Mille: переводы

→In fact, you probably won’t have to worry about a lot
of things. Your risk of heart disease should decline, along with your chances of getting
diabetes and some types of cancer and the possibility that you’ll become impotent.
Your waistline should shrink, and your quality of sleep should improve.

→The beautiful thing about writing for an audience is that, at some point, you real-
ize you’re learning more from them than they are from you. I hit that tipping point
several years ago when I began reading posts on my own message boards about the
concept of clean eating.

→But before I get into that, I want to establish a few of my bedrock principles.
These aren’t the New Rules of Lifting; I self-mockingly call them Lou’s Rules of Exer-
cise. But I think they’re worth stating, right up front:

→It’s hard to imagine one of today’s 300-pound bodybuilders even trying to shoulder-
press that much weight, unless he was sitting on a bench with his back fully braced, and
using both hands. And yet Sandow, at 180 pounds, standing on the floor, could do it with
one hand . . . and no steroids.

→You can see his workouts for yourself on a variety of websites. I went to sandowplus.
co.uk and downloaded a chapter from Sandow’s System of Physical Training, published in
1894. Most of the “heavy-weight exercises” he recommends for advanced athletes involve
lifting a weight overhead, with the weight often starting on the floor. He claims to have been
able to perform a one-arm snatch—a continuous motion, lifting a dumbbell from floor to
overhead—with 186 pounds. But that pales compared to his best-ever “one-handed slow
press from the shoulder”: If his own book can be trusted, he once pressed 322 pounds
with his right arm. (His record for his left arm was a mere 300.)

→At the turn of the century, a strongman and bodybuilder named Eugen Sandow became
one of the most famous people in the English-speaking world. Even today, a likeness of
his muscular physique—he stood about five-foot-eight, weighed 180 pounds, and had
a twenty-nine-inch waist—is used on the trophy given to the winner of the Mr. Olympia
contest.

→The irony is that bodybuilding contests represent the opposite of what Sandow did to
build his famous muscles, and what he promoted.

→However, a 2004 study in the Journal of Applied Physiology found that muscle power
is a better predictor of longevity than is muscle strength. Lots of studies have shown that
power—the ability to generate force rapidly, such as a quick hop to avoid an obstacle—
declines faster than strength does as we age. But this is the first study I know of that shows
the decline in power directly affecting life span. This correlation held up even when the researchers adjusted for body size, muscle mass, and the amount of exercise and other physical activity of the participants.

→It’s not that you can’t develop a fantastic-looking physique while also training your
body to work in harmony in sports competition. It’s just that bodybuilding-type workouts
accomplish the former while hindering the latter. If you get your six-pack abs and peaked
biceps because you’ve taught those muscles to work and grow in isolation, you’ve devel-
oped the look of an athlete while diminishing your ability to actually perform like one.

→Of course, there are some problems with that approach. For one thing, when you
teach your muscles to work in isolation, you run the risk that they’ll forget how to work to-
gether. That’s why you rarely see high-level athletes with bodybuilder physiques. And the
ones who develop them often become more famous for their pose-worthy muscles than
for their athletic accomplishments.

→You’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned the quadriceps, the big muscles on the
fronts of your thighs. Their main job is to straighten your knees when they’re bent,
and that’s not hard to do while walking or running. Runners are notorious for having
tight hips and hamstrings and relatively weak quadriceps, while lifters sometimes are
the opposite—they do so many leg presses and leg extensions for their quadriceps
(the muscles they can see in a mirror) that they end up with relatively weak ham-
strings. Either combination is bad for your posture and the health of your knees and
spine.

→Meanwhile, your postural muscles, such as your internal obliques and some of
the small, strut-like muscles in your lower back and hips, keep your body upright and
stable while you move.

→MUSCLES USED: Your entire lower body gets involved in walking and running—
in fact, walking and running are pretty much the main reasons you have a lower body.
Your hip flexors (muscles on the front of your pelvis) lift one leg up and out in front
of you, while your hip extensors (gluteals and hamstrings) and calves on your trailing
leg push against the ground to propel your body forward. The muscle on the front of
your shin, the tibialis anterior, lifts your toes up on your front leg so they don’t drag
on the ground.

→And at the end of the book, among the chapter notes, I’ll tell you more about the
studies and books from which we created these programs, and in some cases the *s
and **s who conducted or wrote them. That’ll give you a chance to look them up
yourselves, to see if we merely borrowed or outright plagiarized the ideas contained
in them.

→** is for someone with a medical degree or doctorate, and then some of the stuff
the * designees have. An example is my friend Susan M. Kleiner, Ph.D. (doctor of phi-
losophy in nutrition and human performance), R.D. (registered dietitian), and
F.A.C.N. (fellow of the American College of Nutrition).

→I don’t really qualify as a *, since the only letters I have that matter are C.S.C.S.
(My bachelor’s degree is in journalism, making me one of the few who will admit he
went to school for a B.J. But, for obvious reasons, I don’t put those letters after my
name.)

→Alwyn, for example, is a *: M.Sc. (a graduate degree in sports science from
Chester College, University of Liverpool), C.S.C.S. (certified strength and conditioning
specialist, awarded by the National Strength and Conditioning Association), M.S.S.
(master of sports sciences from the International Sports Sciences Association),
C.H.E.K. (certified by exercise guru Paul Chek), U.S.A.W. (certified to teach Olympic-
style weight lifting), N.A.S.M.–C.P.T. (certified as a personal trainer by the National
Academy of Sports Medicine), A.C.E.–C.P.T. (certified personal trainer by the Amer-
ican Council on Exercise), and A.C.S.M.–H.F.I. (certified as a health and fitness
instructor by the American College of Sports Medicine).

→To avoid all this, we’ll have two designations for the experts whose ideas we cite:
“*, ” which means “bunch of letters after his name,” or “**,” which means “tons of let-
ters after her name.”
* will describe experts who most likely have a master’s degree, at least one major
personal-training certification, and other professional designations, like R.D. or P.T.
(registered dietitian, physical therapist).

→“Yes, that’s right,” says Hannah Rottweiler-Edelweis, Ph.D., R.D., P.T., M.I.C.,
K.E.Y, associate assistant professor of human binary eschatology at the
Frances Fullington Beaningham Institution of Advanced Obfuscation at the
University of Eastern South Dakota in Deadwood and author of Humor in
America: Why Laughter Could Be Good Medicine, Except When It’s Not (Con-
glomerate Press, 1997). “At least, I think it is.”

→Since Alwyn and I don’t take credit for creating any of the ideas in this book, we’ll give
plenty of props to those who deserve it. But credit can sometimes overwhelm the idea
that we’re trying to get across. Take, for example, the following, which is only a slight
exaggeration of the type of attribution you see in some fitness magazines: