old man fitness

Old Man Fitness: Supplements that work and why they don’t for you

Ah, supplements — to the uninitiated, they seem like powdered steroids dispensed via that obnoxious shaker the religiously “fit” among us are always carrying around the office instead of a coffee cup. To the beginner, they offer the promise of expedited progress, or even progress you could never do without the aid of science and the Muscle-testosterone-blaster proprietary blend of herbs and chemicals presented on the bottle like a discovery of modern medical science.

And to the seasoned lifter? Well, they usually look like what they are: useless powders that cost as much as the annual dues for your gym membership.

That isn’t to say that all supplements are bunk — as we’ve discussed in previous editions of Old Man Fitness, there are indeed supplements on the market that can help you reach or even exceed your goals faster than you may be able to otherwise. The secret to supplement-success is two-fold: you’ve got to find the right ones and just as importantly, you’ve got to use them properly.

Protein

Protein is usually the first supplement that comes to mind and it is perhaps the most true-to-title of the bunch. Protein powders are intended as a supplement to your natural protein intake. Protein isn’t anything exotic and didn’t require any major scientific breakthroughs in the past few decades to help you get stronger … protein is just the stuff your body uses to repair and rebuild your muscle fiber. Whether you get it from fish, chicken or Muscletech, protein effectively does the same job.

Because supplements are not regulated by the U.S. government’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA), even protein can be a waste of money. All too often, the nutrition labels on supplements don’t actually show what’s inside the container and without FDA oversight, larger brands than you may think are able to get away with the ruse. It’s much cheaper to sell you a tub of corn flour with protein in it than it is to fill the tub with protein — that’s why even good brands often fall short of their claims when it comes to protein content.

My twenties proved that good protein still works no matter what you mix it with.

The problem with even the good protein supplements has more to do with how supplements are perceived than it does with the powders themselves. People lose sight of the fact that the chalky-shake they’re drinking isn’t a magic muscle building potion — it’s literally just extra building blocks your body can use when building the temple of power you’re working on.

And what happens if you keep delivering more building blocks to a site without putting in the time on the temple? Well, you end up with a pile of shit nobody wants to look at from the highway (or your bedroom door).

In order to make most protein shakes palatable, many companies load them up with carbohydrates and sugars that can almost make you think you’re drinking chocolate flavored misery, rather than the plain old generic sort. All those extra calories aren’t necessarily a bad thing — building muscle requires a caloric surplus in your diet (you’ll need to take in more calories than you burn throughout the day). But if you’re not putting in the hours at the gym, that caloric surplus doesn’t just disappear, it finds a new home … in your love handles.

When looking for a good protein supplement, consider the caloric content as well as the protein content and make sure you’re using the shake to help build muscle by putting in the time under the weights.

Creatine

Like protein, creatine has proven effective as a way to help bolster your muscle-building endeavors and like all supplements, it’s important to check with third party lab tests to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth. Unlike protein, some forms of creatine require a “loading” stage, in which you inundate your body with large amounts of creatine to establish a baseline before dropping consumption down to a scoop or two after your workouts. To be honest, I’ve found scientific studies dismissing the loading stage as a marketing gimmick intended to make you run out of creatine sooner and others that claim creatine isn’t nearly as effective without that loading stage.

Like most forms of drinking, “loading” is only arguably productive.

Just like any other multi-billion dollar industry, there’s no shortage of studies funded by (or influenced by) supplement distributors, so it can be tough to sift through the noise. I’m still honestly a bit on the fence about this one, so I tend to lean toward following the directions on the container (of a verified and trusted brand). Maybe I’m burning through a bit more creatine than is truly necessary when I go through “loading” stages, but I’ve decided that the few bucks that costs me is worth the expense.

Like protein, creatine is often loaded with sugars to improve its taste, but you tend to consume less of it by volume than you might a protein shake. Nonetheless, if you’re not putting in the work, those scoops of creatine in your protein shake will also result in nothing more than a few extra dimples in your growing cottage cheese butt. Supplements can’t replace hard work — they can only supplement your recovery process.

Pre-Workouts

Pre-workout supplements are a big hit for younger guys that are looking to add a bit of pop to their workouts, as well as newcomers that love the tingly feeling of invigoration they can provide you as you make a beeline for the weights — but a lot of guys that have lifted for a long time tend to forgo the NO-Xplode’s and Jack3d’s in favor of way crazier shit like getting a good night’s sleep. Why is this? It’s certainly not because older men and women don’t need a pick-me-up before their workout starts, after all. With a baby in my house, I need a few scoops of pre-workout just to get me into the showers some mornings.

