Here are the two principal reasons you should not be doing crunches (or just about any other traditional ab work for that matter):

#1. Crunches will NOT make you look any better. People dissatisfied with their midsections share something in common – there is too much fat on top of their abdominal muscles. Humans are born with abs in a 4-, 6- or 8-pack and when they die, they’re going to be that way too. The only issue is that the layer of fat on top of them is too thick for you to be able to see them.

If you slash your body fat in half, but do no direct ab work whatsoever your abs will look better than they have in years (or possibly ever). But if you waste those same 3 or 4 hours per week just working your abs directly, your stomach will look no better, your posture will probably get worse, and your back will probably hurt more.

The solution to a better stomach is a good fat-loss program:

• Priority #1 is to eat better because you can’t out-train a bad diet
• Priority #2 is smart, metabolic resistance training to accelerate your metabolism and help your body conserve your lean body mass
• Priority #3 is smart interval training to increase your metabolism

Notice what is not on the above list – ab exercises of any kind, completely unnecessary.

#2. Crunches are bad for your back: Dr. Stuart McGill is probably the world’s leading expert on the lower back (pain, disorders, fixing them, and how the low back issues developed in the first place). Here is his fascinating research:

“A couple of years ago we sought the most potent mechanism leading to [spinal] disc herniation.”

“We found that repeated flexion motion under simultaneous compressive loading [like during a crunch!] was the easiest way to ensure herniation.” (Herniation and rupture can be used interchangeably.)

McGill used pig spines, as human spines are a little hard to come by, and they are a very good model. Crunching is a repeated flexion of the spine with compressive loading.

It does not take much to rupture the discs in the human back; tests show that fewer than 10,000 repitions with only 1,472 Newtons of compression! (Newtons are a measure of force.)

A regular crunch (flexion) will put about 2,009 Newtons of compressive force on the spine. If you decided to do 100 crunches per day (about 5 minutes of crunches), then you would have replicated Dr. McGill’s experiment in less than 100 days.

What To Do Instead

The crunch got started as an abdominal exercise based on work with cadavers. After removing all the connective tissue that is encasing individual muscles, you will find the rectus abdominus (the 6-pack). Yank it with a hook and then assume that whatever the cadaver does is identical to what a living human being would do. This cadaver-based research is the foundation of something called “biomechanics.”

Biomechanics means “life movement.” Not surprisingly, living humans and dead humans with hooks in their muscles often don’t really do the same things.

Current research suggests that the muscles in the middle of your body (your core) exist to prevent movement, not create it. Those muscles, including the rectus abdominus, exist to stop your lower back from moving when your limbs move. By holding you steady, your spine is protected from the kind of destruction that Dr. McGill’s research illustrated so dramatically. When you come in for your trial, we will asses your body to see what your needs/risks are, and show exactly how to do the right work for your body. Properly designed core work will strengthen your abdominal muscles and save your spine.

What do you want to do next?

• Find out why heavy weights do not make women look like men.

• Get started towards the body you want?

• Find out why cardio does not help you lose weight (fat).

Also, as a married man I would hate it if my wife ended up looking anything like the picture below from lifting heavy weights.

However, it turns out that when women lift heavy weights, they actually end up looking like Vanessa Hudgens. To get ready for her role in Sucker Punch, Vanessa lifted heavy weight – including at 180lb deadlift.

Vanessa is a little person (5’ 2”), and about 110lbs. 180lbs is more than 1.5x her bodyweight, which is very heavy – making her very strong. (I wonder if this means she can beat up Justin Bieber? BTW, if you don’t read the tabloids they are/were a couple.)

Here she is again. Those are big and heavy kettlebells.

Does Julie Look “Big & Bulky” To You?

People Magazine (which is the place for details about Justin & Vanessa) asked Julie Benz (Actress) what her workout secret is, and this is what Julie had to say:

“There’s this misconception that is you lift heavy weights that you’re going to bulk up. As a woman, I can attest [that] you don’t bulk up – you actually slim down.”

What About LeAnne Rimes?

Does lifting really heavy weights with your upper body give you “man arms”?

Let’s ask LeAnne Rimes. In the issue pictured below a very proud LeAnne Rimes told Shape Magazine that she can bench press her body weight.

