Good morning friends,
I hope everyone is settling into the new year. It's not even the middle of the month yet, so you better not be slipping on your health and fitness goals already!!!!
So this post is going to be about fitness. Prior to this out had been all about nutrition - and with that basically just all about intermittent fasting. As a related side note, I'm well into this IF protocol experiment and so far it's going well. I can say that eating within the time alloted hours each day is actually really good for me psychologically. I don't have to be a slave to my food, eating every 2 hours etc. I just start eating at 10am and as long as my caloric intake is met by 6pm, I'm setting zero parameters beyond that. It's actually really satisfying. There have admittedly been 2 days where the hunger got to be rough after 6pm and this was my own fault as I did not effectively reach my caloric goal for the day. In these 2 cases, I allowed myself to eat after the end time to prevent an all our binge fest! And much to my shock and disappointment, eating after the end time did not make me turn into a Gremlin! Secretly, I was hoping it would!!!!
So to get back on focus here so this doesn't turn into another nutrition post, I'll digress for now. But will be doing a post soon on the IF protocol and how it is going.
With regards to today, step back for a second and close your eyes. Imagine 2 things while your eyes are closed. First picture a yoga studio while a class is in session. Imagine the atmosphere in the class. Think about the participants in this class. Focus your attention there. What does the average person in that class look like? Now that you have that in mind, imagine a heavyweight bodybuilder. His or her primary goal is symmetry in every aspect of the body. But the other primary focus is muscle hypertrophy or muscle size in other words.
When picturing both of these fitness themed trades, let's call them, at first glance they would seem to be conflicting forces of nature right? To effectively encourage hypertrophy of your muscles, it requires picking up lots of heavy shit and putting it back down then repeating and repeating again and then once you've done that, you repeat it some more. The mentality that it takes for this sort of aggressive behavior seems absolutely counterintuitive to the zen like approach of sitting quietly and meditating then going through a series of stretches and movements known as a flow. Even that word is tranquil. It makes me think of waterfalls and nature and it calms me to think of that.
But what if I told you that you could combine the two approaches and it would encourage hypertrophy and even body fat reduction (which can be used as an optical illusion to make you seem even more buff than you actually are!!!). Does that sound like something you'd be interested in?..... Good, let's dive into this than.
First a disclaimer, if hypertrophy isn't your goal this article could still give you some insight on how yoga can be beneficial for you just in general if enjoy lifting weights as well so feel free to keep reading!!!!
As I mentioned earlier, hypertrophy is simply the increase in cell size in a particular organ. In this case, we are talking about skeletal muscle as the organ. We all know how that aspect of training works. You lift heavy, eat lots of protein and lots of calories overall, get plenty of sleep to encourage overnight musculature repair and boom, you've got muscle growth. Of course, it's a very demanding overall practice to actually complete that pattern but that is the jist of how it works.
Now how exactly can sitting through a boring yoga class slowly moving from pose to pose help foster an environment of getting those gainz as the bros at my gym would say? Well there are a few areas in which adding this practice to your routine can help you get swole. We will begin with the area that seems most obvious, stretching out the muscles. Now this is an important factor for multiple reasons. Here let me explain......
First, injury prevention. Nothing can derail your quest in the gym faster than an injury. I know this fact to be true first hand as I have had a multitude of injuries over the years that stemmed primarily from not taking the appropriate steps to ensure my body was primed for the carnage that was about to take place. I'd simply go in, hit the weights and go home. Not taking any time to focus on pampering my muscles along the way and the repeated compounding of lifting session upon lifting session with no effort to lengthen those muscles I had just compressed with heavy weight did nothing to set me up for success. And for those sins I've begun to reap the rewards through various injuries. So had I simply added a yoga class or two to the mix each week along the way, I may have prevented some of the unnecessary pain I've since had to endure. Now I have to stress, yoga isn't the only means to the end in this situation to help prevent injury. Sports massage therapy is another way, active warmup before workouts and stretch cool downs including foam rolling etc are also effective strategies. As the old and gross saying goes, "There is more than 1 way to skin a cat!" Although I'd really prefer not skinning any cats regardless of method. But that's just me! So in short, to allow your gains train to keep on rolling, injury free, implement some or all of the above and check your ego at the door to allow you to lift smart!
