Like most people after high school I began to put on the pounds.  I’m 6’-0” tall and by the time I reached 30 I was up to almost 260 lbs. and I distinctly remember my refusal to buy size 40″ jeans even though buttoning my 38′s was getting very difficult.  I would proceed to try practically every diet imaginable, losing maybe 10-20 lbs. at a time but never really able to keep the weight off.  When I was in my mid-late 30′s I was finally able to lose about 25 lbs. and keep it off with exercise and better eating, however for the next year or two I would become extremely frustrated, working out like a mad man and eating right, 5-6 small meals a day (like everyone says you should do) with no results.  I even had sessions with a personal trainer and a nutritionist at my cookie-cutter gym only to get more frustrated with the science of “counting calories” and working out in my “target heart rate zone”!

Steve Bubel

I was attending my 20 year high school reunion when I’m re-aquatinted with classmate Steve Bubel who I had heard was a highly regarded personal trainer.  I was randomly paired up with Steve at our reunion golf tournament and I remember venting my weight loss frustrations to him to get his advice.  He suggested that I try eating only two meals a day instead of 5 or 6 but I didn’t listen, I remember thinking that Steve’s ideas were too radical…..I obviously wasn’t ready!  Fast forward one year, I was still about 235 lbs. and the frustration had peaked so I decided to contact Steve again, this time ready for some serious change.  It was a Friday in May, 2010 when I had lunch with Steve and we talked about my goal, to be under 200 lbs. on my 40th birthday, which at that time was 15 weeks away.  I told Steve what I had been doing for exercise and how I had been eating up to that point and he told me (and I’ll never forget this) “that’s easy Ray, you eat too much!”  I remember thinking how I had just spent hundreds of dollars at my other gym on a heart monitor, body age tests, BMI measurements, a trainer and a nutritionist…..and my problem is that I eat too much?  It just goes to show what you’ll do if your desperate (or fat) enough!

I.F. (Intermittent Fasting)

At lunch that day we agreed to start my training and Steve’s first instruction was to begin immediately by having me skip breakfasts, eating only lunch and dinner, no snacking.  I was like, “what!”  Skip “the most important meal of the day?” but I figured what do I have to lose?  That weekend I shared my new approach to eating with some neighbor friends, who are all relatively thin and all I heard was “don’t do it, your body will go into starvation mode, your metabolism will slow, your body will store fat, your body will attack muscle tissue for energy”…….I heard it ALL!  Lucky for me I was desperate and already committed to Steve’s tactics.

Major Weight Loss

The results the first few weeks were nothing short of amazing, I was losing 4 pounds a week for the first 4-5 weeks, it was going so well that I decided to lower my birthday goal weight to 195 lbs.  Steve and I continued working together for the weeks to come continually enhancing my work out strategies and tweaking the I.F. Plan.   Being the big breakfast person that I was, the adjustment to I.F. was tough in the beginning but eventually I was able to make it through the whole day and eat only dinner on some days.  What I love most about Intermittent Fasting is that I don’t have to “avoid” any type of food, I eat whatever I want, I generally eat healthy but if I feel like throwing down a ½ pound blue cheese burger, I can.

Strength, Speed and Stamina

When I started with Steve I could do only one un-assisted pull up…..and it was a sad looking pull up at that, today I can jump up on a bar and squeeze out 10 almost effortlessly.  Strength has increased in all areas of my training but my greatest gains have definitely come in my core.  I’ve also made dramatic improvements in my 500 and 2000 meter times on the infamous row machine (Steve’s weapon of choice) and I’ve knocked several minutes off my trail run times at Eisenhower Park (not hard to do when Steve or Greg Burch are setting the pace).

I’m now just days past my 40th birthday and I’m 193 lbs, having met my goal one day early.  My body isn’t storing fat and it isn’t attacking muscle tissue for energy, it is however getting leaner, stronger and faster.  I’ve lost at least 40 pounds with Intermittent Fasting and now I can wear 32″ pants (a size I haven’t seen in nearly 25 years) I feel better than I ever remember and I’m arguably in the best shape ever.  Steve’s methods are not complicated and his approach to fat loss is simple, move more, eat less and I.F. made this approach much more practical than counting calories for me.  Intermittent fasting has changed my life; I come from a culture where life revolves around food and with I.F. I can still enjoy those customs without worry.  In the words of Steve, “I eat what I want, just not when I want!”.

Thanks Steve for giving me the knowledge!

Ray

I recently had the honor of being interviewed by Patrick Ward of Optimum Sports Performance. Patrick is an extremely knowledgeable and talented strength coach in his own right so I was grateful to have the opportunity to answer a few questions regarding my background and philosophy on strength and conditioning. I include it here to provide a little more insight into how and why I train the way I do. Thanks for taking the time to read it. Consider this my 15 minutes.

