Better Is Better

Prasara Yoga Pocket Wheel

Here is a little drill to improve the entrance into and exit out of the "wheel" pose.  This will be especially useful for anyone practicing Prasara Yoga and wanting to develop their Spider Monkey Flow.  I call this exercise the "Pocket Wheel" because I place my free hand near my pants pocket before moving on my posted arm.

How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy

I’m currently reading Paul Chek’s How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy.  It is a very interesting read, and when I came across the following passage I decided that I just had to share it.  Although I was already sold on the evils of sugar, and rarely eat any myself, I still found the following revealing and it helped me pull together many of my thoughts on the subject.  I hope it helps you in your own nutritional decision making.  Also, from what I have read so far, I can emphatically suggest you pick up a copy of the book.

In 1957, Dr. William Coda Martin pondered: “ When is afood a food and when is it a poison?”  HIs working medical definition of “poison” was, “Any substance applied to the body, ingested or developed within the body, which causes or may cause disease.  Physically: Any substance which inhibits the activity of a catalyst (which is a minor substance, chemical or enzyme that activates a reaction).”
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Dr Martin classified refined sugar as a poison because it has been depleted of its life forces, vitamins and minerals.  What is left is pure, refined carbohydrates.  The body cannot effectively utilize this refined starch and carbohydrate unless the depleted proteins, vitamins and minerals are present.  When we eat sugar in absence of the nutritional factors necessary to compensate for digestion, metabolism and elimination, incomplete carbohydrate metabolism results.  Pyruvic acid accumulates in the brain and nervous system, and the abnormal sugars accumulate in the red blood cells.  These metabolites interfere with the respiration of the cells.  They simply can’t get sufficient oxygen to survive and function normally.  In time, some of the cells die.  This interferes with the functioning of that part of the body and is the beginning of degenerative disease.

Daily intake of sugar produces a continuously over-acid condition.  Consequently, minerals are required from he body tisues (such as notes and teeth) in order to buffer the acidic environment and rectify the imbalance.  In order to protect the blood, so much calcium is taken from the bones and teeth that decay and general weakening begin.  Excess sugar eventually affects every organ in the body.

In the liver, excess sugar is stored in the form of glucose (glycogen).  Since the liver’s capacity is limited, a daily intake of refined sugar soon makes the liver expand.  When the liver is filled to its maximum capacity, the excess glycogen is returned to the blood in the form of fatty acids.  These fatty acids are then taken to every part of the body and stored - as fat - in the most inactive areas: the belly, the buttocks, the breasts and the thighs.

When these areas are completely filled with fat, fatty acids are then distributed among active organs, such as the heart, liver and kidneys.  These organs begin to slow down - finally their tissues degenerate and turn to fat.  the whole body is affected by their reduced ability, and abnormally high blood pressure results.  The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is affected because processed sugar is a powerful stimulator of the sympathetic branch of the nervous system.  The circulatory and lymphatic systems are invaded, and the quality of the red blood cells begins to change.  An overabundance of white cells occurs and tissue creation slows down.

When you ingest processed sugars without adequate amounts of the quality fats, proteins, vitamins and enzymes, your blood sugar levels will become elevated.  The body responds by releasing insulin, a hormone that rapidly reduces blood sugar levels.  Unfortunately, the feedback mechanism that tells the brain that blood sugar has returned to normal is slow, commonly resulting in a blood sugar crash, or hypoglycemic state.  The body must respond to this immediately.  If not, your brain will run out of blood sugar to operate on and you’ll go into a coma.  This emergency situation results in the release of powerful stress hormones, one of which is cortisol.  In the midst of all this, most people respond to the hypoglycemic, or low-blood sugar state by drinking coffee or soda, or eating something sweet.

Meanwhile, cortisol has triggered the release of stored glycogen form the liver to quickly raise the blood sugar levels again.  This results in an inflow of sugar form the liver as well as form the sweet thing that you just ate or drank, starting the whole porcess over again.  Many live thier lives on this roller coaster ride all day, every day.  This creates a big problem because after a while, your body can become insensitive to insulin - the first sign being an accumulation of fat around the middle, giving your midsection an apple like appearance.  This results in what is commonly called Syndrome X, and is the first major step toward becoming diabetic.

