A Recipe... of sorts...

This is a first (and last?) for the blog, as today I’m going to share a recipe of my own with you.  Well, to be fair it’s much more of a general framework than a recipe.  See, I wanted to address some of the common objections people have with eating Paleo, or even eating healthier, and I thought one way I could do that is to simply show how I overcome those limiting factors.  I thought the way to do that would be to share a recipe I make at home, but the thing is that I don’t really ever cook with recipes.  I love to cook, but most of the time I start with a concept, and just start throwing things together till it’s cooked and tastes good.  I don’t really ever measure things.  So in this “recipe” you won’t see a lot of specific measurements, but I think this can easily used as a framework for you to make this dish at home.

So, what are the common objections to Paleo or healthy eating I wanted to address???  Today I wanted to address the “I just don’t have enough time to cook”, and “I don’t have to money to eat healthy” objections.  I feel like I hear these objections as much as any, so I thought I’d show how I could make a simple, yummy, nutritious meal in under 30-minutes and on the cheap.  What follows is a meal that we eat nearly every week because it’s so tasty, cheap, and easy…  Is it going to win any culinary awards?  No, but neither is the fast food you’d be substituting for this, because it’s the only thing faster and cheaper.  I love this meal and I think you will too!

            No-Sweat Paleo Stir-Fry

Ingredients:

• From The Pantry/Fridge:
• 1tbs Coconut oil
• 2tbs Coconut Aminos (a soy-free sub for soy sauce)
• 1tsp Gluten Free Siracha
• 1/2tbs White wine vinegar
• 1 clove Garlic smashed
• 1tbs grated Ginger grated
• 1 handful cashews
• Chinese 5-spice
• Salt
• Fresh ground pepper
• From The Grocery Store:
• 1lb Grass fed ground beef ($6.99)
• 1 container sliced mushrooms ($1.99)
• Small red onion ($0.45)
• Cilantro ($0.79)
• 1 lemon ($0.89)
• 1 med carrot ($0.09)
• 1 can bamboo shoot ($1.39)
• ½ cabbage head ($1.22)

Directions:

1. Heat a cast iron skillet over med-high heat.
2. While that’s heating up, chop the onion and carrot to desired size.
3. When the pan is hot, add 1 tbs fat (I used coconut oil), then add the beef. 
4. After a couple of minutes, flip the beef and season with salt, pepper, and other spices (I used some Chinese 5-spice).  Then begin to break up the meat with a spatula.
5. After a couple more minutes (now the beef is about 60% cooked), add the longer cooking veggies (mushroom, carrot, onion). Stir occasionally.
   
6. While that’s cooking prepare any other ingredients left to prep (garlic, cabbage, cilantro, cashews).
7. When the veggies are mostly cooked (5 minutes or so), add the rest of the veggies (cabbage, garlic, cilantro, ginger), as well as the sauce components (aminos, siracha, vinegar, the juice of one lemon).  Fold to incorporate, and increase heat to High. You’re almost done…           
   
        
8. After 1min add the zest of the lemon, and the cashews. Fold to incorporate, and turn the heat off.  Let the veggies finish cooking for another couple minutes while you prepare your plate.
9. Remove from heat and serve.  Garnish with cilantro and siracha as desired.
   

That’s it!  Pretty simple right?  And as you see in the final picture the whole thing (from putting the skillet on the stove, to plating) took me less than 29 minutes.  It takes you almost that long to drive to a fast food joint, go through the drive through, and come home!  What about the cost???  The groceries I bought for this meal came to $13.81!  This is enough food to easily feed two large hungry people, and could likely be 3 portions for many folks.  Even at only 2 portions, that comes to $6.91 per serving, which is less than most fast food value meals!  If money was particularly tight, I could have saved $3.00 buying regular lean ground beef at $3.99 a pound.  Would that have decreased the healthfulness of this meal? Yes a bit, but it still would have been better than anything you could get at a fast food joint or from a box for that matter!  I obviously have a stocked pantry/fridge because I’ve lived this lifestyle for a while, so there is some initial cost to getting going, but once you get stocked up your bill will be about the same.

