Mister, if you’re over 30, your testosterone numbers are declining.  40+? There’s a reason you may be feeling older.  Here’s what to know and what to do to boost your testosterone.

A FEW of my male 40-plus aged friends and I regularly talk about how we hope to boost our testosterone numbers, which naturally decline as we get older.

Some other guys think it strange that we speak so freely about it, as if a man’s testosterone numbers should be kept as close a guarded secret as… well, you get the drift.

I figure that aging brings an assortment of challenges to one’s door, and you can either respond to the knocking and do something about this uninvited guest, or ignore it as it endeavors to burn your house down.

What the hell am I talking about!?

Well, there is that old saying that,

“Aging is not for sissies.”

Which means to me that aging presents an assortment of unsavory challenges, and either you can ignore and thus succumb to age-based limitations earlier then is necessary, or you can rise to the occasion and fight back.

Sissies don’t fight back.

My compadres and I do.  And the one big, age-old villain we fight is declining testosterone.

For men, testosterone and other related hormones begin to decline from age 30 onward at a rate of one to three percent annually.  This adds up!  By the age of 40, many men complain that they’re feeling “older”.

Aging is just one reason for this decline.  There are a host of other contributing and age-related factors, such as:

• Body fat (especially belly fat, and therefore increasing aromatase activity)
• Oxidative damage to tissues responsible for the production of testosterone
• Reduction in testicular testosterone synthesis
• Declining levels of precursor molecules, such as DHEA
• Nutritional status and liver function    (Source)

Should Men Care About Declining Testosterone?

The answer to that question depends on what you want out of life.  If you’re fine with gradually becoming more passive, physically inactive, sexually active, soft-bodied and thin boned… than, no, you don’t need to fuss about testosterone.

In his book, The Life Plan, Dr. Jeffry Life gets specific with some of the signs of low testosterone, where on page 271 he lists these:

Declining sexual and physical energy

Decline in the frequency of early morning erections

Decline in the number of spontaneous erections

Disturbed sleep

Emotional swings, irritability, anxiety, depression

Foggy thinking, memory lapses

Increased cardiovascular issues

Loss of strength

Poor skin tone and saggy, wrinkled skin

Reduced lean muscle, higher body fat

Weak bones, osteopenia, osteoporosis

This seems to be what some doctors assume their male patients are willing to accept from mid-life onward, because the conventional view is that since testosterone naturally declines as men age, why mess with it?

That conventional view presents a recommended range that is lower than ideal. 

Let’s use me as an example.

As I wrote in the post, Fellas, How Sturdy Is Your Morning Wood, I recently, and for the first time, had an extensive blood test panel done offered by the Life Extension Foundation (LEF), which is called the Male Comprehensive Hormone Panel.

The blood giving process is simple:

1. You go to a (hopefully) nearby blood test lab and have blood drawn.
2. The blood is shipped overnight to three labs, each performing a different test.
3. The resulting report is then sent to the LEF, which emails and/or mails the report to you.
4. You then can spend up to one-half hour reviewing the results with a LEF doctor on the phone who, invariably, will make some suggestions about what LEF supplements can help with whatever needs help.

(There is another method that tests for testosterone and other things via saliva, but I know little about this technique at the moment.  Mike Maher offers a test here, which you need to scroll down to once on the site. And read Dr. John Lee’s article too.)

Many years of a nutritious diet, supplementation and exercise helped to get me the sterling blood test results I got for every measure (such as cholesterol, prostrate, blood health, etc.) except one.

Yes, my testosterone was low.

To look at me, this might illicit surprise, for I’m fairly muscular, fairly lean, have enough energy to do what I want to do, and (if the opportunity would ever present itself) am interested and able to frolic in the hay.

These could be attributes you possess as well.  And yet, like me, odds are if you’re a Baby Boomer, or close to this generation, you too are low in testosterone-based hormonal levels optimal for you.

It’s hard to definitively know if you are or are not low in testosterone without a test, although the aforementioned Dr. Life says morning erections are one indicator, as I wrote about here.

That said, it would be helpful to know what is the blue ribbon standard for a healthy, manly man’s testosterone range.  And that’s where the confusion starts.

Testosterone By The Numbers

So, I went to the lab, spilled my blood into several test tubes, and after about a week, the results were emailed to me.

I scanned three pages of results, checking how each obscure number related to the “Reference Interval” (the Lab Range), which indicates where my number stood in the acceptable range.

Several numbers leaped out in a favorable way because they were so good.  But not so for testosterone.

This is what my “testosterone blood panel” measured:

- Testosterone is the principal male sex hormone and an anabolic steroid hormone from the androgen group. In mammals, testosterone is primarily secreted in the testes of males and the ovaries of females, although small amounts are also secreted by the adrenal glands.

Testosterone levels peak in a man at approximately the age of 30. By the age of 40, 5% of men are thought by conventional standards to have low testosterone, although specialists in this area assert that the number is very much higher. By the time a man is 70, his testosterone has declined by 40-50%.

- Free Testosterone is the form of testosterone that many specialists in the hormone world believe is the best way to test for testosterone activity because it is the active form of the hormone; it’s freely available in the blood, and thus able to actually “work” on your tissues.

- Pregnenolone is often referred to as the “mother” or “ultimate” hormone because it is like a hormonal building block, given that it’s used to make other hormones such as DHEA, estrogen, progesterone and testosterone.

- Dihydrotestosterone (DHEA) gets secreted by the adrenal glands, is then converted into DHEA-S (S for Sulfate), which then circulates through the body. DHEA is a precursor for many other hormones, including testosterone and estrogen, and like many hormones, it declines as you age, about 10% per decade from age 30 for both men and women.

- Estradiol is the predominant sex hormone present in females. It is also present in males, and, surprisingly, exists at a higher level because it is being constantly produced in men. In females it is only produced three out of 30 days of her cycle. Estradiol is produced in the gonads and by precursor hormones. Testosterone is converted by aromatization to estradiol, which, depending on the amount, can put men into androphase, the so-called male menopause.

These hormones are measured in:

“ng/dL” (nanograms per deciliter),
“pg/mL” (picogram per milliliter), and
“ug/mL” (microgram per milliliter).

So, that said, let’s take a look at the testosterone part of my blood panel.

In the table below, I present my test results, the range the lab suggests is appropriate for an adult male, and the more ideal range promoted by the Life Extension Foundation (“LEF”).

*No Lab Range listed.
**This range was not found on LEF’s site, but was cited by the LEF doctor who went over the blood test results with me.

Regarding the table above, note that:

- My Testosterone, Serum, Free Testosterone and DHEA numbers are within the Lab Range, albeit on the low side, but are well below the lowest number of the range recommended by LEF, which I think are more optimal.

- My Pregnenolone and Dihydrotestosterone numbers are below the range cited by either the Lab or LEF.

- My Estradiol number is near the mid-mark of the Lab range, but just under bottom of the LEF Range.  This appears to be quite good.

According to a study cited by LEF, men with serum estradiol levels between 21.80 and 30.11 pg/mL – the ideal range touted by LEF — had the fewest deaths. Those with estradiol levels of 37.40 pg/mL or above experienced death rates  133% above those in the ideal range, and the lowest estradiol group with estradiol levels under 12.90 pg/mL suffered a 317% increased death rate.

So, the conclusion here is that when it comes to Estradiol, a mid-range number is key.

How You Can Improve Your Testosterone Numbers

I’m a bit nervous here because at this point I may have convinced you how important it is to know your testosterone numbers, and, if low, do something about it, but I don’t have some natural, fool-proof, one-size-fits-all “do this” formula for you.

Yes, the standard way to boost testosterone is to go to a doctor who specializes in hormone balancing and choose one of four methods:

1. Transdermal gels, creams or patches, each containing a prescribed amount of testosterone;
2. Pellets that are surgically implanted into your skin whereby testosterone slowly leaks into your body as the pellets dissolve;
3. Human chorionic gonadotropin injections in the abdomen stimulate the testicles to create more testosterone, a method less effective for those 50+; and
4. Intramuscular injections done each week.

If your insurance does not pay for this, it may cost you about $200 per month.

Despite my desire to boost my own testosterone-based hormone numbers, I’m going to try to do it “naturally”.  Yes, it’s likely to be cheaper than being under a doctor’s care, but it will also be a slower and less proven path.  What can I say… I like to do it my way.

Here’s what I’ve done already to boost my testosterone:

- Have lost five of the 10 last pounds steadfastly clinging to my body.  Body fat messes with testosterone – less fat, more testosterone is generally true.

- Added High Intensity Interval Training (“HIIT”) to my workouts.  HIIT makes the body dramatically increase its production of Human Growth Hormone and testosterone, a subject I write about in the post, How To Boost Your Human Growth Hormone In 20 Minutes.

- Increased my consumption of protein.  Since I eat no red meat, and little of any other kind, this meant increasing protein powder consumption.  At most meals and snacks, I now use a combination of whey, rice, pea, hemp and various high protein sprouted grains that are pulverized into a powder.

- Began consuming the following testosterone-boosting supplements: DHEA, Tribulus Terrestris, Magnesium Oil, Stinging Nettles and Ginseng extracts.

Supplementing with DHEA was the only suggestion made by LEF’s physician who reviewed my blood work. Well, OK, he’s the doctor and so I am doing this, but carefully, because DHEA can augment estradiol as well as testosterone… I’m not ready for those man-boobs yet.

There is a long list of other possible, natural testosterone-boosting supplements that you can read about at PeakTestosterone.com.  Just search at that site to your heart’s content.

In subsequent posts, I’ll present the results of my testosterone-boosting endeavor, but this will take a few months… not only to give the workouts, diet and supplements a chance to work, but to take another test to see what the new numbers are.

Speaking of tests, man, without one, you’re running blind.  Yes, that morning erection – or lack thereof – may give you a clue, but it’s not exactly a science.  So, choose either a blood or saliva test and take it from there.

Conclusions

OK, let’s close out this meandering post.

By now you should have gleaned the following:

• The testosterone-based hormonal numbers cited as acceptable depend on your perspective – do you want to hang with the pack, or optimize?  There’s a marked difference between what some doctors deem acceptable and what might be optimal in order for you to richly experience life.

• Testosterone is affected by both behavior (diet, exercise, sleep, etc.) and aging.  You can improve your numbers either by either taking pharmaceutically derived testosterone, or doing it via natural supplementation and behavioral changes.

• You can’t determine the journey without first knowing from whence you start, so get a saliva or blood test and know your numbers.

Check out the list of resources below, ask questions, or submit comments in the Comments section below, and have a nice day.

Over and out.

Resources

Male Hormone Restoration

Female Hormone Restoration

DHEA Dosing and Safety Precautions

Important Tools for Disease Prevention

Testosterone is great but Dihydrotestosterone is the king of all male androgens!

PeakTestosterone.com

17 Rapid Fat Loss Tips

Six Best of 2010 — Food, Diet and Nutrition

Related posts:

1. Men’s Health Supplements for Prostate and Testosterone
2. How I’m Boosting Testosterone and Blasting Fat
3. Boost Your Human Growth Hormone in 20 Minutes!

Hey you aging athletes!  The key to sustained physical awesomeness is exercising smarter. Being injury free is the key!  Here are some pointers and a few common injuries to avoid.

NO MATTER how awesome you are as a physical specimen, there is a fact of life that you’d be well advised to absorb:

Time matters.

And with time comes age.

Though we may rail against it, and act in various, specific ways to push it over the horizon, age happens.

It’s not all bad.

Certainly, getting comfortable in your skin, learning what in life can be (or is) worth changing and coming to terms with what is not, gaining wisdom and old friends – these things are the upside of getting long in the tooth.

However, in the physical realm, certain things are diminished with age.  If, like me, you seek to make that body stay as strong for as long as you can, understanding not only what to do, but how to pace things are essential for remaining fit as the clock ticks away.

As I’ve been hobbling around these past three weeks with a very sore Achilles tendon, I realize that this is a lesson that I keep relearning.

The Amigos: Four Case Studies

Mitch, Dan, Lance and yours truly will be used as examples to underscore a few pointers on managing injury-free fitness for the long run.

We four have been friends since college years.  All of us are former athletes.  All have maintained an unusually high level of fitness relative to our peers.  We’re all now in our fifties.

And we’re all painfully learning, slowly and with resistance, the aging athlete’s ultimate lesson: In the long run, less winds up being more.

Mitch

Since a teenage lad, Mitch’s thing has been cross-country running.  He still holds a high school record. In his thirties, he added competitive kayaking. Over the years, he has won many contests and still competes in local races in both sports.  Basically, the guy’s a bad ass who can push his body harder than his competitors can push theirs.

Dan

Dan played basketball in high school and college. In the decades since school, like Mitch, he’s competed in running races, and was very competitive in distances between 400 meters to five kilometers.  Interspersed with the running, Dan has pretty regularly pumped iron. He gets large and strong fast.