OK, great it can maybe help prevent injury but as I explained, there are other ways to do that so what else can encourage a person wanting to gain strength and size to go sit through a yoga class? How about myofascial release, a term you may have heard at some point recently? What exactly is the fascia? It's a dense webbing of tissue that covers our entire musculature system in the body. It's very durable and strong which is why we are able to move as freely as we do. But over time and without proper care, it can become a tangled mess causing muscles to fire incorrectly during certain movements or it can limit our range of motion. For example, in say an ass to grass squat, this requires an intense level of range of motion and it means that everything from the muscles in our neck all the way down to our ankles all need to work together to ensure proper form and alignment throughout the movement. One of the key components to ensure the team inside the body is all moving in the same direction towards the same goal is to have a well taken care of fascia. The method of holding said movements that are encouraged and completed during a yoga class are a very effective way to keep the fascia open, strong and ready to go. The more effective your fascia works the more weight you can potentially lift in the gym as well as the aforementioned range of motion which also plays a huge role in muscle growth. So boom, getting bendy in a yoga class can do wonders on the muscle growth goal in the weight room.
Are there any other aspects that yoga can help with regarding muscle growth? Absolutely, and it is probably one you had not thought about. Hormonal balance in the body. To encourage muscle growth, the body needs to be in alignment physically which is what we touched on above but just as important, our hormones need to be in alignment as well. There are a lot of things in play inside our bodies that can help or hinder our progress towards muscle hypertrophy and simply our overall health as well.
The major players in this internal dance of hormones are growth hormone hGH, cortisol, Testosterone and estrogen. This post is not going to go too deep down the rabbit hole with regards to these hormones. The major overview point is they are all important. There are some simple things to know though. Growth hormone and Testosterone are considered anabolic players which means they work in our metabolism to encourage growth and repair of cells as opposed to cortisol which is linked with the opposite effect known as catabolism which tears down our already built up cells or in other words it makes our bodies eat itself like a zombie would feast on brains. That is the high level of what those hormones do so as you can see, keeping cortisol in check to allow Testosterone and hGH to flourish in its role of encouraging cell growth is a good thing right?
One of the major functions in our bodies that tells cortisol to come out full force is stress. This is a term that can have various meanings. Day to day stress is something we all know very well. Screaming babies, deadlines at work, homework assignments that are due tomorrow that you haven't started yet or just sitting in gridlock traffic that's making you late to an appointment are all external stresses that encourage cortisol production in the body. There are also internal stressers as well. In fact one that we have talked about a lot today, lifting heavy at the gym. This causes muscle damage at the cellular level and the body doesn't know that the damage created is one we are doing on purpose so that intense grueling workout you just completed is actually causing internal stress which also can foster cortisol release rather than suppress it when you over train. So to help mitigate this, doing things to calm the mind and body both from the internal and external stresses can help do just that and suppress that zombie muscle eating hormone. That's where yoga comes into play!!!
We've already touched on how yoga can help the muscles themselves with gaining size, but it can also help calm the brain through intense breathing, the calming flow of the workout progression in a yoga class and the meditative aspects of it as well. At the end of almost every yoga class there is a time of complete meditation to calm the body in all aspects which can encourage cortisol balance in the body and thus allow you to reap the benefits of the other anabolic hormones in your body when you step into the battle field of the weight room.
Now, go forth bros and lady bros. Add a yoga class or 2 to the training mix each week and after a period of correction from the years of tangling abuse you've done to your body, you will start to notice drastic improvements in all the areas touched on in this post and subsequently your gains train will begin rolling down the tracks like a freight train!!!!!
Cheers!!!!!
Shawn
Monday, January 11, 2016
Monday, January 4, 2016
Should You Trust Me To Give You Nutrition Advice?
Hello friends!
Can you believe it is already 2016?? Dang, how time flies. Now that January is upon us and the holidays are over we can get back to real life. And for a lot of people that means setting those New Years goals to create the "new year - new you". I've set goals like this many times in my life. Most of the time they failed. But I get the why behind it so if that is you, than do you and kick ass this year with those goals. I mean hell, I started my fasting protocol experiment on the 1st so how can I judge anyone else that started a plan or goal, right? OK, I digress as this post isn't about the pros and cons of resolutions. However they do play a role in what I'm going to talk about today.
How many of you have heard the term or seen the hash tag used called Fit Fam? I have used this very phrase or hash tag more times than I can count. For those of you that haven't heard or used it, it's just a phrase signifying that if you are apart of this modern day fitness revolution than you are part of the family. As in, we are all on this journey together. I love that idea. I wholeheartedly support that campaign and movement. I admit that I get carried away when I start hash tagging a billion things up which is why I mostly limit my use of them to Instagram.
Hey look, I went off on another tangent! Apparently I have shiny object syndrome this morning while writing and I'm too lazy to make this into a drafted version and edit it down so you get to come along for the ride! Lucky you!
Now, as for today's blog and what it's about, we are going to be digging into the downsides of the fitness craze and delve into how the obsession for getting healthy can actually be very unhealthy. Plus I'm going to throw some shade on those nutrition coaches that do not have the educational chops to be giving nutrition advice, especially those that do so under the guise of slanging products or recruiting people into their ponzi schemes.
In fact let's start with the shade and work backwards! If you are a "nutrition coach" and you approach a potential client to discuss nutrition counseling with them and in that first conversation start suggesting products and supplements to sell them because you "know they work" then you are part of the problem, not the solution. Now I want to stress, I'm not saying (for the most part) that these product sellers don't have the best interest of the client at heart. But with the level of science needed to fully understand someone's nutritional needs, especially those that are severely overweight and potentially could have life threatening underlying conditions, simply tossing the idea of a quick fix out through expensive and usually unnecessary supplements is a recipe for disaster.
The real bad guys in my opinion are these quick fix pyramid style supplement companies themselves. They entrust getting their products sold by average people with no formal education or science/dietetics background through a tiered recruitment style scam. A lot of times these new clients turned coaches have been extremely sedentary and through the motivation and support of the team they become very active and in a lot of cases see dramatic results. But here is the kicker, it is not simply these magic and expensive supplements that you are taking but rather it's the fact that you cleaned up your nutritional intake overall and got up off your butt and started working out. The end result is that YES you lost some weight and feel more energetic which are both awesome successes. And for that aspect, getting tons of people up and more active, I applaud the idea. But that, in my opinion, is where it should end. A large support group sharing recipes, encouraging healthier habits and coming together to get sweaty and move to lose some weight. That is AWESOME, FANTASTIC, I'M ALL FOR IT AND LOVE IT! However..............
Here is where it crosses over into the next focus of the blog today. Obsession, disordered eating habits or even a diagnosed eating disorder, bad self image even though healthier and addiction to the healthy lifestyle. Yes, you read that correctly. ADDICTION TO THE HEALTHY LIFESTYLE.
But how can the pursuit of health be a bad thing? The reality is that it very easily can be a bad thing. The old saying of too much of a good thing is bad comes to mind. As we strive for becoming healthier, it can create a monster within that can lead to all sorts of ugliness.
