Beyond Gravity – Vector Fitness Training

Index/Credits

About the Author

"We are all inhabitants of Planet Earth,

and thus, our bodies are bound by its physical laws.

Fortunately for us, our creative intellect is not."

– H. J. Einsig, MD, ATC - age 54

Dedication

In loving memory of our Scrappy D

AND MY FATHER, POP E

Copyright Information ©

H. J. Einsig, MD, ATC (2020)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Ordering Information:

Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Einsig, MD, ATC, H. J.

Beyond Gravity – Vector Fitness Training

ISBN 9781641829441 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781641829458 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781645366485 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020900104

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published (2020)

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 28th Floor

New York, NY 10005

USA

mail-usa@austinmacauley.com

+1 (646) 5125767

In Beyond Gravity – Vector Fitness Training, I will explain and show you:

methods to obtain optimum fitness, physique, and performance in a multi-dimensional world

techniques to stimulate the neuromuscular system for maximum desired gains, overcome sticking points, and set new personal bests in the least possible time

specific ways to vary resistance and output force vectors to selectively recruit each area within every target muscle, the key to acquiring the most efficient stimulus for directed specific segmental muscle hypertrophy, strength, power, and focal muscle endurance enhancement

how to use F⁵ workouts for functional strength or sculpted mass more efficiently and effectively

mind and muscle connection enhancement that increases focus and results for every exercise

what you need to be a vector variation master, training partner, and/or superior personal trainer

programs to get the most of working out by yourself, with a partner or trainer, with bodyweight exercises, free weights and/or machines, and most ideally, the Vector BodySled

how applied science allows contact sport athletes to excel in competition, bodybuilders to chisel best physiques, power lifters to set records, and ordinary people how to not feel so ordinary.

This book is for all who seriously want to improve body shape,

strength, and physical performance.

Acknowledgment

To Kim… my partner in life. Thanks for giving me the love, working space, criticism, and support I need to succeed.

To five treasured children: Joe, Darion-Grayson, Joannah, and Alexis… my motivation for enhancing quality of life.

To Mom and Dad… always loved, admired, and appreciated. Thank you for a wonderful upbringing.

To Paul… for always reflecting to me the person that I am and what it is that I am compelled to do in this world.

To Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dan Gable, Cael Sanderson, and other amazing athletes and game-changers… who have inspired me to admire, analyze, think outside the box, and then write this book.

To Austin Macauley Publishers… for guiding this project through to completion.

To all my coaches, teachers, and West Chester University Athletic Training, Hahnemann Medical School, Reading Hospital internship, Medical College of Virginia, and Temple University Hospital Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation residency instructors… for educating us and inspiring me to do the same.

To the athletes I have coached with Variable Vector Training… your head start is over.

Prelude

One of my favorite things in life is to see the eyes of experienced weightlifters, bodybuilders and competitive athletes light up the first time I expose them to Variable Force Vector and F⁵ Training. For it is in that moment that they know they can achieve much more!

A vector is a directed force – it has magnitude and orientation.

From the beginning of mankind’s time on Earth, we have become very adept at working against gravitational force, but it is the handling of non-gravitational forces or variable vectors that most of us struggle with. There are spectacular athletes among us who excel at performing in those unusual circumstances whom we marvel at. And it will be those whose bodies and movement skills have been sculpted by informed training adaptation who will be marveled at in the future.

Consider Beyond Gravity – Vector Fitness Training a vector propelling you in the right direction!

Sir Isaac Newton educated us with the fundamental laws of physical science: A body stays in current state until new force applied, Force = Mass x Acceleration, and Action = Reaction.

We just need to apply these laws in novel ways during our training to make them work better for us than we have in the past and to create advantages over our less-informed competitors:

Variable Resistance Vectors x Variable Output Vectors =

Variable Force Vector Training

Author’s Introduction and Background

The following paragraph was written as is years ago, long before any of the relevant worldwide news hit. None of the recent changes in whom I acknowledge diminish in any way the incredible physical and nation uplifting accomplishments I reference. In fact, strength of character perseveres.

I still remember cheering on Bruce Jenner in the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Long since my childhood, the vision of Jenner breaking the world record in the decathlon, on sport’s grandest stage during our country’s 200th birthday, continues to burn bright in me. That fire had been rekindled by my own gold medal in the Junior Olympics as a freestyle wrestler a few years later. Atop the medal podium, as I resonated with our National Anthem, I flashed back to Jenner’s ceremony with tearful pride. Then I discovered his passion as a decathlete myself within the next decade, and finally by meeting and talking with Bruce himself. Don’t worry Bruce, I am not a stalker. But you never know just how your actions can inspire one, a few, or several hundred thousand people over time.

