A Better Beauty…

“We should all look a little different… because we are.” – Geoff Thompson

We all want to look better!  There is an ideal I suppose, and naturally, we would like to have it.  We see the fitness magazines and we see the bodybuilding competitions and many of us go, “I wish I could look like that!”  I suppose it is both normal and natural for many of us to fall into such traps.  I have had clients in the past want the “long, lean” look or want to look like a swimmer, or look like some other body type.  In this post I really want to stress how important your genetics play, not to make it an excuse for why you may never look like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sofia Vergara, but to help so many of us recognize that we can achieve our true potential and not allow ourselves to be limited or disappointed because we do not fit an ideal we may have in our minds.  Rather, it is to say that in the pursuit of true health, fitness, and good nutrition, you can really be something spectacular!  Going back to the swimmer is a great example of what I mean.  Someone watches the finals from the 2012 Olympics and goes, “you know something, those swimmers have great bodies.  I think I’ll start swimming and try and look like that.”  What they likely didn’t see was in the beginning rounds the number of very good swimmers, who don’t look like that.  By the time you get to the finals, you have a whole host of factors coming together to see what is the epitome of both training and genetic selection, which leads to these finalists all having the archetypal swimmer’s body.  This holds true in a whole array of athletics and sports competitions.  It’s why we have so many sports.  And why we have so many weight classes in many of those sports, such as boxing and wrestling.  Naturally, American football and rugby are great examples of the differences in body types, despite the fact that they all train pretty hard.  You have guys who are 6’5” and those who are 5’9”.  You have guys who can run 4.3 seconds, and those who run 5 seconds in the 40-yard dash.  There are athletes who might weigh 170 pounds and look like mini bodybuilders (Ben Johnson), and others who might weigh closer to 250 and won’t.  This is due to a whole array of genetic variance, and that’s okay!  In fact, that’s what we want from the perspective of the species; if we were all the same, our chance of survival as a species would be vastly limited.  Nature loves variety, and so should we!  It will be genetics that will determine how well you respond to training.  Some have a profile, which will allow them to grow a tremendous amount of muscle, but they may not be as strong as they look.  Others have a profile that allows them to gain immense amounts of strength, but they won’t build very much muscle.  Others will do both, and then there are some who just flat out don’t respond well to exercise at all.  Other factors include muscle shape and muscle and tendon attachments.  Some people have long muscles with short tendon attachments; others have short muscle bellies, with long tendon attachments.  Some simply have greater numbers of muscle fibers per muscle than others.  There are also somatotypes: ectomorphs, being on the smaller, leaner end of the scale; and mesomorphs, being at the other end of the spectrum, and having a thicker, boxier disposition. These are all factors which are involved.  None of these are bad, but quite often the trick is to, through some trial and error, find what your body type gravitates to and excels at the most.  With this can come tremendous success and confidence!  Lastly, your body will, within reason, respond to the demands and training protocols placed on it, and there are numerous approaches to training.  Bodybuilding, as a sport, uses a different approach to how they use resistance training than the way a powerlifter or Olympic lifter or sprinter will use resistance training.  Now, as much as I advocate High Intensity principles for every approach, a bodybuilder will be spending a great deal more time in front of the mirror practising posing and will be very strict during the cutting phase of his diet than the track athlete who will be spending his/her time on the track.  As a trainer myself, my strength and experience is not in ‘bodybuilding’ per se.  I can help beginners, but my true abilities and experience lead to helping people develop strength and conditioning and sports performance and, of course, overall health.  There is a difference, and the most important thing to realize is that exercise and training are very important, and it is definitely okay to have an idea of what you want before you start.  What I really want to stress is not to be let down or disappointed, but rather, be ecstatic when you start becoming the best version of you.  Greg Glassman, the founder of CrossFit, says it quite well: It is about building a “better beauty.” With proper exercise and healthy food choices, you will be able to build the best you!

“Listen – Ethel, I, I think…  I think we’re fighting a losing game!”  – Lucille Ball  the chocolate scene

Metabolic syndrome…

It is the new buzzword, and now that we know what it is and how and why it happens, this is going to get out there into the mainstream pretty quickly, mainly because if you’re overweight, there is a good chance you have it.  So included is a good article about the percentage of Americans that likely have it. In the past, I’ve included a great video done by Dr. McGuff who really draws out the science on how it looks, at the molecular and cellular level.  I’ve again included the two parts in his lecture that best describes the science of your metabolism and I cannot stress enough the importance of watching it. But to put it into layman’s terms, here is what it is: You keep trying to put gas into an already-full gas tank.  Or even better, your engine’s flooded and won’t turn over, so all this extra gas (junk food) has to go somewhere, so you get fatter and your body is basically in starvation mode, because it is overwhelmed with so much that the system is basically broken.  Another great visual would be the Lucy episode when she’s working the assembly line. She can’t keep up, the line gets backed up, and a huge mess forms as a result.  Wow, Glenn, this sounds terrible!  This is clearly not good for our bodies. How can we fix metabolic syndrome?  I’m so glad you asked.  We have this great prescription for you that you just have to ask your doctor about.  It’s called get off your fat ass and move! Forgive the language, and although comparing exercise to prescription medicine is not entirely accurate, in this case, the best way to get the fuel lines flowing correctly is to rev that engine!  Get the spark, get yourself fired up, and get those muscles working hard!  When this happens, you will deplete the glycogen stores in the muscle, and that will get the mitochondria firing more normally.  Also, quit trying to fill your gas tank with bad gasoline.  Only the high octane stuff will do for your body! That means lots of vegetables, sources of protein and healthy fat, like nuts and coconut and fatty fish like wild salmon.  No high fructose corn syrup!  It is really bad for your body.  Fructose is also a sneaky little molecule, as Dr. McGuff illustrates, that when your system is backed up and having trouble, it can bypass the whole Krebs cycle and go straight to the fat cells.  Ouch!  That’s not what we want!  Everything we ingest we want going to the muscle first; only when the muscles are full, and don’t need it, will we let the extra calories then go to the fat cell.  But that won’t be a concern anymore either, because you’re going to be more active.   High intensity lifting once a week and being active the other days, you won’t have that problem anymore.