Lance

Lance was born with bulging muscles.  A California state-ranked wrestler in high school, he became the University of California, Santa Barbara’s most salient example of an exercise nut.  On any given day, you could watch Lance blazing by, probably on a run to the weight room where he’d work-out, not pausing between sets, for a 1.5 hours of intensity.  (I know because I was often with him, always a few steps behind.) He dropped the running, mostly, post college, took up bodybuilding, won a Hawaiian island contest, and earned a second-degree black belt in Kempo. He is such a consistent exerciser, that many Hawaiians set their clocks to Lance’s arrival each morning at the gym – 5:30 AM.

Joe

I’m the dilettante of the group.  I did play an organized sport in high school and college (b-ball), but since then have not competed.  In keeping with the overarching theme of my career of being a jack of all trades, master of none, my physical pursuits have been more broad than deep.  On any given day I might be “doing” yoga, barbells, kettle bells, calisthenics, biking, sprinting stairs, meditating, detox cleansing, juicing, or simply drooling.

Our common connection, other than friendship, has been our pursuit of fitness while managing our injuries.

If you’re anything like us, you can expect to deal with certain injuries as you attempt to maintain the exercise effort and frequency of your youth.  This is inadvisable.

What we need to do as we age is get smarter about exercise.  In this case, smarter means doing more preparation before, and more recuperation after exercise.

Smarter also means using less resistance with more form.

Everyone is different and so your vulnerabilities may not be mine, but there are a few body parts about which we all ought to be more cautious.

Calves

All four of us have developed “tweaks” in our calves that have completely altered how we approach running.  This is an ailment common to aging athletes.

Dan, Lance and Mitch would scoff at my use of the word, “tweaks”, because their calf injuries have been of sufficient prevalence and intensity to have made them stop running completely for long swaths of time.

When this happens, Mitch throws as leg over his bike, Dan pumps weights, and Lance (whose always pumping weights anyway) beats up his gym’s stair machine.

What I do is more formulaic.

I do the cold/hot thing in the beginning of the injury.  When no longer benefiting from that, I take a lacrosse ball and knead the muscles in my injured calf and stretch it intensely. Once I can again walk without limping, the bike gets saddled up. Next, I’ll tentatively reintroduce stair sprints, they being favored over running, as I find this activity less impactful to my calves.

Resources:

Various Calf Stretches on Youtube
http://www.mobilitywod.com/  Search for “Calves”.

Knees

My mother is not part of this “case study” per se, but she is one grand data point that underscores a near-certainty: If you are chronically tight in your hips, ankles, quadriceps and an assortment of other muscles and ligaments, you’re knees will suffer.

Mom has just had her second knee replaced.

Naturally, there are exceptions.  Dan has the flexibility of a two-by-four, but his knees are bulletproof.  Lance’s knees are fine too, probably due to a lifetime of both strength training and stretching.  Mitch, however, has at least one knee that competes with his calves for attention, and has yet to figure out how to solve this recurring issue.

Me?  Well, every once in awhile one knee or another shouts at me, but I find that a few yoga postures makes them mute.

If you have knee issues, test the mobility of your lower body.

-Can you comfortably sit cross-legged?

-Can you easily touch your toes while your knees are only slightly unlocked?

-Can you perform various quad stretches?

-Can you “sit” in the “peasant squat”?

Resources:

18 Tips for Bulletproof Knees
Yoga for Knee Restoration
http://www.mobilitywod.com/  Search for “knees”.

Shoulders

I’d like to know how Lance has been able to regularly hoist 175 pounds over his head in his seated, behind-the-neck shoulder press exercise during the last 30 years without decimating his shoulders.

Mitch and Dan have no shoulder issues, but haven’t abused them either.

I haven’t been so lucky.

A few years ago, I started getting a twinge in my right deltoid while doing shoulder presses.  One morning I got up and I could barely lift my arm. It got worse.

The diagnosis was “adhesive capsulitis”, commonly referred to as “frozen shoulder”.

As the name suggests, adhesive capsulitis is the condition whereby fibrous bands of material (think scar tissue) form between the shoulder joint surfaces that do two things:

1. Causes a remarkable decline in shoulder mobility, and
2. Creates deep, constant throbbing pain.

This ailment completely stopped all physical activity.  You’d think that an upper body issue wouldn’t affect your lower body, but au contraire, dear reader… during the time I fussed with this injury, the only caloric expenditure occurring on a regular basis came from whimpering.

Physical therapy was, for me, worthless.  Those little stretchy bands that you’re taught to anchor to a door so you can pull it at various angles did nothing to help.

What did work for me was to grit my teeth in pain as a former orthopedic surgeon from China now working as an acupuncturist in California grabbed my arm and tore through the adhesion as he jerked it around.

Strange, given his ethnicity, that is name is “Rocky”.

His office walls are adorned with testimonials from grateful patients who now amble about walking on their hands, or some such.

I focused upon these signals of success while he manipulated my shoulder and looked at whimpering me in near disgust, whispering that the Chinese are tougher than we white devils.

In between torture sessions with Rocky, my homework was to grab something as high as I could reach that was immovable and hang on it.

At first, I could only painfully reach to eye level. I would tenaciously grip onto a barbell resting on a rack and tentatively bend my knees, thereby loading weight on my throbbing shoulder, till the pain got strong.

And there I held myself, concentrating on my breath.

Each day, I cold reach a tiny bit higher, and apply more weight.  Soon, I was hanging by one arm, and that frozen shoulder was completely thawed.

Though there is a solution to a frozen shoulder, the process is long, arduous and painful.  Better to not put yourself into that position. Be gentle on your shoulders. I suggest:

- Thoroughly warm-up with light weights, perhaps lateral raises with dumbbells, and various shoulder stretches before you add load.

- Don’t do barbell presses behind the head.  Dumbbell presses and front presses are good enough.

- Rather than lift heavy, lift slow (five seconds up, five down), which will increase intensity with lighter weight.

-  Stretch after your shoulder workouts.

Resources:

A Light Workout for Injured Shoulders
Shoulder Stretching and Rehabilitation
http://www.mobilitywod.com/  Search for “shoulders”.

Achilles Heel

My Achilles heel is my Achilles heel.  Both of them, it seems.  The other dudes highlighted in this post sometimes get sore tendons -– sufficient to lavish them with tender mercies – but this is not their weak point.

Not so for me…

Some years ago, I was dribbling at the top of the key in a pick-up basketball game, deciding upon which of my many dazzling moves I would employ to off-balance my opponent as I exploded to the basket.

I stepped forward with my left foot and somebody with a bat smacked my heel hard.

Swirling around, I dropped the ball and clenched my fist ready to do battle.

Imagine my surprise when I saw no one and no bat.  And that I was dragging my left foot.

When the Achilles tendon snaps there’s often an audible sound.  My brain instantaneously connected that sound to getting hit with a bat, no doubt because the basketball court was beside a baseball field.

Befuddled, I slowly lowered my fists, faced my fellow slack-jawed players, and followed their gaze down to my floppy foot.

Can you believe that I spent the next three days hobbling around the house determined to believe that I was experiencing yet another of those painful ankle twists of my bygone b-ball playing years?

Well, the surgeon showed me a simple test to determine if your Achilles tendon is still intact.

Put the knee of the offending leg on a chair so that your thigh is perpendicular to the floor, and your lower leg is half on and half off the chair.  Reach down and squeeze the tendon just under the bottom of the calf.  If your foot moves, the tendon is still intact, although it could be only partially so.  If your foot is unresponsive, it’s time to see the doctor.

If severed, you can either have it surgically connected or have your lower leg put in a casket.  I did the former.

The tendon is now thicker, and presumably, stronger than before, but the calf never returned to its former, full, thick b-ball, glory, despite a lot of exercises thrown at it.

Which brings me to what inspired this whole, long post to begin with – my right Achilles tendon. (You’ve just been reading about my left one.)

For near the last three weeks, I’ve been limping.  I did what I’m no longer supposed to do — play basketball.

I was in Santa Barbara and was asked to join a few friends for a half-court game.  I didn’t immediately say “yes”.  I paused and ruminated for a beat or two about unintended consequences.  I remembered that the last game I played was in Santa Barbara with the same group of guys.

That ended in a sprained calf muscle.

But this time it should be different, I reasoned.  After all, I’m now about two months into some high intensity interval training wherein I sprint up stairs, perform certain plyometrics and jump rope.

Surely, this is sufficient preparation?

For the first game, it was.  During the second game, I – again – strained a muscle in my left calf.  As I hobbled off the court, I also noticed some soreness in my right leg’s Achilles tendon, but the throbbing of the calf overshadowed it.

It only took a few days for the calf to heal, but the Achilles tendon took its place on the injury list.  I’m still limping around and being careful not to exacerbate the problem.

The moral of this story is to know your limitations and behave accordingly.  If I want to return to basketball, I will need to begin slowly and practice drills specific to it.

Even then, I’d be taking a chance.

My Achilles tendon injury has kept me from continuing with and improving my fitness with the high intensity exercises I had been doing.  And that’s what often happens as you get older and do not sufficiently prepare for or recover from exercise – you get injured and lose those (very) hard-earned fitness gains.

It’s much smarter to subscribe to ambitions that you can actually maintain.

Resources:

Achilles Tendon Injuries
http://www.mobilitywod.com/  Search for “Achilles tendon”.

Lower Back

I own this one. My buddies have yet to encounter this problem.

For me, my back problem didn’t assail me in my dotage, but rather in the prime of life, and caused an early end to my basketball career.

I have a long torso.  As a teenager, I worked my upper and lower body, but entirely neglected my core, including my lower back.  The result was a large upper and lower body connected by a long spindly middle.  Yes, my waist was trim, but so was my lower back, bereft as it was of muscle.

I was in my junior year of college playing in a pick-up b-ball game on an outside court.  This guy I was covering drove to my left. I quickly shuffled my feet to place my body in his path and cut off his drive to the basket, but with the deftness of a mongoose, he spun to my right.  My slow, clumsy feet could not keep up, so as my momentum was moving left, I twisted right and reached for the ball.

Snap.

Well, not exactly a snap.  The spine stayed intact, but two disks encapsulated within its vertebrae were squished and pushed out.  I had herniated two disks in my lower spine, the so-called “L-4” and “L-5” (“L” for lumbar and “4”/”5” designating which vertebrae).

I didn’t crumble to the floor.  I wanted to, but my spine wouldn’t let me.  I couldn’t stand.  Again, I wanted to, but my spine wouldn’t let me.  I was locked in a sideways, slightly forward, bent position, and trembling.

I was in shock.

My college girlfriend was watching the game. She wheeled her bike over. I leaned on it as we slowly walked to the campus version of a hospital.

For the next 10 years, L-4 and L-5 were the bane of my existence, as I would repeatedly heal and re-injure myself.

You know that adage about making lemonade out of lemons?  Well, this injury was my lemon, and the lemonade I made of it came from my efforts to heal myself.

I put myself on a path to learn meditation for pain control, yoga to gain muscle balancing, mobility and flexibility, nutrition to speed up healing and grow the muscle that my lower back so needed.

Now I have a flexible and strong back, though I will not challenge it with heavy dead lifts, which brings me to an assertion that you post 40-year olds ought to carefully consider:

It’s no longer about heavy weights.  At this point, bragging rights come from consistency and mobility.

Of course you can deny that you need to accommodate your age.  Indeed, it could be that you’re just as strong and can still run as well as you ever have.

An extreme few of you who could dunk in college may even be able to do it after 40.  But know that even former NBA players lose that ability with age, because one of the first things to go is explosiveness.

Resources:

Low Back Exercises on Youtube
Mayo Clinic: Back exercises in 15 minutes a day (slide show)

Exercise for the Long Life

One of these fine days I’m going to redo this blog and fully align it with my focus, which is living a long and strong life.

It is my intention to live a long and strong life and I’m often asking myself if whatever I happen to be doing (or thinking!) supports or undermines that intention.

Of course, genetics will play a role, but as the science of epigenetics demonstrates, adopting the right behaviors will overcome weak genetics.

“Genetics loads the gun, but behavior pulls the trigger.”

There are a hundred large and small things that constitute the “right” behaviors to maximize the length and quality of life.

Exercise is a big one.

The science clearly shows that exercise enables a person to live a longer and higher quality of life.  I’ve written a few posts about this, such as these:

New Research: Muscles = Longevity,

Here’s How Exercise Slows the Aging Process, and

Three Months to Longer Life.

But, as mentioned already, the key to exercise as we get older is to choose routines that:

- Maintain or slowly improve building muscle,

- Maintain or slowly improve mobility (flexibility over the full range of motion), and

- Maintain or slowly improve aerobic and anaerobic capacity.

So, focus more on:

- Form rather than heavy weights,

- Moving through resistance slowly rather than explosively,

- Thorough warm-up routines rather than jumping into the main routine, and

- Thorough post-exercise stretching rather than heading straight to the shower.

Over and out.

P.S.  If you’d like to get a conversation going about any of this, begin it by making a comment in the Comments section below.

