I’ve known John Romaniello for almost a decade now, and he’s a guy who delivers great content and plenty of humor and entertainment.  Oh, and he also happens to be in pretty good shape.

EC: You were really active as a writer at T-Nation a few years back, and then took a little hiatus before returning with a vengeance - and some great content - recently.  Where the heck did you go?

JR: Ha! I guess I did kind of fall off the radar there.  I didn’t mean to intentionally withdraw; I wasn’t looking to make a statement.  In fact, I guess in retrospect my abscence was specifically because I didn’t have much to say.  I never wanted to be the type of trainer or writer who rehashed other people’s ideas; rather, I wanted to just gather as much information as I could from as many sources, and formulate my own ideas and theories based on that.  So in my early articles, you’ll see that.

A topic of interest that seems to get thrown around quite a bit nowadays is whether front squats are a “safer” exercise than back squats. We don’t do much back squatting at Cressey Performance, so a lot of people automatically assume that I’m against the idea of back squatting. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as my answer to the question “which is safer?” is a resounding “IT DEPENDS!”

At last check, 74% of the Cressey Performance clientele is baseball players. The majority of these athletes have acquired actual structural changes to their shoulders that make the back squat set-up more of an at-risk position than in non-overhead-throwing athletes. To make a long story short, in this externally rotated, abducted position of the shoulder girdle, the biceps tendon pulls awkwardly on the superior labrum. This peel-back mechanism is exascerbated in the presence of a glenohumeral internal rotation deficit (GIRD) and scapular instability - two features extremely common in baseball players. So, for these folks, the front squat is a much safer alternative. We also use giant cambered bar and safety squat bar squat and lunge variations.

Conversely, take an athlete with either traumatic or chronic acromioclavicular joint problems, and the front squat will really irritate his shoulder because of the bar’s position atop the shoulder girdle. Move this bar to the upper back, and the pain is avoided altogether. So, for AC joint pain suffers, the back squat is a safer bet.

All too often, we overlook the important underlying anatomy and physiology upon which solid training and nutrition recommendations are based. In rushing to get to the “meat and potatoes” (the program or ultimate recommendations) of an article, we fail to truly question and understand the basis for why we do what we do. Take, for example, post-workout nutrition. Ever wonder why you can suck up ridiculous amounts of high-carb foods after you train? In the Rugged mission statement, we promised to make you think; the following article should do just that. And, if it doesn’t, you can at least gain an appreciation for one facet of an Exercise Science graduate student’s course of study. Without further ado, I present “the insulin response to exercise: carbohydrate, fat, and protein metabolism implications.”

Introduction

Insulin is well recognized as a powerful hormone capable of diverse metabolic effects in a variety of scenarios. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these scenarios is exercise, the stress of which presents significant metabolic demands. The response of insulin to these demands has far-reaching implications in terms of carbohydrate, fat, and protein metabolism.

Insulin: Broad Roles in Carbohydrate, Fat, and Protein Metabolism

Of all the lousy things that can happen, this has to be one of the worst. Imagine…You’ve just completed the most successful bulking cycle of your life, adding twenty pounds of mass; you’re on top of the world. Now, all you have to do is train properly and eat plentifully in order to solidify your gains. With your knowledge of diet and training, it should be a snap. Then everything hits the fan…

A while back, during the infancy of my transition from business school to the world of exercise science, I wrote Budgeting for Bodybuilders, a collection of thoughts that unified these two facets of my academic background. To me, all the information seemed like common sense; like many poor graduate students, I’m up to my neck in student loans, so I need to be–gasp–cheap. As such, I was pretty surprised to receive dozens of emails from people who really went out of their way to let me know how much they appreciated the article.

Apparently, there are a lot of other people out there like me who are constantly looking for ways to save