The real reason is pre-workout supplements have a diminishing effect on you the longer you use them. That drop in effectiveness will sound logical when you take a look at nutrition label of your favorite supplement … they’re absolutely loaded with caffeine.

Doesn’t seem quite as healthy when you look at it this way.

Now, the guy behind the desk at GNC (and someone in the comments section below this article) will tell you that the herbal blends and fancy ingredients in their pre-workout are really what makes the difference and that the caffeine isn’t what’s doing the trick. They’re the supplement equivalent of a homeopathic doctor trying to convince you that a bag of oregano is the secret cure for your IBS.

While some of these additional ingredients may have some science to back up the idea that they can boost your level of alertness or what have you, they often come in such small doses that they can’t have much effect on you at all, whether good or bad. It’s the caffeine that really gets you moving — and if you don’t believe me, you will when you realize that NO-Xplode has a similar effect on you to a cup of coffee, complete with the often-mandatory trip to the bathroom to squeeze out a number 2.

Just like your coworker that drinks eight cups of coffee a day and swears it does nothing to help him wake up, the more pre-workout powder you take on a regular basis, the less effective it will be at energizing you for your workout. That doesn’t mean pre-workouts are without value, it just means you need to use them with a little forethought.

To keep your pre-workout supplements effective, you should cycle on and off of them. Spend a month with your pre-workout supplement of choice, then spend a month working out without that powdered boost. After a month, your tolerance will be reduced again and you’ll go back to really feeling the value of the supplement.

And of course, remember that these or other effective supplements can’t do the job for you. The supplements aren’t the car, the engine, or even the fuel — they’re more like an octane booster you can add once you’ve already got the rest in order. They can help keep things running smoothly, but you’ll always be the one in the driver’s seat.

About Alex Hollings

Alex Hollings writes on a breadth of subjects ranging from fitness to foreign policy, all presented through the lens of his experiences as a U.S. Marine, athlete and scholar. A football player, rugby player and fighter, Hollings has spent the better part of his adult life competing in some of the most physically demanding sports on the planet. Hollings possesses a master’s degree in communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University.

Old Man Fitness: Tailoring your workout to your injuries

As we get older, we tend to collect things. Piles of artifacts representing memories both lost and treasured, old receipts we think we may need, and that shirt you know you can’t pull off anymore but just can’t find it in yourself to part with all take their places in our lives and homes like a physical manifestation of our own cluttered minds.

These collections start as a byproduct of the lives we lead, but over time, they come to define us. The tools in my garage and guns in my safe are more than an extension of my interests, in many ways, they’re an extension of me.

Of course, as the years go by, there’s also another kind of collection we tend to assemble, though not one that’s as easy to tuck away into a junk drawer: injuries also have a way of piling up on us. For some of us, they can be a point of pride — my list of injuries represents a long list of great accomplishments and bad decisions, but most importantly, none of them have managed to kill me yet. I’m not proud of every broken bone or torn ligament, but I’m proud that I’m still in the fight, dragging my aching ass into the gym despite all the ways life (and my own choices) have conspired against me.

Like my collection of tools, my collection of injuries defines me in many ways. It informs the way I approach my life, as I work to mitigate old injuries and prevent them from leading to new ones. Many of you can likely relate to things like giving your knees some time to warm up in the morning or adjusting the gait of your walk because your ankle is acting up today.

Pain is like the check engine light on the dashboard of a car. When you’re young, and the car is new, it means something’s wrong that you need to address.

But as you get older and the odometer clicks over into six digits, the check engine light tends to come on more and more often until eventually, it’s just on all the time. My car, creeping dangerously close to the 200,000-mile mark, has its check engine light on perpetually now and both my knees do as well.

So, adorned in our collections of old injuries, we carry on, busting our asses and getting things done like we always have, using the wisdom gained through experience to mitigate the ways our physical problems can extend into the things we do. My right knee has a habit of giving out on me, so over the years I’ve become really good at catching my balance before I crumple into a pile on the ground when it does. The detached retina in my right eye earned through years of fighting has led to me shifting the way I use the optics on my rifle. A lot of times, you may not even think about the ways you manage your injuries, you just do what you need to do the best you can — and it works.

