Starting at 5:33 a huge light bulb came on for me. I have never understood this pelvic rotation concept and I have been rowing for 10 months now! Not just understanding I can actually do the rotation and make it work! I was always just trying to sit up tall and ignoring my pelvis. Thank you, Thank you:)
That "grow along" is the missing link and quite a "booom" mic drop moment! It's all we need and so many coaches that train junior B and younger kids fail to understand that one simple trick.
Thank you for this video Aram (from Vancouver, BC, Canada). It addresses what we are working on with our Masters athletes on the erg at this time. As a masters rower and a masters coach of competitive athletes, I look to your channel for inspiration. Thank you!
Aram, there is always something to learn or to think about (or re-think) in Your videos - thanks. One thing I like to do in addition to my stretching and mobility training is to actually row on the erg with my eyes shut. I can actually "see" individual parts of my body and their motion and state better with closed eyes than with my eyes open. It's easier to listen to my body if the visual cortex is switched off. Give it a try, if You never did. Regards from Berlin Frank
Lifting with the "Samaba Butt" is something you learn early on with those of us that work Blue Collar. At 69 I'm working on my "Gopnick squat" to get into a shell. I'm pushing out my belly to tilt my pelvis. Downside is presently my belly is to damn big because I'm working on a loss of 60 lbs.
I'm turning 60 soon. I eliminated 36 lbs of junk in the trunk in one year during the COVID lockdown by intermittent fasting. I tried many different fasting protocols along the way. They all worked, but some were less annoying. I'm a big guy. At a younger age I would have had an couch potato caloric intake of 2400 calories per day. Call it 100 calories per hour. A MET is baseline metabolism, circa those 100 calories per hour. METs were invented to describe exercise intensity levels, but no-one uses these any longer in the age of ubiquitious heart rate monitors. The new trend is percentage of HRmax. But you can also talk about MET-hours, a useful way to normalize total calories, which remains awfully useful when fasting. In my nominal example, 20 MET-hours is 2000 calories of total metabolism. At your age, your baseline diet might be 1800 calories per day and 20 MET-hours would then be 1500 calories of metabolism. Fasting for me was hardest in the 20-28 MET-hour interval after ceasing caloric intake (water fast, coffee and tea allowed, no additives). Simple solution. Fast for 20 hours at baseline metabolism, then find some 5 or 6 MET activities which you can do for 1.5-2 hours. You might feel a little bit sluggish during this activity, but it won't be uncomfortable. If you plan well, when this activity is finished, you'll be 30 MET-hours into your fasting period, and your second energy system will be coming on strong. You need to be about 72 MET-hours into a fast for your third energy system to begin to fully engage, which is ketosis. 96 MET-hours is even better. Your brain _loves_ ketosis. And so does your body, up to a point, which now runs like a diesel engine: absolutely rock solid blood "sugar" levels. (The new sugar is ketone bodies, but let's not get technical.) I don't think your VO2max declines in this state. However, the exertion you can manage at this transport level declines by about 20%. You simply don't generate as much ATP per O2 in this metabolic state. On the flip side, you're a fat-burning Mercedes. Same amount of oxygen in, much fat burned, but far fewer watts out. That's the deal. Let's say you plan a 72-hour wall-clock fast. You do two hours of Zone 2 exercise at 5 METs each day, for another 10 MET-hours per day. The metabolic size of your fast is now 102 MET-hours. You have pushed your body deep into ketosis, and all those fat-burning pathways have been amped to the max. This huge volume of Zone 2 is developing your baseline fitness like crazy. As a general rule, 24-MET hours of fasting translates to 8 oz of fat loss (0.5 lbs). The scale will report weight loss as 1 lb per 24-MET hours over this duration, but half of this is water loss due to unpacking glycogen. That will all come back again the moment you ingest any carbohydrates. At 102 MET-hours, you have likely burned 2 lbs of actual fat over three days. For the next four days, do a mild time-restricted eating, maybe 12:12. The nice thing about a 72-hour wall-clock fast is that you face almost no refeeding issues. It's not enough time to seriously mess up your electrolytes. You'll probably only need to supplement with sodium and magnesium on your fast days. After a 5-day fast, you want to refeed carefully. I went there a few times, but decided it wasn't something I wanted to do more than a couple of times per year (e.g. early January to combat xmas). During your four days per week in the fed state (with glucose available), you can do your higher intensity exercise, where VO2 in translates into watts out on a normal basis. What I've proposed would take a shit-ton of discipline, but you really can lose 60 lbs in 30 weeks without doing anything too crazy. Your fat-burning metabolism by the end of this would be first rate, if not elite for your age bracket. I did a lot of hiking. Hills that used to make my legs burn no longer even register as an incline, if I'm lost in my own thoughts. And let me tell you, having tossed aside a 36-lb bag