Now of course I should correct myself and respectfully say don’t worry Caitlyn, but the meaning and impact of the actions referred to in the first and last lines of the paragraph above were, and remain, some of the most powerful in our nation’s sports history, and perhaps even have a more global accuracy now, especially the last line. This book is not about the change of inspirational direction, but about the product of inspiration and directional variation. I had other childhood heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Olympic Gold Medalists Dan Gable and more recently Cael Sanderson, whom I completely respect as a wrestler and coach myself. Both are internationally and unquestionably regarded as some of the toughest, hardest working men alive today. But disguising my original inspiration for learning, further discovering and ultimately sharing neuromuscular and biomechanical functional advances that will positively change the fitness, sports and strength training world forever is not consistent with a value I will compromise.

By most accounts I have led a successful life – a private practice MD with hours as I and my beautiful loving wife choose them; an eight-acre country estate/sports park with everything our four incredibly wonderful children needed to grow healthy in body and spirit without encumbrance, and over two decades of successful coaching and athletic training experience. Yet deep down inside me there is an unrelenting stir letting me know there is much more I personally could and should do before I can rest. Call it Erickson’s Generativity before Integrity stage of psychosocial development if you like.

The stir started many years ago when I first discovered what I later termed Variable Force Vector or VFV Training while working with my dad in construction the summer I graduated from high school. I was always into exercise, sports and working out, so while on the jobsite I picked up a large telescopic plastic drainpipe assembly and started doing curls with it at the handle end. As I pulled the pipe tubing out by curling my forearms upward, I could feel how the angle of the resistance force was changing and increasing the more pipe length (resistance arm) I pulled out and curled with my (lever) arms. This gave me a much higher resistance at peak Biceps contraction than I could get with dumbbell training. I quickly realized that if I moved that telescopic base up and down on a vertical post, I could vary the force vector I encountered to get a much more selective workout for any point in the range of motion or any section of muscle I wanted to emphasize. I built a simple machine model I called the BodySled and started using it with great results. I could get more pump in just 5 minutes on the BodySled machine than I could in a half hour at the gym, while working out every section of each target muscle maximally on one simple machine. Although college, medical school and residency delayed my publicizing this, related education and intramuscular wire recording research during my residency allowed me to refine and verify the huge performance and muscle adaptation response advantages of this Variable Force Vector Training methodology. I eventually got the United States Patent during my second year of residency, but soon after that a deal with an exercise machine company fell through when they secretly opted to try to purchase and then scrap the patent rights fearing that my machines and methods would make theirs obsolete! After this let down, I got away from the BodySled and advancing Variable Force Vector Training for a long while. Parenting, medical practice and coaching became predominant in the next phase of my life, but it always bothered my generativity phase psychological needs that I did not share these advances in resistance training with the world.

Then in 2007 I left my family to go to the annual American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) conference. I wrote a brief note for my children that went like this…

Dear Joe, Darion, Joannah, & Lexi,

Have fun, work hard, be grateful to your mom, and finally – Be Spectacular! Love, Dad

I wrote that with the kind of anxious motivation any loving parent feels when they are about to be away from their children for a few days. I specifically wanted to end with an enduring slogan of advice they should live their lives by just in case I met an untimely demise before I could get back to them. Then off I went to the conference. Yes, I wanted to learn and improve my sports medicine scientific foundations, but when I first signed up it was more out of necessity to meet my continuing education requirements as both a certified athletic trainer (A.T., C.) and a physician. Athletic Training was my undergraduate degree from West Chester University in 1987 and I earned my M.D. from Hahnemann Medical School in Philadelphia in 1992. At this conference, I would earn two for one credits in both, making it convenient and cost-effective. In hopes of a self-fulfilling prophecy, however, I said to my wife Kim on the day I left, Honey, maybe I will get re-inspired to do something spectacular myself.

Inside I knew what I had once created and had incredible passion about. It even garnered Unites States Exercise Machine and Method Patent # 5,813,951. Then I let becoming an athletic trainer, then husband, then father, then physician, then coach take my focus off that passion and diversify to other well-rounded pursuits. There may be nothing wrong in that, except the persistent low-level gnawing that comes when you know you have something great to offer the masses, but you have not yet done so at the level you should. So off to the ACSM conference I went.

