what would it be? I would guess that you would pick CapTri®. My training partner says you would pick the Old School Parrillo Hi-Protein
Powder^TM - so what would it be?

Randy, Iowa

I get a lot of these “desert island” questions. I suspect the show Survivor is inordinately popular with my readership. If I were forced to pick a single Parrillo supplement, I would select 50/50 Plus^TM. I think a protein/carb mixture would be ideal fare for a desert island. Because of its equal protein/carb mix, 50/50 Plus^TM would be the most nourishing of all the Parrillo supplements. Immediately following a savage progressive resistance workout or a tortuous cardio run, this stuff tastes sublime. On the island I might resort to rock or log lifting and runs around the circumference of the island would handle the cardio element. I would dive and swim and spear succulent whatever fish and shellfish were available. I typically mix myself a triple serving of 50/50 Plus^TM immediately after completing a kick-ass workout. I look forward to drinking this chocolate malt-flavored post-workout Smart Bomb shake.  I think it could be possible to thrive if stuck on a deserted island for a protracted period of time - assuming you had access to lean sea protein and ample amounts of island carbs. 50/50 Plus^TM and cold well water would make the stay a great opportunity to lean out. I’d rather be alone on the island than have to cohabitate with a bunch of low pain tolerance, whining, all-talk, no-go, metro-sexual sissy
urbanites!

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