Lost 14 lbs and 2.5 Inches!

Bryan,

Figured I would drop you a line and say thank you for the information you put on your PT site. I started the program right after Thanksgiving and tested today, so I went a little over the 42 days. I moved to a desk job that allowed me to get lazy. Knowing that my PT test was coming soon I looked to your site for guidance. Well it worked, I dropped 14 pounds and 2.5" off my waist, my run could have been better but it was brutal cold for Mississippi (39 degrees) so I ended with a 13:04 run time (last week in the warm I was pushing 12:30s easy, way better then the 14s I was pushing in November). Sit-ups--I did 50--were a breeze; I could have done my push-ups, but I have profile due to bursitis in my elbow. Either way your "program" worked for me, with some "funky" type modifications. Just figured I would tell you of a success story.

Thanks,

Mike

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New Year's Resolution: Take Care of Your Health

For many of us, January 1st means getting excited about New Year's weight-loss resolutions.  Sadly, it often means being disappointed in ourselves later because we didn't follow through.  This year I propose a different approach:  Rather than resolving to lose weight, lets make the decision to improve our overall health!

Losing weight is great, but weighing less doesn't always mean being healthier.  I want to show you some simple steps you can take that will actually improve your health instead of just making the number on the scale smaller.  Rather than attacking your weight with some wacky diet and then seeing the boomerang effect on your scale a few months later, fix the problems in your body that cause weight gain in the first place.  The best part of it is, one of many happy side effects of improved health is weight loss!  So are self confidence boosts, improved attitude, more restful sleep, and lots more energy!

Make Realistic Goals and Be Committed to Change

Unfortunately, making resolutions is much easier than actually completing them. To improve your odds of success, only create a few goals, and set a time limit for when each goal should be completed. These two strategies can make achieving your goals easier and help prevent you from feeling overwhelmed.

To keep things simple, I'm going to suggest the least number of diet and lifestyle changes possible to make the greatest improvements in how you will feel every day. I promise you that once you get used to these changes, you'll never go back to your old unhealthy ways again!

Improve Your Diet

There seem to be many definitions of what a healthy diet is, making it hard to figure out exactly how to improve your diet. I've found that all effective diets have the following four things in common:

• Limit added refined sugar intake to no more than 20-30 grams per day (this does not include sugars found naturally in fresh fruits and vegetables). Constant over-consumption of refined added sugars like table sugar, high-fructose corn syrup (and regular corn syrup), honey, agave, and maple syrup can cause chronic stress and reactive hypoglycemia (a spike and crash of blood sugar levels). (1) Both chronic stress and low blood sugar can cause INTENSE cravings for more foods with added sugar (which will temporarily elevate blood sugar), causing a never-ending cycle of constant sugar consumption. (2)
  
  The easiest way to reduce your intake of refined added sugars is to reduce or avoid soda, fruit juice, candy, and baked goods. Instead, try water and real food.
• Avoid all wheat products. For most people, wheat causes all kinds of havoc in the body. Most of its destructive capacity is due to two proteins found in wheat: Gluten and wheat germ agglutinin (WGA). Gluten can cause poor nutrient absorption and inflammation. (3) WGA--which is an insecticide produced by wheat--can also cause inflammation, (4) as well as insulin resistance/sensitivity, (5) leptin resistance, (6) and altered gene expression. (7) In other words, wheat (and anything made with wheat) is really bad for your health.
  
  To avoid most of the wheat in your diet, remove all bread and pasta from your diet. If you like, you can replace these items with gluten-free versions (e.g., rice pasta).
  

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Cool Sites: Beast Skills

Lately, I've been getting into advanced calisthenics (body weight exercises like the front lever, planche, L-seat, human flag, handstand). Why? The competition Ninja Warrior. This TV show is centered around a ridiculous obstacle course and requires contestants overcome some seriously difficult obstacles, often while also hanging above the ground.

In 2011, Ninja Warrior made its way to the US. To get on the show American contestants had to demonstrate that they had enough physical strength and agility to make it through all 4 grueling stages. Some of the videos these contestants submitted would make even the most athletic person feel like a slouch.