The last visual I will include is referenced in the videos.  If you think of Metabolic Syndrome as an over flowing bath tub, you can then see how a good diet, following basic Paleo guidelines, will help turn off the spigot.   High intensity training is the removal of the drain plug.

Once you get moving and get the system flowing, you can really improve your metabolic conditioning and say goodbye to “Metabolic Syndrome.”

Time magazine:

http://time.com/3887131/metabolic-syndrome-obesity/

Biochemistry you’ll understand… A must watch and it will only take 20 minutes!

Dr. McGuff part 5 of 7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t71qsBo_kRc    (you can skip to timeframe 6:07 to begin)

Dr. McGuff part 6 of 7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KfYjeRyBzo

 

 

A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book. ~Irish Proverb

So at the beginning of the month, my brother-in-law was getting married.  Naturally, his sister and I would be going.  The catch was that we had busy work days before the wedding and we were taking the red eye into the mainland.  This is never the best option, but in our case offers the least number of layovers and lowest cost getting from here to the D.C. area.  Of course there was a delay, but we ultimately got to her parents’ place around dinner time the next day.  At this point, we had been up almost 36 hours and still had the festivities around meeting the bride’s parents and family, which was wonderful, and then going out for the rehearsal dinner.  By the time all the events were done, we were finally crawling into bed around 11:00pm, and we had now been awake for over 40 hours. With exception to grabbing an hour on the one flight from Puerto Rico into Ft. Lauderdale and another hour from Ft. Lauderdale into Baltimore, we honestly didn’t, by any means, get ‘a good night’s rest.’  But some interesting things were happening.  She, my lady, was falling apart.  I was, on the other hand, cruising!  I even was thinking of all those military training documentaries where they show all the sleep-deprived soldiers.  If it wasn’t for the whole 30-mile-forced marches-with-120-pounds-of-gear-on-my-back…I’d be a rock star with the lack of sleep.  I say this because going 40-plus hours without sleep is really extreme, by anybody’s standards, and is certainly something I do not advocate!  It just happened to help drive home the point, on a very personal level, the importance of sleep… especially to the fairer sex.

So this is now where this public service announcement comes into play.  In a Duke study done back in 2008, the researchers found:

Their study, appearing online in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity, “Found that poor sleep is associated with greater psychological distress and higher levels of biomarkers associated with elevated risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. They also found that these associations are significantly stronger in women than in men” (sciencedaily.com). Other risks and issues include a greater number of clotting factors in the blood, which increases the risk of stroke.

In the shorter term, women suffer to a much greater extent, both physically and mentally, and prolonged bouts of inadequate sleep, as Dr. Saurez, one of the authors of the study, puts it, “We found that for women, poor sleep is strongly associated with high levels of psychological distress, and greater feelings of hostility, depression and anger. In contrast, these feelings were not associated with the same degree of sleep disruption in men.”

Now, more research needs to be done on how our sleep requirements do change over time as we age from childhood all the way through to old age,  but more and more links are being made to good health and good sleep.  Another point of concern in this study was the length of time it took to fall asleep.  “Interestingly, it appears that it’s not so much the overall poor sleep quality that was associated with greater risk, but rather the length of time it takes a person to fall asleep that takes the highest toll,” says Suarez. “Women who reported taking a half an hour or more to fall asleep showed the worst risk profile.”

Your immune system also begins to fail when sleep becomes an issue.  We’ve all felt those effects: all-night weekend benders, which leave us, by the following Monday or Tuesday, just not feeling good.

When we were living in Korea, my light-sleeping partner and I were in a real conundrum. I was sleeping great! I am also allegedly a snorer—well, was back then, and moved more when trying to fall asleep. This proved to be rather disruptive to her patterns.  She pretty much went the whole year in Korea battling chronic colds, being short-tempered, and all and all, just not feeling pleasant.  Now, the scope of this blog post is not to come up with up ten different ways to solve these “sleeping together issues.”  Each couple is different and each couple can find those solutions that work best for them.  But this post is about stressing the point that women do need more sleep than men; it is not about a toughness thing, it is, however, a reality in the general population.  Are there exceptions to this? Of course, but the importance of regular quality sleep cannot be emphasized enough.  So for the lads, sleep is important, too!  Especially if you do strength training and other activities, but you will also have to share in the responsibility of making sure your partner is getting the sleep she needs as well.  You will both be happier if you do!  So, how did we solve our sleeping arrangements?  She wears earplugs, and since I tend to be more of a night-owl than her, I either go to be when she does, or I time it that I don’t come to bed until I know she is out.  This way I don’t disrupt her in that crucial transition phase of nodding off.

I also do not drink as much as I used to, and have lost 20 pounds, which has made a huge difference in reducing my alleged snoring.

“When you give your brain a problem, your brain will resolve that problem. Do you believe that? Yes or no?”