1) Thanks for taking the time to do this interview Steven. Can you please give a little bit of background on yourself and why you got into training?

I came into training quite by accident. I was a three-sport athlete in high school (football, basketball, and baseball) and picked up lacrosse in college. At A&M I also picked up a penchant for beer and pizza rolls. By the time I was getting ready to graduate I had put on about twenty-five pounds – some muscle but mostly fat. I had begun working out but really had no idea about what I was doing. I asked and observed others but was left even more confused. As such, I began reading fitness magazines and became intrigued with the science of training and nutrition. About this time, two fortuitous things happened: I saw a television program on the Olympic Training Center and I enrolled in a course in first aid to finish out some of my requirements for graduation. The first challenged my prevailing belief that great athletes were born and not made. The second changed the course of my future.

I don’t recall how but I had struck up a good relationship with the instructor of the first aid course (which just so happened to fall under the Kinesiology department). She learned of my new-found interest and encouraged me to apply to graduate school. With her letter of recommendation and my GRE score I got in. It certainly wasn’t for my grades. After grad school I took a job at a large, commercial gym, got certified, and soon after got my CSCS. The rest is history I guess.

If not for that one first aid course I never would have gone to graduate school and thus would never have embarked on a career that I am so passionate about. I also would not have met my wife and would not have the same two wonderful children. I owe that instructor my life and even made a trip back to College Station a few years ago to tell her as much.

2) At a time when so many want to specialize in working with athletes in just one sport, you seem to be more of a generalist; working with athletes in everything from motocross to football to lacrosse.  What is it about being a generalist that really sets you apart and allows you to hone in on the athletes needs?

I guess you could consider me a generalist. I love all sports and, fortunately for me, all athletes need a foundation of strength, power, speed, flexibility, mobility, endurance, etc. Sport-specific training is merely a manipulation of the modes and methods used to develop these qualities and knowing which ones need emphasis and when. Having done this for so many years and being a student of sport, I have a pretty good understanding about how to develop sport-specific fitness whether I have played the sport or not.

Case in point, I trained Supercross rider Heath Voss to a World Championship in 2004 even though I had never been on a motorcycle. Interesting side note: his main competition for the title that year was Damon Huffman who was trained by none other than Alwyn Cosgrove. Anyway, knowledge, observation and, most importantly, dialogue with the athlete are the essential elements for putting together a successful training plan. Having played the sport is merely a bonus.

My success as a “generalist” lies in my 15 years of experience and broad knowledge base. When you work with athletes from wildly varying disciplines, you have to spend considerable time studying areas that you might not be concerned with when working with just one sport. Doing so gives you the ability to see things from a different perspective and reduces the likelihood of being biased by tradition. Being an “outsider” does come with it’s own challenges but once the athlete buys in the results ultimately speak for themselves.

3) You have a great interest program organization and understanding how to manipulate training variables to improve strength and power. Can you tell us a little bit about your overall approach to training and philosophy?

Yeah, I guess you could say that I am obsessed with the planning and organization of training. From the single workout to the annual plan, I want to know how to best fit everything together to optimize the training process (wow, that sounds very guru of me). I’ve read just about all there is on the two-factor (fitness-fatigue) theory of adaptation and the various forms of periodization. Zatsiorsky, Verkhoshansky, Issurin, Siff, Bompa, Rippetoe & Kilgore, Loren Chiu, Dan Baker out of Australia are all guys that have a had a huge impact on my training philosophy. I’m particularly interested in post-activation potentiation in the form of complex training and the short and long-term delayed and/or residual training effects.

The cool thing is that, using my Micro Muscle Lab, Just Jump mat, and Brower timing system, I can test a lot of these theories. Not to sound too much like Dietrich Buchenholz but I can also use these tools to “autoregulate” my training. For example, I can use the vertical jump as a measure of preparedness for the day’s training or I can use a predetermined drop in power to terminate an exercise or a workout. These devices also allow me to individualize the training as well as quantify performance over time. I’m a total geek in this regard.

4) You’ve been in the industry for a long time. Looking back, if there were one thing you know now that you wished you knew then, what would it be?  What should young coaches in the field focus on if they want to be successful.

As an athlete, I wish I had known that you can get faster and jump higher with proper training. In high school, we lifted weights but it was all about getting bigger and stronger not necessarily about getting more explosive. At that time (mid to late 80′s), it was believed, by our coaches anyway, that you were either fast or you weren’t. You could jump or you couldn’t. There was no emphasis on power. Hell, there was hardly any emphasis on strength for that matter. The weight program was haphazard at best and voluntary. There certainly wasn’t any thought into injury prevention. What a waste.