This recipe is super simple, and can be adapted to whatever meat and veggie options you prefer and/or have available.  I’ve done this with ground beef, turkey, and pork.  I’ve also used snap peas, broccoli, and asparagus.  It just depends on what I’m feeling at the time.  Often times I actually cook a lot more cabbage in a separate pan, and serve the stir-fry over a plate of sautéed cabbage.  Sometimes if it’s after a workout and we need some carbs, I’ll serve this stir-fry with some white rice.  Try this out, and make it your own!

So, if you haven’t implemented a Paleo eating plan, what’s holding you back?  I hope I’ve proved here that we can all eat healthy meals while maintaining a tight budget for money and time!

Cortisol, Caffeine, Coffee, and Country Music

Today I wanted to share with you a couple of concepts that are currently at the forefront of my personal journey towards health.  This week I’ve been thinking a lot about Cortisol, and the causes of elevated Cortisol.  Why, you may ask?  Well, I can’t seem to get my body fat below 13%, and the body fat that I do have is contained in a spare-tire I have at the level of my belly-button.  Now, being at 13% is certainly within the range of healthy and carrying my body fat in a small spare-tire isn’t inherently a problem, however I have some competitive goals I’d like to pursue and that spare-tire could potentially hold me back from reaching those goals.  Also, storing your fat in your mid-section can be indicative of things like carb-sensitivity, gluten-sensitivity, and (you saw this coming right) elevated Cortisol.  I already don’t eat gluten, and eat a low carb diet, so Cortisol is the most likely cause of my inability to get below 13% body fat.

So, what is Cortisol???  Well, Cortisol is a hormone that the body releases to help you become more alert and focused by increasing metabolism, blood sugar, and suppressing the immune system.  It’s always being produced in the body at some varying level.  Cortisol levels should be elevated in the morning (to help us wake up), and should decrease during the day (so we can sleep), bottoming out in the middle of the night.  Cortisol should also elevate when we are exposed to stress, as it is the “fight or flight” hormone.  Herein lays the problem with Cortisol levels in modern life…

When our caveman brethren had stress, it was because they were being chased by an animal that wanted to eat them or they were chasing an animal they wanted to eat.  In that setting being more alert and focused can mean the difference between life or death (or eating this week).  The caveman didn’t have to deal with worry about whether or not he could pay his mortgage this month, or whether or not one of his Facebook friends was mad at him (after all he didn’t read my blog!).  Modern life presents low-level chronic stress, instead of the high-level acute stress our bodies are designed to deal with.

So, if you’re concerned at all with your Cortisol levels like I am (and you should be!), the first step is taking stock of the stress in your life.  I previously addressed this topic in http://timstrainertalk.blogspot.com/2013/08/sleep-more-exercise-less.html , but I’ll hit it briefly again here.  Modern day stress comes in many forms, and here’s a list to get you thinking about the forms of stress in your life:

• Emotional Stress: Anxiety, Worry’s, Job Stress, Relationship Stress… It all adds up.
• Physical Stress: It you’re recovering from an injury, surgery, or illness you’re body is stressed! Exercise also falls in this category…  too much exercise could be more harmful than too little.
• Sleep: If you sleep less than 7 hours a night (or your quality of sleep is lacking) you’re sleep deprived and stressing your body!
• Diet: Eating too many calories, or too few calories are both stressors on the system.  Likewise eating a diet of crap is a stressor too…
• Caffeine Intake: This could fall under diet, but it needs its’ own bullet point. Caffeine is a stress on the system like any other…  If you have too much caffeine you could be doing more harm than good.
• Alcohol Use: Alcohol intake is a stress… period…

Now honestly take stock of how you’re doing in each of these areas, and consider that they all affect your cortisol levels.  If you know you’re not doing so well in one or two of these areas you need to make sure you account for that when you consider the other areas in the list.  IE- If you don’t get enough sleep and have a bunch of emotional stress, it’s time to tighten up the diet and back off in the gym.