The constant hormonal roller coaster ride caused by the typical sugar-laden junk food diet overworks the adrenal galnds.  They finally become exhausted from producing excessive cortisol.  When the hormonal system becomes disturbed and unbalanced due to the stress of eating processed sugars, numerous other pathological conditions soon manifest - degenerative disease, allergies, obesity, alcoholism, drug addiction, depression and behavioral problems.  Our ability to resist disease progressively decreases as processed sugars displace the nutrient dense foods we were designed to thrive on...

Clubbells 101 - Free E-book

I just released Clubbells 101.  I am offering this E-book as a free gift to subscribers of my Momentum Training News.  To get your subscription to this valuable newsletter and download your copy of Clubbells 101, just click here.

The courage to start and the grit to persist.

My grandfather would often say, "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger."  This is not an uncommon phrase, but some people, like my grandfather, are actually qualified to use it.  If I could be half the man my grandfather was, I would be very pleased with the results of my life.  But not having been through a fraction of the hardship that he, and so many others of his generation, had to endure, makes it difficult to imagine being able to attain the level of character, fortitude and integrity that he displayed day in and day out.

He and his generation were not concerned with getting Flat Abs in 10 Weeks.  They were more concerned with things like getting enough food to eat for the rest of the week.  Or staying alive in the trenches for the rest of the day.  I think this reinforced for them the value of working for the long term.  They did not put life on hold for the depression, the war or whatever else was going on.  They had the courage to start families and plan for the future.  They had the grit to persist when things looked bleak.

We watched We Are Marshall on DVD last night.  It's a movie about the aftermath of a university town in West Virginia losing their entire varsity football team in a plane crash.  I don't want to give any of the movie away, because I think it is well worth the watch, but I will say this.  As the final credits rolled, the one thought that came to mind is the incredible courage to start and grit to persist displayed by those who decided to carry on with the program and those who worked to rebuild it.  And if you watch this film through to the very end I think you will know what I mean.

I think this is probably the best mindset to have when you set out on a new endeavor, including one devoted to your health and fitness.  It may be tempting to Lose 10 Pounds in 2 Weeks.  But its always discouraging when those pounds come back in 1 day of binging to make up for the starvation.  There are no short-cuts to anything truly worthwhile.  But if you set yourself up for the long term, making incremental progress each and every day, the cumulative effect is astounding and the time it takes to see real, permanent change, goes by more quickly that you can imagine.  Better yet, the momentum of real, solid results spurs you on to persist and improve even more.  But this can only happen if you change your paradigm to reflect a long term, lifestyle approach to health and fitness.

Inspiring Movement!

Inspiring Movement...

Worthy Mission...

False sense of security.

I ran across the following passage from Mel Siff not too long ago and it really resonated with me.

Thus learning of the half squat, power clean or machine bench press
does not properly prepare the beginner for safety and efficiency with
heavier loads. In fact, the well-meaning, but misguided advice to do
certain 'safe' movements can actually lead to the dangerous situation
in which the client may be MORE vulnerable to injury if he/she by
chance is called upon to execute the banned form of that exercise.

This has been one of my pet-peeves for a number of years now.  I sometimes have the feeling that the fitness landscape has been white-washed with fears of injury and litigation.  Anything that could be considered "risky" and leave someone responsible would appear to be taboo.  But in shunning complexity in our training, we are courting a much more dangerous bedfellow in the long run.  By allowing ourselves to be convinced that machines and simple, vanilla flavored exercises are the "safest" way to train, we set ourselves up for injury down the road when we need to move outside of those specialized patterns.  Because unfortunately life and sport do not follow the "perfect" lines of force which are dictated by our Nautilus machines.

Circular Strength Training has a great maxim which flows from its Training Hierarchy Pyramid.  During Specific Physical Preparedness, CST maintains that it is important to create a "safety valve" of movement just outside the range and scope of the skills or activities you are training for.  This ensures that when things do deviate from the expected your body has moved through those extreme ranges under load and can react without a sudden stretch reflex and subsequent injury.  Somehow I don't think they have invented an exercise machine yet that does that for you...  But there are tools that do, such as the Clubbell, and to a lesser extent rings, sandbags and kettlebells.

Explore CST and the Training Hierarchy Pyramid if you want to figure out how to stay healthy and injury free in the long run, not just during your workout...

Pumping iron modifies genes, study suggests - Good news for aging.

