Fitness, powerlifting, social media, and more

The "Make America Healthy Again Movement", largely started by failed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, has now become one of the items on the Trump administration's agenda. Unfortunately, the Make America Healthy Again movement largely fails to identify the actual causes of America's health problems and demonizes things like vaccines and seed oils which haven't been shown to be linked to the health outcomes RFK Jr. claims they have been. RFK has said he is "not anti-vaccine", but has made multiple statements encouraging vaccine skepticism and has clashed with the top US vaccine official, Peter Marks, to the extent that Mark's resigned and stated "“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies." The White House's "Make America Healthy Again" commission repeatedly references increased rates of autism and ...

 The topic I'd like to go over this week is why I believe that Powerlifting, Bodybuilding, and potentially sports such as Strongman (which includes more than just men, but based on the name not everyone might know that) and Crossfit should be recognized as Olympic Sports. Recently added sports include things like 3 on 3 half court basketball, which is similar to what we consider "recreational park basketball" and doesn't even have an official league, break dancing (which is more of an art than a sport, although it does require significant physical abilities), flag football (again a sport that does not even have an official league), and squash. I do not mean to degrade any of those activities, but the Olympics were supposed to be a major celebration of sport every 4 years, with sport implying physical activity. Currently, the only strength-related sport in the Olympics is Olympic Weightlifting, which is significantly different than other strength sports because athlete...

In this blog post, I will be showing you how social networking between researchers, coaches, and athletes helped modern weight training programming evolve. It was originally based on relatively inflexible parameters (set amounts of weight and repetitions in a strict order, assuming that everyone recovers and adapts the same). As time went on, researchers, coaches, and athletes became aware of these issues and techniques to adapt training structure to account for these issues.  In the past, strength training was generally programmed based on a percentage of an athlete's 1-repetition maximum (the maximum weight they could use for a specific exercise). It was structured in a way that would generally start off easier (using lighter loads such as 60 to 70 percent of their 1RM) with higher amounts of repetitions (to instill technical proficiency and produce a higher training stimulus) and gradually progress toward heavier weights, such as in the example below: Eventually, John Kiely deci...