Related posts:

1. The Reboot Cleanse Diet – Two Common Struggles
2. Here’s Why Exercise Slows the Aging Process
3. Watch: Aging… Let’s Slow it Down! (Barbara Walters)

Your testosterone is low and body fat’s high.  It often works that way.  Improve one and the other improves too. This post details what I’m doing to measure and manage nutritional inputs as I endeavor to boost my testosterone and blast away some body fat.

PETER DRUCKER famously said that what gets measured gets managed.  When it comes to food and drink, most of us just consume it without much regard to what or how much is going down the hatch.

That’s fine if you’re OK with the status quo, but if you want to lose fat, gain muscle, cultivate more energy and get healthier, than the default must change.

You must measure in order to manage whatever new set of actions (food/drink/exercise/sleep) you adopt.

Which brings me to a few of the things that I’ve been measuring of late.

During most of my adult life, I’ve tried to do stuff that make sense to me – proper nutrition, exercise, and supplementation sorta stuff.  Some months I’d look trim and feel strong, and other months not particularly so.  Rarely having a goal in mind, I took this typical +/- 10% variation in stride, thinking that as long as I hovered within a tight (5%) band, all is well.

But now, if you haven’t noticed, I’m blogging about health matters.  I’m also getting older.  (Thanks for not noticing that!) Both these facts conspire to make me more cognizant of Peter Drucker’s truism, and to be motivated to measure things.

What I’m Measuring to Manage

I’ve started measuring what I eat, drink, weigh, body fat, body water percentage, daily caloric intake capacity, metabolic age and bone mass.

Let’s break down the actions I’ve taken into two compartments: testosterone and body fat.  Conveniently, the actions that boost one also diminish the other.

Testosterone

In the post entitled, How to Measure And Boost Your Testosterone, I make the point that men over 40 years of age typically have declining testosterone.

This creeps up on you slowly like the proverbial frog in the pan, and changes your life.  Energy levels decline, the belly gets over-sized, lean muscle mass declines, sexual appetite becomes inversely related to food appetite, etc.

Even though I’ve been a life-long exerciser and nutritious eater, it happened to me.

When I got my testosterone tested a couple of months ago, I found myself nicely nestled into the statistics: My testosterone numbers were low.

[Get the story of how I tested myself and the testosterone test results here: Boost Your Testosterone Naturally.]

Not too surprising.

The reason that the low testosterone numbers didn’t surprise me is that I have some of the symptoms of low testosterone; namely:

• Complacency: I’m not leaping out of bed ready to do battle.
• Body Fat: It’s over 15%, my former self-imposed ceiling.
• Libido: Now, where did that go?

But if you walked in my shoes, you might have been surprised by a low testosterone outcome, because unless you know what to look for, you might think that all is well being Joe Garma.

For instance, in my case — notwithstanding the three symptoms listed above — I’m very fit for my age and fairly muscular.  One might think that this would mean that my testosterone is just fine.

And yet, it’s not “just fine”, as you can read about here and here.

The reason I know this is that I had an extensive blood panel done via the Life Extension Foundation’s Male Comprehensive Hormone Panel Blood Test.

(You can get a less expensive test that just measures testosterone levels with the
Male Testosterone Panel Blood Test.)

I reviewed my test results during a 20-minute conversation with a Life Extension Foundation doctor.  After I hung up, I took a deep breath and got into gear:

1. I purchased and am using some testosterone-boosting supplements; namely:
DHEA, Magnesium Oil, Stinging Nettles, Indole-3-Carbinol, Chrysin (combined in the amazing Super MiraForte), Branched Chain Amino Acids and Tribulus Terrestris, (also known as puncture vine).

(I take many more supplements than these, ones that target inflammation, cell oxidation (anti-oxidants), joints, detoxification, etc., which I’ll describe in a future post.)

2. My protein intake was increased to about 75% in grams of my weight in pounds: 0.75 x 212 = 159 grams (or thereabout); much of it taken through supplementation (protein powders), such as whey (ImmunePlex from ProHealth) and raw organic sprouts (Raw Organic Protein from Garden of Life).

(Note: There’s nothing magical about this 75% “formula” – you’ll find a variety of recommendations for protein as related to body weight, but the point is that the more you break down muscle via exercise, the more protein you’ll need. And, by the way, if you’re looking to pack on muscle, get strong and optimize your hormones (aka testosterone), check out Mike Maher’s Advanced Kettlebell/hormone optimization DVD.)

3. The intensity of my workouts increased, principally by adding Human Growth Hormone-producing high intensity interval training as described in Drs. Mercola and Campbell in the post, How To Boost Your Human Growth Hormone In 20 Minutes.

I’ll continue with this for four months and then either do another blood test, or saliva test to learn if I’ve been able to bump up the testosterone numbers.

Body Fat

I have one of those body fat scales, a Tanita BC534 Glass InnerScan Body Composition Monitor.  Bought it a few years back, stood on the thing and then gave it the middle finger when it told me how fat I was.

“Thing must be broken”, I muttered behind my waving finger.

Yes, it is true that this type of scale isn’t completely accurate, although it should do a good job of tracking percent body fat change, up or down, from whatever mark you begin with.

(For more on my wrestling match with my body fat and attempts to accurately measure it, please read Just Exactly How Fat Are You Anyway.)

Thus, I’m standing on the scale twice per week and scribbling down my numbers, which in addition to weight and percent body fat, the scale attempts to measure:

- Body Fat % -– the amount of body fat as a proportion of body weight.

- Body Water Percentage – the total amount of fluid in the body as a percent of total weight.

- Daily Caloric Intake – the sum of calories for basal metabolism, activity metabolism and diet-induced thermogenesis.

- Metabolic Age – the average age associated with the basil metabolic rate.

- Bone Mass – the amount of bone (bone mineral level, calcium or other minerals) in the body.

When introducing these measurements I used the word, “attempts” cause god only knows how in the heck it produces accurate numbers for these things.  For instance, the Daily Caloric Intake number for me routinely is between 3,826 and 3,895 – more than 1,000 calories than I consume per day.

So, with the Tanita scale, the point is to measure and record changes from the original baseline numbers.  I want the body fat to go down, the water percentage to go up, the metabolic age to go down, the bone mass to go up, and the daily caloric intake to just continue to confuse me.

Including the scale, the breakdown of what I’m doing to measure fat-producing related things is:

1. The twice weekly recording of the Tanita scale numbers as above described.

2. Making a record of everything I put in my mouth: food/drink type, calories, and grams of fat, carbs and protein.

3. Adopted Dave Asprey’s controversial coconut butter coffee protocol (minus the butter) to see if consuming medium chain fatty acids in the morning instead of carbohydrates will help burn fat, given that fat is a testosterone inhibitor.

4. Got into the habit of doing some light body movement in the morning before anchoring myself to the desk, which consists of some stretching, squats and push ups – just to get the body warmed up and blood flowing, which also wakes up the metabolism a bit.

Conclusion

In a few weeks I’ll have enough data to tell me if what I’m doing is working, which I’ll share with you on this blog.  My intent is to show my readers the work sheets I used, and the graphs the data produce over the course of a few months.

We’ll see if my new supplements and habits raise testosterone and reduce body fat.  If not, will have to manage things differently by adopting some new protocols.  Then measure them.

If you’ve read this far, I gather that this topic is of interest to you.  If so, go deeper into this topic and gain more context by reading one or more of the following:

Fellas, How Sturdy Is Your Morning Wood

How to Measure And Boost Your Testosterone

Just Exactly How Fat Are You Anyway

How To Boost Your Human Growth Hormone In 20 Minutes

If you have anything to share about what you did to boost testosterone and/or reduce body fat, please get a conversation going in the Comments section below.

Over and out.

P.S. These are images of some of the products I mentioned, and are all affiliate links.

Related posts:

1. Boost Your Testosterone Naturally
2. Men’s Health Supplements for Prostate and Testosterone
3. 7 Ways for Faster Fat Blasting

The older you get, the smarter you need to be about fitness and exercise.  The potential for injury moves in the same direction as age. Develop a strategy for staying injury free and for healing once injured. You’ll be well served to employ the tools, techniques and the flexibility of mind to shift to less intense or rehabilitative exercise.

I’M SITTING in a café typing this, which wasn’t the plan for this Sunday morning.  The plan was to sprint some stairs followed by some push-ups and pull-ups.

Can you spell… “F_R_U_S_T_R_A_T_I_O_N”?

Yes, the coffee is good at this high-end coffee place in fair Sausalito, but I’m supposed to be sucking my guts, sprinting 30 seconds up the stairs, walking 90 seconds down; repeat eight times till legs are wobbly, the ground looks welcoming, and I mutter to myself repeatedly,

“Why is an old boy like me doing this?”

Well, today I’m not on the stairs as scheduled, and the reason I’m not is the subject of this post, which is:

How to deal with exercise-based injuries.

Yeah, I’m not on the stairs because I woke up this morning with a sore right leg Achilles tendon.  Somewhere in my thirties I ruptured my left Achilles tendon while playing that miserable game, basketball, the very same sport that caused me to rupture two lower disks in my back when 21 years young.

There was a time in my feckless youth when I’d power through injuries.  Not any more.  Paid that price.  So when my tendon is sore, I back off and recalibrate what will constitute exercise for the day, if I exercise at all.

If I don’t do this, what is likely to happen is that what’s now sore or weak will become dysfunctional.  That means no exercise at all for perhaps a long time.  That means all that hard work — particularly those stair sprints — that got me at the fitness level now enjoyed is thrown out the window.

It’s not worth it.

Sometimes, when your body gives you the alert, you need to step back from the usual, hard charging exercise routine.

Here’s my main point:

Fitness is a long-term game and it has its ebbs and flows.

Consistent with that point, let me again underscore that:

If you don’t back off when on the verge of injury, or actually injured, it’s almost certain that at some point you’ll have no other choice but to suspend all exercise and watch your fitness level revert to some repugnant level that you long ago swore you’d never allow yourself to retreat to again.

This assertion, I assert, is triply true as you get past 40 years of age.  At this point in life, rest, recovery and nutrition are more important than the effectiveness and rigor of the exercise.

Keep the following three things in mind as you try to maintain your fitness as the years float by, or get it back after years of desk jockeying:

1. Injuries take longer to heal, so greater vigilance is required to keep them from happening.

2. Weakness in your physical structure, such as alignment, core strength and mobility will have a greater tendency to cause an injury.

3. The tools, techniques and flexibility of mind to shift to less intense or rehabilitative exercise must be acquired and used.

Today, by dint of my Achilles soreness, the stairs were denied me, but I’ve taken #3 to heart and am prepared.

Later today, I will substitute the stairs for a yoga session that fiendish friends have called, “Garmanetics”.  Yeah, they’re a strange bunch, but what that term is getting at is that I made up an exercise routine that works for my injured body.

It works because it’s:

• Deliberative in its movements so I have less a chance of exacerbating an injury,
• Aerobic because there’s no place to stop, unless you really need to catch your breath,
• Muscle-building because you’re both lifting your own body weight and the dumbbells I’ve incorporated into the yoga (and thus the name “Garmanetics”), and
• Mobility-enhancing due to the stretching of the yoga postures.

No, it will not give me the same human growth hormone pump that the high intensity interval training of the stairs, nor tax my muscles in the same way as do push-ups and pull-ups.

[Watch Boost Your Human Growth Hormone In 20 Minutes]

But, when done, I’ll feel the bliss out of a hard yoga session and my body will take yet another step toward being injury-free and integrated.

Certainly, that’s worth doing.

Yep.

P.S.  As I’ve said before somewhere on this site, mobility enables every other physical thing.  Without it, you’ll be limited in how strong you can be, how resilient you can be from injuries, and the speed with which you heal.

Lucky you, there’s a great source to be mobile and repair yourself – it’s MobilityWod, the brainstorm of physical therapist Kelly Starrett.  The hundreds of videos he has posted cost you nothing to view. Do yourself a favor go check it out and use the search function there to find Kelly’s prescription to heal and strengthen whatever needs fixing on your body.

Overeating is inevitable during the Holidays, but you can minimize the damage by selecting the best among the foods offered, prepare for the feast by eating certain foods, taking certain supplements and doing certain activities.  Read on…

THIS IS a quickie to alert you to two methods to reduce the fat growing tendencies of the inevitable Holiday-time overindulgence.

One comes from weight lifting coach par excellence, Charles Poliquin, who writes that taking Glutamine could prevent food cravings and maintain body composition over the holidays when we tend to over indulge. (More about Glutamine here.)