Just in case you are wondering, being able to bench press your body weight is more than most men can do, and that is very impressive for a woman as women tend to have less upper body strength. (Sure you see men at the gym pretending to lift a similar relative weight, but to actually do a legitimate looking press with good form at your body weight is strong.)

The Body You Don’t Want

Generally, one of the requests we get from women is, “I want my arms to be nice and toned. But, not Madonna toned. That’s just gross.”

Madonna’s personal trainer is Tracey Anderson. Anderson told the Oprah Winfrey Show that, “no woman should lift more than three pounds.” (Tracey was Madonna’s personal trainer until 2009, this pic is from 2008, so this is several years of never lifting more than 3lbs, except carrying her purse, picking up her children, or carrying a half gallon of water.)

What About Power Lifters?

We all know that “female power lifter” is a euphemism for a short, strong man who doesn’t have that much facial hair right? (Kidding.)

Well, this here is Stephanie Kubik. She weighs 105lbs. At the time of this picture she was a competitive power lifter.

She deadlifted (picked up) 320 pounds in competition!

To put that in perspective, I was twice her body weight at the time I found this picture. At that point in my life the most I’d ever deadlifted was 315. So, she was half my weight and slightly stronger than me.

If you are going be able to deadlift 3x your bodyweight you need to spend many, many years focused solely on getting as strong as humanly possible. And to be as strong as you possibly can, then you also need to avoid things like jogging, light weight bicep curls, and all of the other stuff you see most women do in the gym because all of that makes you weaker. So, Steph’s tiny body is the result of years and years and years of deliberate focus on getting as strong as she possibly could (lifting extremely heavy weights over and over again).

I wrote a blog post about her, and Stephanie found it, and was nice enough to email me the following, “Josef, I’m sure if you really worked at it you could pull 320 too.”

Sadly, for my manhood, this is a true story. Thanks Steph!

More Women Who Can Kick My Butt

This next lady’s name is Kara Bohigian, and, yep, she’s a power lifter too.

Kara makes me look like a complete weakling. She can squat in excess of 500lbs, deadlift 501lbs, and bench press 420lbs in competition.

She’s got pigtails! You’re not supposed to be that strong if you have pigtails.

To help you appreciate those numbers, I’ve been working out for 20 years (intelligently for 9 of those years), and I can’t even come close to touching those numbers.

My bests are a 315lb squat, a 405lb deadlift, and a 275lb bench. Those were not in competition, so those numbers are suspect as there was no judge watching to say, “hey, that bench press was incomplete – no credit for you, try something lighter.”

Here is Jennifer Thomas. At 132 pounds Jennifer can squat 315, deadlift 419, and bench press 293. (Why can’t I bench 293?)

Here’s Rachel Cosgrove, who holds the record for most weight ever deadlifted by a woman in her weight class in the entire state of California. (California has a lot of people, so winning that state means a lot more than winning a Virginia for example.)

Here’s Neghar Fonooni, who’s just a general lady badass. That’s a heavy weight she’s holding over her head. She can do pull-ups with no assistance and makes sure that her female clients who want “tone” lift heavy weights so that they succeed.

The above doesn’t include any of our female clients who can do pull-ups, full push-ups, and deadlift their body weight and then some. They all started out as women who wanted to be smaller and more toned, and they achieved those goals by lifting heavy weights. No pink dumbbells because they don’t actually work.

Bottom Line

Getting strong does not equal getting big for women (not always for men either).

As Julie Benz said above, “There’s this misconception that is you lift heavy weights that you’re going to bulk up. As a woman, I can attest [that] you don’t bulk up – you actually slim down.”

This lady didn’t get big and bulky by accident. It took her 10-20 years of intense focus, training and heavy drug use to look like this. Rest assured that you’ll never wake up one morning and notice you’re becoming a “beast”.

Heavy weights help women shrink, they also give women power (you get to help the men on the plane put away their luggage) and being strong helps women stay out of the rest home as they age.

Very light weights yield no results, and may very well contribute to bone less because they do nothing to prevent bone loss. (Did you see that Gwyneth Paltrow, one of Tracey Anderson’s clients, who never lifts more than 3lbs, was diagnosed with osteopenia at the age of 37? Osteopenia is the precursor to osteoporosis.)