So as I watched one submission video after another, my interest in advanced calisthenics was piqued. Since I usually only lift weights, I decided to try some of what I was seeing on the show. I started out trying the handstand and then moved on to the one-arm push-up, front and reverse levers, planche, and human flag. Although the training was (and still is) VERY difficult, it is also seriously fun!

Of course, I didn't have a clue how to do any of these exercises when I started my training. Because I don't believe in re-inventing the wheel, I started doing research for exercise tips. This is when I came across the exceptional Beast Skills website, which has several tutorials for the advanced calisthenic exercises I was attempting. Here is a list of a few of these tutorials:

• The Handstand
• The Muscle-Up
• The One-Arm Pull-Up
• The One-Arm Push-Up
• The Front Lever
• The Flag
• The L-Seat

The site also has videos of other exercises and a blog portion that discusses various fitness topics (one topic on his blog talks about training for some seriously crazy exercises like the 90-degree push-up).

I challenge you to go to the Beast Skills website and choose one of the exercises in the tutorials section to master. It doesn't matter that you can't do it now; take the time to train for it. Before you know it, you'll find yourself doing something that you may have thought impossible just a few months before. To me, that's the real fun of a good life-long exercise program.

Good luck!

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How to Build Muscle and Strength, Part 4: Nutrient Timing

In the last post I talked about how important proper nutrition is for building muscle and strength. While researching the topic of nutrition I happened across an interesting theory that argues that you could build extra muscle from your workouts by simply timing your intake of certain nutrients before and after your workouts.

After toying around with nutrient timing for a few months I have found that it will help you grow several pounds of muscle in just a couple of weeks (so long as your workouts are intense enough)!

What is Nutrient Timing?

Essentially, nutrient timing is a 24-hour eating schedule that is started by an intense 30- to 45-minute workout. By eating a few easily-digestible nutrients before and after each workout, as well as eating highly-nutritious meals in-between each workout, you can enhance how much muscle you can grow. More specifically, by correctly timing your nutrient intake you can elevate a hormone that accelerates muscle synthesis while suppressing a hormone that breaks down muscle.

Recap on Building Muscle

Before I talk about this technique, I want to recap how muscle is grown so that I can better explain why nutrient timing works so well. As I talked about in the introduction of this series, building or losing muscle can be reduced to a very simple formula:

Muscle Synthesis - Muscle Degradation =  Muscle Growth, Maintenance, or Loss

Another way of putting this is to say that if you experience:

• More muscle synthesis than muscle degradation then you grow muscle overall.
• More muscle degradation than muscle synthesis then you lose muscle overall.
• The same amount of muscle synthesis and degradation then you maintain the muscle you have. 

So, if you want to build muscle very quickly then you have to both minimize muscle degradation and enhance muscle synthesis.

Cortisol and Muscle Degradation

Of course, for you to grow muscle of any kind you have to signal a need for this additional muscle. This need can be simulated by 30-45 minutes of intense exercise 5-6 days a week. If these exercise sessions are intense enough, then hormones will be released that can enhance muscle growth.

However, the big problem with intense exercise is that the abuse that signals a need for muscle growth also creates physical stress and depletes sugar stores, both of which results in the additional release of the stress hormone cortisol. (1,2,3)

Why should you care about elevated levels of cortisol? It works against your ability to build muscle. While cortisol is dealing with stress and maintaining blood sugar levels it also does its other jobs: Mobilizing amino acids from muscle cells and slowing down immune cells as they try to fix exercise-damaged muscle cells. Taken together, cortisol can cause muscle degradation and inhibit muscle synthesis. (1,2,3)

Insulin and Muscle Synthesis

Earlier, I mentioned that muscle growth happens when there is more muscle synthesis than muscle degradation. This muscle synthesis is facilitated by anabolic hormones. While testosterone and growth hormone are the better known anabolic hormones, insulin is the muscle-growing hero of nutrient timing.

Insulin is a storage hormone that can store sugar, fat, and protein. When protein is stored in muscle (as amino acids), these muscles will grow.