of flour from my own backside, you aren't short on muscular power. You can't help but be very muscular carrying around an extra 60 lbs. Fasts are also slightly easier if you cut down on carbs the day before you cease to eat. Ideally, you cut carbs on Sunday, fast Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday, refeed with a high fat-protein diet on Thursday morning, eat normally on Thursday evening, pig out on Friday/Saturday as much as you psyche demands, and then do it all over again. On my own program, I ate popcorn and nachos and pizza on Friday, all washed down with copious booze, and then chocolate cheesecake for desert. My body packed quite a bit of that back on, so I had to do a lot of total fasting to achieve my goal. But I never felt all that deprived of my previous diet, either. Plus I had to do a lot of experimentation to determine that the 72-hour fast with copious mild exercise throughout represented the maximal gain/pain ratio. If I had known then about the long-term benefits of targeted Zone 2 exercise, I would have jumped on that wagon a lot harder. Here's another thing. If you decide to do this, and you are such a pig on Friday that for the first month, you hardly see any real weight loss, it's no big deal. You've trained the fuck out of your body's capacity to switch from glucose to ketones. Your glucose dependence is now a tiny fraction of what it was before. Just keep on trucking, and learn to regulate your weekends just a bit better (ex nay that second thick slice of cheesecake). You're guaranteed to start winning soon enough. Also, your fatty liver disease (you almost certainly have this, given your parameters) will already be vastly reversed. While in ketosis, the liver predominantly burns the nearest available fat, which is liver fat (followed by organ tree fat, the other most dangerous kind). Trust me, you don't need the scale to tell you that you're winning for the first month or two. The internal changes are monumental, even without visible fat loss. From age 20 to age 55 I gained roughly 1 lb/year, and that's how I ended up 36 lbs overweight. Every year I ate enough food for 367 days, but the year was only 365 days long. The last pound accumulated slowly over time. To lose 1 lb/month would have reversed this trend at 12× the rate I gained it. To lose 8 lb/month (achievable, but far from easy) would have reversed the velocity of my weight gain by 96×. In your case more like 50×. What other problem in your life have you ever fixed 50 times faster than you caused it? People need to get a grip on relative time scales. My own Zone 2 on the stationary bike and the linear erg is around 130 bpm. As soon as I hit 134 bpm I can feel myself losing it fairly quickly. At 133 bpm I'm probably drifting out of Zone 2 slowly but surely. My output around 130 bpm is 130 watts on a good day. (I've only been training this way for two weeks now, after ten years of barely ever sitting on an erg. But I have good form from long ago, and I can still pull repeated 400 W sprints for 50 s each, which is my high-intensity set.) 130 W is enough to make me sweat profusely after twenty minutes. It's mild and yet vigorous all at the same time. I can speak 15-word sentences easily, which is one of the common, informal tests. Of course, at your age, most doctors would consider a weekly 36-hour fast to be a radical proposal, and you should certainly get medical advice, and maybe work into the program gradually with a few 36-hour fasts, etc. to see how it goes. But I guarantee you, if I find myself 60 lbs overweight on my 70th birthday, and for some reason I once again commit myself to getting the lard out, this is precisely the program I would follow, knowing what I know now. One final warning: Beware the mad church of autophagy. They will try to sell you that 72-hour fasts are barely long enough, suggesting 120 hours. But this is _very_ recent science, and I think the more prudent balance-point is the far safer 72-hour fast, in quantity.
I am so thick headed that it takes a year to understand what my coach is yelling about “rotating my hips.” I am 65 next month so that is my excuse. :) I’ll stick with it, watching u tube rowing videos, going to the senior center gym 3-4 Per week, rowing on the water when the wind is calm, ERGing at our boathouse. We are located along Lake Whatcom in Washington USA. Thanks again:). Alan
Hey man, great video- I'm about to save you a headache, haha. With shorts, right click the video and 'Copy video URL'. Paste that into the address bar and voila, you can now manage it just like a normal video.
I can’t find this stretching mobilization video you were talking about at 9:53 can you help to find it? As far as your pelvis,…. “If you don’t do it , you don’t feel it , you don’t know where it is.” :)
It was starting to look like a Nordic drama there for a while Aram with the lights, external sounds and a spooked Mac 😵 A great video for any rower no matter what age as every time you go on the water or are in the gym you’re bound to witness this ‘rigid’ body technique. Ironically most people are unaware of it until it’s pointed out or see it on a video 😎
Starting at 5:33 a huge light bulb came on for me. I have never understood this pelvic rotation concept and I have been rowing for 10 months now! Not just understanding I can actually do the rotation and make it work! I was always just trying to sit up tall and ignoring my pelvis. Thank you, Thank you:)
Great feedback! Thank you!