I’ve broken my wrist so many times, I think part of me just assumes it’s always broken.

Tailoring your workouts to injury should optimally work the same way. We tend to think of “diet and exercise” like alchemy — some strange foreign science we can’t hope to grasp on our own, and as such, we rely on the expertise of others (in the form of products and diet fads). The truth is, exercise is just a way to imitate physical challenges in a safe and repetitive manner, and if there’s one thing you’ve learned to manage over decades of collecting injuries, it’s physical challenges.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to do most lifts — form is important to maximize your results and minimize your chances at adding to that collection of injuries, but sometimes it’s okay to stray from the path and adjust your activities to suit you. Just like I occasionally switch hit and shoot lefty to compensate for problems with my eye, I’ve also changed many of my lifts to better suit the pile of old problems and surgically installed steel I call my lower body. I do front squats because of the slipped discs in my back, as one example. I don’t pursue one-rep maxes on my lower body lifts either. Would it be cool to know how much I can deadlift? I guess, but not as cool as being able to walk tomorrow.

A reader recently asked me if I could discuss the types of workouts that are good for older guys that may not have the experience behind them to lean on that some of us military types do — it was a great question, and there are some general suggestions I can always provide: focus on functional strength and compound movements when you can, walk and swim to ensure you’ve got muscular endurance without putting too much strain on your joints, and place an emphasis on stretching and flexibility to keep you capable and to stave off injury.

But more important that any of that is developing a level of trust in yourself. Start with a generic workout plan and try to work through it with light weights — when you come across something that hurts, give yourself a sincere gut check about whether the pain is truly indicative of injury. If it is, either adjust how you execute that lift so it doesn’t hurt, or pull it out of your regimen all together. Squats too hard on your bad back? Your form may be the problem but if it isn’t, maybe swap in the leg press in instead. No, a leg press machine won’t give you the same results as squats, but we’re not talking about working out the way you wish you could, we’re talking about working out the way you can safely.

I can take bigger chances with my upper body because I have fewer injuries in that hemisphere.

Struggling because something is hard is a good thing. Struggling because you’re hurting yourself is not.

Eventually, we all have to leave things behind. My wife stopped wearing miniskirts at around 30, my brother stopped installing fart-can exhausts on his cars at around 25, and I stopped trying to break records with my deadlifts right around my fourth surgery. It doesn’t mean she gave up on fashion, he gave up on racing or I gave up on lifting — we just adjusted our approaches as time went by.

There is often a “best way” to reach your fitness goals, but when the best way proves infeasible for you, you can either walk away from the fitness endeavor altogether, or you can find the way that works best for you. Maybe that means using more machines or less weight, maybe it means adjusting foot positioning or possibly not lowering all the way down on your squats (SACRILEGE!)

If you have access to a trainer, it never hurts to get a little help adjusting your game to suit your specific needs, but for those of us working alone and unafraid (with no clips on the bar), always err on the side of light weight. As you get more comfortable, it’s always easy to add a few pounds — but if you hurt yourself, you’ll have that much further to go again once you’re back on your feet.

What matters is that you get something out of your workout and stay healthy. That collection of injuries is going to keep growing, but in time, your ability to compensate for it will as well.

About Alex Hollings

Old Man Fitness: How to earn your ‘black belt’ in fitness

If you’ve ever taken the time to sit and read a bodybuilding magazine from cover to cover, you’ll likely come to a few interesting conclusions: the first is that advertising often tries really hard to pretend it’s expert analysis, and the second is that supposed experts in the fitness field often contradict one another, and even themselves, when it comes to the “best” workouts, methodologies, nutrition plans and lifts are. To be fair, a large part of these contradictions are tied to marketing endeavors: every new product invariably also needs to be the best one, otherwise people wouldn’t buy it but there’s another, less nefarious element at play here as well:

Different people respond to different things, well … differently.

There are, of course, many scientifically backed constants in the fitness world: burn more calories than you take in, and you’ll find yourself smaller than when you started, emphasize the development of fast twitch muscle in your regimen and you’ll likely end up bigger, and of course, if you try to learn how to use a machine via the guess-and-check method, some asshole is going to record it and share it on Twitter. It’s really not so much the broad strokes of fitness that are subject to interpretation and individual variances, it’s the ground level execution you may find needs adjustment.

