The Super Bowl of Leg Day Observer
are NFL athletes concentrating too much on the Olympic lifts? + a movie review
New column from me on Inverse.com:
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/can-athletes-lift-too-much
About the preponderance of… backwards-acceleration Olympic lifts (and classic barbell exercises) in football strength training (as well as in other sports)… i.e. is football’s evolution into a sport completely inextricable from barbell training bad for its athletes?
As Janet Malcolm might concede, it’s difficult to reach any objective truth about strength training and muscle work in a single 1400-ish word column, but this one is mega refractory as … frankly… it is a collection of maybes, some of the maybes I found researching feel noteworthy enough to lay out here:
Lawrence Taylor reportedly didn’t work out with weights… his coaches would ask him to and he didn’t ever hit the gym…
Marv Marinovich was not the first NFL strength coach… some other guy was. I always thought Marv was… I liked Marv a lot and thought he got a bad rap, though he was difficult on his son, future CFL quarterback Todd… some of the stuff he was training and working around in the 1960s, we have still not yet caught up on. Todd had mostly a macrobiotic diet, heavy on vegetables… this was the 1980s… it was impressive. If Marv had let Todd eat McDonald’s once in a while maybe Todd would have breathed a little bit easier, Marv hated money and when he got older his hair got curlier.
Ricky Stanzi is an ex NFL quarterback I touched on who trains athletes… he seems like he’s onto something…
(cont’d)… I wish he didn’t call this stuff GOATA… but whatever. Stanzi believes legs should be bowed, knees a bit out, toes in, heels should kick out when you’re running… it’s fascinating. I’ve been following some of this stuff through my trainer and it’s helped. Standing on the outside of your feet, with heels out, and not on the inside, is a counter to Olympic weightlifting, where your heels go in, since the bar goes backwards (actually straight up, but you go backwards)… some Japanese lifters do the “frog pose,” which is touching heels at the start of a lift. It’s beautiful… but it’s not good for forward acceleration. There is something about the natural acceleratory capabilities of whatever muscles it is that run from your pinky toe to your glutes… and I think that is the key to this. Bo Jackson ended his career by planting his foot wrong… there is a ton of acceleration in a step. My question is whether cornerbacks, who sometimes have to run backwards, should do some heel training as well… but that is a quibble.
There is a laundry list of incredibly strong, physical baseball players who got drafted based on their athletic capability and a flier that they might hit a curveball. I think it was Kevin Goldstein, the former Astros executive who’s now back at Fangraphs, who said (a decade ago) that Greg Golson was the best athlete in baseball… I’m sure he was… (Golson had an undistinguished career, look it up.) It’s hard to see aesthetics in baseball because they all wear pyjamas. You can look at their forearms I guess.) It makes sense to draft players like Golson on the chance that one of them learns how to hit….
It’s a bit unclear (to say the least) how exactly NFL and college trainers train their athletes and what exercises they do. Some are very very good. Some are charlatan scammers. It does make sense on one level that pushing the squat, even on a 26 year old insanely fit and healthy NFL player, would lead to some lag on the field, but the sport is also one full of 1. outliers and 2. higly-trained individuals, people whose internal work capability doesn’t tire them out much, or folks who’ve trained and worked so much that they don’t get tired out… but the bigger issue, I think, is the sheer…. drift into exhaustion and overwork for all athletes… no matter how good your genes are, or how much you’ve trained, it’s a slog. Someone once said being a pro athlete isn’t a good job, it’s a terrible job that pays well… I think that is it… it is also hard to parse out the weight-training related injuries in football from the inhumane ones. Sure, there are MCL and ACL tears… but still.
Quarterbacks don’t lift super heavy.
Sprint training… I don’t know enough about this. But I would like to know more. It does create serious velocity and strength… feels like the path…
I could go on for a while. Not sure if I’m watching tonight, not very into NFL football, and since the McGill neurosurgeon who plays for the Chiefs has taken the year off, I have no emotional investment in this game.