Poliquin also adds ten tips to avoid tipping the scales this holiday.  I’ll list them, but go to his site for the raison d’etre:

1. Set a goal

2. Choose the least worst option

3. Eat protein and nuts for breakfast

4. Drink green tea to combat the negative effects of alcohol

5. Focus on eating low-glycemic carbs

6. Sleep more

7. Take omega-3 fatty acids

8. Avoid processed foods and strive for organics

9. Train high volume before eating

10. Increase protein intake and eliminate foods craved

For a more exotic approach (the second method) to dealing with excess calories, we turn to the innovative self-hacker, Tim Ferriss.  I wrote about this in a post called, This Holiday, Overeat And Gain No Weight., where I said:

“Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Body, tells us how to binge without gaining weight.  The secret is in the supplements, starting the day right, and a wee little bit of well-placed exercise. The end result: this Holiday, overeat and gain no weight!

Tim’s method is based on three principals:

1. Minimize the release of insulin
2. Get the food out quickly
3. Perform brief, multi-muscle contractions throughout the binge

The details are eagerly awaiting you right here.

So, in conclusion, dear readers, choose a method, or hunt and pick a few suggestions among them that you’re willing to do.  The aim is to be smart about the calories you pack in, if possible, and at the same time reduce their ability to add fat on your body.

Happy Holidays!

Yep.

P.S.  If you’re still scouring the planet for gifts, check out 10 Gifts Of Health For You And Yours and Get Your DNA Tested For An Unbelievably Low Price!

Related posts:

1. Tips for Holiday Eating and Being
2. This Holiday, Overeat and Gain No Weight!
3. Dr Hyman: “Ten Simple Tips That Will Save Your Life”

The reason you rarely see even regular gym-goers improve their fitness is because they do not perform the right exercises with the required effort. If you’d like to get stronger, muscular and mobile, here’s a routine that will bring you to the promised land.

OVER THE Thanksgiving Holiday, I visited friends in DC and Charlottesville, VA.

Ate plenty, but also was lucky enough to have Kevin, my DC friend, plop me on his spare bike and had me chase him all over the magnificent Capital Crescent bike trail; and Gary, my Charlottesville pal, hauled my lazy butt to his gym nearly every day.

From time to time, I’d see Gary looking over at my weight lifting antics.  On the third day, he wandered over, kindly waited for me to catch my breath, and asked me if I could put together a workout routine for him.

Gary is typical of the gym-going crowd who goes regularly, but doesn’t get much out of it. In his case, he’s gotten in decent aerobic shape by furiously pumping pedals to keep abreast a comely bike diva that he rides with, but the muscle/strength thing was lagging.

“So, Joe, could you put me on a new routine that will get me in better shape”, Gary asked.

Still panting, I nodded and gasped out, “Sure, tomorrow.”

That night at his home, I penciled out the workout routine I’m about to share with you. My objective was to present Gary, and by extension, you, a workout out that would achieve six things:

1. Grow muscle
2. Build strength
3. Improve mobility
4. Increase anaerobic and aerobic conditioning
5. Be flexible
6. Be progressive

If we had a video camera and were a little less shy, we could have taped what I showed him. Since we didn’t, I’ve hunted down the exercises on YouTube.

[Note: If you want to learn about a particular exercise, search for it on YouTube. Look at several examples, cause some are much better than others.]

Before you jump into the videos and explanations below, please read the following Guidelines. Without knowing them, confusion will abound.

Read These 10 Guidelines to Gary’s Workout

1. Whole body each session

This training routine consists of five Compound Sets of resistance exercises aimed at increasing joint mobility, muscular development and strength. The entire body will be exercised each session.

2. Workout session frequency

The routine will be done three alternate days per week in order to allow your body to recuperate. Muscles do not get built during the exercise, but when rested afterwards.

3. Sets and reps

“Sets” typically refer to the number of times you do a particular exercise, but here we tweak the term a bit by referring to a sequence of multiple exercises done without pause as a “Compound Set”. So, say, rather than doing 10 pushups and referring to that as one set, we will do a pushup and some number of other exercises back-to-back, and call all those together one Compound Set.

“Reps” are typically the number of times you do an exercise to complete the Set. Same here: you’ll do some number of reps for each exercise within a Compound Set.

Aim for 12 reps for upper body exercises and 15 for lower. After a month or two of consistent lifting, you can reduce the reps to 8 upper, 10 lower, as you add weight.  Typically, high reps produces definition and cardio capacity and low reps produce muscle and strength, although there are plenty of exceptions.

4. Exercise routine

The routine consists of some number of Compound Sets done without rest, followed by active rest. Before each Compound Set, focus your mind on what you’re about to do, and ensure that the equipment is ready so you can more quickly from one exercise to the next in the compound set.

5. Be here now

Be where you are, meaning do the number of Compound Sets and Reps that your body and mind enables without judgment. You will quickly improve.

6. Proper form is paramount

Proper form is exceptionally important. Unless you aim to be competitive, the amount of weight lifted is inconsequential as long as it’s heavy enough to tax you. If you can, observe yourself in a mirror to ensure proper form. Stop the exercise when your form breaks down, such as rounding your back when dead lifting. Ideally, ask a fitness trainer to observe your technique.

7. Multiple exercise options

For most exercises here, multiple options are presented so that you may select one that matches your interest, ability and equipment. Remember #6 and do not overreach. So, if you have a “bad” back, do not choose barbell dead lifts.

8. Fresh and confused

Keep your routine fresh. From time to time, substitute the exercise you’re doing with an alternative offered. Not only will these keep your exercise sessions interesting, but present muscle confusion; meaning, your muscles will continue to be challenged by new stimuli.

9. Off day activity

If desired, do aerobic, yoga or HIIT activities on non-workout days.

If you wish to incorporate High Intensity Interval Training (“HIIT”) into your workouts, limit them to twice per week, and seek to do one on a non-workout day and one on workout day, but before it, and reduce the number of exercises in the workout. (More on HITT here.)

10. Feed your muscles

Just prior to exercise, drink about 20 grams of whey protein with water, skim milk or almond milk. Within an hour after exercise, again consume the whey drink, but this time add some carbs and high quality fat to it, such as blueberries/blackberries, banana, 1/2 cup of Greek yoghurt, flax seed powder and chia seeds.

Be aware of total calories; you don’t want this post-workout drink to replace a meal.

Before bed, consume some casein protein powder. Casein digests more slowly than whey protein, so is ideal for feeding the muscle tissue you broke down during exercise as you sleep. Whey is digested quickly, and so feeds the muscle when you most need it — just before and after exercise.

Protein supplement quality is very important. The whey should be “denatured” and cold processed. Among the few brands that fit the bill are Dr. Mercola’s Miracle Whey Protein Powder, and Prohealth’s ImmunPlex Undenatured Whey Protein

As Ori Hofmekler describes in If Your Protein Contains This – Throw it in the Trash, most casein on the market is garbage. Although Hofmekler does a great job of underscoring what’s bad in most casein supplements, he does not provide recommendations for good brands to use, nor have I yet found any. So, know that a good alternative to casein is low-fat, organic cottage cheese.

[If you can recommend a quality casein protein supplement, please mention it in the Comments section below.]

OK, with these Guidelines in mind, let’s dive in…

The Routine

-There are five Compound Sets, each consisting of three or more exercises.

-Go for 12 Reps for each upper body and 15 Reps for lower body exercise.

-If you can, do three circuits of each Compound Set before moving to the next one. But one is fine to start.

-Rest: During each Compound Set, you rest while doing the Calf Raisers. Once done with all the circuits for a Compound Set, try not to rest more than three minutes before moving on to the next.

-Duration: It may take longer to do this routine than you like at first, but as you become more accomplished, you’ll fly through it.

1. Warm-up/ Core /Glutes

Before taxing your back and legs it’s important to warm-up your core, that part of your body extending from below your chest to your hips, front and back. While we’re at it, we’ll get the glutes fired up so you can have a better kinesthetic awareness of them during the next compound set.

1.1 Full Body Dynamic Joint Rotation

My recommendation is that you watch the videos in this section and choose the mobility exercises that will work with for you. The objective is to warm up all your joints, create a bit of perspiration and heat in your body so that you’re ready to put out some effort.

Don’t choose the simplest ones for you to do, for often the most difficult ones are those you most need.

Of the following 1.2 thru 1.8 that you chose to do, perform them without (or with minimal) rest, for three circuits (“3X”). This means you move from 1.2 to 1.3, etc., and after completing 1.8, do it again three times.

Expend some effort, with the understanding that if you push to failure on any one, the next will not be done very well since you’re not recovering (resting) between exercises.

1.2 Dead Bug

Make sure you press the lower part of your back, the lordosis, firmly against the floor, and stop the exercise once you now longer can keep your lower back flat against the floor.

1.3a Stability Ball Leg Lifts

Or

1.3b Bicycle Kicks, followed by Leg Lifts

1.4a Stability Ball Crunches

Or

1.4b Floor Crunches

1.5a Stability Ball Glutes

And/Or

1.5b Floor Glutes

1.6a Back Extensions (with rear delt raises)

[By the way, the guy in the last three videos above is Ben Bruno. He's an exercise wizard. Check out all his videos here.]

Or

1.6b Back Extensions on Floor

These next two are really good for people who sit all day, particularly hunched over a keyboard. The Scapula Pushup and Elbow Pushups will strengthen the muscles in your upper back that help hold up your head and have more upright posture.

1.7 Scapula Pushup

The Scapula Pushup is demonstrated at the 3:48 minute mark, so go straight to that mark, or watch the whole video for more ideas for warm-up exercises.

1.8 Elbow Pushup

OK, you’re done with warm-up and core exercises, with some upper back and glute work thrown in. Now it’s time to get to the stuff that will really task your large muscles.

2. Dead Lift/ Stair Lift/ Pull-up 3X

2.1 Dead Lift

Warning: Do not perform the dead lift if you have back problems. Do not perform the Dead Lift if there is no instructor at your gym to show you proper form and observe that you’re doing it correctly.

Remember, for the first month or two of consistent exercise, try for 15 reps for lower body exercises and 12 for upper body. One reason for this is that it will force you to use a lower weight, which is appropriate as your body gets accustomed to the challenge. The Dead Lift is designated a lower body exercise.

I’ve found several versions of the Dead Lift posted on YouTube; pick the one that’s best suited for you. Select a lower weight than you think you can lift.

Begin with the single leg dead lift, with dumbbells (as shown below) or a light barbell, or unweighted.

As you develop strength and balance, try dumbbells.

Finally, move on to the barbell.

Once one of the three dead lifts are completed, move quickly to…

2.2 Stair Lift

In the example below, the woman is stepping up onto a high platform. Begin with a lower one. Choose a weight, dumbbell or kettle bell (as shown), appropriate for your fitness level, or just use your body weight.

Move quickly to…

2.3 Pull-up

Begin with palms facing away from you for the first set, then palms facing you and finally for the third set, thumbs facing you if your apparatus allows for that position; otherwise do the first two sets with palms away and the last with palms facing you.

Most people can not perform more than a couple of pull-ups/chin-ups, so use assistance. If none is available, step up on something that lifts your chin to the bar and lower yourself down no faster than five seconds. Eventually, you’ll be able to pull yourself up.

Here’s an example of a band assisted pull-up, and note that her hands are positioned with thumbs facing her, which is the option for your third set:

You can also use machine assistance:

2.4 Calf Raisers

This is your rest period. Yes, you’re working your calves, but you’ll be able to catch your breath while doing so.

There are three muscles in the calf, and you work each of them by pronating your toes in, parallel and out. So, start if toes in and do the reps relative to the weight you’re using, but not less than five, then immediately go to the parallel position for five, and finally the toe-out position for the last five.

in the example below, the woman is on a weighted calf raise machine, but you can do the same exercise without weights, on one leg at a time, or holding a dumb bell. She does not turn her toes in, parallel and out, but you can.

OK, that’s the first Compound Set completed. Do up to three circuits (meaning, repeat it as many as three times). Rest for no more than three minutes and begin the next…

3. Press/ Squat/ Bench 3X

3.1 Press

This is a shoulder press.

If you don’t have a barbell, use dumbbells, or one at a time as our innovator par excellence, Ben Bruno, demonstrates:

Yeah, a nutty way to press a dumbbell, but this technique introduces instability which will require strength and balance to overcome.

Move directly to…

3.2 Squat

[Check out a really good discussion of squat technique at Arnold Schwarzenegger's site: Squat 101.]

There’s a near infinite number of ways to do a squat, but if you haven’t done them much, begin with a “free squat”, which means without weights. Then progress to squatting with dumbbells before you move on to the barbell.

Once you can do more than 40 reps, add weight. But not much. Form is critical. Have an exercise instructor assist you.

Or

Or

You’re huffing and puffing by the time you done with squats, but move quickly to…

3.3 Bench Press

If you don’t have weight, do push-ups. There’s something for everyone here:

Have a bench and barbell? Well, try this:

Dumbbell version:

Right after you’ve done one of the three above chest exercises, go do the calf raises…

3.4 Calf Raises as described above.

After completing the calf raises, rest for three minutes or less before you move on to the fourth sequence of compound exercises.

4. Lat Row/ Rhomboid/ Trapezius 3X

4.1 Lat Row

OK, as before, I’m serving you up some choices to work the latissimus dorsi. The idea remains the same, and that is progression; meaning, to offer a selection of exercises that build upon the other.