I’ve spent most of my life training for one of only three things: football, rugby, or fighting. While I’ve participated in other sports (haven’t we all) those are the only three physical endeavors that broke the plain of adulthood and accompanied me into my higher mileage years — but with years worth of experience behind each, I can personally attest that not everything I’ve been taught has benefited me on the field or in the cage. The fact of the matter is, there are two things to take into account every time you learn a new technique for any of those sports: 1) does this new technique aim to improve my game, or just change it? And 2) how does my body respond to the endeavor?

When it comes to collision sports like football or rugby (dancing is a contact sport), change for the sake of change isn’t worth all that much — though I could make an argument that changing your game when fighting can lead to a better rounded proficiency (and when lifting for better rounded results). So with that element a wash, let’s focus on the second one: how does your body respond to this new thing?

When studying martial arts to demonstrate mastery of a discipline, it’s imperative that you learn to mirror the movements of your instructors, but when training in martial arts for the sake of a fight, it’s far more important that you learn how those movements translate into violence inflicted or violence mitigated — and optimally, you’ll find yourself capable of plenty of each. In the pursuit of that interest, you may find that, although you’ve developed a competency in a new technique, it works better for you if you adjust your wrist position slightly or the positioning of your legs. Sometimes, you may find yourself uncomfortable with a technique in general — and as such, hesitant to use it in force-on-force applications.

When you have to subdue a drunk Marine in a hotel room, you fold him in half the way you’re most accustomed. (Everything and everyone was fine once he woke up)

This is where the modern “mixed martial arts” mindset comes in: you train in multiple disciplines, adopt the techniques that work well for you, and discard the ones that don’t. You may be able to sink a triangle choke perfectly according to instruction, but if you find doing so takes you off your game, you’re better off keeping that technique in the “under development” category of your brain and utilizing what you know you’re capable of, if and when you find yourself in a dangerous situation. There are no points awarded for attempted techniques in competition, and there are no accolades for almost stopping an attacker in real life.

Of course, this mindset involves mental discipline — there’s a significant difference between what doesn’t work and what you just don’t like doing. Just like in writing, you can break rules for effect, but you’ve got to know them and practice them first; otherwise there’s no difference between you and someone that was never taught at all.

There’s a common legend about the colored belting systems employed by martial arts disciplines that says all warriors wore white belts, but as a student traveled, learned, and trained, that belt gradually grew dirtier and more battle worn, eventually making the transition to black at around the same pace as the fighter’s skill set developed to match. That legend has little basis in reality (belting systems are actually an advent of the 19th century and most agree they were introduced by the founder of Judo, Jigoro Kano).

Legend or not, there’s an important lesson to be learned from the story: the idea that, to become a master, you had to travel and train under different teachers in different variations of a discipline, honing your skills against different opponents was meant to emphasize the concept of developing a well-rounded skill set that was, in many ways, as much about thinking as it was about doing. Being a fighter is a mindset as well as a skill set, and despite the risk of sounding like I attribute too much spiritual vigor to my workouts, I honestly feel that being an athlete is no different.

Over the years, I’ve trained in pankration [Greek wrestling], Brazilian jiu-jitsu, muay thai, various Filipino martial arts, scholastic wrestling, and of course the hodge-podge of techniques employed by the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program and, if you really pushed me, I could probably demonstrate some of the differences inherent to each, but honestly, they’ve all kind of blended into the sloppy Marine with a solid right cross and a propensity for submissions that I am today. Like my friend from South Africa that immigrated through Tennessee, my fighting style has developed an accent all its own — unique when compared to the elements it’s made of, and more defined when I lose my temper.

My fitness regimen has likewise become a unique collection of practices I’ve found to be especially effective for me. My metabolism (despite betraying me at around 30) still allows for looser discipline in my diet than many of my peers, my body’s knack for building muscle on my lower body faster than my upper ensures that I won’t ever be accused of skipping leg day and, to be totally honest, I’ve always been weaker on the bench than I ought to be based on my overall fitness levels. These and a million other small variables have, over time, informed my fitness endeavors, and once coupled with a laundry list of injuries I need to allow for, it has developed into a style all its own.

But here’s the thing people hate hearing: my method works for me, and ultimately may not be as effective for you. Your list of variables are different, the injuries you’ve accumulated over the years don’t affect you the same way, you may have more trouble adding mass or putting on weight may be your biggest challenge. If I can claim a “black belt” in fitness, it’s truly derived from my years spent traveling and learning under various schools of thought, not because I once passed a test that dubbed me a “trainer.”