• Darren Shirlaw

This has something to do with goal-setting, but also putting down a real constrained time limit.  This comes up more than once if you follow any material Tim Ferris has put out.  Deadlines with rewards and punishments will go a long way and I can talk more about that in later posts, but what I really want to stress in this week’s post is this…  If you can’t see the end result.  You will never get there!  As this applies to your body and subsequent health.  I see too many people in and around town, at the mall, at the pubs.  I can guarantee that they would all want better bodies, better health, super human like capabilities,  but they have no idea what that would actually look like for them.  They see their flabby meager bodies and have just accepted it with what I see as benign resignation.  They are not happy, but they also don’t seem to want to, or be willing to, or know how to change.  I love the matrix when Morpheus is explaining to Neo about image constructs.  You look the way you do, in the way your mind expects you to look.  So you have to change what your brain or mind is seeing.  You have to be able to visualize how you will look and feel.  You will have to believe that that is how you are supposed to look or are meant to look.  Now as you really make that happen you will then be posing a problem to your brain.  When you look in the mirror, your eyes won’t be transmitting the image your brain is expecting to see.  Your brain will start working out the solution to make sure your body becomes what it expects to see.  Almost magically your google searches will take to blogs and websites (like mine) that will help.  You will make better food choices.  You will (as fast as you want yourself to) become the person your brain or mind’s eye has created and expected you to be.  Now lastly as one final trick to all of this.  Your brain doesn’t communicate in words.  It communicates in pictures and feelings.  It really works well when those images are attached to very powerful emotional states.

Now there is a boat load of free content on the internet from all the guru’s from Jack Canfield to Tony Robbins as well as a multitude of resources surrounding hypnosis and the power of your subconscious mind.  There are thousands of methods and techniques and everyone has their own angle, or way of doing it. Some will work great for you and others won’t.  There will be some trial and error finding an approach you like the most.  Just remember, the ultimate goal here is to communicate to your subconscious in very emotionally powerful images!

In other words, if you see yourself and feel yourself as being fat and weak.  You will be fat and weak!  If you instead put yourself into a state of seeing yourself and feeling yourself as being strong and sexy.  You will become strong and sexy! It really is as simple as that.  In the same way the body will turn and follow the head.  Yeah/ It’s a martial art/wrestling truth.  “Where the head goes, the body follows!” This is also true on the spiritual and mental plain.  Where your thoughts go, your physiology will follow.

Lastly I will finish with this.  As cliche as it is, Michelangelo always said of his famous statue of David that David already existed inside the block of marble.  He just had to remove the excess pieces.  He could say this because he already knew what this statue was going to look like.  He so strongly saw it in his mind’s eye, that the actual labour of sculpting was the easy part.

“…. and it was just right!” – Goldilocks

More protein in the diet.

But let us not go to extreme on this either!  You do not need to eat like a professional body builder to get some great benefit.  This article comes from Sciencedaily.com, and where trying to eat like a professional athlete may be a little extreme for the average weekend warrior, the reality is most North Americans, are not getting enough protein in their diet.  The article recommends approximately 1.2-1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight spread out evenly throughout the day.  So a little protein sourced food at each meal can have a tremendous impact on helping you feel full, lose fat, and preserve your hard earned lean tissue.  (All that rock solid muscle.)  Now most of us are getting plenty of protein at dinner time, so the article also suggests, as an option, splitting that piece of steak in half and saving the second half to eat with your morning meal or lunch, which is a great idea.  So let’s break this down into the nuts and bolts of what this can really look like.

So we got a lad who weighs 220 and he’s not too happy with his body composition, so how can this research and study summary help him out.  Well it recommends just over a gram per kilogram of body weight.  Okay so doing a some quick math (220/2.2) it turns out he weighs 100kg, so he’ll want to consume close to 120 grams of protein spread over his meals during the day.  Well that’s great, but how much food does that actually equal?  Well the good news is that it is not a huge amount. To say that it is totally doable.  For example 3 oz of Salman, Tuna, or Halibut has about 22grams of high quality protein.  An egg has 6-7g.  3 oz of steak has 19 grams.  3 oz of pork has 23grams (one slice of bacon has 3 grams of protein)  3 oz of chicken has 16 grams and 3 oz of turkey has 26g.  And 3 oz of tofu has about 6 grams of protein in it.  Okay so because I’m lazy, I’m going to say that on average for every 3 oz of meat, you’ll get about 20g of protein, so if our guy needs 120 grams.  That means he’ll want to eat 18 ounces of meat or fish a day.  Or only 6 oz per meal if he’s eating three times a day. At each meal the amount of meat he wouldd need would fit in his palm.  So in the morning he could have a couple eggs and a small can of salmon,  at lunch he could have a pork chop from last night’s leftovers and tonight have half of that 12 oz Ribeye and save the rest for lunch tomorrow.  The rest of his food for the day would come in the form of veggies and fruits and nuts. 1 oz of nuts can vary from 5 up to 9 grams of protein,  for this example he will eat almonds and could have a couple handfuls as a snack.  Now all of a sudden he’s getting plenty of protein. He feels full and doesn’t need to eat excess amounts of potato chips or cake.

So the last two things I wish to comment on is 1.  Meats, Fish, eggs etc. are considered “high-quality” proteins because they generally contain all the essential amino acids we need to make all the tissues of our bodies.  You will find protein in plants, but it is harder to find all the essentials. No single plant source contains all the essentials.  So being vegan, or vegetarian is possible, just harder, so be aware of this and make sure you are getting lots of variety of veggies in your diet to meet your needs.  Two this is exactly why Adkins’s famous diet worked so well for so many people who stuck with it.  When they finally broke it down.  They learned that even though he claimed, you could “eat as much as you want” Adkins followers in fact ate fewer overall calories than those who did not follow the Adkins/paleo diet.  The reason, was not the increased fat, but was the extra protein they were eating. It made them feel more satisfied and more full during the day resulting in smaller meals and eating less as often as the “pro-carb” folks.

Well how is this for some food for thought eh!?

 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150430124835.htm

“When one considers that the dominant intellectual approach of the growing number of self-styled “experts” in the bodybuilding field is characterized by approximation, contradiction, equivocation and evasion, it is little wonder that an entire generation of bodybuilders – many of the top champions included – finds itself bewildered and without rational guidance. However, let me assure those who refuse to allow the flame of their passion for a more muscular body to die, who, having some awareness of the role of facts, logic and reason in their lives: There does exist a science of bodybuilding – and it can be understood by anyone willing to exercise the required mental effort.”