I also wrote a series of four articles on nose to tail powerlifting, also for Inverse, also Leg Day Observer, that can be accessed here…
Here’s a movie review:
Until The Light Takes Us (2008)
I want to say I saw this in theaters the week it came out, at the old Cinema Village on 12th Street near The Strand, on a weekday afternoon back when I used to have weekday afternoons off, with Shaun Dean and Jay Schellar. It was beautiful out, and when the film ended, Dan Higgs walked down the street past the theater, upon which Shaun and Jay turned sheet white, and veered our discussion towards him instead. I spun it again the other day(1), but could not remember whether I had seen it or not until a third of the way in, when Demonaz and Abbath (Immortal) drink in a bar, a moment that caught the three of us off-guard when we saw the movie back then.
The film, which is about black metal, the genre, does not go very deep, which is fine; any film about this genre is worth seeing, if only for a moment of new footage. It’s been a while but I think there’s some here. Mostly it’s a series of sketches, and on my second viewing, I was impressed with Fenriz (Darkthrone), his self-possession and easiness, and how well he comes off in just about every aspect. The movie is best chased by an interview he gave to Rockhard, in 2005, which is on YouTube…
where the bald German guy with a rat tail shows up at his place at 2:15 in the morning, and they discuss art and money, Michael Jackson, Nocturno Culto’s house, and music, they listen to Adrenalin OD. Fenriz here comes off like Arnold (Schwarzenegger) in Pumping Iron, fluid and easy, still and forward, driven by an aversion to money (or something…) that embodies itself in the freedom and ease of a person living, honestly, on the middle path, or perhaps just his own. But I might be reading into this; Fenriz may be just an effusive, friendly guy whose opposite aspects come out in his music. Still, he’s beatific.
Varg, for his part, is cold, and his speeches here predate the YouTube screeds he’d drop later, and which some people use to grow up with; it's a smart decision to set the two friends against each other, narratively I mean: both live in small rooms (Vikernes’, a cell; Fenriz has his laundry out everywhere) and turned away from possessions, mostly for their art, though not in both cases by choice. The videos Varg uploaded to YouTube, a few years ago, where he plays guitar in his wife’s computer room, are better than anything he does here. It’s hard to overrate him as a musician.
The film is not just about them, but mostly is. Part of the doc features Immortal, perhaps the best rock and roll band of the century, and, during the 90s, even better than that, but there’s nothing on what they did; it’s just Abbath and Demonaz, the two guys in the band, cool and apart, discussing the scene. Shouldn’t there be something about them? (The band was as good as any BM band but mostly sang about the weather. They are geniuses.) This feels less like a choice than a mistake. There’s also a bit about Mayhem, the store (Helvete), and Christianity. But it’s all told through the musicians, who aren’t experts, or very insightful, except maybe Varg.
It all makes for a middling, thin look at the music, and no attempt to draw it into the world, or the two main characters back to their art, beyond its shock value. It’s a shame, and a problem shared by works covering just about every subcultural phenomena: the experts don’t have formal grounding; the competent pros miss the point of the art. (Successful examples are Martin Scorsese’s documentaries about Italian and American film: he knows it all deep in and out, and frames the knowledge in a way that’s accessible for the viewer; still, these are movies, and not exactly subculture.) A documentary about black metal might, in truth, run 100 hours, 10 hours or 20, and would be best left to Frederick Wiseman, I think, or somebody else. Any coverage of this genre is worth glancing at (the recent documentary, Helvete, is OK, too), but in this director’s hands it’s barely a sketch, with no context and not enough access; it’s short, sure, but any would help. It’s sad because there is so much to this music; it only flits on the screen.
Oslo, cold, spaced out, and grey, feels identical to the Warsaw in the Kieślowski films (White, and Dekalog) as well as the town I grew up in, and we get a look at the nature. It would have been nice if there was more rigor here. The scene where Fenriz gives a phone interview is the best one in the film; that and a couple others are worth the price of admission. Would that this were done totally differently.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
(1) month