A study was released the other day in which the effects of weight training on the elderly was examined.

The study, published today, says resistance exercise for people 65 and older can actually reverse important aging effects on skeletal muscles, to the point where they work genetically like those found in people four decades younger.

This is huge and encouraging news for those of us who are starting to see some gray around the temples and have to face the fact, for the first time in our lives, that we are not immortal... ;-)  Most importantly, I think it reinforces the message that do not have to accept that we are at the whim of time and our environment.  There are choices we can make that will increase our health and enjoyment of life.

But Tarnopolsky said the genetic "fingerprints" of the exercising seniors actually shifted from their age-altered state to one more closely resembling those found in young men and women in their mid 20s to 30s.

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Tarnopolsky said weight lifting might remove some of the mitochondria damaged by age-related stresses, replacing them with genetically intact ones. As well, it may turn on genes, switched off by age, that offer muscle cells protection from damage.

Pretty neat if you ask me!

Dr. Howard Dombrower, director of rehabilitation at Toronto's Baycrest Geriatric Health Care System, said it's been well established that exercise benefits both the physical and mental wellbeing of seniors.

But Dombrower said he has typically recommended aerobic exercise like walking or biking for most of his patients and that the study may cause him to consider resistance training as well.

I love it when doctors admit that scurrying about on a treadmill or stationary bike is NOT the only (and in my books certainly not the most effective) means of exercise!

All in all, this was very inspiring "news."  Hopefully it will spur on a few people who are starting to feel the loss of functionality that comes with aging to get active and reverse the process.  The study only looked at the benefits of strength training, which I agree are huge, but there is another important component to address.  As Coach Scott Sonnon says, "you're as old as your connective tissue."  And if you want to stay young you need to nourish your joint capsules, remove adhesions from your joints and balance out the tissues which house your muscles.  The VERY best way to do that is through Coach Sonnon's Ageless Mobility DVD.

So no excuses... We can all grow old with grace. ;-)

Working out, training, practicing and coffee...

The title of this post is a bit rambling, and I suppose the content may be too.  In essence it is a collection of thoughts which grew out of my training a couple of days ago.  It is not uncommon to read about the performance enhancement effects of caffeine.  As any of you who know me can attest, I have a coffee problem.  And the problem is I love the stuff.  For a long time I was a 5 cappuccino a day kind of guy.  Nowadays I can go for months without it, and generally won't allow myself more than one day a week of coffee consumption.  But when I hear people tout the benefits I must admit that the devil on my shoulder still kicks in and says, "hey, why are you avoiding the stuff?"

Then the other day I had an experience.  This was one of those days that I allowed myself a coffee (OK so I had three...).  I was all jacked up, since coffee actually affects me now that I don't drink much of it.  Then I hit my training.  Things actually went quite well as long as I was doing fairly straightforward stuff.  In fact, I actually felt quite strong (probably from the adrenal stimulation).  But then I got into more sophisticated movements and everything fell apart.  Forget about applying strength through a sophisticated movement pattern while balancing on one leg!!  I fumbled through it, but what I had gained in brute strength I had given up in fine motor coordination.  I had traded capacity for sophistication.  I had given away quality for quantity. 

And that is when the realization hit me.  If you are "working out," coffee may indeed improve your performance.  If you are "training," the performance improvement would depend on what you are trying to train.  But if you are "practicing," you will be shooting yourself in the foot!  What's the difference?  Well, in my books, working out is just pushing weight, putting in mileage, etc for the sole reason of burning calories and building muscles.  You don't need anything more than brute or gross motor patterns to get the job done.  Training involves doing work which will take you towards a specific goal.  So the goal you are training towards and the phase of training you are currently in will determine the degree of sophistication needed in your movement.  Finally, practicing involves the fine tuning of the technical intricacies of the goal you are training for.  This requires perhaps the most complex motor patterns and the most sophistication.  And this is where a stimulant like coffee would appear to have the most detrimental effects.

These are just ramblings from my recent experience based on my own training performance.  And they deal only with the "performance" aspect of using stimulants.  There are also a whole host of health related considerations which should be looked at before "using."  But I'll leave those for you to explore on your own.  I doubt I will ever give up my occasional cappuccino.  I enjoy it too much.  But I am glad that I have some distance now and realize more and more the effect that everything has on my body that I put in my mouth.  Just "food" for thought...