Mike Mentzer, The Science of Bodybuilding, HEAVY DUTY I

 

So what happened?  Well, this happens to coincide with another dilemma/problem I was trying to figure out.  Back in 2008 or so, Dan Carter was the undisputed best player in rugby!  When they showed his stats, (you know, height, weight, etc.), he and I are pretty close to the same size.  And don’t get me wrong, he’s fast!  But in a straight race,  I believed I could keep it close, so how was he the best rugby player in the world and I was just an OK player for a Division 2 club in the States? Could it be that he was a better “rugby” player?  I am ashamed to admit that I was very late to the party.  It is important to be strong enough and fast enough to play these sports, but after that, it’s skill, it’s knowing your sport in and out.  (Wayne Gretskzy was not the best athlete, but he’s the great one!)  I finally clued in, so I spent less time in the weight room and more time on the rugby field perfecting my lines and just learning the game.  I was also fresher getting to practice, and able to work harder at practice, which led to better “rugby” conditioning and I was much more refreshed going into the games on Saturdays.  I no longer felt like hammered… you know.  And to top it all off, I was the strongest I had ever been up to that point.  Finally, everything clicked!  Less was more.  Even in rugby training.   If we had to run a 400m, I didn’t pace myself, I ran the first 200 as hard as I could and then would dog it at the end (combination of being super tired from blasting the first 200m and wanting to recover before the repeat).  It worked though.  I am no world-class player by any stretch, but after the shift, I was now playing the best rugby I had ever played… and it felt great!

But the frequency was still something that troubled me.  I really believed that to miss more than a week would see a reduction in strength and a step back. That was all about to change the following summer.  I had a holiday planned where I would be in Canada, by myself, for almost three weeks. So when I got to the mother country, a day or two later I hit the gym at the local aquatic center and did my high-intensity workout (with some strip sets mixed in).  I went to the leg press machine they had and put it on the stack and went to lift.  I could only do three–no biggie. I continued on my strip sets and left my legs so exhausted that it was a few minutes before I could get out of the machine.  Then my road trip began.  Camping, fishing, drinking, more travelling, camping (did I mention the drinking?) and some water skiing.  Needless to say, I did not do much in the way of “working out” while on my two-week bender.  When I finally got back from the road trip, I went back to the gym for a training session before I left Canada to head back to the States.  When I got to the leg press, I put it on the stack to see if I could at least move it the previous best of 3 times, if at all…  I did it 20 times before my legs gave out!  Oh, and all my other lifts that day went up as well.  I had finally convinced myself that missing a week would not be the end of the world and, in fact, actually help!  So, now I train once a week, my workouts last about 25 minutes, and I spend most of my days feeling good and not beat-up–unless I tackle with my face, which is not the preferred tackling technique by any stretch of the imagination.

I hope this long-winded tale helps; hopefully many of the athletes who read this will be able to relate in some facet.  And for those starting out,  I will finish with this:  McMaster University has put out some great studies, which are easy to find online.  Some conclusions they have drawn: 3 sets seems to cause/allow more protein synthesis for a longer period of time, but it was not conclusive whether this led to overall greater hypertrophy or strength gains.  The university has found more conclusively that lifting heavy to failure or lifting lighter loads to failure have an equal effect in increasing muscle hypertrophy. The only difference was the heavy-loads group increased their 1-rep max greater than the light-load camp (who also increased their 1-rep max).  Likewise, both groups increased muscular endurance, but the light-load camp increased their endurance more.  So,  the take away in this case for me is if you have some joint concerns, using lighter loads will still–despite what the old guard has to say–trigger some great gains, but if you would like to get really strong, you might prefer going with the heavier loads and fewer reps for the 1-rep max increase.  And lastly, since the 1-set vs 3-set continually seems to battle it out, I will say this:  Even if three sets per body part get you stronger faster, is it as sustainable over the long run for the average working parent or weekend warrior?  I don’t think it is.  If you like it and prefer training with multiple sets, that’s fine, I won’t tell you not to, but if time is a concern or overtraining, then 1 set is a terrific option… and I’m speaking from experience.  And just so you know, Arnold won a lot of competitions and he did a lot of sets and spent a lot of time in the gym.  Dorian Yates won even more competition,s and he’s been in the 1-working set camp almost his entire career.  So someone might say one way is not “better” than the other, but I know what worked for me, and it has saved me a lot of time to write posts like this.

 

Recommended readings on this topic.

McGuff, Doug and John Little. (2009). Body by Science. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Anderson, Owen. Recovery training: too much hard training can devastate your muscles and implode your immune system. Retrieved from http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/recovery-training-too-much-hard-training-can-devastate-your-muscles-and-implode-your-immune-system-510

Bass, Clarence.  Intensity, What Is It? Intensity, Failure, Rep Range, Muscular Endurance, Specificity (web log article). Retrieved from http://www.cbass.com/IntensityResistanceTraining.htm

Bass, Clarence. Light Weights Build Muscle—Study Provides Proof

Complex Study, Simple Training (web log article). Retrieved from http://www.cbass.com/LightWeights.htm

Bass, Clarence. More Support for Effort-Based Training

Even Light Resistance Builds Muscle—If Lifted to Failure (web log article). Retrieved from http://www.cbass.com/Effortbasedtraining.htm

 

Christopher G.R. Perry, George J.F. Heigenhauser, Arend Bowen, and Lawerence L. Spriet. (2008). High intensity aerobic interval training increases fat and carbohydrate metabolic capacities in human skeletal muscle [Abstract]. Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, 33(6), 1112-23.

“Without health life is not life; it is only a state of langour and suffering – an image of death.”

– The Buddha

I had a lot to say in this post, so I broke it up into two parts.  Part 1 will discuss my beginnings and how I got started.  Part 2 will describe how it helped me.  I hope you enjoy!

