What Are You Doubling Down On?

What Are You Double Downing On?

Gambling has never been my strong point. Whenever I go to a casino, I usually play it safe by hanging out with friends, watching them play craps, roulette, or going off on my own to the penny slots or quarter slots myself.

I’m positive a good chunk of change (read: I’m up about $1200 from slot machines) by knowing to not get sucked in by conventional gambling, because I have an all or nothing personality.  That’s me, I know what kind of mentality I’d get into if I get into a serious game like Texas Hold’ em Poker, or Blackjack, so I choose to stay away from it. I know when to call it during slots, and it is usually after netting my first small victory that I have come away in the positives.

I’ll just relegate my gambling fantasies to movies like Ocean’s 11 or Rounders, both movies that happen to host Matt Damon.

Give That Man His Money
“Give that man his money!”

I’m mentioning how much I don’t believe in gambling because from a strategy point of view, gambling is simply risky. I don’t like the odds, I can’t control the outcomes, and it isn’t fun when you lose.

And I’m a sore loser.

If I lose, I’m going to think I can “outwork” the system, but it isn’t possible because you can’t outwork a system that have the odds against you (or at least, that’s what I believe in).

Now, I look at gambling from this point of view. When you gamble, you place down something that you value (time, energy, money), and hope for a higher return on your investment. This makes sense, right? You earned some paycheck from your job, and then you go to the casino with some buddies.

When you play blackjack, there is a phrase called “double downing” where you receive a set amount of cards, and you have to make a decision on whether or not you’ll bet more (double to be exact), and risk losing, or risk winning more based on the outcome of the pending card.

Double Down Definition Blackjack

Well let’s look at this phrase from a priority point of view, instead of just gambling.

Typically when it comes to deciding your future, the future events is relatively foggy. Doubling down on certain actions can shape what happens in your future. If you’re thirsty, you can drink some water, and be relatively sure your thirst will be quenched. If you drink a handle of Jack Daniel’s and decide to go masquerading into the city, well then you’re in for a series of unknown events, that is for sure.

So barring letting Jesus take the wheel, let’s take away the random accidents, random events, and random things that may can be considered coincidences.

I’ll ask a few simple questions:

What are you double downing on right now?

  • Are you double downing on work?
  • Are you double downing on family?
  • Are you double downing on Happy Hour with buddies?
  • Are you double downing on video games?
  • Are you double downing on Netflix?
  • Are you double downing on your health?

This is another version of going all in, an idiom taken from another card game – poker, that represents a cause and effect response in a better light.

Work

If you are double downing on work right now, then this means you are denying going out sometimes. You are learning a new skillset, maybe learning how to better manage your time so you can have some nights out (but not as much), or creating the back end for a new project that is in the works.

Happy Hour

If you are double downing on Happy Hour or meeting up with friends every Tuesday and Thursday for drinks, you are placing priority on your enjoyment with friends, drinks, and food. While you are out enjoying yourself, you may be missing opportunities on developing skillsets, reading to expand yourself, or improving your network (or maybe you are having drinks with new people every day in order to network, it all depends).

Whether or not you know it, you are placing your time, energy, and money on drinking with friends, sometimes without any real benefit to your immediate future.

Video Games

If you’re double downing on Call of Duty, Diablo III, and the newest video game system out there, you’re enjoying yourself, having fun with friends, or by yourself. At the same time, you are prioritizing an escapism, but what is being prioritized for your future?

Keep in mind I played tons of video games myself growing up, and I can still hang with some of the best, but I don’t play video games anymore. At all. I stopped cold turkey.

The Good And Bad

There is both a good and bad here. If you have work you need to do, then do it. I’m not judging. But you might be missing out on being with your family. You might be missing out on seeing your child’s first steps – that is something that might happen because you’re in a 16 hour work day with an hour up and hour back commute, making it an 18 hour day.

If you plan on playing video games professionally, which is certainly possible for some, then you NEED to double down on playing video games, and A LOT of them. You need to get good in order to be the best, so play more.

However, I’m not sure 8 hour marathons of Call of Duty, or watching Netflix, can be justified because you “need a break” from work for the weekend. If you’re still living at home with your parents and you’re complaining about not finding a career or passion, but you can go on multiple online dates over the course of a weekend, there is a misunderstanding between what is prioritized and what really matters to you.

Your Health

If you’re double downing on going out to the bars with your buddies, having cake, ice cream, and all desserts every weekend, what is being prioritized? You’re double downing Ben & Jerry’s, instead of double downing chicken salads, and complaining about aesthetics not being where you want them to be. Are you double downing on sleep?

  • What matters to you?
  • Where are your actions being visibly placed on?