People who are first getting into fitness are often looking for a sheet of paper with a list of exercises, sets, and reps that will guarantee them someone else’s success. That’s a fine place to start, but as you continue along the road to your own fitness goals, whether its to run a marathon or to squat 500 pounds, allow yourself to grow, to absorb new things and, when necessary, to dismiss the things that don’t prove as effective for you. If greatness could be easily reproduced using a checklist, it wouldn’t be that great at all.

Remember, seek scientific evidence to support your fitness decisions, but as you develop a relationship with your body, seek insight from within. When you see yourself respond well to five sets rather than four, to doing cardio before your workout rather than after, or you find that doing front squats aggravates old injuries, learn from it and move forward.

Get that fitness belt dirty by trying to master new things, and embrace the wisdom born out of finding what doesn’t work, as much as what does.

About Alex Hollings

Old Man Fitness: Superstition, fitness and the power of belief

The old adage, “there are no atheists in foxholes,” while maybe not universally true, speaks to the level of helplessness that’s inherent to our very being. No matter how hard you work, no matter how prepared you try to be, there comes a time when there’s nothing left to do but succeed or fail. There, in that moment, all you can do is try your best and pray that your best is enough.

In a recent appearance on SOFREP Radio, Jack Murphy, Ian Scotto and I were talking about the differences in our fitness mentalities. Ian thoroughly enjoys the fitness lifestyle. I lift for the same reasons I sharpen my knives, clean my guns, and change the oil in my car. Jack, however, mentioned that he has trouble differentiating between the act of working out and it’s ultimate use as a tool for violence.

“When I work out, I feel like I’m preparing for war,” he explained. Even as a kid, Jack Murphy took to exercise with the intrinsic understanding that eventually, the endeavor culminates in taking lives. He didn’t grow up drinking in dirt floor bars and trying to find excuses to turn rugby games into fist fights like I did, and as such, his appreciation for physical preparation took on a different flavor, but beyond that fundamental difference in our approach, our paths aren’t without common ground.

There are no atheists in foxholes.

For some, religion plays as significant a role in their lives as a loved one, and while I respect that in my spiritual brothers and sisters (and even in my spouse) I’ve always struggled with my own set of beliefs, and through that struggle, a number of superstitions have taken hold. Not everything I do comes with a rational explanation: I wrapped my right wrist for every football and rugby game I played in, from high school, to college, to the Marine Corps. The wrist does give me trouble from time to time, but that’s not why I did it. As a young man, I found that I could deliver a pretty damaging blow to the sides of opposing player’s helmets with a clubbed up wrist, and eventually, I came to feel naked without it. Finally, as I approached my first playoff game in the Marine Corps, our trainer asked why I wrapped my own wrist before every game.

“Because I wouldn’t be any good without it.” I explained, grabbing two roles of tape from his table and forgoing the line to receive professional help in the endeavor. I didn’t need a trainer to wrap my wrist the right way, I needed it wrapped the way I’d always done it.

My old college rugby team didn’t shy away from superstition or tradition — demanding terrible prices be paid from new ruggers that score their first Try (comparable to a touchdown in American football). Shooting the boot is undoubtedly a form of hazing that has likely been banned since, but in my day, your first Try meant your first date with the boot: a cleat, worn in the day’s game, filled with beer and passed around the team for additional … ingredients. Dirt, spit, and worse finds its way into the alcoholic elixir and there, surrounded by a few dozen of your closest friends, you chug the poison from the cleat to the cheers of the crowd. Soon, you find yourself buying ever shorter shorts despite Rugby jerseys sporting collars and, often, long sleeves. Tradition, superstition, holds that the shorter your shorts, the faster you run.

When your shorts are shorter than your underwear… then you really start moving.

In the gym, I lift by myself and have for years. Workout partners have come and gone, but the problem with the buddy system is that you come to rely on your buddy to justify your workout. When your buddy can’t make it, you give yourself a pass on skipping a day; after all, you’d have no spotter. Then your buddy takes a week off, then a month, and before you know it, you’ve both got Type 2 Diabetes together and you’ve got a buddy to help with insulin injections.

You’d think, then, that my workouts are free from cultural superstitions like one might find in a weight room occupied by a football or rugby team — after all, no one would shoot their own boot but as I thought about Jack’s comments, relating working out to his practical experiences in combat, I started to see the ways my own practical experiences continue to influence my methods. Many of the things I do in the gym are informed by old habits, born out of superstitions or practical applications now long behind me.