That "grow along" is the missing link and quite a "booom" mic drop moment! It's all we need and so many coaches that train junior B and younger kids fail to understand that one simple trick.
Thank you for this video Aram (from Vancouver, BC, Canada). It addresses what we are working on with our Masters athletes on the erg at this time. As a masters rower and a masters coach of competitive athletes, I look to your channel for inspiration. Thank you!
Thank you very much for your great feedback Carolyn! All the best to Vancouver!
Aram, there is always something to learn or to think about (or re-think) in Your videos - thanks.
One thing I like to do in addition to my stretching and mobility training is to actually row on the erg with my eyes shut. I can actually "see" individual parts of my body and their motion and state better with closed eyes than with my eyes open. It's easier to listen to my body if the visual cortex is switched off.
Give it a try, if You never did.
Regards from Berlin Frank
Much appreciated Frank!
I agree. Have done a lot of it. It may be a matter of which communication type you are, though.
I couldn’t find those mobilization exercises video? :)
ruclips.net/video/0Pjsw457Rig/видео.html
Lifting with the "Samaba Butt" is something you learn early on with those of us that work Blue Collar. At 69 I'm working on my "Gopnick squat" to get into a shell. I'm pushing out my belly to tilt my pelvis. Downside is presently my belly is to damn big because I'm working on a loss of 60 lbs.
I'm turning 60 soon. I eliminated 36 lbs of junk in the trunk in one year during the COVID lockdown by intermittent fasting.
I tried many different fasting protocols along the way. They all worked, but some were less annoying. I'm a big guy. At a younger age I would have had an couch potato caloric intake of 2400 calories per day. Call it 100 calories per hour. A MET is baseline metabolism, circa those 100 calories per hour. METs were invented to describe exercise intensity levels, but no-one uses these any longer in the age of ubiquitious heart rate monitors. The new trend is percentage of HRmax. But you can also talk about MET-hours, a useful way to normalize total calories, which remains awfully useful when fasting. In my nominal example, 20 MET-hours is 2000 calories of total metabolism. At your age, your baseline diet might be 1800 calories per day and 20 MET-hours would then be 1500 calories of metabolism.
Fasting for me was hardest in the 20-28 MET-hour interval after ceasing caloric intake (water fast, coffee and tea allowed, no additives). Simple solution. Fast for 20 hours at baseline metabolism, then find some 5 or 6 MET activities which you can do for 1.5-2 hours. You might feel a little bit sluggish during this activity, but it won't be uncomfortable. If you plan well, when this activity is finished, you'll be 30 MET-hours into your fasting period, and your second energy system will be coming on strong. You need to be about 72 MET-hours into a fast for your third energy system to begin to fully engage, which is ketosis. 96 MET-hours is even better. Your brain _loves_ ketosis. And so does your body, up to a point, which now runs like a diesel engine: absolutely rock solid blood "sugar" levels. (The new sugar is ketone bodies, but let's not get technical.) I don't think your VO2max declines in this state. However, the exertion you can manage at this transport level declines by about 20%. You simply don't generate as much ATP per O2 in this metabolic state. On the flip side, you're a fat-burning Mercedes. Same amount of oxygen in, much fat burned, but far fewer watts out. That's the deal.
Let's say you plan a 72-hour wall-clock fast. You do two hours of Zone 2 exercise at 5 METs each day, for another 10 MET-hours per day. The metabolic size of your fast is now 102 MET-hours. You have pushed your body deep into ketosis, and all those fat-burning pathways have been amped to the max. This huge volume of Zone 2 is developing your baseline fitness like crazy.
As a general rule, 24-MET hours of fasting translates to 8 oz of fat loss (0.5 lbs). The scale will report weight loss as 1 lb per 24-MET hours over this duration, but half of this is water loss due to unpacking glycogen. That will all come back again the moment you ingest any carbohydrates.
At 102 MET-hours, you have likely burned 2 lbs of actual fat over three days.
For the next four days, do a mild time-restricted eating, maybe 12:12. The nice thing about a 72-hour wall-clock fast is that you face almost no refeeding issues. It's not enough time to seriously mess up your electrolytes. You'll probably only need to supplement with sodium and magnesium on your fast days. After a 5-day fast, you want to refeed carefully. I went there a few times, but decided it wasn't something I wanted to do more than a couple of times per year (e.g. early January to combat xmas).
During your four days per week in the fed state (with glucose available), you can do your higher intensity exercise, where VO2 in translates into watts out on a normal basis.
What I've proposed would take a shit-ton of discipline, but you really can lose 60 lbs in 30 weeks without doing anything too crazy. Your fat-burning metabolism by the end of this would be first rate, if not elite for your age bracket. I did a lot of hiking. Hills that used to make my legs burn no longer even register as an incline, if I'm lost in my own thoughts.