The research backs it up.  Professor James Timmons, PhD., in his Horizon special and in subsequent lectures provides overwhelming evidence that supports the effectiveness of HIIT protocols.  Dr. McGuff with John Little do so as well in their book, Body by Science.  Anecdotally, there are an increasing number of trainers who advocate this type of training, and their clients are benefitting tremendously as a result.

So I won’t bore you with the statistics or graphs, but instead would like to share my transition into this approach to training and my experiences and discoveries along the way.  So we will predicate this on how I used to train… overtrain, to be more accurate, and then what I experienced after I made the shift.

Growing up, I was always playing  a sport every season. As a result, there were usually overlaps.  So naturally, there were plenty of times when I was pulling double duty, usually going to two practices the same night, playing a game, and then if there was time, going to the next practice, etc.  God bless my mum for all the driving to and from.  But high school was when it got really busy, especially the first couple years.  There was high school football, flag football, and then of course, our hockey-obsessed culture, so the irony that try-outs would be going on in September before the first official day of autumn is not lost on me.  I loved playing all these sports and enjoyed every second of it.  I did not enjoy the hamstring cramps when I would get home and try and sit down for dinner, but that seemed like a small price to pay to do it all.  The start of high school and the access to the small weight room also began my strength training.  I wanted to be the best, and I had no problem with outworking my competitors.

Of course, like every kid starting out… I basically did what the bodybuilders did (of course, I mean Arnold, not Mike Mentzer or Dorian Yates). So it was lots of reps, lots of sets, split training, the list goes on.  If I wasn’t at a practice, or a game, I was in the weight room.  My coach was aware of this and spent many afternoons telling me to go home!  But I had to run through the hurdles just one more time (yeah, I said through–not much technique in getting over them). So I basically spent a large part of high school always feeling a little stiff and needing good warm-ups before competing.  In college it didn’t change… in fact, it got worse.  There were the weights, plyometrics, then practice.  Our coach wasn’t the most efficient at time-management, so naturally, practices had to be 3 hours. If I dropped a ball, I did pushups.  I wasn’t the best on the team… didn’t even crack the starting line-up, but I knew if I could outwork everybody, that would change.  I’ll spare you the suspense… It didn’t. I went through college basically feeling like hammered dog #$@^.  Not to mention that I seemed to be injury-prone, and not because the linebacker who had 50 pounds on and lit me up like a Christmas tree every practice–although that didn’t help.  It was the soft tissue injuries. The pulls, the sprains, the shin splints that got so bad my junior year I couldn’t walk for two weeks (I’ve always wondered if it was not a cracked tibia). I strained my Achilles one winter in the Detroit airport heading back to college for indoor track season. Obviously from carrying my luggage, but still, how does a guy who was training 3-4 hours a day do that just picking up 50 lbs. of luggage?  Needless to say, the idea of overtraining never occurred to me despite my body repeatedly breaking down and getting injured. Not to mention, although fit, I did not look like Arnold or bench press 500 lbs. or outrun Ben Johnson.  In fact, in a couple of track seasons, I actually think I got slower; so did some of the really fast guys on our team, which speaks volumes to “old school” training in general.  But the point I’m trying to make is I trained long, hard, and since I didn’t take any steroids, I was my own worst enemy.

Then, after college, I reconnected with my true love… Rugby, and was working as a P.E. teacher. Naturally, I wanted to be good at my job and bust the stereotype of many P.E. teachers in the industry and instead, be a good role model, practice what I preach, and be the best goddamn weekend warrior I could be.   On a side note, anyone who has played rugby will tell you that “rugby fitness” is an enigma! You will never be in enough shape and there will always be someone in better shape than you.  Rugby conditioning is Coach Bear Bryant’s wet dream! So I couldn’t train as long as I did in college, but I still hit the gym every night after work and before rugby practices.  I did that for 3 or 4 years.  Even in my glorious summers off, I was at the gym and the track for a couple of hours each day before I hit the community pool with my book.  And then, something was about to change.  My old man was busy, overweight, etc., but knew he needed to do something, so instead of doing what I told him to do, he went about finding his own solution.  I was aware of John Little’s work regarding “max-contraction” training and had stumbled across Pete Sisco’s work as well.  I decided to try these concepts out for myself before I sent them my Pop’s way, and I was seeing some good strength gains, so the one summer I showed my old man the protocols and explained how it was only once a week.  This led to my Pop doing a lot of his own research into the world of High Intensity Training and Mark Scisson’s work regarding the Paleo Tribe. That’s when he came across Dr. McGuff’s book, so after reading it myself upon his recommendation, I gave it a shot.  I was skeptical and honestly didn’t think that only training once a week would do it.  I agreed with the overtraining.  The book uses a lot of pee-wee hockey examples I could relate to, but surely more volume had to be in the cards–at least, a greater frequency than only once a week.  But the book is great and very convincing, and so I gave it a go.

So what happened?   Tune in next time.  Same Blog time.  Same Blog page.

“Americans have more food to eat than any other people and more diets to keep them from eating it.”  — Unknown

Let the frustrations begin.  This post will be about clearing up a few things about our diets.  Paleo will be explained in Layman’s terms and, by and large, I am going to rant and vent. But try and spin my frustrations with nutritionists, the industry at large, and pop culture into a piece of beautiful intellectual poetry that hopefully will leave you going “huh… well, now it makes sense!” and hopefully will allow you to take the knowledge to help aid you in your quest for all things awesome!

Carbohydrates, or “carbs,” are macro-nutrients we find in foods.  It is short for anything your body consumes where the majority of the molecule is made up of carbon and hydrogen.  These molecules are generally more complex than your simple sugars, such as glucose and sucrose and—the devil—fructose.  But the major point here is that the majority of these “carbs” get broken down into… glucose, which, of course, your body then breaks down at the cellular level and ultimately into ATP.