So, choose one of the rowing movements from the options presented below.

The one arm dumbbell row is a good one to start with because it provides stability and control for the beginner.

Once you build up some strength and become accustomed to the movement, you can get creative, as Mr. Bruno demonstrates, albeit with an excessive amount of weight which you will not attempt (please):

The one-legged rowing movement shown above will prepare your core and back for the standing barbell row, which, hopefully, you will do guided by a fitness instructor:

Having selected and performed one of the above three options, quickly move to the next exercise…

4.2 Rear Delt + Rhomboid

Here we seek to do two things: 1. Reverse the slump forward posture that hovering over a keyboard all day promotes, and 2. Develop an oft forgotten part of the anatomy, the rear deltoids. Without rear delt development, your deltoids will look flat, rather than rounded.

Choose one of these two exercises, perform it, and move quickly to the next exercise.

Or

Go fast to…

4.3 Trapezius

Here’s the instructional video:

Option 1:

Option 2:

Go to…

4.4 Calf Raises per above.

Rest for three minutes or less, and then begin the last Compound Set.

5. Dips/ Curl/ Triceps Extension 3X

5.1 Dips

Whether you include them now or in some later workout incarnation, the Dips must be apart of your resistance training. Like the Dead Lift, Dips are a true compound exercise — it works the chest, shoulders and triceps simultaneously.

Or

If you can do more than 15 reps with your body weight, and you have the jones to add weight, Scott Hermann demonstrates how to do it.

Or

If you don’t have a Dip apparatus, use any stable corner, like your kitchen counter.

Or

Can’t do Dips? Hopefully, your gym as a Dip Machine which provides assistance that effectively reduces your body weight by any amount you choose.

Next up are the Bicep Curl and Triceps Extensions. Rotating the biceps and triceps within a Compound Set is a great way to make them stronger and bigger, which is typical of doing antagonist exercises back to back: The bicep contracts, the triceps lengthen, and visa versa.

5.2 Curl

If your core isn’t very strong yet, begin with a seated curl:

Or

Or

5.3 Triceps

The first option is a good place for the novice:

Or

Here’s Mighty Ben demonstrating a triceps dumbbell pullover:

Or

5.4 Calf Raises (as above)

6. Stretch

For your consideration, I’ve got some old tape of me going through a post-workout stretch routine that I still use.

Do stretch after your workouts, particularly the muscles you exercised and areas where you’re locked-up. Increased mobility allows you to be stronger, lift safer and enjoy life more. Also, stretching after exercise speeds up your recovery so that you can go abuse yourself again more quickly.

Well, that’s it.

Do you have any questions or suggestions? If so, put em in the Comments section below.

Yep.

Onetime skinny-but-fat Joe Warner exchanged his aerobic routine for some anaerobic intensity and completely transformed his body, losing 17.5 pounds of jiggly and adding 22 pounds of braun.  Here’s how he did it…

PAY ENOUGH attention to matters of health and you’ll soon be dazed and confused.  That’s because few things in the health world seem to hold steady.

Once upon a time coffee was bad for you, and now many health gurus extol its virtues (as this debate will show).

Once upon a time saturated fat created the dreaded arterial plaque leading to heart disease, now some with flashy credentials say it just ain’t so.

Once upon a time the way to lose fat was, naturally, on a low-fat diet, but not – au contraire – it’s the carbs that make you fat, not the fat.

And now, at least for Joe Warner as depicted in his new book, 12 Week Body Plan you can build muscle and lose fat fast by working out less, along with that aforementioned low carb diet.

This story caught my attention because recently another debate has been strolling around the Interwebs.

For a long time it was conventional wisdom that aerobic exercise was the best way to lose body fat.

Then it became fashionable among those who pay attention to these things that really the best way to lose body fat is with a combination of resistance training to build muscle and high intensity interval training (“HIIT”), which boosts your body’s production of human growth hormone, a metabolic driver for weight loss, among other things.

And then, just over the last month or so, I started seeing various articles scattered about that cited studies showing that aerobics — once again — is better than resistance training et al for reducing fat, such as this one on The Huffington Post.

Confused yet?

Well, I’m not, cause I have this thing called “experience”, and what I know from that are three things:

1. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for everybody, though there are some that fit most, and
2. A fitness routine that’s centered on resistance training plus HIIT, and feathers in some aerobics, will maximize fat loss, but
3. Diet is the most important single input into a fat loss regime.

From what I’ve read about Joe Warner’s experience getting those abs to pop after 12 weeks of exercise and diet is that his experience mirrors mine. (Ahem, minus the six-pack.)

Which is to say, resistance training + HITT + some aerobics served on a bed of high protein/low carb food = muscle – fat.

How Did Joe Warner Get Six-Pack Abs in 12 Weeks?

He did it by gaining 22 pounds of muscle, and shedding 17.5 pounds of fat. And he did that by exercising and dieting smarter; meaning, exercising and dieting in a way that works to dump fat and pump up muscle.

The smarter exercising meant largely substituting his 4.5 hours of mostly cardio (aerobic) exercises each week for 4 hours of resistance training (weight lifting) and HIIT.

Joe Warner’s old fitness regimen of 4.5 hours:

• Monday and Thursday: 60-minute run
• Tuesday and Saturday: 45-minute run
• Wednesday: 60-minute gym workout
• Friday and Sunday: Rest

Joe Warner’s new fitness routine of 4 hours:

• Monday, Wednesday, Friday: 60-minute gym workout at lunchtime
• Saturday morning: 60-minute gym workout
• Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday: Rest

The smarter diet meant tossing out the high glycemic load carbs and processed food in favor of healthy fats, low glycemic load carbs and healthy fat.

Importantly, in order to slab on a 22 pound slab of muscle in only 12 weeks, Joe Warner also ate a lot of lean protein.  I haven’t read how much protein, but would guess that it was within 85% in grams of his total body weight in pounds.

I don’t know what Joe Warner weighs, and this 85% metric is simply one espoused by a number of weight lifting coaches in order to maximize the growth of lean body mass (muscle).

An example: If you weigh 200 pounds, your daily protein intake objective would be 170 grams.

That’s a lot of protein!!  Even for a 200 pounder. I’ve never consumed that much protein, and wouldn’t even know who to do so, given that I’m not much of a meat eater.  And am not advocating you pound down 170 grams either.  But that might be the mark to be able to get to Joe Warner’s 22 pounds in a measly 12 weeks.

For more about Joe Warner and his plan, read this Yahoo Health article.

Good luck, and over and out.

Click the image to learn more about the book.

Related posts:

1. Why It’s Critical that You Muscle Up as You Age

Scientific studies are clearly indicating a formula for living a long and strong life, and one of simplest ingredients is completely in your hands (or feet) – exercise!  Read on…

THERE’S A lot of science being targeted at the perennial questions about why we age, and what can be done to slow it down.

Way down!

Some of the studies on aging include therapeutic interventions, such as caloric restriction, stem cells, hormonal anti-aging therapy, antioxidants and the activation of biochemical pathways like sirtuins.

The famous futurist, inventor, and newly appointed Google Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, argues that in a couple of decades — not centuries – science will enable humans to merge with machines to become cyborg-like and enjoy lives of indefinite life spans.

[Read Ray Kurzweil’s March to Extend Life.]

Kurzweil has popularized a concept of  “three bridges” to immortality that a person will enjoy pretty much as a cyborg, part human, part machine.

Three Bridges to Immortality

Bridge 1

You eat right, ingest a bunch of supplements, and avoid getting hit by a bus, and if you’re healthy enough by time “Bridge 2” is built, and get on it, you’ll have the opportunity to live longer than anybody has before. So, the goal while on Bridge 1 is to preserve yourself long enough for Bridge 2 to be built.

Bridge 2

Here, use of gene therapy, stem cells, therapeutic cloning and replacement cells, tissues and organs will enable us to reverse our biological clocks.  You’ll live longer than any other generation while walking on Bridge 2, but what you seek is Bridge 3.

Bridge 3

This is the Promised Land, immortality!  Bridge 3 is where, Ray Kurzweil predicts, the merger of nanotech and artificial intelligence happens. He envisions that programmable, communicating nanobots will replace old-fashioned neurons and blood cells with more efficient units that can destroy infections, reverse degenerative changes and rewrite genetic code.

I have no way of knowing if Mr. Kurzweil’s predictions will happen.  What I do believe is that I’ve been skipping along on Bridge 1 for 30 years, with increasing devotion as my clock ticks, and what I’m doing seems to be working.

Basically, my live long and strong kick is comprised of nutrition, supplementation, detox cleansing, meditation, intimacy and exercise, the very strategies that Kurzweil and his writing partner, Dr. Terry Grossman, wrote in their book, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever.

[See Food, Diet and Nutrition and Health Is A Comprehensive Sorta Thing]

Getting into all the aspects of what it takes to age well is beyond the ken of this post, for such would fill a book. But suffice to say, one straightforward thing to do that makes a big difference is to exercise.

It is the value of exercise on longevity that is the focus of the rest of this post.

The Anti-aging Effects of Lifelong Exercise

To explain how and why exercise is the one sure-fired thing you can do now to slow down the aging process, I’ll do you the favor of summarizing and (hopefully) making more readable a scientific report by the Journal of Applied Physiology called, I am 80 going on 18: exercise and the fountain of youth, which you can read, as well as check the sources of my forthcoming assertions, here.

The bottom line of the report:

Maximal oxygen uptake (V̇o_{2 max} ) in 80-year olds who were former athletes, and have remained physically active all their lives, was nearly twice that of otherwise healthy sedentary 80-year olds.

“Oxygen uptake”, or  V̇o_{2 max}, measures cardiorespiratory fitness, which is an important indicator of mortality.

Another important indicator of health among the athletic group was body fat, of which they had less, although no stats were provided on percent body fat.

OK, so the athletic group was less fat and was more fit, as measured in ways that are predictive of a longer lifespan than their non-exercising counterparts.  But is it reasonable to suggest that they’re may be other factors to consider that impact these outcomes?

Yes, three questions come to mind:

1. Are the genetics of the athletes responsible for their large compliant hearts with big stroke volumes?
2. How did the athletes remain motivate to exercise all their lives?
3. Are there additional benefits accruing to fit elders that may be instigated by their fitness regime?

The Genetics of Older Athletes Only Get Them So Far

It appears that the answer to question #1 above is yes, at least partially.

The authors of this study say that it’s reasonable to anticipate that perhaps 50% of the difference in V̇o_{2 max} seen in the 80-yr-old athletes vs. non-athletes might be due to their baseline physiological endowment.

Meaning, they were blessed with big hearts and lungs, which potentially encouraged them to be athletes, and keep exercising throughout their lives.

This is a reasonable assertion, but the fact is when such athletes stop exercising in their middle age, their V̇o_{2 max} values are similar to their sedentary counterparts.

Yes, the genetically advantage lose their advantage.

OK, you started life well endowed for exercise, but as the years ticked by and you didn’t keep it up, your fitness level reverted to that of the dude who sat near you in college and went to program for Microsoft whilst you headed to the NFL.

You Like What You’re Good At and Do What You Like

The answer to question #2, simply put, is that success breeds success.

It’s reasonable to suggest that the athletic individuals remained motivated to exercise as they got older because they were good at it, and were rewarded for this behavior.

Quoting from the Journal of Applied Physiology report:

“Perhaps the athletes enjoyed success as a result of superior “talent” when they were young. If they also enjoyed training and competing, then a number of central reward pathways might have been activated, reinforced, and remodeled. As they aged, daily exercise and their status as “super-fit” may have further reinforced their motivation and activated these reward pathways.”

Brains Get Better Through Exercise

The answer to question #3 is that, yes, there are profoundly beneficial ancillary benefits beyond physical fitness that lifelong exercise promotes.

It’s now accepted that overall fitness is associated with higher cognitive function and learning.  Moreover, older adults with high aerobic fitness have higher hippocampal volumes and better spatial memory, providing additional protection from the age-related decline in brain volume.

This means less chances of getting dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Conclusion

So, with exercise, you get less fat, more mobility, greater strength, and resistance to dreaded old age diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s.

What’s not to like about adopting a lifelong exercise regime?

If you want to experience a longer, higher quality life, at the very minimum, you need to exercise. If you’re ambitious, you might consider diet, detox cleansing, and something to bust up stress, like meditation and intimacy. This comprehensive approach will more likely get you to Ray Kurzweil’s Bridge #2.

Start where you are.

If the couch is your favorite perch, start by walking.  Grab a friend, get yourselves a fitbit, and record how many steps you take each day, with 10,000 being the goal. Then add resistance training, like calisthenics and/or weightlifting.

If you already exercise, but perhaps intermittently, find a way to do it regularly.

It’s a bit goofy, but my video, The Homestead Workout, will give you some resistance training ideas that you can do without equipment.