I walk circles around my makeshift gym between sets, keeping my heart rate elevated and often counting softly to myself — just as I did between rounds when training for a fight. I don’t put clips on the bar when under the bench, even when using weights I know I can manage because, when lifting alone, clips are an act of hubris. Securing the plates to the end of the bar means I’m certain I won’t fail — and if you ever find yourself certain of such a thing, you’re probably not working out right. I very rarely allow myself to fail so badly I have to tip myself over and let the plates fall on the concrete floor of my garage — though the cracks surrounding my bench will tell you it isn’t unheard of — but really, it’s my fear of bad luck that keeps the clips off the bar.

My superstitions have become so ingrained in my methodology, that I often have trouble rooting them out from the litany of practices and procedures I’ve adopted over the years. Some are easy to call out: a lucky shirt, a favorite song for max-days. Others are a little more nuanced: the order of my lifts when pursuing a new personal best is a good example. One might argue that I’ve developed a system that lets me maximize my potential when choosing to go really heavy, but the truth is, it’s more about building myself up with a series of lifts I feel good about than warming up. What began as an exercise in self confidence has become an exercise in superstition: I stick to what I know works on my max days, and fear reprisal from the lifting gods when breaking from tradition.

Much like my friends that attend church on Sunday mornings, the daily sermons echoing through my basement in the form of clanging plates and muffled grunts are physical manifestations of a combination of practical knowledge and unsubstantiated belief. Faith, my religious friends remind me, doesn’t rely on evidence to prove its worth. Ultimately, proof is faith’s undoing after all, because with proof, belief becomes nothing more than fact and there’s no room for magic in that.

These Old Man Fitness columns always place an emphasis on seeking a scientific grounding for your workout decisions, and with good reason. Most supplement companies are nothing more than modern day snake oil salesman and barely a week goes by without some new workout fad taking the internet by storm (and ultimately proving to be little better than the last one) but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for a little superstition — a little faith — in your regimen. If you need a scientific justification for the power of believe, I remind you of the placebo effect, wherein people manifest physical changes in their body through nothing more than the belief something is happening.

There doesn’t always have to be a logical explanation for the ways you prepare your body for the challenges you present it with, just as long as you find the balance between what helps you and what’s just predatory marketing. You’ll never catch me buying a laser to zap my love handles or rubbing crystals on my aching joints.

… But you’ll never catch with me clips on the end of my bar either.

About Alex Hollings

Old Man Fitness: How to keep making progress when lifting alone

For lots of people, fitness is a social endeavor. They go to the gym with the intention of both improving themselves and catching up with friends, and for many, it’s that social interaction (and peer pressure) that helps keep them coming back. The social element of fitness can be a powerful one, serving as the basis for long lasting friendships and offering a level of mutual support that can help you to achieve things you may not have thought you could otherwise.

I’m just not at all about that shit.

I’m one of the other kind of gym guys: the guys that have headphones in before they even walk in the door. In my personal and professional life, I strive to be more approachable than my admittedly gruff looking exterior lets on — but in the gym … there I get to be the real me: no polite welcoming of constructive criticism, no bright-eyed “networking” handshakes, no concern for how I look, just me and my objective.

My “lone wolf” approach to fitness was probably born from years of failed attempts at relying on a gym partner (or group). People have bad habits of making promises to themselves while drunk on motivation, then failing to follow through on those promises in the harsh glow of the morning sun. I’ve organized groups of lifters, fighters, runners and watched our numbers dwindle as progress came too slowly for some and the effort proved too much for others, until there I was again — alone on the mats getting my time in with the one teammate that always shows up, my punching bag.

The danger in relying on gym partners is that their motivation can directly affect yours. That’s really the point of a gym partner: to help motivate you into making progress and be your spotter along that route, but that symbiotic relationship can turn on its head with the wrong partner. Sometimes, that symbiosis can give way to a parasitic relationship, wherein you’re trying to stay motivated enough for the two of you, and your increasingly undedicated partner can start to be your own excuse for skipping days.

“Greg isn’t coming today, so I might as well take today off too.”

Lifting alone grants me full control over my fitness destiny, gifts me a reprieve from our social world, and gives me a chance to unwind while improving myself but it also makes progress a little tougher to come by. Having a spotter is about more than just safety, they allow you to push your limits in a way you simply can’t on your own. When you know someone can help the get bar back off of you, you pack a few more pounds on or go for a few more reps. When you know the only way this bar doesn’t end up embedded in your sternum is by getting it up under your own power, you have no choice but to play things a little safer.