Here is where I get just a little annoyed about all the naysayers regarding Atkins and the Paleo world in general.  Carbohydrates exist in vegetables!  I repeat… there are plenty of “carbs” in your vegetables!  There also just happens to be a tremendous amount of useful nutrients in your vegetables that are extremely hard to find in your run-of-the-mill GMO bread/pasta/pastry/fettuccine alfredo.

But the problem is that we use the term “carbs” to mean the grains of this world.  As a result, this has led to more confusion, not less, and more people having more problems than ever before.  So at this point,  I am going to break down a little history and science and then ask a couple questions just for you to think about.  And then below I will have some links where you can see what I saw first-hand for yourself.  Then you can call them liars, and not just me, if you still don’t believe us.

First, Atkins/Paleo or as we will call it, the “low carb” camp, statistically works very well for a lot of people who switch to it.  There are those who go on it and fail to lose weight; some even gain.  Generally, these people failed to adhere to the diet.  Second, when testing the “high carb,” some lost weight—not as many as the low carb, but some did.  What both camps had in common was if they consumed fewer calories, they lost weight.  The biggest thing was adherence to the plan and being careful not to eat too much.  This last sentence is going to come up again later in the post.

But what drives me nuts is that there are carbs in your vegetables, and even in these experiments they really treated them separately from all the grain products.  Why?  I don’t know, but it annoys me nonetheless.  Oh, and the high-fat vs low-fat diet tends to go along with this, but this also confuses people thanks to our heart specialist in the 70s who know a great deal about hearts, but who honestly knew jack about anything else in the human body….  (I’ll get to that in a minute,too.)

So that we are clear, good fats are better than the bad, but science is not really sure what is good and what is bad.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say olive oil, coconut oil… good!  Trans fats from McDonalds, canola oils… bad!  But the more important thing to realize and understand about why the low-fat crusade backfired and caused more obesity and more heart disease and more Diabetes is they forgot some very critical things.  But first, the history: When doctors back then looked at a patient dying from heart disease, they noticed a lot of cholesterol in the arteries.  Their conclusion was that the person had consumed too much of the foods which were high in cholesterol and therefore, “fat—bad! Stop eating fat.”  The mistake in their logic was similar to showing up to a house on fire, and seeing the firefighters there to put it out, and going “Huh… house on fire… firefighters… they must be why the house is on fire.  Get rid of ‘em!”  They missed that part where the cholesterol was going there to try and repair the damaged caused by the inflammation, which is, in fact, caused when we consume too many foods of an inflammatory nature, i.e., too much sugar (fructose) being the culprit.  So, what happened? They pulled the fat. We eat more to feel full, or think we can eat more just cause it is fat free so “we’re allowed,” and what has happened? More heart disease, because now we eat a heck of a lot more of the sugars that cause all the problems in the first place.  I need to be clear.  People think that the fat in the meat or yogurt or coconut is the fat that will go straight to their hips.  The truth: Most of that gets used for cellular membranes and pretty much all of your tissues as well, being the preferred source of fuel.  Too much sugar is what will go straight to the gut because it can only be used as a fuel source, and if your body can’t use it? The body is very good at throwing it into the fat cells. But let us also be clear that too much fat, as in too many calories, will then also go to your hips.

Okay, now the big thing I want us to get from this post, because the other concern in the weight-loss industry is inactivity: We, as a Western society, are much less active than our primal ancestors.  But a recent study has determined that is not the case; when researchers studied energy expenditure, East-coasters in the U.S. were compared to tribes living today as hunter-gatherers.  Differences in size were allowed for, etc. They have discovered that we are about the same in that department. In fact, I couldn’t help but notice many Westerners were actually more active than the average hunter-gatherer.  Remember, our big brains have helped us be physically lazy in nature; we will only work when it is deemed necessary.  Here is where it got interesting.  When they looked at energy consumption and plotted that on the graph… holy supersized sundae, Batman!  The East-coasters blew the hunter-gatherers out of the water—by, like, a lot!  More than double in some cases.  And a side note: The average hunter-gatherer is about 20 kg smaller than his Western cousin, and far leaner.

Finally, I would like to clear up that the Paleo diet is very high in vegetables, along with being okay with a bit more meat and fat in the diet.  What the leaders of this movement are really trying to push is the reduction/elimination of refined sugars, i.e., bread, pasta, cereal, jalapeno kettle-cooked potato chips, and all foods that have a ridiculous amount of high fructose corn syrup in it.  I would like to add, and quote Dr. McGuff in doing so, “is that if you took a bunch of us and went out into the woods to find food… What do you think you’d find?”  When you answer that question, you might get a much better picture of what we are generally supposed to eat on a daily basis.

The last thing I would like to say is anecdotal in nature.  A few years ago I was talking with one of my aunts, and she noticed I had not put any bread on my plate, or macaroni salad, or potato salad.  I simply explained that I was going to eat some macaroni salad (my other aunt makes the best!), but in general, I had cut most of those types of foods out of my diet.  Her question to me was “Well then, what do you eat? Won’t that get boring?”  I love my aunt, but we’ve looked at that damn food pyramid for so long,  no wonder she felt sorry for me.  She has no idea that angel-hair pasta is the exact same as fettuccine, which is the exact same as spaghetti, which is only less fluffy than bread and less sweet than my honey crueler.  There are hundreds of species of plants we can eat, and are actually supposed to eat.  So, just to sum up… A lack of variety is NOT going to be the problem when you go more “Paleo” in nature.  Low-carb, high-carb… who cares!  Eat lots of vegetables and a lot less crap, and you’ll be better than fine!