Circling back now, I told you I was going to share some of the things I’m working on in my own journey towards health…  As I said I have a good reason to think my cortisol levels are (at least) somewhat elevated and that the elevated cortisol is holding me back from reaching the leanness I currently want to reach.  So, #whatareyougonnadoaboutit!?!?  Here’s what I’m doing over the next 6-weeks to address my elevated cortisol levels:

• Redouble my efforts to sleep more:  The next couple months I’m only coaching classes 2 week days during the work week, so in theory I should be able to get in bed earlier more often.  I’m going to make every effort to sleep more than 7 hours per night.
• Cut my caffeine intake: I LOVE coffee!!  No, I mean I REALLY LOVE COFFEE!!!!  This isn’t gonna be easy, but I’m cutting coffee out for a little while.  This week I’m reducing my intake to one cup a day, and next week I’ll switch to decaf for 4-weeks.
• I’m meditating: I’m going to make a solid effort to spend 10 minutes a day meditating.  This has been proven to do great things for stress management, but I haven’t been able to get into the habit.  We’ll see if I can this time…
• No cardio: I’m going to walk when the weather isn’t too terrible, but otherwise I’m not doing any cardio.  3 Days/week of strength training is my exercise for the next 6-weeks.
• Explore tanning: There’s some good science suggesting that small amounts of tanning can do great things for vitamin D levels and help with stress management.  I’m going to investigate options, and potentially integrate a tiny bit of tanning into my weekly routine.

Basically, I’ll try these things for the next 6-weeks, and reassess.  If I haven’t seen improvement then I’ll go back to the drawing board.  And by the way, I TOTALLY recommend this sort of approach for you.  As Robb Wolff always says try something new for 30, 60, or 90 days, and if you don’t look feel and perform better, try something else.

Finally, I’ll leave you today with a hot tip on some fantastic music.  If you don’t know already, I’m a HUGE fan of a band called The Avett Brothers.  I love them and their music for many reasons, but this quote nicely sums up a few of the reasons:

“…they craft alternately stompy and swoony music that's rooted in a desire for self-improvement. Take their body of work as a whole, and it forms the outlines of a makeshift guide to life, and to being fundamentally decent in the pursuit of something even better.”

As you already know, I love self improvement, and the struggles that The Avett Brother’s music is so often about, are the struggles I identify with so well.  It’s amazing music!  Today, in the interest of stress management, I’m going to spend my lunch break in a quiet dark room listening to The Avett Brothers new record Magpie and Dandelion.  It will be released next Tuesday October 15, but you can stream it NOW on NPR (http://www.npr.org/2013/10/03/228941827/first-listen-the-avett-brothers-magpie-and-the-dandelion).  Take some time to check out the stream, then buy the record next week!  You can thank me later for turning you on to this life-changing music!

Slap Your Inner-Voice in it’s Dirty Little Mouth

Have you ever slapped someone across the face when they said something you didn’t like?  NO?!?  Well, I haven’t either…  But there have been a few times in my life when I had the urge to do that.  Today I want to encourage you to take that step whenever that voice in your head gets out of line…

I don’t know about you, but my entire life I’ve battled my own negative self talk.  That voice in my head has told me I wasn’t good looking enough to talk to that girl across the room, that I wasn’t strong enough to lift that weight, that I wasn’t worthy of the thing I wanted at the time.  You can find any number of books in the psychology section of Powell’s that will provide well laid out theories regarding the psychological origins of  that negative self talk (damaged inner-child, out of whack id, relationship with parents), and you can spend thousands of dollars working with a psychologist to find those root causes, but I’m going to suggest today that you simply learn to slap that inner-voice right in the mouth when it gets out of line, and move the hell on with your life.

This past weekend I competed in a powerlifting competition for the first time in about 13 or 14 years.  I decided earlier this year that I wanted something to train for, so I set up a 10-week cycle and trained for this competition.  It was a very interesting experience for me because not only was it my first time back on the platform in a LONG time, I also cut weight for the competition for the first time in my life (we won’t get into that right now).  I say all of this because there was a moment this weekend that illustrates the point I want to make in this blog.  Powerlifting is a sport comprised of the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift.  During a competition lifters have an opportunity to complete 3 squat attempts, and their highest weight counts towards their powerlifting total.  Likewise, lifters also get 3 attempts at the bench press, and finally the deadlift.  Well, Saturday afternoon, about 3+ hours into the meet, I warmed up for the deadlift and felt like crap.  My energy level was low, and I couldn’t seem to improve it.  I had already committed to my opening attempt being 495#’s (a weight I did in the gym a couple weeks ago pretty easily), so I wanted to finish my warm up with 455#’s in the warm up room.  Well, I did pull 455#’s in the warm up room, and it felt SUPER heavy.  I waited about 5 minutes and decided to pull it again before I went out onto the platform to do my opener.  This time it felt even worse.  At this point that little voice in my head was going crazy…  “You opened too heavy you idiot” “You are going to fail”…  And on and on…

