Friday, July 12, 2013

BAMF BAMF
 what it do

BLARRRRRRR okay, let me see if I can put together something coherent about BAMF!

Some time ago, I put together this training skeleton to help folks figure out where they might be fitnesswise, different strokes for different folks and so on and scooby doo.

And then I started at the top and talked a little bit about what it might take to get from sedentary to active, which is defined as 30 minutes of moderate intensity activity three times per week. Maybe you fit this in three Workouts per week, or maybe you find this in your normal daily activity, or maybe you soup up your normal daily activity to hit this.

And then I feel like I clouded the issue with my demented BAMF! chart, which is measuring ...what. I'm going to say that BAMF! gets introduced at the same time but is a separate measure from Get Active (30 minutes of moderate intensity activity 3x per week), and is carried, still separately, though Get Fit (30-60 minutes of moderate intensity activity 3-5x per week), Get Performance (60-90 minutes of high intensity activity 3x/week, 60-90 minutes of low intensity activity 2x/week), and Get Lean (any workout plus diet protocol). And yet, not separate. Because BAMF! supports all of those protocols, and at the same time the raison d'etre of all these protocols is BAMF! In other words, BAMF! is your daily life. What you do in your daily life supports—or doesn't—your activity, your fitness, your performance, and your body composition, but what do you want to be active or fit or fast or strong or lean for... if not your life? One hand washes the other, is what I'm trying to get across.

Here's another way to look at it: the difference between active and fit and performance-oriented persons might be 1.5 versus 5 hours versus 8 hours of working out per week, and believe me working out 8 hours per week feels like a lot, full stop, but also a lot more than 1.5 hours per week. Yet it's still less than a tenth of the rest of your life and if we look at that, now we're talking about 110.5 versus 107 versus 104 hours of daily life per week. Which is not so different from this end. Pretty much for everybody except for elite professional athletes, the volume of daily life greatly overwhelms training volume. ALSO if this needs to be said, you cannot bring this even in the ballpark of balance, so please don't go there. That's not what I'm saying.

Well then, what am I saying.

Okay so, at the Get Active level, you have the Get Active goal of 30 minutes of moderate intensity activity 3x per week and we also introduce the BAMF! goal of 500, because I'm sneaky like that. Which means what? Which means standing or otherwise moving around for half of your waking life, and the other half sitting. If you count your whole life and add in a third sleeping, that's a third on your back, a third on your feet, and a third on your butt. But for easier math, let's just say half standing and half sitting when you're awake.

Half standing might not seem like a lot but believe me, I almost never got to BAMF! 500 in a month of tracking and I'm pretty active. Outside of workouts I'm a pretty standard office worker, or well, I'm not standard at all with my two and a half days of work per week, but if you add one and a half days of writing per week, I'm potentially sitting from 9 to 5 like a lot of folks.

On the other hand, it's not as hard as standing for eight of your sixteen waking hours straight. (Not that I don't know people who are on their feet all day, this is the opposite problem that has to be worked from the opposite direction—put a pin in that.) You get a BAMF! point for standing up at all—but let's say for at least a minute—in any fifteen minute increment, so BAMF! 500 means that you're standing up and shaking it out every half hour. And also any intensity of movement counts, it's perfectly fine and I think preferable to keep this at low intensity.

I'm reading Kelly Starett's Becoming a Supple Leopard right now and it's great, and he says:

As a rule, you should mobilize for four minutes for every thirty minutes of sitting. For example, you could do the couch stretch—a brutal hip opener you can find on page 331— for two minutes on each side very half hour. The idea is to tackle the areas that become restricted, specifically your glutes, psoas and other hip flexors, thoracic spine, hamstrings, and quads (to mention a few). Think of it as a mobilization penalty based on sitting time.

And I will tell you this, athlete that I am, this frankly seems unattainable. Remember I tried something like this and unhinged myself? But you know what, you do it the way you eat any whale, one bite at a time. I'm not going to try to deadlift 2x my bodyweight right off the bat, even though Box says I will definitely be able to do this someday.

I'm going to leave that 4 min/30 min out there as my goal, and right now here's where I'm at:

Get up every hour, you can go to the kitchen or the bathroom or whatever, or you can shake it out and sit right back down.

How am I going to do that without unhinging myself. Ha, I have a plan. TK!