Insulin not only shoves more protein and sugar into muscle cells, it also extends the life of the potent anabolic hormone insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). The longer IGF-1 remains active, the more muscle cells proliferate and grow. (4)

Finally, insulin increases blood flow to and from muscles. This speeds nutrients into exercised muscles and quickly gets rid of metabolic waste that can hinder performance, recovery, or growth. (2)

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The Six Principles of Optimal Health: #2-Avoid Toxins

"There is a growing consensus in the scientific community that small doses of pesticides and other chemicals can have adverse effects on health, especially during vulnerable periods such as fetal development and childhood." 

Andrew Weil

In the first principle of achieving optimal health, I focused primarily on the importance of eating more nutritious foods. After you start to improve the nutrient content of your diet, you then have to start focusing on avoiding as many dietary and environmental toxins as you can. While chronic exposure to individual toxins may not be very destructive to your health, collectively, these toxins can cause chronic stress and/or mess with the proper function of the endocrine system. So even if your diet is 100% on point, chronic exposure to the multitude of environmental toxins typically found in industrialized countries (especially the US) can relentlessly chip away at your health.

Being assaulted by any toxin can cause a stress response as the body detoxifies itself. If you are constantly assaulted by many toxins every day, then you can suffer from chronic stress and endocrine disruption.

•  Chronic stress brings excess cortisol which can strip muscle, increase body fat (especially abdominal fat), cause insulin resistance, sap energy, and suppress the immune system. 
• A malfunctioning endocrine system prevents the body from using hormones correctly to manage essential life processes. 

Both chronic stress and endocrine disruption accelerate the development and progression of disease.

Of course, nature is full of dangerous chemicals. I'm not talking about these natural toxins. I'm talking about man-made dietary and environmental toxins that are a consequence industrialization. These toxins were largely an unintended consequence of the Industrial (both first and second) and Green Revolutions. While these revolutions lifted peasants out of poverty and produced an abundance of calories, it also allowed for the creation of dangerous synthetic chemicals, destructive pollutants, and unhealthy pseudo-foods.

Environmental Toxins

I'll start this section off with a little history. In most industrialized nations, unhealthy exposure to environmental toxins really started with the heart of the Industrial Revolution: The steam engine. For the steam engine to work, it needed lots of heat, which came from the combustion of large amounts of low-quality coal. When this coal was burned, it released toxic smoke and soot, which was disposed of by simply funneling it out of smoke stacks. Unfortunately, this smoke and soot eventually came back down to the Earth, literally turning whole cities black. This smoke and soot also had a terrible impact on the health of people who worked and lived around cities that used coal. (1) 

An artist's depiction of early industrial pollution.

While electricity eventually helped to reduce coal use, some places were slow to embrace this change. (1) This was punctuated in 1952 in London when the pollution from commercial and private coal use, combined with automobile exhaust and very calm weather, produced a thick and persistent 5-day cover of yellow and black tinted smog that resulted in an estimated 12,000 deaths (and over 100,000 cases of respiratory infection/aggravation). (2) 

A London police officer tries to protect himself from The Great Smog with a "smog mask."

The Industrial Revolution didn't just pollute the air, it also polluted water. Of course, humans have unknowingly polluted their water sources with raw sewage for many centuries. Sometimes this pollution was so bad that it led to many outbreaks of infectious diseases like typhoid and cholera (however, the connection between human waste and infectious disease wasn't realized until 1854). 

But industrial waste water was something else, adding both conventional (e.g., oil and grease) and unconventional (e.g., mercury, lead, and cadmium) pollutants into common waterways. By the 1950s and 60s, waster water pollution had gotten so bad in Ohio that the Cuyahoga River actually caught on fire several times during these two decades. In other places, many species of fish became so polluted with mercury that they were unsafe to eat.   

The degree of pollution in the Cuyahoga River was so bad in some places that it could coat a person's hand in oil and grease. These oils slicks would occasionally catch on fire. 

Finally, the advances of the 20th century gave rise to another deadly form of pollution: Synthetic chemicals (e.g., dyes, insecticides, plastics, and fertilizers). Although many of these chemicals have no known effect on human health, a few of these chemicals were found to mimic the hormone estrogen (e.g., PCB, BPA). Unlike natural estrogen, the body cannot control the action of these estrogen mimickers, causing endocrine disruption. (4)

This picture shows how the man-made pollutant polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) can move up the food chain. As it moves up, it concentrates. This means that phytoplankton will have the least amount of PCBs while the herring gull (or humans) will have the most.