So what did I do???  I told that voice to shut the hell up!  I told that voice that I had easily pulled 495#’s just a couple weeks ago, and I was going to easily pull it today!  I told that voice that I was in fact going to rip the damn weight off the floor like it was 195#’s.  I slapped that voice right across its’ dirty little mouth, then went out on the platform and did what I had prepared to do.

One more example I have is one that didn’t end as well…  A few months back I was coaching someone as they pursued a max height box jump.  If you’ve ever done box jumps anywhere near your max height, you know it can be a little scary.  In this particular case, the woman I was coaching was having a heck of a time putting the fear of missing the jump out of her head.  We were working up in height, and she was doing well, but the self-talk was sitting in the back of her head getting louder and louder as the box got taller.  She made a jump easily around 26”, but when we added 1” she missed horribly and skinned her shins on the side of the box.  Did she miss because she exceeded her jumping ability that day?  26” she could do, but not 27”?  Nope!  She missed the jump because at the moment she jumped she allowed that self-talk to take over.  She didn’t commit to the jump, hardly got off the ground, and in the process nearly hurt herself.  That inner-voice snatched away her ability to succeed that day.

Now, what’s the point of all this???  Well, today I wanted to make a couple points about self-talk that I hope will help you continue to improve yourself, and find a way to rise above the negative self-talk that I think everyone suffers from at some point…

My first point about all of this is simply, learn to identify this negative self-talk and talk back to it (IE- slap that little jerk in the mouth).  There’s a great book written by psychologist Dr. David Burns called “Feeling Good”, that goes into great depth on this subject.  What I want to say here is just that learning to identify when your brain is talking to you in a way that doesn’t reflect reality, is the first step to improving your own self-talk.  Really what this comes down to is that no matter what the cause of that negative self talk is, if we can learn to identify and combat it, we can defeat it.  After all, once you slap that inner-voice in the mouth enough times, it’s going to start saying things you like so it doesn’t get slapped any more.  Re-train your brain to identify that crap, and talk back to it.  Give that inner-voice a dose of reality!

  

The other point I want to make about this is that I suggest you move away from the practice of comparing yourself and your performance to others, and simply compare yourself to you.  Now I’m all for competition, I’m all for holding yourself to high standards, and I’m all for wanting to be the best, but in my own experience I’ve learned that comparing yourself to others can only do harm.  There are VERY few people in this world that will ever have a moment in their life where they can say they were the best in the world at something, and even for those few people it’s a passing moment.  For everyone else there will always be someone better than you, no matter how good you get.  If you’re trying to measure up to others, you can always find a way to ensure you don’t measure up.  Now I’m not going to say you shouldn’t compete with others and that you should go all “rah-rah everyone-gets-a-trophy” on life, but I am suggesting you compete more often with yourself than with others.  Today is the day to do the work to make yourself a better you tomorrow.  If you set a personal record be proud of that personal record, instead of focusing on how it’s not as much as so-and-so’s personal record, then go back to work trying to better that personal record.  I think that success in life comes from the journey of constant improvement, not the end result of being the best.  I think I said this in a previous blog, but take some time to celebrate your successes then get back to work addressing your weaknesses.

So, do me a favor today and honestly consider how you’re talking to yourself and how you’re measuring your success.  If you’re like most of us, there is some work to be done in how you talk to yourself.  That self-talk may well be holding you back from being the best version of yourself you can be (IE-the box jump example), and it most certainly is holding you back from being as happy as you can be.  Next time your mind tells you you’re not good enough, strong enough, smart enough, or whatever…  Slap that sucker in the mouth, and tell it what reality actually is.

The Picture of Health, part 2

How do we recognize health???  In part 1 of this blog, I discussed some basic qualitative measures of health, but this time I aim to discuss some basic quantitative measures.  This list does not represent optimal health, but should be considered a baseline that everyone should strive for.  These measurements are basic enough that EVERYONE can and should meet all of them.  If you don’t, you’ve got some work to do.