Great lectures for your own interest:

 

Dr. McGuff:

Paleo Diet and Strength Training biochemistry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PdJFbjWHEU

Low carb Diet: Fat or Fiction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GUIBNKnT1M

The Battle of the Diets: Is anyone winning (at losing)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREuZEdMAVo

Professor James A Timmons.  The truth about exercise and public health

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=E42TQNWhW3w

“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.”
― Charles M. Schulz

So I’d like to follow last week’s post about being aware of how many calories you are taking in. I have little tale of me, Easter and that wonderful Easter Bunny. We had a cheat day that day and for breakfast it seemed fitting to have some chocolate before we cracked open eggs we boiled and decorated Friday night. Well, we had purchased some Reese’s Easter Eggs. They’re awesome!  I looked on the back to see what the calorie count actually was…. 220.  Okay, that’s actually not too bad, except that one serving size was actually only a ¼ of the egg.  So the whole thing was 880!  To save the suspense, I ate the whole egg!  They’re not that big!  And did I mention they are awesome?! Oh so good!  But this leads to this PSA.  When we look on the back at the food label,  just remember that the calories listed is based on a serving and more often than not, when it comes to that delicious junk food, the servings are not big at all!  It becomes really easy to slip and take in way more calories as a result.  Another great example of this is potato chips—especially kettle-cooked jalapeño chips.  On the back the calorie count is 150, but that bag of air I purchased actually contains six servings!  Now, I’m likely to fill a small bowl full of these chips to snack on while watching some rugby, and that small bowl just took over half the bag.  And I’ll likely have two bowls while watching the game, so I very quickly just went through the bag.  Oops!  I just took in 900 calories without even trying.  This is the real danger as a society we’ve put ourselves in.  Calories have never been more plentiful or cheaper, and it is too easy to take in too much.  Now, I don’t want to get into the sugar addictions and how our brains are wired to seek sugar and fat out. But our brains are wired for those things and we have made it way too easy to get that stuff.  What I do want to say is just be aware!  With this awareness comes the ability to pick and choose, and on the days you do decide to indulge, then I would strongly suggest that the other days you ought to not touch these types of foods at all.  Remember, a leaf of lettuce has 5 calories, so you can eat a lot of nutrient-rich food without the fear of taking in the excess calories that does occur when we do eat the junk food—which does taste good—but really does not have a single useful nutrient that our bodies need.

“I am less interested in concepts and philosophies, but more interested in systems that get results.”

• John Kehoe

Diets, diets, and more diets!  In this post I’m going to talk about how every diet works and every diet fails.  How there is so much information out there and how it can be…  no, it is overwhelming!  One study after another comes down the pipeline about the value of one nutrient or another.  All the rages and raves of the “super fruits” like açai and then of course, kale.  I touched on it last week with the various fads in the industry.  We are looking for a magic bullet: One perfect routine, one magic food that will fix everything.  Sadly, that doesn’t exist.  But not all is lost.  When we understand the basics and principles behind it, much can then be successfully accomplished!  So, why every diet works?  Well, if you ate today, and you are alive, congratulations–you are on a successful diet!  Why does every diet fail?  By misunderstanding diet for dieting, we get ourselves into a great deal of trouble.  So let us be clear: whatever you eat in a day, week, month, lifetime… is your diet.  Dieting is the removal or addition of foods on a temporary basis in the hopes of achieving a specific goal.  Usually, losing weight, but some try and gain (bulk-up phases).  The problem with this is that dieting doesn’t work!  And what I mean is that it rarely works for the long-term because as soon as the goal is reached, the individual stops dieting.  How often have we seen someone do this, lose the weight, stop the diet, and then bounce back to their previous form, or worse?  Then we start labelling the dieting protocols: “I’m a South-beach man”… “I’m an Adkins lad”… “Vegan is the only way to go, you unholy butcher!”… “Vegetarian is clearly the true champion.”  Oh and the Mediterranean…  I almost forgot.  The problem with this is that labelling diets and selling lots of books about diets is like trying to copyright or get a patent for walking.

So, what is the solution to all of this?  Enter my friends: simplicity and common sense.  And how I do it? I won’t tell you what you should do, and this post will not be a book about the food industry (there is a lot of that out there)!  In fact, there is a lot of great stuff out there and I encourage you to continue learning, researching, and growing.

Point 1: Organic food is probably better than non-organic food in that, I will argue, food that has no– or at least, very little–pesticide is logically going to be better than food that has a lot of pesticide in it.

Point 2:  Try not to be fooled by marketing and labelling.  Many foods now say they are organic, but actually aren’t.

Point 3:  Avoid foods that are “enriched” with stuff (like omega three’s).  Again, the majority of this is simply marketing the fads and the new “In” discovery.

Point 4:  This is important! If the food has ingredients you can’t pronounce, you probably shouldn’t eat it.  But let us also be realistic: there is a trade-off.  Some preservatives in foods will be necessary to allow me to go to the grocery store to buy that food, saving me the time to drive all the way out to that particular farmer or food manufacturer directly to pick up that food.  Civilizations trade.

Point 5:  Going back up to point 4, whole foods grown in the ground are much better and much richer in nutrients than the foods you buy in a box.  Think outside aisles of the grocery store, not the middle ones.

 

Point 6: Sugar itself is not bad.  Too much sugar–too much refined sugar–is really, really bad.

Point 7: You likely consume way too much refined sugar….

Point 8:  High fructose corn syrup is in just about everything, and it is my conclusion/opinion the real threat to your health.

Point 9:  This is why you likely consume too much refined sugar.

And lastly, Point 10:  If you are looking to lose weight, you have to calorie count! At least in the beginning.

Let us be clear: you are overweight because you eat too much, drink too much, or simply consume too many calories.  And if you tell me you watch what you eat and are overweight, you are lying your ass off and I don’t believe you!  I won’t blame you, but you are clearly eating more than you realize.  When that stops, amazing things will start to happen.  So for the rest of this post, I am going to tell you what I eat.  In this, you will see the principles  and then you can get creative and do it your own way.

Oh, and lastly: meats from animals that eat what they are supposed to eat are really good for you!  Meats from animals that are not eating what they were made to eat can be really bad for you in the long run.  I cite grass-fed beef vs corn-fed, antibiotic, hormone-jacked-up factory cows as my example.