Today, government regulation has reduced or eliminated much of this earlier pollution. And even though air, soil, and water quality has improved, there is still environmental toxins hanging around. Burning fossil fuels releases air pollutants. Residues of banned synthetic chemicals (e.g., dioxin, PCB) are still found in waterways. And endocrine-disrupting pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers pollute soil, water, and food products. Being exposed to any of these toxins on a daily basis can cause chronic stress (and disease) in the body.  

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Success Story: Now Taking Care of My Health

I've always been kind of a pudgy guy.  Even after I joined the Air Force and went through boot camp I could still pinch well over an inch around the ol' midsection.  Even after I had mandatory PT four times a week almost every week during which I ran for miles, did push-ups and sit-ups and jumping jacks in formation; in unison to a four-count bellowed by somebody with all seriousness.  Even in my late teens I was still soft around the middle, and not very muscular.  And so it went, for years and years... seven and one-half years in the Air Force, all the while barely passing my annual fitness evaluations.  I'd cram for each PT test, "study" if you will...

"Crap!" I'd say.  "I have a PT test in two weeks!  I need to get in shape!"

This (obviously) was the wrong approach, but since I spent the better part of the rest of my life trying to decide where and when to eat (largely contingent on who had the best margarita specials, two-for-one coronas, dollar drafts, etc. etc...), my annual fitness evaluation seemed more an inconvenience than anything else.  Come time for me to shine, I'd push, grunt and sweat my way to a barely passing score and then return to my usual loafing.  At the time it all seemed good enough; at least I was having fun.

Years after I got out of the military I was still sort of depending on my youthful metabolism and luck when it came to being "in shape".  Then I started to get fat... and it made me nervous.  I hadn't really changed anything about my lifestyle, but I found myself breathing more heavily, getting winded more quickly, snoring louder, getting tired more...until I was peeking over thirty extra pounds of pudge just to see those little numbers on the bathroom scale.  Not to mention someone was sneaking in at night and pumping a few more psi of air into my spare tire. 

That sneaky bastard!

It was right around this time that I moved to Missouri, where I happened to settle in a few miles away from an old friend from back in the day:  Bryan Mayo.  As it turned out, Bryan had recently become particularly interested in the areas of personal fitness and nutrition.  He began ravenously soaking up information from every possible source and he shared the best points with me as he went, sending me his condensed notes on all sorts of nutrition and fitness books that he had recently devoured.  One such book was "The Paleo Solution" by Rob Wolfe.

"Read it."  he said, with no small amount of conviction.

"Okay."  I replied, since I had no reason not to.

I read it, and between that and Bryan's prodding I finally decided to have a real go at being healthy for a change.  Once I read that book, I understood why Bryan was so passionate about understanding what it means to really be healthy.  I'd been doing everything wrong.  Even the stuff I'd been doing in an attempt to stay reasonably not-too-fat wasn't doing me any good and was actually harming me.  It blew my mind; it was as if I'd tasted the truth and now I wanted more of it! 

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The Squadron Program

Having been in the USAF as long as I have, I'm pretty experienced when it comes to squadron PT programs. From flutter kicks to arm circles to body weight circuit training, I've seen many different approaches to getting a squadron physically fit. While some of these programs were pretty well thought out, quite a few had me asking, "What does this have to do with the PT test?"

The Importance of Training Specificity

Generally, when I ask this question I find that a squadron's PT program is more geared towards getting people to become more active than to efficiently and effectively train them for their PT test. In my opinion, the priority of all PTLs leading squadron PT should be to physically condition its members so that they can easily achieve an 80 or better on their PT test.

This brings me to a critical aspect of any training program: Training specificity. (1) A person's success or failure with any test depends very much on how specifically the training simulated the challenge.

For example, doing nothing but pull-ups will not help an individual with the push-up because the muscles involved in the pull-up have little to do with the muscles involved in the push-up. Training in pull-ups will also have little to no impact on running times because an individual's upper body has little to do with running performance. So, if someone wants to improve their push-ups, then they need to do push-up-style exercises. If they want to improve their run times, then they have to run (or do leg strength exercises).

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