That’s not to say that you can’t push yourself — I try my best to lift to failure every day, you just have to be a little creative in the endeavor.

Use dumbbells

Dumbbells represent the easiest way to push yourself to your limits without fear of failing in a dangerous way. If you reach a point where the weight has become too much, you can often drop them right where they are without too much risk of injury to yourself or others, offering you the chance to push for a few more pounds, a few more reps, or both in ways that you often can’t when lifting solo. Dumbbells have the added benefit of engaging your body in a way the barbell can’t — as both of your arms are forced to not only move the weight but to maintain your body alignment and balance the weights in a way you don’t have to under other circumstances.

In some instances, just using a curl bar rather than the full bar can give you a higher degree of control.

Use machines

Admittedly, I don’t use any machines in my normal workouts because, well, I don’t have any. Machines do rob you of some of that stability work I touted in favor of dumbbells, engaging only the muscle groups they’re designed to engage and often leaving subsidiary muscle groups ignored, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still get a hell of a workout in using machines.

If you go to a gym with a decent collection of equipment, you can often work your way through a circuit of machines and come out the other side with a pretty well-rounded workout under your belt. Throw some dumbbells in when and where you feel comfortable, and your machine based regimen can yield some pretty significant results. You will find websites that argue working out with machines is so inferior to free weights that you shouldn’t bother and those websites are wrong. Doing something is always better than doing nothing, and if machines represent the safest and most comfortable way for you to work without a partner, don’t let some dude’s blog convince you that it’s a bad idea. It is true that a well-designed regimen that uses free weights might be the fastestor most effective route to gaining muscle, but it’s certainly not the only one.

Leave those clips off the bar

If you’ve been reading OMF for a while, you probably already know my position on clips. They’re there to keep the weights from moving on or falling off the bar as you go through the movements of your lift, but they’re also a great way to get yourself hurt when you lift alone. I have two dumbbells in my home gym (both 40 pounds) which means they’re good for little more than some shoulder lifts and high-rep curl work, that means most of my work comes in the form of bar-based compound movements like the bench press and squats. Admittedly, I often have to leave the clips on the bar for squats, but in that instance, you can drop the whole bar straight back — something you can’t do on the incline bench.

When you find yourself failing in a no-clips situation, getting out from under the weight is the easy part, doing it without destroying half the gym is harder. Simply tilt the bar until the plates fall off of one side, and hang on tight to prevent the newly lopsided bar from becoming a medieval trebuchet. It’s loud, it’s embarrassing, and it can damage your floor — but it can also stop you from dropping 300 pounds on your neck.

After three knee surgeries and two ankle surgeries, even just coming off the pull-up bar is a calculated risk.

Use your head

I received a comment after a recent OMF column that said the way I workout is “too dangerous.” They were referring to my method of going heavy, going hard, and counting on my ability to push myself (and my lack of clips) to get me out of a jam if I find myself in one. The element of my routine that doesn’t translate as easily into words is the mental aspect: my understanding of what I’m capable of, my experience informing how I go about my workout, and my internal discussion as I put more weight on a bar I’m already struggling with. Yeah, I guess there’s potential for injury, but it’s sort of like carrying your firearm at condition one (with a round in the chamber). Technically speaking, that’s a more dangerous thing to do than carrying at condition three (empty chamber). It’s training, not hardware, which makes having a round in the chamber a reasonable and manageable risk.

Approach your lone workouts in the same way: listen to yourself, trust your better judgment, and mitigate risks in appropriate ways. For instance, I never lift for single-rep maxes when I’m by myself — it’s just too dangerous to be worth it — but I regularly push myself to failure on lower weights that I know I can get myself out from under if I need to.

Make good choices, keep your safety in mind, and don’t tie your motivation to the dwindling motivation of others and you’ll find yourself continuing to kick ass alone or in a group for years to come.

Images courtesy of the author.

Alex Hollings writes on a breadth of subjects ranging from fitness to foreign policy, all presented through the lens of his experiences as a U.S. Marine, athlete and scholar. A football player, rugby player and fighter, Hollings has spent the better part of his adult life competing in some of the most physically demanding sports on the planet. Hollings possesses a master’s degree in communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University.