So, here was my dilemma a few months ago:  I was less active with moving to Puerto Rico and eating (and drinking) more than I should have been.  When I joined one of the local gyms, I measured a 36-inch waist, weighed 225 lbs., and according to those fat-measuring electronic devices, 22.5% body fat! Yikes!  Going in the wrong direction for a fanatical rugby fan and player, former P.E. teacher, and a personal trainer, eh?  But all would be fine because we joined the gym and I started getting some shifts and working at the other gym.  So I was working out, I was more active, my fitness was getting back to where I like it. All was going well. I was making all of our brunches and dinners, I was drinking less.  We were doing a lot of things right again.  Except, nothing was really changing.  I mean, I was getting strong, getting fit.  Eating much cleaner.  What was I missing?  I have a confession.  All the years I have taught and trained, I have never calorie counted; never really had to, I suppose, so I decided to take a real hard look at what I was eating to see where I could make the change.  I won’t bore you with every food and its calorie number, but I do encourage you take a look for yourself. Now, to tell you what my lady and I were eating….

I really love fajitas! Breakfast fajitas with eggs, lettuce, sautéed onions, tomato, sweet pepper, salsa, and a little hot sauce.  They are amazing!  So for brunch I’d make three, one for my lady and two for me.  I really love fajitas!  So for dinner I’d make steak or chicken fajitas with lettuce, onions, tomatoes, sweet peppers, salsa, and hot sauce!  Lots of vegetables!  Protein!  How could this be bad?!  Just a quick note: a whole leaf of lettuce has 5 calories.  Five!  That’s it! An egg? 70.  A tomato? 20-30, so all of these vegetable and the eggs are not the problem. 10 oz. of Steak has a lot more calories than chicken,  approximately 700 calories to 450 for 10 oz., respectively.  So the steak is heavy, but not the end of the world… but the flour tortillas I was using? 220 calories per wrap!  Multiply that by the four I was eating on such a regular basis, and that was 900 additional calories I was consuming almost every day. WOW! So I cut out the wraps. In the last 8 weeks, I’ve lost 15 lbs.  I’ve gone from a 36-inch waist back down to a 33.5-inch waist (my tailor-made James Bond suits fit great again), and I have dropped from 22.5 % to 16%.  Much better!

So, to clear up a few things: I am not saying you have to completely give up breads, but most are full of extra sugar and extra calories.  So be aware of this.  One slice of toast is not the end of the world, but if you eat a lot of bread, toast, pancakes… IT ADDS UP!  I also got into enjoying my own version of the pina colada (I make the best in Western Puerto Rico), but a glass of this deliciosa heaven is like, 300 calories. So treating myself to a couple of those on a regular basis adds up.  So I knocked those off.  I also occasionally enjoy a “butter coffee;” this recipe is courtesy of Dave Asprey and Brian Rose from the London Real Podcast.  Having 2 or 3 of these adds up. So I cut back to only one and I don’t make them every day.  On average, I have reduced my daily calorie consumption by 1000 calories.  That’s a lot!  But I haven’t drastically lost weight.  It came off relatively slowly over these past two months, and I feel great and haven’t forced myself to starve… which leads me to my final point:  Nutrient percentages on the back of food labels are based on a 2000-calorie diet.  It is my contention that that is too high; unless you are a construction worker or other manual labourer, that’s too many!  Now, I’m not going to preach calorie restriction either, but if you are not happy with your weight, you are consuming too many and need to cut back on your calories.  But you don’t have to eat less!  In fact, I eat more now than I did, but consume almost half the calories.

So here is what I eat currently (this could change as my tastes or preferences change, but the underlying basics won’t):

I enjoy a couple cups of coffee in the morning. (I do the intermittent fasting thing… it is not for everyone, but I like it). So for brunch I have 3 fried eggs with salsa. In the afternoon as a snack I will have some pepper jack cheese with cucumber, some lettuce with spice and homemade dressing (olive oil and apple cider vinegar). For dinner we have been on a real Thai curry soup kick, so I fill the pot with celery, onion, pepper, jalapenos, and sometimes broccoli or cauliflower. Basically, whatever vegetables we have in the house at that time which fills the pot about ¾ of the way up (so about 3 -4  cups worth of veggies). Then I add half a can of coconut milk, a jar of pre-made green, red, or yellow curry.  Then I will mix it up with either chicken, beef, or no meat at all, add some water to fill the pot up, and boil for a bit.  It is delicious and sometimes she gets full so I can score an extra bowl.  Now consider the coconut milk and the meat, etc. It is fair to say that the pot is probably close to 600-700 calories, split between the two of us. That’s pretty good!  And it fills us up.  So the three eggs in the morning is approximately 210  calories.  The lettuce in the afternoon with dressing is probably 250  (an ounce of dressing plus 15 calories worth of lettuce).  A couple ounces of cheese is also a couple hundred calories, so my afternoon meal is rounding up to 500 calories, my two bowls of Thai soup are about 300 calories, and if I choose to have a couple ounces of spiced rum mixed with water, that’s an additional 120 calories.  So my grand total for the day is approximately 1200 calories.  That doesn’t sound like that many compared to the average 2,000, and it is much less than the 2500 calories (if not more) I was consuming before, but it was really making one change that has made such a difference: by cutting out over a thousand calories a day in tortilla shells and pina coladas and sangrias, I was able to add an extra egg for breakfast and not really have to change anything else!  (I still ate the salad and cheese in the afternoons before.)

So your homework will be to Youtube a great TED talk by Brian Wansink and to think about one change to make to your daily diet. I will say that once you do, and start seeing results… you will feel much better, it will be easier to stick to, and you won’t feel as guilty about that office birthday cake.  But take an honest look at how my calories you are consuming and where those calories are coming from… and reduce that number.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ogsmh_czeY