That’s when Bruce Jenner re-inspired me again, (May 30th, 2007), more than 30 years after I first watched him earn Gold. At this national sports medicine conference, he was the highlight motivational speaker. I always understood innately the basic core of his speech Finding the Champion Within. After all, I won at almost everything I put effort into, even the decathlon after just a few months of trying it. But as my responsibilities grew horizontally, the vertical vector of my individual task focus diminished. Bruce talked about raising the bar. Every time you raise the bar you must raise the level of commitment. He trained relentlessly for six years to obtain amateur sport’s highest pinnacle. Once that was achieved, he committed to parenthood and earned a perfect 10 in that department – 10 children that is! (Including 4 stepchildren.)

The internal passion it took Jenner to be a world champion became the driving force in his quest to bring the champion out in others. Seated in the front row, I could feel my own adrenaline pumping as Bruce talked about that exhilarating endogenous agent. But what really hit home was when he admitted he had his shortcomings and internal dilemmas, but that he did not let them stop him. (Again, I myself find what I wrote here years ago slightly surreal if not uncanny, but it all holds true to this day, so I am not going to change it.) It is difficult for me to accept just how long I have taken to get to this literary point in my life, but it is never too late to share what is still uncommon fitness training knowledge and experience that represents true game changing practices and the history behind them.

I had come close to being spectacular several times in my life but usually just fell short by my own internal standards. I was the first football player in my high school’s history to gather any All-State recognition. I did that as a defensive end but not as a first teamer, just honorable mention. Although my 52 varsity QB sacks and over 300 tackles in just 3 seasons were perhaps the best performance statistics in the state of Pennsylvania, my measly 160-pound mass and not so blazing speed kept me off the A-list and from being recruited by any D-1 football programs. I was high school class-president for two years; my sophomore and junior years, but not my senior year. I was the first Exeter wrestler to win a high school AAA district champion title and the only one to ever go undefeated in a season up through districts, but I lost my first round at States by 1 point, and I was instantly awoken from the dream of a PA wrestling State medal. Academically, I worked hard but fell short of my goal to finish in the top 10 of my high school class – ending up 12th, and mostly because of a little joke I tried to pull on my Honors Humanity teacher, which she did not feel was that humorous. However, I did reach the highest goal I could in high school freestyle wrestling by winning the AAU Junior Olympic Gold Medal with a fast pin in the finals.

At West Chester University, I got more serious about my academics, earning Magna Cum Laude in the Honors Pre-Med Program, but not Summa Cum Laude. I was the University’s first Athletic Training major student and varsity wrestler to be accepted in the Honors Pre-med Program, but I did not get their final Seal of Approval on my application to medical schools because of those facts. I wrestled well as a Division 1 starter my freshman year, but a late season injury kept me out of Freshman All-American Honors. I battled back getting individually ranked in the top 5 nationally during my senior year, but the university’s program being suspended by the NCAA from post-season competition near the end of my senior year wrestling season pulled the carpet right out from under my All-American run.

I did not give up on wrestling, however. After graduation from college in 1987, I wrestled and served as the athletic trainer for the Pennsylvania Stallions, a newly formed real professional wrestling team coached by Olympic Gold Medalist Andre Metzger. I split a few wrestle-offs with a future world silver medalist, but fortunately for him and sadly for most of the others on the team, before any of us got paid the nationwide program folded. I decided I would let go of my Olympic wrestling quest to focus on medical school. But my passion for wrestling and my desire for international wrestling success resonated on inside me, even through the life changing events of getting married and starting a family. After graduating from Hahnemann Medical School in Philadelphia in 1992 my professional life took precedence during my four years of internship and residency. I was still intermittently involved with wrestling at the club level when we suffered through the tragic flaw of Team Foxcatcher’s main sponsor John E. DuPont, who eventually shot and killed Olympic legend Dave Shultz. But I completed residency that year in 1996 and moved back to my hometown of Exeter with my family, and there my wrestling passion was reignited.

I took over the head high school coaching position and started training hard again even though I was a young physician just starting out in practice and the father of two young boys with another bun in my wife’s oven. I could envision a whole little team of Einsig wrestlers! As an athletic trainer, physician, and coach, I thought I could not be in a better position to develop my little athletes. Of course, parenting teaches you that preconceived notions of what’s best for your kids are not always entirely or specifically accurate. My pre-school and early grade school boys started out totally into wrestling, so I let that justify myself working hard as head high school wrestling coach. Then two girls followed and yes, they became athletes as well. But by high school they all found lacrosse to be their main sports passion, so that became a sport I also learned to love, coaching it for 7 years between the boys and girls high school and junior high teams. The point is that you never know what endeavor may ignite your passion, but that passion is the key to successful enjoyment.