Given that in the United States, only 5% of adults are meeting what might be described as minimal physical activity guidelines, and with the obesity statistics getting absurd, it’s time to join the minority and have a long, strong life.

Get moving!

Yep.

Related posts:

1. Here’s Why Exercise Slows the Aging Process
2. Five Diet and Exercise Myths that Need to Die
3. 5 Common Injuries of 4 Aging Athletes

The older you get, or the more intensely you exercise, the more important your recovery period becomes. We build muscle and exercise capacity during the rest periods — not while exercising — so rest well and smart.  Here’s my “six rules” for exercising injury free, and what happened to me when I ignored them.  (Video at the end of the post.)

I’VE WRITTEN before about fitness + aging = be more careful.  Whether you’re a stud or exercise neophyte, the hard reality is the same:

The same attention must be paid to when you are exercising as when you’re not, or you’ll soon be injured.

To consistently exercise vigorously, particularly as you age, requires the discipline of these six rules for injury free fitness:

1. Get plenty of recovery time,
2. Activate muscles before and stretch after every workout,
3. Increase mobility,
4. Ingest proper nutrition,
5. Cycle between intense and gentle exercise regimes, and
6. Listen to your body.

And you know what?  If you do these six things, you probably still will not sail throughout your long, fit, vigorous life without injury.

Don’t wish to put any ju ju on you, but the stats are the stats.  Certainly, I’m a data point.

Through my many years of pounding weights, riding bikes, running and yoga, I’ve been served more than my fair share of injuries.  I won’t bore you with them all here, but suffice to say that the latest injury is my right leg Achilles tendon.

It’s sore, makes me limp, is (I think) related to hip joint soreness, keeps me from sprinting the stairs for my high intensity interval training, and pisses me off!

How I severed my Achilles tendon on my left leg

About twenty years ago, I popped the left leg’s Achilles tendon while playing basketball.  “Pop” is the right word for it, cause that’s exactly the sound it made, like a bat slamming a fast-pitched hardball.

I had the basketball, took a fast step to the right, intending to drive to the basket, and heard the “pop”.  I had no idea what happened, but immediately stopped, dropped the ball, and actually twirled around to face the nearby baseball field with my arms up and fists clenched.

Yes, in that instant I actually thought that someone had hit my lower leg with a baseball bat.  Actually, it wasn’t a thought, but a reaction.  Of course, no one was there.

For three days, I flopped around trying to convince myself that this was another of my awful ankle twists that playing competitive basketball so generously provided.  Finally, common sense prevailed and I went to an orthopedic surgeon who showed me the simple test for discovering if your Achilles tendon is still working.

If you have a friend handy, lie on your stomach and bend the offending leg. Your friend places his hand around your lower legs so the thumb is against the tendon, an inch or two below where the calf seems to begin.  Squeeze.  If your foot moves, your Achilles tendon is intact, although it could be partially severed or otherwise compromised.

If you don’t have a friend handy, kneel on a sofa with your feet dangling off it behind you.  Reach back and do as described above.

Now, the right Achilles tendon is acting up

I’m thinking that maybe I have some congenital Achilles tendon defect.

Looking back to assess how I got this long lingering (three weeks now) sore Achilles tendon, it becomes clear that I violated two of my “six rules”; namely, numbers five and six:

#5  Cycle between intense and gentle exercise regimes, and

#6  Listen to your body.

I was so intoxicated about how much I was improving with my stair sprinting that I did not cycle in and out of this intense routine, nor did I stop when I got my first twinge that something was wrong.  I slowed down, but did not stop.

So the tendon got worse and now I’m not even walking up stairs much, just hobbling along like an old man. (Although I am working on healing the thing, as I show you in the video below.)

With that overlong prelude, let’s now dive into each of the “six rules”.

Six Rules for Injury Free Fitness

1. Recovery time must relate to exercise intensity.

The more intense an exercise session, the longer and more thoughtful must be the recovery period before you can duplicate the effort again.

The length of recovery is dependent on conditioning and age.  Generally, the more fit and better conditioned you are, the less recovery you need; however, as you age you need more recovery time, even if very fit.

When I say “thoughtful” I refer to what you’re doing during the recovery phase.  Athletes who work out intensively must actively recover.  By “actively” recovering, I mean applying rules number two, three and four during the recovery period:

#2 Activate muscles before and stretch after every workout,
#3 Increase mobility, and
#4 Ingest proper nutrition.

Consider what NBA players do in order to quickly recover between games.  They stretch, get stretched, massaged and fed proper nutrition.

2. Activate muscles before and stretch after workouts.

Prior to exercising, it’s very helpful to move all the major muscles in the body, paying particular attention and time to those muscles you’re about to exercise.  At this point – before exercising – you’re not stretching per se, where you hold a static stretch for a minute or more.  No, before exercise, rather than stretch, you articulate the joints.

By “articulate the joints”, I mean to slowly move each body part that hinges to a joint. Rotate the ankles, knees, hips, shoulders and neck.  After this, you can put some body weight “load” on the joints as you continue to rotate them.

For some muscle activation routines, see the videos in “Section 1” of Get Strong, Muscular and Mobile (Fast).

Another good muscle warm up is to use a foam roller, as I demonstrate in the video below.

After exercising, you get static.  At this point your muscles are very warm, which is the ideal time to go into deep stretches that you hold.  Here’s where you gain new ground – a deeper stretch.

Although it’s a bit of a goofy video, I suggest you view a video of me doing my after-workout stretches in “Section 6” of Get Strong, Muscular and Mobile (Fast).

3. Increase your mobility.

When you’re doing your pre-exercise joint articulation, you’re increasing your mobility in preparation for the work your body’s about to perform.  But with Rule #3 (“Increase mobility”), you’re spending more time at it, doing more complicated movements, going deeper and increasing the range of motion around your joints… in effect, increasing your mobility.

And if you think you’re doing just fine with your mobility, I suggest you watch a child romping around. My niece is nine years old. During any ten-minute time slot, she’s sitting in the lotus position, or sitting on with her butt on the floor, both legs alongside.

If you can still do this as effortlessly, I salute you. For most of us, this type of mobility wanes year by year till we become forward slumping, shuffling immobile oldsters.

All of us have particular problem areas: Stiff shoulders, tight hip flexors, immobile ankles that compromise the quality of our workouts. Now is the time to heel this stuff. If not addressed, these become the weak “Achilles heel” that takes you down.

I have another perfect example that points to the mobility-challenged.

Have you ever tried to do the Olympic lift called the “Snatch”?  If so, you get a real quick insight about immobility.

Check out the picture below.  In order to be able to even hold a broomstick over your head while in a full squat with your buttocks nearly on your heels requires a combination of wrist, shoulder, hip and ankle mobility that few of us have. (Including me.) Imagine what it takes to do what the fella below is doing.

(Watch how the Snatch is performed here.)

Naturally, I’d like you to read the rest of this post, but once you’re satiated with this site, check out Kelly Starrett over at www.MobilityWod.com and get educated about mobility.  Search for what ails you, and do what Kelly suggests.  (I do.)

4. Get proper nutrition.

The more muscle tissue you break down during your exercise (the “catabolic” phase), the more of the proper nutrition you must ingest to build the muscle back up, plus a small increment more that results in larger and stronger muscles (the “anabolic” phase).

The proper nutrition depends on a host of factors, such as the type of exercise, the intensity level performed, and your body type.  Suffice to say that if you’re exercising to build muscle and strength, you need plenty of protein, and if you’re training to run a marathon you need plenty of high quality carbs.

Protein supplement quality is very important.  A favorite kind among weight lifters and nutritionists is whey protein.  The whey should be “denatured” and cold processed. Among the few brands that fit the bill are Dr. Mercola’s Miracle Whey Protein Powder, and Prohealth’s ImmunPlex Undenatured Whey Protein. I use and like both.

If your a vegetarian, good protein supplement selections include pea, hemp and various sprouted grains that usually come in a combination of grain, legume and bean sprouts. There are many choices. The one I like and use is Garden of Life Garden of Life Raw Organic Protein

Carbs should generally be low glycemic, meaning that they’re slowly absorbed into your blood stream.  Low glycemic candidates are vegetables, beans, legumes, and sweet potatoes.  High glycemic foods are white grains, white rice, potatoes, most packaged food and most fruit.

High glycemic foods are OK to eat right before a workout, but the amount and digestibility is key.

For instance, before an intense one-hour workout, eating something like dates is good because it provides immediately usable energy in the form of simple (aka: high glycemic) carbs without making you full.  For longer, less intense aerobic exercise, you would be better off eating something with more complex (aka: low glycemic) carbs in it because they will feed your body longer.

When Is Protein Necessary?

Unless you’re a big-time weight lifter, you typically need not worry about a pre-work out ingestion of protein.  I think that highly regarded strength coach Charles Poliquin (link below) would dispute this assertion, but keep in mind that he primarily trains weight lifters and athletes who train to be strong and explosive (I think), not lithe and enduring.

The reason that most exercise does not require protein loading prior to the work out is that exercise requires fuel, and protein is a poor fuel source.  Carbs are a good fuel source.

Soon after a work out, however, protein should be ingested, along with high quality fats (omega-3 fatty acids like flax seed and fish oil) and carbs.  How much of each macronutrient you eat depends on the intensity, length of and type of exercise you did.

The more your exercise breaks down muscle tissue, the more protein should be consumed relative to your norm. In this case you might want to take up to 40 grams of protein, along with some fruit and fish oil or flax seed oil subsequent to an exercise session that is designed to tax muscle with the objective of gaining size and strength.  The carbs (fruit) will help transport the protein to the cells via the blood glucose uptake response to them, and the fat will help quell inflammation and the inevitable cell oxidation that occurs during and after exercise.

If the exercise was long (+1 hour) and of moderate or light intensity, the mix of macronutrient in your post-exercise meal or drink should favor carbs rather than protein, along with the omega-3 type fats mentioned above.  In this case, the carbs should be of the low glycemic variety, given that you’re not looking to fuel your body for exercise, but to feed and restore it post exercise.

For an insightful post about pre and post workout nutrition, I highly recommend that you read Charles Poliquin’s blog.  You can find summaries of posts about exercise nutrition on his blog here.

5. Cycle between intense and gentle exercise regimes.

Few people can consistently workout intensely day after day without overstressing their bodies and eventually getting burned out and/or injured.

Professional athletes get all the guidance, recuperative potions and assistance that money can buy, and yet those who play intense, tightly scheduled sports such as basketball often tweak, rupture, break or bend something that forces them to stop and repair.

As I’ve written in Boost Your Human Growth Hormone in 20 Minutes, there’s much value in performing high intensity interval training (“HIIT”). By doing HIIT, you can increase the body’s own production of human growth hormone, stimulate fast muscle growth, increase both anaerobic and aerobic capacity, quickly reduce body fat, and get a fast workout.

But as just mentioned, there is a downside to HIIT given the higher probability of injury or plain old fatigue.  So, be smart about intense exercise sessions by making sure that in between them you do “gentle” exercise sessions.

By “gentle” I don’t mean the way you carry a baby.  What I do mean is that you stimulate rather than tax the muscles that you previously worked intensely.  This will bring blood into them and help them repair.

There’s one important thing to know about exercise that must be underscored here, and that is:

You build muscle after the workout out, not during it, and therefore how you recover is essential to how well your training will progress.

(See #4 “Get proper nutrition” above.)

Thus, if you do not give your body adequate time and nutrition to recover from intense workouts, you’re progress will be anemic and an injury will be lurking around the corner.

In practice, then, the day after a sprint workout you could choose to jog and at a slow pace, or do yoga.  Or the day after heavy squats and dead lifts, you could walk some stairs, or do yoga.

(Yes, I’m a proponent of yoga.)

6. Listen to your body.

There’s that old adage, “No Pain, No Gain”.  We remember it because it rhymes and resonates, and who hasn’t exercised hard without feeling pain from time to time?

Pain is memorable.

But what should be obvious is that when it comes to exercise, there’s “good” pain and “bad” pain.  The good pain emanates from the muscular and cardiovascular systems. The bad pain emanates from nearly everything else, such as overstressed tendons, cartilage, joints and bone.

You need to discern the difference, as you can learn to handle the good pain, but must stop what you’re doing when the bad pain happens.

Bad Pain = No Gain + Injury.

This is a lesson that I had to relearn once again. 

My HIIT is often stair sprinting which is easier on my body than sprinting on flat ground.  Nonetheless, as mentioned, about three weeks ago my Achilles tendon started to protest.

I eased up some, but kept at it, which for me meant doing this HIIT workout twice a week, with gentler exercise workouts in between as described in #5 above.

Not good enough: My Achilles “protest” became a jail sentence that I’m still serving three weeks later.

If I had stopped sprinting after the first twinge, and walked the rest of my stair circuits and then took some time off, I might have been able to return to this exercise full throttle.  Because I didn’t, I’m still limping – and certainly not sprinting stairs.

