Blog - Barbell Medicine

Aug 21

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Mobility Explained

Rolling through Instagram or Facebook, we find narratives and interventions claiming to improve something called “mobility”. We can select from options including stretching, foam rolling / body tempering, lacrosse ball smashing, voodoo flossing, power tools converted to guns being sold as therapeutic, and the list goes on. The level of marketing would make even Donald Draper of Mad Men proud. But are these implements doing what we think they are? Are we just hidden pliable versions of Gumby walking around, waiting for our supple potential to be released? Or, are we committing the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy? Before…

Aug 14

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When Logic Fails: Part 1

By Austin Baraki | Training | 6 Comments

Take home points: In the context of complex systems, logical analysis can be useful in generating hypotheses, but not for drawing conclusions with a high degree of confidence, because there are almost always confounding factors that have not been discovered or accounted for. We must therefore always be cautious with the claims and conclusions we draw from our own observational experience. This is why scientists and evidence-based practitioners carefully qualify their statements in order to avoid overstepping, and should clearly identify conjecture that lacks supporting evidence. In contrast, we must be deeply suspicious of anyone making very confident claims in…

Jul 20

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How To Measure Your Waist Correctly

By Jordan Feigenbaum | Nutrition | 21 Comments

If you’ve been paying attention to our latest podcasts, articles, Q/A’s, and other content then you’ve likely heard us discuss the importance of waist circumference in determining who is a good candidate for weight gain and who could stand to lose a bit of weight. Waist circumference is a quick, low-cost piece of data with reams of scientific evidence relating the distance around your abdomen with health outcomes like premature death, diabetes, heart disease, stroke risk, etc. While the aforementioned disease processes have many variables contributing to their development and burden, we have large, well-designed studies showing that males and…

Jul 06

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Navigating Potholes: My Back Pain Experience

By Sarah Al-Khayyal | Recovery, Training | 4 Comments

I’ll spare you my lengthy back pain origin story and set the scene in 3 bullet points: Pre-back pain, I was a pretty killer athlete with a promising future in powerlifting and strongman. Also pre-back pain, I partially tore my hamstring tendon, which led to hamstring and hip pain. I rehabbed my way back to the platform from this injury, but its lasting impact lay in the consequent mistreatment of my back pain by medical professionals. One day in the Spring of 2016, I “tweaked” my back on a heavy axle deadlift in a strongman show. I finished the competition…

Jun 23

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Fear, Catastrophizing, and Training

By Austin Baraki | Training | 3 Comments

Introduction Regular followers are likely familiar with our interest in a “biopsychosocial” approach to both training and injury, particularly the modifiable psychological factors that can have significant effects on performance, recovery, and subsequent adaptation. One important phenomenon we discuss frequently in the context of acute injury and persistent pain is catastrophizing. Catastrophizing is a complex psychological process (sometimes described as a cognitive distortion) in which an individual appraises a situation in a maladaptive, excessively negative way — for example, immediately thinking of the “worst-case scenario”. It consists of three fundamental components: 1) Rumination, e.g.: “I can’t stop thinking about how…

Jun 14

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Novice Bench and Press Plug-In

By Jordan Feigenbaum | Training | 54 Comments

Note: We published this protocol in the Barbell Medicine newsletter in March of 2018, but have since added some additional context, explanation, and recommendations for this intervention. Be sure and sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on all the latest content! A novice lifter is someone who can add weight to the exercises being performed each time they train, typically every 48 hours. Ideally, the increased load functions as both a display of the strength previously developed as well as a training stress designed to facilitate further improvement. As the novice phase comes to a close however,…

Jun 06

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She lost over 25 pounds and stepped on stage. Here’s what she learned.

By Jordan Feigenbaum | Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Prologue Alexis Irwin has been a client of mine for some time now. Together, we’ve successfully added hundreds of pounds to her lifts in total and improved technique, but the weight loss end of the bargain was always a little harder for some reason. Fast forward to late January when Alexis approached me about competing in a bikini show. If you’re a faithful Barbell Medicine reader you know this isn’t really my forte’, as I’ve only prepped a handful of clients for this sort of thing. That said, I thought it would be a good way to boost compliance for…

May 18

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Does YOUR metabolism change with weight loss?

By Austin Baraki | Nutrition | 6 Comments

Yes. Your metabolism changes when you lose weight. Some of these changes are good, e.g. decreased fasting blood sugar, improved cholesterol measures, decreased storage of fat in places you don’t want it like your liver and waist, etc. Not all of the metabolic changes are good however, and in recent times there has been much discussion and handwringing over the role of metabolic adaptation (sometimes referred to as “metabolic damage”) in the setting of weight loss. The idea is, given that body mass is controlled by the balance of energy expenditure versus energy intake, that in periods of caloric restriction,…

Apr 01

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A Novel Approach For Replacing USELESS RPE

By Jordan Feigenbaum | Training | 9 Comments

It has been said that using Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) is useless for strength and conditioning, which has caused quite a stir between the Barbell Medicine crew and other coaching organizations because we had been using this tool with our clients to manage loading, training fatigue, and the intensity of conditioning efforts up until very recently. New data has come to light that have forced us to reevaluate our stance on RPE and ultimately replace it with a novel method that we’ve been working- The Baraki Exertion Scale (Figure 1). Figure 1: The Baraki Exertion Scale is visually represented…

Mar 21

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Placebo Sleep?

By Austin Baraki | Recovery | 9 Comments

A 2014 paper by Draganich & Erdal studied the effect of sleep on cognitive functioning in 164 undergraduate students – with an interesting twist. Participants were given a questionnaire in which they ranked how deeply they had slept the prior night on a scale of 1-10. Subjects received education about REM sleep and cognitive function, then were intentionally deceived by the experimenters to believe that measuring certain physiologic parameters would allow calculate how much time they spent in REM sleep the night before. Subjects were attached to various sophisticated-appearing monitors, and were allowed to watch their brainwave activity by EEG…