And let me tell you, having tossed aside a 36-lb bag of flour from my own backside, you aren't short on muscular power. You can't help but be very muscular carrying around an extra 60 lbs.
Fasts are also slightly easier if you cut down on carbs the day before you cease to eat.
Ideally, you cut carbs on Sunday, fast Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday, refeed with a high fat-protein diet on Thursday morning, eat normally on Thursday evening, pig out on Friday/Saturday as much as you psyche demands, and then do it all over again. On my own program, I ate popcorn and nachos and pizza on Friday, all washed down with copious booze, and then chocolate cheesecake for desert. My body packed quite a bit of that back on, so I had to do a lot of total fasting to achieve my goal. But I never felt all that deprived of my previous diet, either.
Plus I had to do a lot of experimentation to determine that the 72-hour fast with copious mild exercise throughout represented the maximal gain/pain ratio. If I had known then about the long-term benefits of targeted Zone 2 exercise, I would have jumped on that wagon a lot harder.
Here's another thing. If you decide to do this, and you are such a pig on Friday that for the first month, you hardly see any real weight loss, it's no big deal. You've trained the fuck out of your body's capacity to switch from glucose to ketones. Your glucose dependence is now a tiny fraction of what it was before. Just keep on trucking, and learn to regulate your weekends just a bit better (ex nay that second thick slice of cheesecake). You're guaranteed to start winning soon enough. Also, your fatty liver disease (you almost certainly have this, given your parameters) will already be vastly reversed. While in ketosis, the liver predominantly burns the nearest available fat, which is liver fat (followed by organ tree fat, the other most dangerous kind). Trust me, you don't need the scale to tell you that you're winning for the first month or two. The internal changes are monumental, even without visible fat loss.
From age 20 to age 55 I gained roughly 1 lb/year, and that's how I ended up 36 lbs overweight. Every year I ate enough food for 367 days, but the year was only 365 days long. The last pound accumulated slowly over time. To lose 1 lb/month would have reversed this trend at 12× the rate I gained it.
To lose 8 lb/month (achievable, but far from easy) would have reversed the velocity of my weight gain by 96×. In your case more like 50×. What other problem in your life have you ever fixed 50 times faster than you caused it? People need to get a grip on relative time scales.
My own Zone 2 on the stationary bike and the linear erg is around 130 bpm. As soon as I hit 134 bpm I can feel myself losing it fairly quickly. At 133 bpm I'm probably drifting out of Zone 2 slowly but surely. My output around 130 bpm is 130 watts on a good day. (I've only been training this way for two weeks now, after ten years of barely ever sitting on an erg. But I have good form from long ago, and I can still pull repeated 400 W sprints for 50 s each, which is my high-intensity set.)
130 W is enough to make me sweat profusely after twenty minutes. It's mild and yet vigorous all at the same time. I can speak 15-word sentences easily, which is one of the common, informal tests.
Of course, at your age, most doctors would consider a weekly 36-hour fast to be a radical proposal, and you should certainly get medical advice, and maybe work into the program gradually with a few 36-hour fasts, etc. to see how it goes. But I guarantee you, if I find myself 60 lbs overweight on my 70th birthday, and for some reason I once again commit myself to getting the lard out, this is precisely the program I would follow, knowing what I know now.
One final warning: Beware the mad church of autophagy. They will try to sell you that 72-hour fasts are barely long enough, suggesting 120 hours. But this is _very_ recent science, and I think the more prudent balance-point is the far safer 72-hour fast, in quantity.
I had the same kind of day at work today... Mike died, drilling, am I in the picture!!!??!! Put all that crap aside, love your coaching! Thank you!
Fantastic video and advice!
Thank you , Just this morning, I had my first experience with this pelvic rotation idea on the Erg. Very interesting
I am so thick headed that it takes a year to understand what my coach is yelling about “rotating my hips.” I am 65 next month so that is my excuse. :)
I’ll stick with it, watching u tube rowing videos, going to the senior center gym 3-4 Per week, rowing on the water when the wind is calm, ERGing at our boathouse. We are located along Lake Whatcom in Washington USA. Thanks again:). Alan
Hey man, great video- I'm about to save you a headache, haha.
With shorts, right click the video and 'Copy video URL'. Paste that into the address bar and voila, you can now manage it just like a normal video.
Thank you Gemini! Awesome!
I can’t find this stretching mobilization video you were talking about at 9:53 can you help to find it?
As far as your pelvis,…. “If you don’t do it , you don’t feel it , you don’t know where it is.” :)
ruclips.net/video/spMgv7QFV68/видео.html
It was starting to look like a Nordic drama there for a while Aram with the lights, external sounds and a spooked Mac 😵
A great video for any rower no matter what age as every time you go on the water or are in the gym you’re bound to witness this ‘rigid’ body technique. Ironically most people are unaware of it until it’s pointed out or see it on a video 😎