One growing condition through this fit fam is a disorder called Orthorexia Nervosa. It was defined in 1996 as literally meaning fixation on righteous eating, in other words it is the hipster version of an eating disorder! The idea is centered on being obsessed with clean eating to a point of creating an isolation pattern with the patient due to being so fixated on eating healthy that things like eating with friends and family become impossible due to not being able to allow themselves the freedom to eat certain things for fear of messing up their diets. I want to stress that orthorexia is not officially recognized by the American Psychological Association as a true eating disorder and thus it falls under the more general disordered eating habits side of things but there are genuine symptoms that can be analyzed and diagnosed to at least give the patient an understanding of what they are dealing with. On the NEDA (National Eating Disorder Association) website there is a checklist of symptoms that if a person checks them off can self diagnose and then seek professional help from a credentialed counselor. To see the checklist, here is the link:
https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/orthorexia-nervosa
Another issue that the fit fam movement can encourage is in fact a widely known and clinically diagnosed eating disorder called anorexia nervosa. The simple clinical definition of this disorder is inadequate caloric intake causing extreme rapid weight loss. This is a condition I've seen multiple times when working with clients and been fortunate enough to catch it early on before it escalated into a full blown situation. Now, I don't want to dive too deep into this rabbit hole because I am not a trained psychological counselor.
Lastly, I want to touch on the obsessive compulsive behaviors that the fit fam and healthy lifestyle movement can encourage. Unfortunately, this a much larger societal issue stemming from perceived levels of beauty rather than what is truly a healthy way to live. The idea that to be sexy or look good you must be thin as a woman and ripped as a dude is what we are told. This in most people's minds triggers the idea then that to be healthy is the same thing. This couldn't be further from the truth. The reality is that if you took blood samples and analyzed the true health of the majority of obsessive fitness people you'd see things such as low Testosterone, suppressed thyroid function, imbalanced hormones, blood sugar being out of whack and a host of other internal issues so while they have that rocking 6 pack or their ass looks epic in those new jeans, they are far from optimal on the inside. And as much fun as enjoying the outside is, it's the insides that truly define our health.
So how does this all tie in with my rant at the beginning. From the standpoint of community, encouragement, support and the like, the entire fit fam movement is a HUGE success. Never has it been easier to get started on a life changing transformation with more information at our fingertips than ever before. The advent of social media has made networking to find a support peer group so easy to do that there is literally no excuse to not get out there. But with all the information comes even more misinformation. And that is one of my major points while on this soap box rant.
Because anyone can take an online course that takes a weekend to complete or even a few months to complete and then call themselves a nutrition coach, you as a consumer of nutrition advice need to be hyper vigilant about who you get your counseling from. Ask the nutrition coach about their knowledge of things like biochemistry, organic chemistry, anatomy, chemical interactions in the body and bioavailability of nutrients in various forms. Ask them about there motives as a coach. Are they looking to sell a specific brand of products? Are they genuinely able to create a specific plan targeted to YOUR specific health needs or does your plan look suspiciously similar to the person with a completely different body type than you?
Being vigilant and careful like that will help you find a nutrition coach that will help you to cultivate genuinely healthy habits, both physically and psychologically, that will lead to a true transformation both inside and out. If, when talking to the "coach", it feels like a generic response that could be for anyone or it feels like a sells pitch right off the bat I suggest you run away and quickly. With the issues I mentioned above plus the simple fact that you are entrusting your overall health and wellbeing to this person and the reality that in most cases a "nutrition coach" does not have the true science and understanding of the human body to safely coach you through some of these more extreme situations, it is up to you as the consumer to research the person you take your nutrition advice from. The bottom line is, having these folks with good intentions around to encourage and support healthy lifestyles is fantastic but my personal opinion is to keep that encouragement on the surface level.
In closing I will say that as I'm still in my schooling and working towards my degree, I fall into the category of surface level advice giver. This post is not intended to be a pat on the back to say I'm better than anyone else because I absolutely am not. This is just a bit of advice to all of you to be careful who you get nutrition insight and information from. Including if you get it from me.