You can imagine what’s happened to my fitness relative to stair sprinting these last three weeks.  I’d guess that I’m nearly back to where I began when I first took up this exercise.

So what did I gain by not listening to my body?

Nada.

In the video below, I show you how I’m treating my Achilles tendon issue.  As you’ll see, my assumption is that my issue resides not only in the tendon itself, but also along the whole leg and hip.

Yes, links in a chain, all connected.

Take a look…

Am happy to report that I’ll soon be on the stairs again.

Yep.

What’s in the mirror? Hopefully, you see a beautiful you, but if you’re like most of us, there’s more pounds on that frame than is healthy. More than half us are overweight. Time to measure your Basil Metabolic Rate, and target a lower body weight goal. Here’s how to do it…

EVER NOTICE how nearly all the people in old movies are far leaner than in current movies? Yes, it’s obvious that over the last 40+ years, the people of the industrialist world are getting progressively heavier.

[Here's why.]

Time for a reset.

*This post is about getting some clarity about the damage that those extra pounds can do to your health and well being, resetting your caloric target based on your Basil Metabolic Rate and activity level, and taking some physical action a most simple and effective exercise.*

Let’s go!

Below are three infographics:

• One tell the tale of America’s over weight/obesity problem (mirrored by much of the industrialized world, by the way);

• One indicates how calories in and out must be understood to help solve the eating part of the problem; and

• One offers a simple activity to help solve the sitting part of the problem.

First up is “Infographic #1: Obesity”, and it peppers us with the daunting statistics about obesity, as well as average, run of mill overweightyness.

(Yes, I made up the word and I like it.)

Obesity

The Obesity infographic below states that:

• Nearly 55% of Americans are overweight, and
• About 25% of Americans are obese.

If you suspect these numbers appear too low, a trip to the mall might confirm your suspicions.  As you scan the bevy of shoppers, your perceptions may suggest that 25% obese and 55% overweight might be a tad on the light side.

Indeed, the reliable U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”) puts America’s adult obesity rate at 36%, 11 percentage points higher than what’s shown in the Obesity Infographic., and the percent overweight (including obesity) at about 65%; again, 11 percentage points higher.

Here’s the CDC graph depicting these numbers:

If these statistics don’t alarm you, perhaps because you just sat your skinny self down to read this after a 15 mile run, consider that obesity combined with diabetes (Dr. Hyman’s so-called “diabesity“) is becoming a national health catastrophe that will affect everyone via a crippled American health care system.

So, listen up.

Back in 2009, I wrote in a post called, The Seriously Serious Problems of Obesity, which cited a New York Times’ projection that 43% of Americans will be obese by 2018.

When you add that number to total overweight, will anyone be able to do more than waddle from building to car come 2018?

Thus, this first infographic sounds the alarm bells.  Check it out, and then scroll down to  “Infographic #2: Calories”.

Unless readers of this blog are exclusively health nuts, odds are that the Obesity Infographic hit a nerve.

Perhaps, then, there’s appetite for Infographic #2: Calories.

Calories

Calories measure the energy we get from consuming, digesting and using food. 

These days, there’s much debate about the quality of calories, meaning that food source of the calories determines the extent to which the body produces energy (or fat).

For instance, 200 calories of candy will affect your body differently than 200 calories of avocado.

Due to the sugar content, the candy will cause a fast spike in your blood glucose level.  At this point – all other things being equal – if you don’t use this extra energy, some portion of the associated calories will be parked as fat.

“Yes”, the body is saying, “we’ll just store this excess energy as fat until you need it later, like during the winter when food is scarce”.

Now, this Calorie Infographic takes the bold step of declaring an ideal proportion of macronutrient mix.  Given the wide range presented: 10-25% Protein, 20-35% Fats, 45-65% Carbs, some ratio within this mix should be adequate for most people.

Serious weightlifters might want more protein.  Long distance aerobic types might want more carbs.  And there are unusual individuals who live on either side of the bell curve, and thereby simply have to find their individualized macronutrient mix.

Just make sure that, more times than not:

1. The carbs are complex (low glycemic), unless ingested prior to a one hour plus exercise routine when simple carbs will be used to fuel rigorous activity;
2. The fats are mostly omega-3 fatty acids; and
3. The protein is from lean, grass fed meat, no-mercury fish or preferably organic vegetable sources.

[Read my posts, Blueprint for Eating Right, and Pump Up Your Metabolism – Eat Protein, Not Wheat]

OK, here’s a primer on calories…

How to Determine Your “Stable” Daily Calorie Intake

Here, we’re going to dive into determining the amount of calories necessary to sustain you at your current activity and weight level, and then at the weight objective (aka “target”) you may desire.

First, calculate your Basil Metabolic Rate (“BMR”)

The BMR is the daily amount of energy your body expends at “rest”, as measured in calories. (source)

Note that “rest” doesn’t mean sleeping or lounging on the couch, but refers to normal daily activities. It does not include any vigorous activities, whether it be a long walk, weightlifting or mountain bike ride.

It might be a bit hard to read the equation part in Calorie Infographic found under the header, “How to Determine Your Daily Calorie Intake”, so I’ll type it out.

The Basil Metabolic Rate formula looks like this:

Females: 655 + (4.35 x weight in lbs.) + (4.7 x height in inches) – (4.7 x age in years)

Males: 66 + (6.23 x weight in lbs.) + (12.7 x height in inches) – (6.8 x age in years)

According to Answers.com, in the USA the:

• Average female’s height is 63.75 inches (5’3.75”) at 152 pounds.
• Average male’s height is 69 inches (5’9”) at 180 pounds.

It’s taking me too long to find a reliable average age for men and women in the U.S., so for purposes of this example, I’m going to use 45 for both genders.

Plugging these numbers in the above formulas:

Average Female: 655 + (661) + (300) – (212) = BMR of 1,404

Average Male: 66 + (1,121) + (876) – (306) = BMR of 1,757

Second, determine your activity level

The next part of determining your daily caloric target is to adjust your BMR number by your activity level.  The Calorie Infographic presents various multipliers for that starting at 1.2 for the sedentary life style to 1.9 for “extra active”.

Read the descriptions related to each multiplier and choose the one that best fits what you actually do, not what you wish you were doing.

If our very average man or woman in the above example were smack in the middle of the high to low activity level, his/her multiplier would be 1.55.

Third, calculate your “stable” daily caloric intake

The daily caloric intake (consumption) target is the BMR multiplied by the activity level multiplier.  For our average candidates, that would be:

Our Average Female’s Caloric Intake: 1,404 (BMR) x 1.55 (Activity Level) = 2,176

Our Average Male’s Caloric Intake: 1,757 (BMR) x 1.55 (Activity Level) = 2,723

At this point, there are three comments I’d like to make about this BMR/calorie stuff:

1. It’s highly unlikely that your numbers are the same as these examples, so don’t think that these results fit you.  Plug in your own particulars into the appropriate equation given your gender.

2. If you have a lot of muscle, it will affect the BMR formula results.  Muscle weighs more than fat, so a 5’8” male body builder could weigh 195 pounds and have no excess fat at all.  Also, muscle burns more calories at rest than fat.  The result is that these formulas may not be relevant for muscled people.

3. Realize that the daily caloric intake numbers here calculated so far are the calories required to maintain the current body weight of these average people profiles.  That’s why I used the word “stable”, referring to keeping the current weight stable.

Fourth, calculate your daily caloric intake target

If you want to lose weight, there’s another – lower – caloric intake number, and we’ll call it the “daily caloric target”

So, if our average male said, “I’d be a hell of a lot better off if I weighed 160 pounds instead of my portly 180” (hmm, does anybody really refer to themselves as “portly”?), then he could pop “160” into the BMR formula, adjust his activity multiplier if he was going to increase his activity, and then calculate his caloric intake target.

Given the lower weight inputted into the formula, unless the activity level multiplier offsets the new weight input, the caloric intake number will be lower.

In other words, our pal will have to consume fewer calories to drop the weight.  Makes sense, yes?

Walk

Last up is “Infographic #3: Walk”.

Indeed, for many people, walking is the first step (ha!) toward integrating sufficient activity into their lives to help lose weight and get fit.  Everyone knows how to do it, and no special equipment is required.

Check out all the benefits attributable to walking in the Walk Infographic:

That’s a heck of a long list of good things. Surely, walking does a body good.

Now, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever be able to bench press your body weight, run a marathon or fold yourself into a pretzel simply by walking a lot.  But if the only thing you’ve been exercising of late it your TV’s remote control, walking is a good way to begin getting active.

Three Conclusions

1. Yes, you are phenomenal, but you may also be a bit overweight.  Unless you’re packing a lot more muscle than average, use the BMR and caloric formulas above to determine the calorie target to get to your ideal weight.

2. If you’re more than a wee bit overweight, stare hard at the Obesity Infographic and consider what actions you may be willing to take.  Then do #1 above. And #3 below.

3. Unaccustomed to exercise?  Well, try walking.  Start by noting all the associated health benefits derived by walking, recruit a buddy or two, and get marching.

Over and out.

Don’t forget to share this with someone who might be interested, and comments are always welcome (scroll down for that).

Yep.

P.S.  Many thanks to L.A. Bariatrics, Greatist and Everybody Walk for their wonderfully illustrative infographics!

Related posts:

1. Forget Aerobics — Burn Your Fat with Metabolic Circuits
2. Get Lean And Strong With Dr. Hyman’s Metabolic Boosters
3. This Holiday, Overeat and Gain No Weight!

Few things are as confusing as diet and health information.  Here, I attempt provide some clarity as I dive into the myths and truths of eight common diet strategies.

Yahoo recently posted an article written by Janice Graham entitled, The Surprising Truth About 8 Common Diet Strategies, and me thinks it’s largely spot on.

Except for a few things, some pretty important.

And it’s these few things I’d like to dive into and expound upon so that you, dear reader, are left with the clarity of Buddhist chimes.

Well, at least as pertains to these eight “strategies” about diet.

The “8 Common Diet Strategies” cited by Ms. Graham (along with my quick comments in parenthesis) are:

1. To lose a pound, you must cut 3,500 calories.
(Correctly deemed “FALSE” but there’s more to it.)

2. Three squares a day works as well as a “many mini meals” plan.
(Typically “TRUE” as stated with an important caveat.)

3. A history of yo-yo dieting wrecks your chances of future weight-loss success.
(Yes, “FALSE” as stated, and I have pretty much nothing to add to Graham’s assessment.)

4. Exercise does not burn off pounds. 
(No, no this is not “TRUE” as claimed for specific reasons I’ll cite.)

5. It’s best to set challenging weight-loss goals.
(I’m OK with “TRUE” but there is an important footnote.)

6. Milk drinkers lose more weight.
(Yeah, “FALSE” is right on and there’s an even better alternative to the suggested yogurt.)

7. Tracking carbs is the best way to keep pounds off.
(The “FALSE” claim on this one is confusing, but I’ll yak about it anyway.)

8. You have to watch what you eat – forever.
(This is marked as “TRUE” and it is for most of us.)

OK, now that the stage is set, let’s get into the details presented in The Surprising Truth About 8 Common Diet Strategies, and then launch into my twist on things.

From time to time, it may be handy to refer to Janice Graham’s article, which is right here.

The Truth (and My Truth) About 8 Common Diet Strategies

1. To lose a pound, you must cut 3,500 calories. (“FALSE”)

The reason this is marked “FALSE” is that while in the lab 3.500 calories equals a pound of fat, this doesn’t necessarily hold up in the real world with real human bodies.

Remember: a “calorie” is the approximate amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. (Source)

Which makes me wonder if scientists figured out that it takes 3,500 calories to make a pound of fat by heating up water hot enough to burn a pound of the unsightly jiggly, and then measured how much energy was needed to make the heat.

(Just kidding.)

Anyway, the point Yahoo makes from citing the work of Kevin Hail, Ph.D. is that as you lose weight your metabolism slows down, and thus as you get thinner and thinner, each extra pound of fat takes more caloric energy (calories) to burn off.

The example provided in Ms. Graham’s article is a 46-year-old woman who weighs 170 pounds and thinks that she needs to cut 500 calories per day to drop a pound per week, losing 26 pounds over six months, but will actually only lose 19.5 pounds according to Dr. Hall.

Dr. Hall has created a “body weight simulator”, which is how he did the math expressed above for our 46-year-old, which looks like this:

And can be watched in action here.

There’s one more thing relevant to this topic – and that’s about the equality of calories.

Are all calories created equal? 

I –and those who actually study this stuff for a living — assert that they’re not; Ryan Andrews over at Precision Nutrition, for example.

The idea here is that different foods will affect insulin sensitivity, metabolism and fat storage differently.  Manufactured food – the stuff that lives in cans and boxes and resembles nothing like that which is grown on farms – are “non-foods”.

As Ryan Andrews puts it in his post, All About Dietary Displacement:

“Non-food” calories are more likely to be stored as fat, degrade health, lead to further hunger, lead to further food preoccupation, and low energy levels.”