What do you want to do next?

• Find out why crunches do not actually help you get a great midsection, and why they might be one of the most dangerous exercises for your lower back?

• Get started towards the body you want?

• Find out why cardio does not help you lose weight (fat).

You’ve been had.

She literally does aerobics “cardio” for a living

What Does The Research Have To Say?

The USDA came out with their recommendation to do 60-90 minutes of aerobics for fat-loss in 2005. The first ever research study on the efficacy of their advice didn’t come out until late 2007. Do you know what the study said?

Men who did moderate to vigorous (think your target heart rate zone) exercise for over 60 minutes per day, 6 days per week, for an entire year lost only 6.5lbs of body fat! Women barely dropped 4 pounds in that same year. (1)

So, if you had 20lbs to lose, all you’d need is 18 hours of aerobic exercise per week and you’d be set in 12 months!

She does aerobics (cardio) for a living too

Does it work in the real world?

Does aerobic exercise work for real people with jobs and families who can only get to the gym 3 days per week? Researchers in Australia had their subjects do 40min of steady-state aerobic exercise, 3 days per week (40min in your “target heart rate zone”). They gained a pound of fat on average over the course of 15 weeks. (2)

What About Running A Marathon?

The Danish thought of this in 1989. After a grueling 18 month training program to get their subjects ready for a marathon here are the results:

• The men dropped 5 pounds of body fat
• The women dropped no body fat at all (3)

So, if you’re a man looking to drop 40 pounds, then you just need to work up to a leisurely 210mile run by quitting your job and abandoning your family. If you’re a woman it looks hopeless – sorry.

I didn’t lose weight when doing marathon training either

So, Just What Is “Cardio”?
Technically, “cardio” = cardiovascular exercise. Exercise that taxes the cardiovascular system – it asks your heart and lungs to work harder.

When lay people, fitness magazines and most personal trainers (who should know better as this is exercise science 101) say “cardio” they really mean “aerobic exercise.”

I deliberately used this word wrong in this post because I want you to know what I’m talking about.

All exercise is cardio because all movement requires your heart and lungs to do at least some work. For example, if you do 10 very hard (for you) squats, your legs do a lot of work and then ask your heart and lungs for lots of extra blood and oxygen – this is “cardio.” You can’t actually take the heart and lungs out of your chest and throw them on a treadmill, your muscles go running and ask your heart and lungs for blood and oxygen. It’s the muscles that drive it all.

All exercise is cardio, and all aerobic exercise is cardio, but not all cardio is aerobic.

Aerobic – less intense, you can keep it up for longer periods of time like 5min, 10min, 60min. Jogging, distance running, cycling, swimming, etc.

Anaerobic – more intense, you must stop because your body physically fails. These are activities like actual sprinting (bike sprints, swimming sprints, running sprints), or resistance training with weights that are actually worth lifting. These require you to stop, rest and then repeat.

When you do anaerobic work (resistance and interval training) correctly you turn your body into a fat burning machine – your metabolism and fat burning are accelerated for at least 36hours. (4-10)

What do you want to do next?

• Find out why crunches do not actually help you get a great midsection, and why they might be one of the most dangerous exercises for your lower back?

• Get started towards the body you want?

• Find out why heavy weights do not make women look like men.

A list for all seasons. Developers have the wp-hackers mailing list to discuss core and plugin code. Sometimes UI/UX stuff comes up and gets discussed there, but there is a whole universe of discussion around navigation labels, gradients, button styling, layouts, alignment, etc. that would be clutter on wp-hackers. Designers need a list to call their own, and now we have one. You can sign up for the wp-ui list to discuss ways to improve the interface or user experience of WordPress, and to discuss progress on design-related projects for the open source project, like the design challenges we’re going to have.

Design Challenges. We learned a lot from the icon design and header refresh contests, and we want to do these kind of open design challenges on a regular basis to give UI/UX designers who want to contribute to the WordPress open source project more opportunities to do so. If we could do one per month, that would be ideal, keeping the challenges relatively bite-sized to allow potential contributors an easy way to get involved at first. As each challenge is posted, people can use the list to bounce ideas off each other and work toward optimal solutions. I’m hoping the design challenges will evolve to be less contest and more collaboration. We’ll announce the first one before the end of January, so if you’re interested, please sign up for the list! (Hint: one will likely be a touch up to the Right Now dashboard module, to improve the information design, and there will be a couple of screen layout challenges coming up as well.)