Happy 2016 to everyone who reads this and I hope you like the content that I'm providing. As always feel free to leave comments on here or my social media and if you do enjoy the blog than hit the subscribe button and tell your friends about it.
Can you believe it is already 2016?? Dang, how time flies. Now that January is upon us and the holidays are over we can get back to real life. And for a lot of people that means setting those New Years goals to create the "new year - new you". I've set goals like this many times in my life. Most of the time they failed. But I get the why behind it so if that is you, than do you and kick ass this year with those goals. I mean hell, I started my fasting protocol experiment on the 1st so how can I judge anyone else that started a plan or goal, right? OK, I digress as this post isn't about the pros and cons of resolutions. However they do play a role in what I'm going to talk about today.
How many of you have heard the term or seen the hash tag used called Fit Fam? I have used this very phrase or hash tag more times than I can count. For those of you that haven't heard or used it, it's just a phrase signifying that if you are apart of this modern day fitness revolution than you are part of the family. As in, we are all on this journey together. I love that idea. I wholeheartedly support that campaign and movement. I admit that I get carried away when I start hash tagging a billion things up which is why I mostly limit my use of them to Instagram.
Hey look, I went off on another tangent! Apparently I have shiny object syndrome this morning while writing and I'm too lazy to make this into a drafted version and edit it down so you get to come along for the ride! Lucky you!
Now, as for today's blog and what it's about, we are going to be digging into the downsides of the fitness craze and delve into how the obsession for getting healthy can actually be very unhealthy. Plus I'm going to throw some shade on those nutrition coaches that do not have the educational chops to be giving nutrition advice, especially those that do so under the guise of slanging products or recruiting people into their ponzi schemes.
In fact let's start with the shade and work backwards! If you are a "nutrition coach" and you approach a potential client to discuss nutrition counseling with them and in that first conversation start suggesting products and supplements to sell them because you "know they work" then you are part of the problem, not the solution. Now I want to stress, I'm not saying (for the most part) that these product sellers don't have the best interest of the client at heart. But with the level of science needed to fully understand someone's nutritional needs, especially those that are severely overweight and potentially could have life threatening underlying conditions, simply tossing the idea of a quick fix out through expensive and usually unnecessary supplements is a recipe for disaster.
The real bad guys in my opinion are these quick fix pyramid style supplement companies themselves. They entrust getting their products sold by average people with no formal education or science/dietetics background through a tiered recruitment style scam. A lot of times these new clients turned coaches have been extremely sedentary and through the motivation and support of the team they become very active and in a lot of cases see dramatic results. But here is the kicker, it is not simply these magic and expensive supplements that you are taking but rather it's the fact that you cleaned up your nutritional intake overall and got up off your butt and started working out. The end result is that YES you lost some weight and feel more energetic which are both awesome successes. And for that aspect, getting tons of people up and more active, I applaud the idea. But that, in my opinion, is where it should end. A large support group sharing recipes, encouraging healthier habits and coming together to get sweaty and move to lose some weight. That is AWESOME, FANTASTIC, I'M ALL FOR IT AND LOVE IT! However..............
Here is where it crosses over into the next focus of the blog today. Obsession, disordered eating habits or even a diagnosed eating disorder, bad self image even though healthier and addiction to the healthy lifestyle. Yes, you read that correctly. ADDICTION TO THE HEALTHY LIFESTYLE.
But how can the pursuit of health be a bad thing? The reality is that it very easily can be a bad thing. The old saying of too much of a good thing is bad comes to mind. As we strive for becoming healthier, it can create a monster within that can lead to all sorts of ugliness.
One growing condition through this fit fam is a disorder called Orthorexia Nervosa. It was defined in 1996 as literally meaning fixation on righteous eating, in other words it is the hipster version of an eating disorder! The idea is centered on being obsessed with clean eating to a point of creating an isolation pattern with the patient due to being so fixated on eating healthy that things like eating with friends and family become impossible due to not being able to allow themselves the freedom to eat certain things for fear of messing up their diets. I want to stress that orthorexia is not officially recognized by the American Psychological Association as a true eating disorder and thus it falls under the more general disordered eating habits side of things but there are genuine symptoms that can be analyzed and diagnosed to at least give the patient an understanding of what they are dealing with. On the NEDA (National Eating Disorder Association) website there is a checklist of symptoms that if a person checks them off can self diagnose and then seek professional help from a credentialed counselor. To see the checklist, here is the link:
https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/orthorexia-nervosa
Another issue that the fit fam movement can encourage is in fact a widely known and clinically diagnosed eating disorder called anorexia nervosa. The simple clinical definition of this disorder is inadequate caloric intake causing extreme rapid weight loss. This is a condition I've seen multiple times when working with clients and been fortunate enough to catch it early on before it escalated into a full blown situation. Now, I don't want to dive too deep into this rabbit hole because I am not a trained psychological counselor.
Lastly, I want to touch on the obsessive compulsive behaviors that the fit fam and healthy lifestyle movement can encourage. Unfortunately, this a much larger societal issue stemming from perceived levels of beauty rather than what is truly a healthy way to live. The idea that to be sexy or look good you must be thin as a woman and ripped as a dude is what we are told. This in most people's minds triggers the idea then that to be healthy is the same thing. This couldn't be further from the truth. The reality is that if you took blood samples and analyzed the true health of the majority of obsessive fitness people you'd see things such as low Testosterone, suppressed thyroid function, imbalanced hormones, blood sugar being out of whack and a host of other internal issues so while they have that rocking 6 pack or their ass looks epic in those new jeans, they are far from optimal on the inside. And as much fun as enjoying the outside is, it's the insides that truly define our health.
So how does this all tie in with my rant at the beginning. From the standpoint of community, encouragement, support and the like, the entire fit fam movement is a HUGE success. Never has it been easier to get started on a life changing transformation with more information at our fingertips than ever before. The advent of social media has made networking to find a support peer group so easy to do that there is literally no excuse to not get out there. But with all the information comes even more misinformation. And that is one of my major points while on this soap box rant.
Because anyone can take an online course that takes a weekend to complete or even a few months to complete and then call themselves a nutrition coach, you as a consumer of nutrition advice need to be hyper vigilant about who you get your counseling from. Ask the nutrition coach about their knowledge of things like biochemistry, organic chemistry, anatomy, chemical interactions in the body and bioavailability of nutrients in various forms. Ask them about there motives as a coach. Are they looking to sell a specific brand of products? Are they genuinely able to create a specific plan targeted to YOUR specific health needs or does your plan look suspiciously similar to the person with a completely different body type than you?
Being vigilant and careful like that will help you find a nutrition coach that will help you to cultivate genuinely healthy habits, both physically and psychologically, that will lead to a true transformation both inside and out. If, when talking to the "coach", it feels like a generic response that could be for anyone or it feels like a sells pitch right off the bat I suggest you run away and quickly. With the issues I mentioned above plus the simple fact that you are entrusting your overall health and wellbeing to this person and the reality that in most cases a "nutrition coach" does not have the true science and understanding of the human body to safely coach you through some of these more extreme situations, it is up to you as the consumer to research the person you take your nutrition advice from. The bottom line is, having these folks with good intentions around to encourage and support healthy lifestyles is fantastic but my personal opinion is to keep that encouragement on the surface level.
In closing I will say that as I'm still in my schooling and working towards my degree, I fall into the category of surface level advice giver. This post is not intended to be a pat on the back to say I'm better than anyone else because I absolutely am not. This is just a bit of advice to all of you to be careful who you get nutrition insight and information from. Including if you get it from me.
Happy 2016 to everyone who reads this and I hope you like the content that I'm providing. As always feel free to leave comments on here or my social media and if you do enjoy the blog than hit the subscribe button and tell your friends about it.
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