Getting back to my wrestling passion, in 1999 a surprise opportunity presented for me to be the team physician for the USA University National Wrestling Team. Practices were held at Ursinus College where I previously took advantage of the chance to become a member of the first real professional wrestling league’s Pennsylvania Stallions years earlier. I started rolling around with team members in my weight class and it turned out that I still had it on the mat at a national level.

My team physician role quickly changed to team physician/wrestler. Next thing I knew we were off to wrestle the Cuban International Wrestling Team in not so friendly conditions. In a heavily guarded foreign government complex, Fidel Castro’s men stood watch as the Cubans destroyed our Greco-Roman team, sending two to the hospital including our heavyweight. That dominance led their government to televise the upcoming freestyle competition to the nationals. The condemned training facility and lack of food and drink made available to our US team left most of us sick and quite depleted. Our coach was lost for nearly two whole days due to police harassment and the cutting off our lines of communication. It got so bad that before our head coach could reunite with the US team, I, acting as team physician and the eldest statesman of the wrestlers, along with the assistant coach, met with the Cuban and Dominican officials and coaches to inform them that we had decided to change all our flights out of the country to three days earlier since we were mistreated, broke, hungry, and in serious trouble with local law enforcement. I did not think we would make it to the one-week mark without imprisonment, near fatality, or worse. They conceded that our treatment did not match the FILA standards under which the international event was agreed to. However, they insisted that they had no financial means to upgrade to our standards for three additional days, so they agreed to hold the freestyle competition the next evening with our deportation the following morning.

Since one of our US heavyweights was out with a compound ankle fracture from the Cuban heavyweight team captain throwing him into the bleachers (ruled a legal 5-point match winning move!), and the other was also in the hospital getting IV’s for dehydration, we knew that either myself or my backup would have to wrestle heavyweight if the match were on the line. That is exactly what would happen. Our US team was winning by just two points with two matches to go. We were a much better freestyle team than we were in Greco-Roman, but the Cuban heavyweight was undefeated for the past two years in international competition. His patented move was a front suplex in which he would throw his heavyweight opponents over his head height while arching backwards. That is how our starting heavyweight got his ankle broken with a bone popping out the skin just the day before.

Surely, our team’s chance of victory and my own health would be at great risk if an actual 198-pound American had to go up against this 260-pound Cuban behemoth. We thought, however, that fortunately for us the backup freestyle wrestler at my weight class was our varsity Greco-Roman wrestler at that weight class, and he was one of only two of our 8 wrestlers to win for the US in the Greco-Roman competition. He would be facing the same wrestler in the freestyle competition if I decided to give up my varsity freestyle spot and bump up to wrestle heavyweight if needed. Head Coach Bill Racich came to me immediately after the third to last match with exactly that strategy in mind. So there I was, after working most of life in wrestling to finally get this chance for international glory with an opportunity to seal the win for Team USA at the weight class I earned, only to find myself relinquishing my spot for the potential good of the team. I knew full well that if our substitute wrestler would win then he would get the glory and I may not even get to wrestle on the international stage. If the team win would become out of reach for the Cubans after the light heavyweight match, they may not even send their final wrestler out to the mat. At the best for me, a loss by my back up would mean I would not only have to avoid getting pinned by their two-time national champion and undefeated injury-delivering heavyweight who would outweigh me by over 60 pounds with the weight of his whole country on his shoulders in front of Fidel Castro at a military enforced compound, but I would have to beat him if the US was to win! Did I say at the best for me?! I had known Coach Racich for many years. He was an All-American Division 1 wrestler for West Chester State College and I was an assistant wrestling coach for him at Ursinus College for two years. I also played rugby with him for Philly-White Marsh for two seasons. He was my friend and fellow rebel rouser. But in this situation the most important things were that he was my coach and it was he who gave me the opportunity to be part of this international wrestling team in the first place. Besides, he believed that I was never afraid of going up against bigger guys my whole sports career, and if it came down to it he thought I would have the best chance (no matter the pre-match odds) of me winning the match against their heavyweight leader. After he looked me in the eyes and told me just that, what else could I say but Whatever you think is best for the team, Coach. The decision was made and then suddenly and unexpectedly my backup proceeded to get pinned by the Cuban wrestler, putting us down trailing in team points with only 1 match to go – me vs. their heavyweight champion in the most intense and meaningful circumstance of my athletic life to that point. And, oh yeah, it would now take a pin by me for my country to win!

The only advantage I had (if you can call it one) was that I