Distributed Usability Testing. We started to try this out last year, and several dozen usability professionals volunteered to help get the program going, but a combination of scheduling and infrastructure issues combined to stall the progress. Having the “UI/UX contributor team” infrastructure in place, starting with the mailing list, will make it much easier to get this project going again.

Chit-chat. The weekly developer chats in IRC at #wordpress-dev have been very productive. We’ve created an IRC room at #wordpress-ui on irc.freenode.net so that we can have the same kind of “water cooler” for UI/UX contributors as for core code contributors. In addition to being a place where you can drop in and discuss core UI/UX (note: this room will not be a place to discuss the design of blog themes, it’s to discuss the design of the Wordpress application itself), we’ll set up a weekly chat. Choosing a day and time for the chats will probably be the first discussion on the mailing list.

A blog of our own. Once again, taking a page from the code contributor infrastructure, we’ll set up a blog for UI/UX updates, announcements, progress reports, etc. This will be on WordPress.org in the nearish future, and will be announced to the mailing list when it is live.

So, if you want to become a contributor to core WordPress by using your design skills, join the wp-ui mailing list and get ready for a fun year!

January 8–9: WordCamp Atlanta
January 23: WordCamp Boston
January 30: WordCamp Greece in Thessaloniki
January 30: WordCamp Indonesia in Jakarta
February 27: WordCamp Fukuoka
March 6–7: WordCamp Ireland in Kilkenny
March 27–28: WordCamp Toronto

NORTH AMERICA

January 8–9: WordCamp Atlanta. First WordCamp of the year, and it’s already sold out — twice! They changed to a bigger venue based on demand, from Georgia Tech to the Atlanta campus of Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). They’re still letting people onto the waitlist, if you’re interested. A guaranteed way to get in would be to sponsor the event, and they’re taking last-minute sponsors right now. Atlanta will have sessions on Friday evening and all day Saturday. I’ll be opening the Saturday program with WordPress Resolutions: What to Expect in 2010. After a day of design, development and content track sessions, Lead Developer Mark Jaquith will take the closing slot for a Town Hall-style Q&A. The attendee list (follow link, scroll down) includes a number of WordPress core contributors, theme/plugin developers, and support providers as well as proof that Atlanta has a strong WordPress user base.

January 23: WordCamp Boston. I think WordCamp Boston is trying to one-up every WordCamp the organizers have been to, including the awesome NYC from November, and it looks like they might succeed. From Doc Searls and David Weinberger as keynote speakers to the multiple-track, unconference and Ignite sessions to the sweet-looking venue and the party plans, this one has got it going on. I credit it in part to the fact that they are one of the few WordCamps to follow the advice of having an organizing team of more than just 2 or 3 people, so the work is better distributed. I see a number of familiar names on the attendee list, but even more that I don’t know, so I’m looking forward to meeting the Boston WordPress community. They’re still selling tickets, so if you’re in the northeast, you should try to make it. I’ll be at this one also, talking about how the merge with MU will affect the WordPress admin (by then we should have started figuring it out!).

March 27–28: WordCamp Toronto. The last two Toronto WordCamps have been really good. I heard there would be one in March, but their site right now is just taking emails for notification. I’ve contacted the organizer to see what’s up, and he says the site will likely go live this week. They’re looking for volunteers to help organize this year’s event, so if you’re interested, it would be a great opportunity to get involved. Believe me, volunteering at a WordCamp is one of the best ways to make sure you meet a lot of other attendees.

ASIA

January 30: WordCamp Indonesia. WordCamp Indonesia will be in Jakarta again this year. I love how they worded the beginning of their sessions page. “Come in, we’ll get you breakfast and coffee, you’ll register, there’ll be networking. It’ll be great.” There will be a single track of sessions, but there are several time slots set aside for ad-hoc discussion and breakout sessions.

February 27: WordCamp Fukuoka. WordCamp Fukuoka is just getting its site up, too, so check back periodically a little later for more information. One of their visiting speakers will be Noel Jackson, developer of the Press This bookmarklet as well as themes like P2 and Monotone/Duotone.