Double down on your health. If you don’t have your health, you can’t prioritize anything else that you enjoy doing – Netflix, video games, drinking (in moderation) with buddies. You get the picture.

As always,

Keep it funky.

MAsymbollogo

One Weird Trick: Installment 10 – Bend Over to the Front, and Touch Your Toes

Have you ever wanted to drop it, drop it, drop it low? (If Lexy Panterra, the twerkmaster featured above, can’t help you, no one can.)

If you’ve endlessly tried stretching your hamstrings, getting massages, and nothing works, give this one weird trick a go.

If you want the meat and potatoes of a how to touch your toes, check out my post here that goes into a lot more detail.

Read: Simple Self-Assessments: Toe Touch

For an updated point of view on what I think of touching your toes, read on below, and enjoy!

—-

Sometimes, improving your toe touch is not what you need. In fact, let’s back track to the question behind the intent for wanting to touch your toes:

What do you need? What do you want?

Before you undertake any new exercise endeavor, it helps to understand why you’re about to try what you’re doing.

Not the Four Horsemen… But the 4 Buckets

If you want to:

  • Improve athleticism
  • Improve movement quality
  • Improve fitness quality and/or levels
  • Reduce feelings of pain

These are all different goals, and they all require different and unique approaches when looking to affect these items positively (or maintain at best).

Athletic Quality

I know plenty of high level athletes that have difficulty touching their toes. Does this mean they need to touch their toes to improve to their next level? Not necessarily. On a specific level, athleticism could mean many things, but does touching your toes mean anything?

I’d argue, yes, and also no.

Yes, having the ability to shift into and out (read: extension and flexion) of your hips is important.

No, because having unrestricted range of motion at your hips is also important, but for a different reason (it identifies hip pathology)… so you need to be able to control it.

Movement Quality

Improving movement quality on a general level can talk about skipping, lunging, running, push ups, or the simple things that involve more frequency and repetition.

On a specific level, movement quality can refer to the quantitative movement patterns found deeper within the movement patterns:

What happens in detail when you touch your toes?

Toe Touch Collage

When you touch your toes, you are demonstrating good quality going into flexion, which can also speak to your ability to control your abdominal musculature, along with relaxing and inhibiting the posterior musculature to allow for a forward bending motion.

Does touching your toes mean you’ll have a good push up? Skip? Sprinting pattern? Not necessarily, but it is one piece to the puzzle, certainly.

optimum-performance-pyramid
Functional movement… leading to functional skill!

Fitness Quality

On the other end of things, when you are aiming to improve your fitness levels, your ability to get into certain joint positions can certainly impact you when you’re trying to get better at sprinting, running, rowing, or anything usually involved with the word “conditioning.”

At the same time, another fitness quality that is difficult for other coaches to understand is power and speed, which speaks to rate of force production.

If your hip position (or anywhere up or down the kinetic chain) is out of position for whatever reason, do you think force production will be limited?

Sprinting - Joint PositionReducing Sensations for Pain

I usually disregard any discussions about pain, but I’ll attack them directly today.

Sometimes if certain vertebral facets (anterior, posterior, or lateral aspects of the vertebrae) are in contact with one another, that shit hurts. Nerves are on high alert, bones are touching where they aren’t supposed to necessarily, and not much in your body is happy when you have to round over like a mofo to deadlift a heavy weight off the ground.

Deadlift - Missed 5225
Do you even miss lifts, bro? Here I am missing 522.5 at the knees for a world record. Good times.

Placing a band around the hips, or navel (belly button) is one way to provide a posterior weight shift, along with providing a slight distraction away from extension based back movement patterns at the lumbar spine. This sensation of shifting the center of gravity (into more flexion) can provide relief for those that are experiencing extension based back pain. (1)

At the same time, if you find yourself STILL in pain, go go go go go to a professional.

I’ll Need a Band and a Yoga Block…

So with all of this under your belt, let’s introduce today’s “one weird trick” to help improve your toe touch.

This is a very quick and easy video to understand.

The directions of the video that may go unsaid:

  1. Have a band placed around your navel.
  2. Place a yoga block, hoodie, shoe, anything really, between your knees (or higher preferably), and SQUEEZE TIGHT.
  3. As you exhale, look down through your skull first,
  4. Bring your head down (chin to chest) next.
  5. Chest goes down.
  6. Lower back flexes.
  7. Band should help pull you into a posterior weight shift during the whole move.
  8. Make sure to keep legs locked out.
  9. Find the weight on your heels – but don’t lose all the weight on your toes.
  10. Feel this in your abdominals as you exhale – if you feel it in your lower back, pause for a second, inhale again, and restart from that same position as you go down.
  11. Come back up segment by segment until you are standing straight.

Toe Touch - Qualities of Corrective

With all of these things said, I also recommend identifying the real reason why you want to improve your toe touch.