Come to think of it, not much has really changed. I get kids in all the time that are weak and slow or strong and slow. Very few are powerful or fast. They either have no strength or can’t express what strength they do have quickly. I routinely put six inches or more on a kids vertical jump and shave several tenths off his or her forty-yard dash in a couple of months simply by having them train for speed and power. It’s not rocket science. Or, maybe it is.

As a trainer, I wish I had been taught the importance of quality of movement (over quantity) early on. It wasn’t until a few years into my training that I came across the work of Paul Chek. While he has gone a bit mad these days, the material that he was putting out in the late ’90s radically changed my approach to training and changed my mind about what a trainer could and could not do. He was a pioneer in the melding of exercise and therapy and much of what is being taught these days about “functional” training is the direct result of Paul’s work. There are a lot of guys doing that sort of thing now – Gray Cook, Stuart McGill, to name a few – but back then he was on the cutting edge. I actually spent a week with him in Miami getting his golf certification and was tested by the man himself. He is quite a character. Speaking of characters, I also had the good fortune of attending one of Mel Siff’s Supertraining camps before he passed away. The influence that these two men had on my career cannot be overstated.

I have spent the last fifteen years working “in” my business and it’s only recently that I have begun to work “on” my business. I have always sought the respect of my peers more than financial gain. Unfortunately, getting better means having to routinely find new peers and so I always feel like I still have so much left to learn – and I do – but this mindset can be paralyzing professionally. There must come a time when you just have to feel confident in your knowledge, move forward, and market yourself a bit. That’s not to say that you stop learning but honestly, after a while, the details can become a bit trivial. Practically speaking, how can you share your expertise with someone if they don’t know who you are? Fortunately, my clients appreciate my dedication and my ability to help them achieve their goals and have always been more than happy to refer others. My business has been and will continue to be built on these relationships. I think that’s the secret to any business success.

5) Steven, thanks for taking the time out of your day to answer these questions for us.  Could you please tell the readers where they can find out more about your articles, services and where they can get in contact with you?

My pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity, Patrick.

Although I don’t get to update it as often as I would like, I have a blog where people can learn more about me and my training philosophy. I’m also on Twitter and Facebook if anyone cares to follow my ranting or keep up with my day-to-day musings. I can also be reached via email at steve@stevenbubel.com.

How early is “early”? According to the position stand of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA), “if a child is ready for participation in sport activities, then he or she is ready for some type of resistance training”. This can include children as young as 7 or 8 years of age. Some parents might think that a bit too early. Most, unfortunately, give the idea no thought at all.

For the vast majority of young athletes, their first exposure to resistance training comes during their freshman year in high school. Research shows that that may be a little too late – at least when it comes to injury prevention.

In looking at the graph above we can see that the incidence of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries spikes quite dramatically from 15-19 and more so in females. The reasons for this are quite varied and beyond the scope of this post but the take-home message is two-fold:

1. the liklihood of injury (especially ACL injury) is greatly reduced with a properly designed resistance training program
2. waiting too long to get started can be detrimental to your child’s health.

When I run I sometimes get pain in my left shoulder close to the base of my neck. It’s always the same pain, only the intensity varies. It started happening once I broke the 10-mile mark in my training. Any thoughts?

Sounds like it could be fatigue of the primary respiratory muscle – the diaphragm. As the diaphragm fatigues there is increased reliance on the accessory respiratory muscles – namely the scalenes, sternocleidomastoid, and upper trapezius – to elevate the rib cage and draw air into the lungs. Overuse of these muscles can lead to pain.

This problem should resolve with better conditioning. Focus on deep, diaphragmatic breathing while you’re running and breathe through your nose as much as possible.

If the problem persists, you may want to look into soft-tissue therapy. Trigger points can often develop in these muscles with overuse.

While there’s no substitute for a pair of expert hands, there are ways for you to work on yourself.
The Trigger Point Therapy Workbookis an excellent resource for the self-treatment of trigger points in the neck and almost every other region of the body. I can’t recommend it highly enough

When it comes appetite or satiety, the first thing that comes to my mind is ghrelin. Ghrelin is a peptide hormone that stimulates appetite. Under “normal” conditions, ghrelin is suppressed postprandially (i.e. after a meal) reducing the desire to eat. However, it turns out that ghrelin is sensitive to “low” dietary sodium intake.

When sodium is restricted, salt-sensitive individuals exhibit increased postprandial ghrelin (relative to normal intake anyway) which may trigger a premature hunger signal leading, in turn, to increased food craving and intake. It is probably for this reason that white individuals in particular tend to lose less weight on combined calorie- and sodium-restricted diets than under calorie restriction alone.

Anecdotally, I have been adhering to an intermittent fasting regimen for the last two years and have found that a 1/4 to a 1/2 teaspoon of sea salt several times during the day really increases my energy and blunts my appetite. Interestingly, research has shown that in the first 24 hours of fasting, sodium excretion accelerates by about 15% above normal which might explain my response.