So let’s get to measuring!

Quantitative Measures:

• Blood work:  Here’s a list of recommended blood tests to have done.  Do you know where you’re numbers are at with these tests?  If not, get some blood work done and find out!
• Total Cholesterol 120-140
• HDL <50
• LDL 40-70
• LDL Size A large nonreactive
• Triglycerides 50-80
• A1c<5
• Blood Glucose <72
• C-Reactive protein <1.0
• Source: The Paleo Solution, by Robb Wolf, 2010
• For more information on cholesterol go here: http://chriskresser.com/cholesterol
• Body fat:
• General goal:  Here’s a general goal for body fat percentage.  There are a few ways to find out your body fat percentage like going to see your friendly local trainer (me?), or having hydrostatic body fat testing, or even the BOD POD.  If you don’t have easy access to any of these methods don’t worry, the next bullet point (waist to hip ratio) can function as the poor-man’s body fat measurement.  Again these numbers don’t represent ideal, but they do represent a minimum that everyone can and should reach.
• Women should be less than 25%
• Men should be less than 18%
• Source: http://www.bmi-calculator.net/body-fat-calculator/body-fat-chart.php
• Waist to Hip ratio:  Take your waist measurement at the smallest place (this should be just above your belly button), then take your waist measurement at the widest place.  Now take the waist measurement and divide it by the hip measurement.  Ratio’s higher than stated are typically indicative of insulin resistance, and are associated with cancer, heart attack, reduced fertility, and other malities.
• Women should be less than .7
• Men should be less than .9
• Source: The Paleo Solution, by Robb Wolf, 2010; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist%E2%80%93hip_ratio

That’s my list of quantitative markers of basic health.  Again, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but a basic minimum we should all meet no matter our age or athletic ability.  How do you like this list, and what do you think of these markers?  Did I miss something, or just miss the mark on something?  Please let me know what you think…

                       

The Picture of Health, part 1

So, what is the picture of health?  Can you tell by looking at someone whether they’re healthy or not?  Which of these pictures make you think health?  How do these pictures make you feel?

The first of these pictures is a supermodel, who most certainly weighs the least of any of these pictures.  The next two pic’s are of Molly Galbraith (http://mollygalbraith.com/).  In the first pic(upper right) of her she was at one of the lowest bodyfat percentages of her life, yet admittedly felt horrible.  She said about that pic “I can remember feeling like every inch of my body had been beaten, and was bruised from head to toe”!  (Read more about that here: http://mollygalbraith.com/2013/07/extreme-leanness-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/) That doesn’t sound like health to me!  The next picture(lower left) is Molly again, at a much more manageable weight and bodyfat.  The last image is of a size 14 model which, as I understand it, is the size of the average American woman.  To me, this woman looks pretty healthy, yet our society might call her “thick” or even “chunky”.  From my perspective the two pictures on the bottom look more like “health” to me, than the two on the top.

That was an exercise to get you thinking about what “health” looks like, but mostly to get you realizing that “health” is much more than what we see with our eyes, and cannot be measured with one single measure like weight or bodyfat percentage.  Take for example the two pictures of Molly Galbraith…  If you saw those two side by side, you may automatically assume that she’s more healthy in the pic on the left, because she’s more lean.  For that matter you might think that the first picture of Molly better represents “health” than the picture of the size 14 model because she’s obviously more lean.  I hope the fact that she said she felt like complete crap when that photo was taken will get you thinking twice about either of those notions. 

So, how do we recognize health???  Previously, I talked about The Journey To Health and denying perfectionism on the way to health, but what are we actually striving for and how do we know when we’re there?

First, let me say I don’t think we’re ever “there”…  Aspiring to be healthy is a never ending story (not this one: http://youtu.be/3khTntOxX-k), and there is ALWAYS something you could do better.  That said I think there are ways for us to measure either qualitatively or quantitatively whether or not we’re healthy, and that’s what I’ll attempt to outline here.  What follows is what I consider to be some baseline measurements for health.  Do I mean that if you don’t meet all of these metrics you’re not “healthy”???  Well no, not exactly.  I would say that you should me most of these metrics, and more importantly you should know which ones you meet and don’t meet.  Because after all, knowing IS half the battle!  A big piece of the healthfulness puzzle is understanding what areas you need to improve on.  Understanding your strengths and weaknesses, and addressing those weaknesses in a systematic fashion is what we should all strive to do.  I think we can all agree that this approach is a lot better than making some vague and/or unreachable new years resolution every year, then failing to follow through.  Or worse yet, just never addressing what’s wrong with us, and continuing to live blind (and without health).

So without further a due, here is the first half of my very basic list of health markers:

Qualitative Measures:

• Proper Exercise: Do you get regular (3+ times per week) exercise?  Do you move regularly (ie-walking, playing, etc.)?  If you exercise regularly, do you make sure to get enough quality rest to recover properly between sessions?  Are you keeping some athletic skills polished (ie- sports skills, gymnastic skills, etc.)?  To be able to check this box, you need to answer yes to all of these questions.  Here’s some basic guidelines:
• Exercising enough, but not too much: More 2 days/week; less than 7
• Lots of low intensity movement: Walking or other slow movement 5+ days/week for 30+ minutes
• Some strength training: Between 2 and 5 strength training session/week
• Some high intensity training: Between .5 and 4 high intensity sessions/week
• Proper recovery: this has many pieces including sleep, diet, and mobility covered elsewhere in this article; here I’ll just say you should take at least 1 day off/week, and more days will be needed if those other things aren’t dialed.
• Maintaining adequate strength: 5 pushups, 35 air squats, ¾ bodyweight deadlift, and 1 pullup are the minimums
• Aerobic capacity: Jog a mile in 10 minutes or less
• Skill: Maintain some sort of sport-specific skill whether it’s golf, bowling, softball, skiing, or otherwise at an average (or above) level.
• For more information on this topic: http://chriskresser.com/9-steps-to-perfect-health-7-move-like-your-ancestors

• Proper Eating:  Do you eat mostly proteins and veggies?  Is it rare for you to eat processed food from a box or package?  Do you mostly keep sugar, grains, and alcohol out of your diet?  To be able to check this box, you need to answer yes to all of these questions.  Here’s some basic guidelines:
• Diet of whole foods: Lots of lean protein, lots of veggies, some fruits, some good fats, cheats and treats (processed foods, sugar, grains, alcohol) are 20% of your intake or less.
• Eating enough, but not too much: when eating a diet of whole foods, most people can just eat until they’re full and not overeat; when cheating or enjoying treats we should be conscious of not overeating.
• For more information on this topic: http://robbwolf.com/what-is-the-paleo-diet/

• Healthy Sleep:
• Sleep enough: 7-8 hours in completely dark room
• Aim wake up without an alarm clock (I know…I know…)
• For more information on this topic: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-definitive-guide-to-sleep/

• Healthy Joints:
• To call a joint healthy it should move in a full range-of-motion without pain; we should strive to achieve this with ALL joints in the body
• Adequate mobility: Be able to perform the duties of your life (job, workouts, sports, etc.) safely and without pain or discomfort, by maintaining adequate mobility (range of motion, and stability) to accomplish the required tasks.
• Perform “basic maintenance” on ourselves: Stretching, mobility exercises (next bullet point), and seeking treatment (massage, chiropractic, PT, etc.) as needed for maintenance.
• For more information on this topic: http://www.mobilitywod.com/

That’s my list of qualitative markers of basic health.  Again, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but a basic minimum we should all meet no matter our age or athletic ability.  In part two of this blog I’ll share my list of quantitative measures of health.  Look for that next week…

How do you like this list, and what do you think of these markers?  Did I miss something, or just miss the mark on something?  Please let me know what you think…

Every Day, In Every Way, We Get A Little Better

Growing up I was never a great athlete, in fact in most sports I wasn’t much above average and that remains true to this day.  That said I did work hard on my conditioning and training in the second half of high school and into college.  That resulted in me getting in pretty darn good shape, which had me thinking I should make an attempt to play college football.  I walked on at Southern Oregon University, and trained with them through their winter conditioning program and spring football practices.  At that point I was cut from the team, and my dream of going from small college walk on, to NFL star took a serious blow.  Even though I didn’t make the team, the 6+ months I spent training with those guys had an impact on me.  I learned a lot about what a college level strength and conditioning program should look like, and I also learned some of the finer points of coaching.  The head coach at SOU at that time was Jeff Olson, and he had a saying he used at practice all the time…  “every day in every way, we get a little better”.  That saying has been bouncing around in my head for 11 or 12 years now, and I’ve even used it at plenty of practices I was coaching, but I’m writing today to tell you why that saying is dead wrong…

My problem with this saying is really just with the middle part, and the implications that come with that middle part.  I would like the saying just fine if it was just “every day we get a little better”, but that doesn’t have the kind of rhythm as saying needs to become a good chant!  Here’s the thing though…  I see people all the time who are paralyzed by perfectionism, and I used to be in the same place.  I’ve gone through multiple periods in my life where I lost a bunch of weight.  The only way to do that, is to have multiple times in your life where you gain a bunch of weight.  The times when I’ve gained weight have always started with getting “too busy” to get to the gym, which has rolled into an extended period of doing nothing, which has rolled into an extended period of eating like crap.  See I always used to battle this all or nothing mentality where I told myself that if I couldn’t train like a competitive athlete, then it wasn’t worth doing anything.  Additionally I had a mentality that if I wasn’t working out like a beast, I might as well eat whatever I want cause I’m going to gain weight anyway.  It’s sounds completely ridiculous to write it out, but that’s the way my head used to work.  Would I have been better off spending some time walking each day even if I was really “too busy” to get to the gym??  Yes…  Would I have been better off getting to the gym a couple of days a week, and doing what I could, instead of quitting altogether when I felt I didn’t have time to train like a competitive athlete???  For sure!  Would I have been better off eating clean while I wasn’t exercising???  Most definitely!!  I was paralyzed by all-or-nothing thinking, which is a form of perfectionism.

I hear and read people all the time who say “I don’t have time for exercise right now”, or “I don’t have money to eat healthy” (all-or-nothing).  I also hear and read people over-analyzing the details of eating plans, so much so that they paralyze themselves trying to figure out the most minute details (paralysis-of-analysis).  Lastly, I’ve come across so many people who make some positive changes, but the first time they slip up they fall completely off the wagon (perfection-or-bust).  In my mind all three of these types of excuses are very closely related.  Whether you’re an all-or-nothing person, a paralysis-of-analysis person, or a perfection-or-bust person, it’s time to give up the ghost!

  

We don’t need to improve every day in every way to continue heading in the right direction.  We don’t need to train like an NFL athlete in the off-season to improve our fitness.  We don’t have to worry about whether green beans are paleo, to improve our eating habits.  And we don’t have to do everything right all the time to be improving our health.

Today you will have an opportunity to make a few hundred decisions, which will impact your health.  In my mind if you made one more positive decision today than you did yesterday, then today was a success.  In fact if you made ANY positive decisions for your health, then today was a success!  Give yourself praise for the positive choices and changes you make, and forget about the mistakes.  It’s a marathon not a sprint, and every step you take gets you closer to where you’re headed.

What did you do for your health today?  If you can’t come up with an answer to that question, what’s holding you back?  If it’s some form of perfectionism, let go of that, and move forward one small step at a time.

To Cardio, or Not To Cardio… That is the question!

As with much of the rest of the health and fitness world, many fallacies exist around cardio.  I will do my best in this brief article to dispel some of those fallacies, and discuss some of the considerations for how much and what type of cardio you should be doing. 

So what are some of the fallacies that exist???  When I think of cardio fallacies I think of things like:

• More cardio will make me skinnier
• We need to do cardio to “burn” calories
• We need to do cardio to be in great shape
• Cardio makes us healthy
• The more cardio the better

Do you have any of these ideas about cardio?  If so, keep reading and see if I can convince you otherwise.

Will cardio make you skinny??? (A better question may be do you even want to be skinny, but we’ll save that for another day.)  Well, my answer would be a resounding no!  Follow me here for a second… Do you have friends who are runners?  If so, how many of them are skinny?  How many of them are skinny fat (fairly small but soft and flabby), or maybe chubby?  Have you ever sat by a jogging path and looked at the people running by?  How many of them are skinny?  How many are skinny fat, or chubby?  Skinny people tend to gravitate towards running, the same way tall people gravitate towards basketball, but running will not make you skinny anymore than basketball will make you tall.  I know runners, and often watch people run on the waterfront in PDX, and what I see is much more skinny fat people and chubby people, then skinny people.  I know this is anecdotal, but there’s more to come on why cardio doesn’t make you skinny.

The idea that you need to “burn” calories to lose weight, is overly simplistic and mostly just useful for marketing gym memberships, fitness classes, and fitness DVD’s.  Guru’s argue back and forth about whether or not the key to weight loss is as simple as take in less than you burn, but even if it is that simple, doing high intensity cardio to burn calories doesn’t make sense.  Here’s why it doesn’t make sense…  When you jump on the elliptical and go hard for 30 minutes, racking up 350 calories burned (as the machine tells you), you did some work!  You leave tired, but you’re satisfied that you burned 350 calories.  The problem is that even if the machine calculated your “burn” correctly (they often over estimate), you still likely did less for your calorie burn than if you would have spent 30 minutes lifting weights.  You see, 30 minutes of weight lifting may only burn 150 or 200 calories, but the increase in your metabolism following that weightlifting session (EPOC-  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_post-exercise_oxygen_consumption) can last as long as 38 hours after the session!  Additionally, building more muscle means that your resting metabolic rate is increased every day you have that muscle.  So, any way you slice it, you will likely “burn” more calories with weightlifting than you would with cardio.

Do you need to do cardio to be in great “shape”???  Well, I guess that depends on how you define cardio…  The approach I recommend for most people includes lots of low-level cardio (read: walking), and lots of strength training.  I would argue that most people can get in just as good of shape with this approach as someone who’s running regularly (or doing other mainstream forms of intense cardio).  They will not perform as well on extended efforts (30-minutes or more), and they won’t be as proficient at running (or Zumba or Spin) as someone who’s doing those things regularly.  They will however perform nearly as well on a VO2Max test (the gold standard for cardiovascular performance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VO2_max), and they will avoid the overuse injuries and metabolic damage that can come from large amounts of intense cardio (more on that in a future blog).  They will also likely be much stronger than the runner, and strength trumps all! 

The idea that you need tons of cardio to be healthy is just ludicrous to me!  So much so, that I don’t even want to address it, but I will.  Here’s my first piece of evidence that large amounts of cardio does not make you healthier than other exercise:

  

Which one of these two people look healthier to you???  To me, one looks like a POW, and the other looks like the peak of health!  The adaptations that occur in your body when you are doing large amounts of cardio are very similar to those that happen as you die.  Does muscle wasting and storing fat inside muscle sound like health to you?  Clearly cardio doesn’t MAKE us healthy!

I’ve already touched around the fallacy of “the more cardio the better” above, but I’ll briefly touch on it again.  I don’t like that society has this “everything in moderation” mentality because I think that’s total BS, but that said, I think it’s clear that moderation is better in a lot of things.  More cardio is not better, unless you’re training for an endurance event.  More cardio will not necessarily help you lose fat faster, it won’t necessarily make you healthier, and it won’t necessarily improve your fitness.  We’ve covered this enough right???

So, who should do cardio, what kind of cardio should they do, and why?  As I said before I think everyone should be strength training and doing lots of walking.  These things will help everyone be healthier, and leaner, and more fit.  Beyond that, the question gets more complicated… 

Are you metabolically broken (read: obese), or suffering from adrenal fatigue, hormone issues, or thyroid dysfunction?  If any of those apply to you, then you are best to not do any more exercise than what’s listed above.  If you fit into any of those categories, you need to clean up your diet, sleep, lift some weights, and walk, AND THAT’S ALL!  Once your metabolic/hormonal/adrenal/thyroid issues are improved, you can begin adding in some higher intensity work.

If you’re metabolically healthy, then adding in some higher intensity work can be a great thing for you.  If want to train for an endurance event, go for it, but still do the strength training and walking.  If you just want to be healthy, or you want to lose some fat, adding in some high intensity interval work once or twice a week might be great for you.  Studies show that high intensity work can be great for metabolism, VO2Max, and other indicators of health and fitness, so if you’re not metabolically broken this could be a good thing to add into your routine.

I hope I’ve proved my point to you that more cardio isn’t better, and not everyone needs any more cardio than just daily walking.  Did this article clear things up for you, or just make you more confused?  What questions do you have about application of cardio?