Whether you want to do back flips or tie your shoe, there should be a reason for doing these exercises that will help you move better!

As always,

Keep it funky.

MAsymbollogo

References

1- Fritz, Julie M., Anthony Delitto, and Richard E. Erhard. “Comparison of Classification-Based Physical Therapy With Therapy Based on Clinical Practice Guidelines for Patients with Acute Low Back Pain.” Spine28.13 (2003): 1363-371. Web.

Comparing a Powerlifting Bench Press and One-Arm Push Up

DisplayFeats of Strength of feats of strength is something that I have come to love. Whether in the gym, dance floor, or anywhere really, an impressive feat of strength is that – impressive.

It’s always interesting to ask almost everyone who benches anything relatively heavy whether or not they can do one-arm pushups.

Nine times out of ten these individuals cannot do a one arm push up, yet they can have some incredible displays of strength with respect to a bench press.

Before dissecting what consists of a good push up technique, I have to first dissect what is involved with an amazing bench press:

  • Arch
  • Tension (whether through air, or total body tension)
  • Technique

Arch in the Bench Press

Whether or not you subscribe to powerlifting guidelines or not, an appropriate arch is important towards achieving bigger numbers for your bench press. Imagine the difference between a large arch, and a small arch.

Bench Press - Arching

If you’re benching with no arch, and a flat back against the bench, your bar path will be [x] amount of inches for the barbell to travel down and up. If you bench with a relatively larger arch, your distance will be reduced.

Total Body Tension

There is nothing that deflates me more than seeing someone get very hype for a bench press, and then they grip the barbell with a lack of tension, or don’t respect tension in their legs or lower body.

For those of us fortunate to have a decent bench press, there is an understanding that there will be a greater ability for tension to be created via breathing coupled with lower body tension.

Technique

While this article is not meant to go over the purposes of specific technique (Read: Wrapping the Barbell in the Bench Press) I hope you can respect the fact that there is a specific technique that will allow more of your strength to be exhibited.

Technique should involve the following:

  1. Setup
  2. Intra-abdominal pressure
  3. Leg drive
  4. Bar path
  5. Reversing the bar path

With all of these items in mind, it is easy to see that being “good” at the bench press does not naturally correlate to being good with a one-arm push up, since they are, by it’s very nature, completely different exercises.

Components of a One Arm Push Up

There are a few reasons why this someone can bench a lot of weight, but can’t do a one-arm push-up:

  1. Lack of technique.
  2. They never practiced a one-arm push up before.
  3. Improper positioning.
  4. Inability to recruit total body tension (or irradiation for those of us following the science game at home).
  5. Lack of strength – let’s be real.. it takes a lot of strength to do this!

What to Look For in a One Arm Push Up

The Setup

  • Irradiation in your hands.
  • Spreading of your fingers.
  • Total body tension
    • Tension in your feet
    • Tension in lower body (all the way down to feet)
    • Tension in opposite hand

Something that needs some clarification is what I like to think of as “spreading your fingers” into the floor in order to maximize mechanoreceptor input to the hands, shoulders, and eventually the rest of the body.

Human Hand - Pressure on Distal Aspect of Metacarpals

There needs to be pressure on the inside “knuckle” part of the hand. Displayed here on the palmar view of the bones of the hand (highlighted in red), there needs to be pressure on the distal portion of the metacarpals for pressure to be truly maximized.

This doesn’t mean “cup” the floor with only that portion, but think of placing pressure on that part of your hand (before your fingers elongate outwards).

Actual Movement

  • Spreading of the floor with one hand
  • Pull yourself to the floor with one hand
  • And obviously, pushing yourself away from the floor.

Regressions to Improve Upon a One-Arm Push Up

Band-Assisted One Arm Push Up

To reduce the total loading found in the one-arm push-up, check this version out.

Eccentric One-Arm Push Up

The eccentric or negative variation of this push up works on improving the pattern as a whole, while respecting that pushing away from the ground is equally difficult.

One Arm Front Plank Hold

The one arm front plank hold is a different exercise that combines the rotary demands of a one-arm push up, along with respecting that you will need one upper body limb in contact with the ground.

With these in mind, it is easy to see how different the one arm push up and the bench press are.

Despite being upper body focused exercises, they are vastly different with respect to the demands.

My Observations

How often do you hear of someone injuring themselves doing a one arm push up, versus tweaking something in a rep max or even a 1RM bench press? No agenda in that question; it is merely an observation of mine.

On the other end, do you know of anyone that can do a one-arm push up, but have a bench press that is lacking? Similar arguments can be made for those that have the requisite mobility for a one-arm push up, but have not developed the high level technique for a “respectable” bench press.

As always,

Keep it funky.

MAsymbollogo