The power of your playlist in the gym

The workout mix: a time-honored tradition of fitness enthusiasts in gyms all across the world. Few things can inspire an athlete to push harder, to work longer … or to start a fist fight with other gym goers better than a carefully selected list of songs intended to get the heart pumping.

At some point, years ago, running wasn’t “cardio,” it was just what got you to the other end of the playground faster – back when food was food and we never worried about the caloric content, back when we tapped our pencils on our desks, impatiently waiting for recess to start so we could stretch our legs, our lungs, and our imaginations.

Eventually, our days grow fuller, more regimented, and “fun” becomes a vague concept we associate with far away tropical locations or the few fleeting days a year we’re able to sneak away from our jobs, responsibilities, and social lives to gallivant around in the woods with a rifle or a pack. We stop running across playgrounds and start jogging around the neighborhood. We stop tapping our pens on the desk in wait for recess, now looking at the clock and pining for the blessed reprieve of our beds… “only ten more hours to go, and I can finally get some sleep.”

During that one hour a day or so that we grant ourselves the freedom to haze ourselves in the gym, we devote ourselves to counting things. Four more reps, ten more minutes, thirty more pounds, and the only thing that can save us from seeing this part of our day as a function of the adult work life we’ve cultivated is our choice in tunes, blasting from our stereos, headphones or speakers.

The right beat, the right guitar riff, the right combination of vocals and emotion pouring out of Spotify, a CD, or if you’re like some the dudes I work with, a seasoned old cassette tape can take even the most arduous workout and turn it into a romp across the playground. It can take the salty old man that stumbled into the dimly lit, damp, cold garage beneath my kitchen and turn him into a light on his feet powerhouse – eager to get under the next bar, and antsy at the idea of improving.

What makes a good playlist then? Well, like so much of the fitness racket, it all comes down to personal preference. What gets my blood pumping might not work for you, in fact, I’d be willing to bet that most of you would probably laugh at some of the songs I tend to use to put me in the right state of mind (especially on heavy-weight, very low rep days). Like so many lifters that came before me, my moto-mix seemed to stop evolving somewhere around my senior year in high school, and while lots of songs have been added and removed since, the old standbys remain the same.

But then, maybe that’s why it works.

I’ve had this iPod since 2006… and haven’t added a song since then.

The music that drives you has to connect on a deeper level than simply making your toe tap. “Uptown Funk” by Bruno Mars is one of my wife’s favorite songs, and I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t make you want to move your feet, but I’ve never heard it come on the radio and felt the overwhelming urge to do deadlifts.

“Cowboys from Hell” by Pantera, however, tends to have that effect on me.

You probably already know which songs can nudge you off the couch and into your running shoes, and if you’ve spent some time in the kind of dingy, hangar gyms I’ve loved all my life, you’ve probably been subjected to the playlists of some others… that just didn’t make any damn sense to you.

“Who the hell works out listening to Pink Floyd!?” I’ve shouted from beneath a 200 pound Marine, hammer fisting my face from half guard. You know you’re music preferences are strong when “Comfortably Numb” is a more pressing issue to address than the guy trying to feed you your mouth guard.

The right song, at the right time, can elevate your workout, your state of mind, and your spirits for the rest of the day. The right workout playlist can turn an arduous workout into the best part of your day. That’s the power of music: nothing more than vibrations of air molecules, manifesting themselves in added plates, added reps and added progress.

Just like the way a glance from the right woman can stop even the drunkest of idiots in their tracks.

In my opinion, the workout list is a pretty private endeavor: I can’t be worried about what you might think of a song and how well it’ll motivate me if I’m trying to get anywhere good. I prefer headphones over speakers, so I don’t have to defend my choices or put up with yours, and if I’m honest… sometimes I may even be a little embarrassed of what’s working for me this week.

A few years ago, while lifting in a Workout World in Worcester, Massachusetts, I was approached by a young guy for some advice. Despite wearing my headphones and maintaining a pretty impressive resting bitch face, some folks still think the time between sets is best used for talking shop – and I try to be polite, but concise, in my responses.

“One last question – what are you listening to on there? I wanna get on your program!” The flattering dude gave one last jab at a conversation.

“Slayer,” I replied, hitting play again on my Harry Potter audiobook.

It’s all about whatever works, guys.

I’ll see you on the blacktop.

*Modified feature image courtesy of Pixio, all other images courtesy of the author