EUROPE

January 30: WordCamp Greece. WordCamp Greece will be held in Thessaloniki, and they expect about 100-150 people to attend.The program includes regular sessions on the usual topics (how-to, programming, SEO, multi-language sites, etc) as well as “QuickRounds,” which will showcase Greek projects based on WordPress. I’m especially intrigued by the “WordPress vs. Expression Engine” session. Whenever people compare different publishing platforms, it’s interesting to see which features they highlight. I hope someone gets video from this one and posts it to the WordCamp section of WordPress.tv.

March 6–7: WordCamp Ireland. WordCamp Ireland will be in Kilkenny, and for such a geographically small country, it’s got an impressive list of speakers, including Donncha O Caoimh, lead developer of WordPress MU. The program includes three tracks: Intro, Blogger, and Developer, and I think this will be the first WordCamp I’ve heard of that is deliberately family-friendly, with on-site child care. They’re also going to have a charging station for mobile devices, which is clever. It’s not confirmed yet, but I think I’ll be at this one, too.

If you want to attend a WordCamp but don’t know of one near you, check out WordCamp.org for the official list (updated frequently). That’s also where you would start if you wanted to organize a WordCamp in your area.

*Developer chats are held Thursdays at 21:00 UTC in the #wordpress-dev channel at irc.freenode.com.

The as-long-as-we’re-not-in-freeze-yet model isn’t working. People wind up waiting months longer for new features they want, like Trash and Image Editing, because we’re still adding other things and then we need to test them all. If we kept the releases smaller feature-wise, we could push out the new stuff sooner (3 releases per year is the goal) and have more focused beta testing, making the releases themselves better. It’s hard, because everyone has their pet features and fixes, and if there’s a patch, why not get it in this release rather than waiting? Sometimes people complain that a patch has been waiting to be committed for weeks or months, but what no one ever seems to bring up is that sometimes patches introduce new bugs, and the more we add at once, the harder it is to keep it all well-tested on various platforms, in different hosting environments, etc. So. What’s our proposal?

We take a page from the world of project management and we make a project plan before we jump into the dev cycle. We let everyone propose features and enhancements, and we choose a limited number to include in 3.0 (in this case we need to be especially stringent, because the merge of WordPress and WordPress MU will automatically mean a lot of work) and set a realistic release date that we stick to. We create a tentative set of features for the next two releases, to be re-evaluated at the beginning of the next cycle, so that people know the community is committed to certain features, as opposed to the vague “future release” label we now use for everything not included in the current version. We fix bugs that are reproducible and affect a large number of users before focusing on edge case bugs or bugs that haven’t been well-described or reproduced. We stop diverting our attention from agreed-upon goals when a “squeaky wheel” decides we should all be focused on something else. There are always things that pop up unexpectedly, but we need to do a better job of restraining ourselves when it comes to trying to sneak things into the current release (I include myself in this, of course…as a UX person I always wish we could do everything all at once!).

As an open source project, we accomplish more when we work together than we do following individual agendas, and we need to keep our project focused on commonly-agreed-upon goals instead of following tangents whenever a community member starts to take us on one, regardless of whether it’s to follow a cool idea that everyone loves or a suggestion based on a personal agenda, and regardless of whether it’s a newbie who doesn’t know any better or a frequent contributor or committer who has a strong opinion and a loud voice (so to speak). The issue here is that it’s easy to get distracted, so we need to create a structure that will help us keep moving forward instead of getting sidetracked. We need to keep Trac clean for the current dev cycle so that it includes confirmed features and bug reports, and all new feature suggestions go into a different milestone.

We think it’s at least worth a try. When we re-start the weekly IRC dev chats in 2010, the first meeting will be to talk about the scope of 3.0. When we’ve got a general agreement about what will be included, we’ll create the appropriate Trac tickets, and punt tickets for non-3.0 feature requests/enhancements to a future release so we can stay focused. New bug reports will still come in to the current milestone. It’s going to be hard. There are at least a dozen new features that I feel like we’ve pushed back multiple times that I’d like to see in core, but for this experiment, I’m just going to keep reminding myself, “You can do that with a plugin!”

Sound off on the features you would like to see in version 3.0.