The moral of the story is to eat a variety of lean protein (grass fed meat and low-mercury fish), complex carbs (low glycemic brown rather than while), healthy fats and as little manufactured food and drink (soda, fruit drink) that you can manage.

More about calories:

• Metabolism’s Role in Burning Body Fat
• More Than 50 Ways to Cut Fat Calories
• How to Measure Your Basil Metabolic Rate (BMR)
• Want Longevity? 5 Alternatives to a Calorie Restricted Diet
• This Holiday, Overeat and Gain No Weight!

2. Three squares a day works as well as a “many mini meals” plan. (“TRUE”, somewhat)

In the Yahoo article, this one is marked “TRUE”, but then correctly makes an important caveat, which is: three meals per day is as good as several frequent meals throughout the day only if you’re good at portion control.

If you’re going to eat three modest meals and two healthy snacks each day, the key is not to actually wind up eating five modest meals.

Frequent eating requires good food quantity control. If you aren’t adept at that, then stick with the traditional three squares per day.

More about meal frequency:

• How Many Meals Per Day Do You Think Is Optimum?
• Get Thin With These 5 Foods

3. A history of yo-yo dieting wrecks your chances of future weight-loss success (“FALSE”)

Over the years, it’s been an oft-cited mantra that yo-yo dieters are damned to eternal fatness. But now the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle says something like, “not so, yo-yo”.

Their research asserts that even women who lost 20 or more pounds on three or more occasions were still able to follow yet another new diet and exercise program just as ably and successfully as those who don’t yo-yo.

(Yes, their focus was women because, apparently, they are overwhelmingly representative of yo-yo dieters.)

This is good news and I hope it get propagated throughout the land till everyone who is dejected and dizzy from yo-yoing realizes that they can still get trim.

4. Exercise does not burn off pounds. (“True”, they say; “Not, say I.)

Janice Graham, the writer of the Yahoo article under review here, begins this part with:

“It’s hard to believe, but in a study of 411 women, those who worked out for one, two, or three hours a week for six months didn’t lose significantly more than those who’d devoted themselves to Suoku or other sedentary purists.”

She goes on to say: “You’d think this finding was a fluke…” and then mentions 15 studies that conclude the same.

The reason touted for this surprising, “fluke”-like result is explained by how the body adapts to weight loss by lowering resting metabolic rate, thereby burning less calories – a similar situation as described in #1 above.

If, like me, you’re thinking that these outcomes don’t pass the smell test, Diana M. Thomas, Ph.D., of Montclair State University in New Jersey, provides us a clue about what may be actually going on here.  She says that although the exercisers didn’t lose weight, the exercise:

“… helps reduce your waist and gives you a firmer, leaner-looking shape overall.”

So, I’m thinking that two things are going on here that unwittingly contributed to the assertion that “exercise does not burn off pounds:

a)    Total pounds may not have gone down but the fat component decreased, as the muscle component increased, thus resulting in Ms. Thomas’s description about improved “shape overall”; and

b)   The women’s exercise intensity and type were subpar to burn fat.

Listen up and listen good:

It’s true that, generally speaking (that is – for most of us), diet is more important than exercise from a strict fat loss point of view. But as the economists like to say: this is a necessary but insufficient condition.  (Irrelevant fact: I studied economics in grad school.)

To the extent that your exercise builds muscle, that muscle – although weighing some 40% more than the fat it replaces will increase your basil metabolic rate (burn more calories at rest) and slow down the ravages of aging.

Not to mention, make you look better.

Nuff said.

Learn more about fat-burning exercise:

• Five Diet and Exercise Myths that Need to Die
• The Anti-aging Effects of Exercise
• Boost Your Human Growth Hormone in 20 Minutes!
• 90% of Sustained Weight Loss Includes Exercise and Diet
• How to Measure Your Metabolic Rate and Why It’s Important

5. It’s best to set challenging weight-loss goals. (“TRUE” with a twist.)

A Dutch study is cited showing that:

“… the more weight loss the participants strived for, the more effort they made – and the more weight they reported losing after two months.”

The conjecture is that ambitious goals are more “energizing” and pumps up “your commitment and drive.”

I have no complaint with this assessment, but my twist is that although you can make your goals ambitious, they should then be parsed into smaller, more easily achieved sub goals that as achieved they step by step enable you to complete the bigger ambitious goal.

As I wrote in Why Your Goals Should Be Small:

“Make goals that are small, but in the direction you want to go.”

The point is to make them achievable, because there’s nothing like one success that catalyzes another.

The example I use in Why Your Goals Should Be Small is a person who is 50 pounds overweight.  My presumption is that someone in this situation got there over the course of many years, and through “an assortment of activities, propensities, emotionally charged stuff and habits.”

And that it’s precisely because of these big, entrenched reasons that losing 50 pounds is too big of a goal psychologically for most people.

It probably took years to gain that weight through an assortment of activities, propensities, emotionally charged stuff and habits.  And it’s precisely these big entrenched reasons that make losing 50 pounds too big of a goal.

I think it would be better to break down the process of achieving the loss of 50 pounds into specific, achievable sub goals, each leading to the rapturous one.

What do you think?

More on this:

• Why Your Goals Should Be Small
• Practice Your Fears With Tim Ferriss
• Six Tools To Make Your Resolutions Come True

6. Milk drinkers lose more weight. (“FALSE”, yep.)

Researchers from Harvard examined 29 studies about this and found that over the long run, milk does give you a white mustache to help your friends take their eyes off your increasing girth.

Do you like diary?  Eat yoghurt, or better yet, kefir.

Kefir?

Yep, the probiotics contained in kefir far exceed those in yoghurt in both quality and quantity.  You can get it at many grocers and all health food stores.

Why should you bother?

Well, in addition to substituting a fat-producing diary drink (milk) with a lower calorie, healthier alternative (kefir, or yoghurt), you will also be taking a large step toward gastrointestinal health.

You might have read that our bodies have more organisms that are “not us” than are “us”.

Trillions of them.

Some are beneficial and others are not.  Simply put, probiotics feeds the good guys and that’s really good for us.

Read more about probiotics:

• All About Probiotics
• End Sluggish Digestion
• Eating for a Long Life: WebMD’s 13 Tips

7. Tracking carbs is the best way to keep pounds off. (“FALSE”…)

As mentioned, the Yahoo write-up on this confuses me.  Basically, the assertion is that counting grams of carbs or fat ingested doesn’t make for a successful weight loss technique as compared to a balanced plan:

“A balanced plan topped the usual technique of counting carbohydrates or fat grams in a study of adults who had recently lost a significant amount of weight.” (Source)

I don’t get if the point is that counting any macronutrient (such as fats or carbs) is futile for weight loss, or if it’s the actual amount of each respective macronutrient that is being, uh, weighed?

If you have a moment, go here and scroll down to #7, read it and tell us what you think.

The conclusion presented about the need to make your carbs be “low glycemic”, along with a balance mix of healthy fats and proteins is one I can readily get behind:

“The study’s balanced plan included lots of whole grains, fresh vegetables, legumes, fruits, nuts, healthy fats like olive oil, and lean fish and meats; it excluded heavily processed foods like white bread and instant rice.” (Source)

 The skinny on carbohydrates:

• What’s Making Us Fat and Sick?
• Pump Up Your Metabolism: Eat Protein, Not Wheat
• Why Dr. Weil’s Anti-Inflammatory Food Pyramid May Be The Best Diet
• How Sugary Is Your Blood?

8. You have to watch what you eat – forever (“TRUE”, typically)

Yes, indeed, we all know someone who can eat anything and still stay trim.  That’s not me, and, likely, that’s not you either.

We need to pay attention to what we eat and how much of it.  This is particularly true in this age of manufactured food, where most of what you can buy in a supermarket is adulterated food; meaning, processed.

Manufactured foods possess the “Holy Trinity” of salt/sugar/fat, and it’s designed to make you want as much as you can stuff in as often as you can.

As weight-loss researcher Fiona Johnson, Ph.D., of University College London puts it in the Yahoo article I’m here referencing:

“… the constant bombardment of food temptations has led to a situation where self-control is essential.”

Psychologists suggest that rather than live a life completely denying yourself the guilty pleasures of the Holy Trinity, do occasionally indulge.

“Occasionally” is the operative word.

Here, a scale is useful.  As in, use it.

Weigh yourself regularly and when you see that an extra pound has appeared out of nowhere, remember what “occasionally” is supposed to mean.

As long as you take swift action in reaction to thoaw uninvited pounds, they won’t sneak up on you year by year till one day you look in the mirror and wonder where you went, and where that other person staring back at you came from.

Good stuff to know about diets, et al:

• Diet 101
• Food, Diet and Nutrition
• Lose Weight Without Dieting
• 5 Simple Things to Live Longer, Better
• 10 Unusual Tips About Losing Weight
• Are You Addicted to the Holy Trinity of Salt, Sugar and Fat?

Conclusions

1. Calories are confusing critters.  The way they affect your body is largely determined by the food/drink source of the calories and what’s happening to you metabolically as your lose weight.  Eat high quality fats, particularly omega-3 fatty acids, low glycemic, so-called complex carbohydrates, and lean protein (grass fed meat, low-mercury fish, organic diary). To help with gastrointestinal health, consume probiotics.

2. When it comes to the number of meals you eat per day, know yourself.  If you’re good with portion control and can really eat two small, healthy meals intermixed with three modest sized ones, try it.  Otherwise, stick to three.  Whichever you do, consider consuming 30 grams of protein within the first half hour after arising, as this might set you on the right path the whole day, given the satiety that the protein will provide.  (Read Like Time Ferriss, I Try to Overeat Without Gaining Weight.)

3. While it’s true that – if you had to chose just one — diet is more important than exercise for losing weight… for true health you must move the body and eat right.

4. Make your goals manageable.  “Reach for the stars and you may get the moon” is an apt analogy, because you know the stars are unreachable from the outset given from where you’re starting.  So, if the stars are really the dream, make the first goal a star ship, next the moon, and go from there.

5. Remove “diet” from your mindset and replace it with “lifestyle”.  The point here is to make a lifestyle change that incorporates a new and different way of eating for the long haul, as opposed to some restrictive diet that you have to suffer through for some defined time frame.

OK, so that’s it for this post.

Please feel free to dive into the Comments below.  You may agree with me, or tell me I’m nuts.

Yep.

Related posts:

1. Five Diet and Exercise Myths that Need to Die
2. The Reboot Cleanse Diet – Two Common Struggles
3. 12 Myths About Cholesterol

Yes, stress is a super ager, but it’s manageable and the benefits of doing so are huge. Watch SciShow’s Hank Green present some details, and Physicist Michio Kaku dive into how stress messes with genetics.

MY OPEN secret is that I’m very focused on life extension, as in mine — and thru many of the topics here explored on this site, yours.

Over the years, the stuff I’ve been doing seems to be working, and this has not gone unnoticed.

Now, when I do a detox cleanse, my buds clamor to jump aboard. When people are visiting and they see me reach for the supplement box, they want to know about my latest protocol. And, they wonder, why a once-committed gym rat now rarely enters one; or why I now stress mobility rather than heavy weightlifting exercises.

(I have nothing against gyms, just wanted to test what’s possible without one.)

Another open secret is that I intend to finally focus this blog on health matters related to living a long and strong life.

After all, that’s what I’m doing, day in, day out… step by step, I’m tweaking that which will – hopefully – add up to some fine, long, strong unencumbered living.

One tweak that is essential, and so really is not a “tweak” at all, but a “major rehab” is the topic of this post: “why stress is the biggest super ager of them all.”

We “Age” Based On How We Live

Let’s begin with the two ways you can measure aging.

In our normal parlance, the way we measure “age” is by math: Today’s date minus date of birth. The other way age may be measured is determined by genetics and behavior. Often this measure is called “bioage”, or “real age”, as Dr. Oz and his associates like to put it.

There’s nothing you can do about chronology – the math that measures your years on this planet, but there’s a ton that you can do about your biology, or bioage.

I follow a fellow named Doug who writes a blog called Health Matters. Recently, he tweeted a link to his Pinterest page that shows “385 of the most inspirational fitness pics you will ever see.” One is particularly relevant to us at present.

This is a picture of Ernestine Shephard, a 74-year old body builder who never stepped into a gym till she was 56!

How old do you think you’re body’s going to be when you’re 74? Certainly, Ernestine proves that chronology does not equal biology – her biological age is far younger than her actual age.

And, not to leave the other gender out of play, consider the famous example of Dr. Jeffry Life, the medical doctor who in the process of working away his obesity committed himself to youthful hormone balancing, healthy eating and lots of weight lifting.

This is Dr. Jeffrey Life at 72:

I present some details about him and his work here.

Now that you’ve had a glimpse of what’s possible, let’s turn to what may be the biggest thing in your life that could prevent you from living a long and healthy life.

It’s not a lack of exercise — though that does contribute to premature aging — nor is it sitting all day, overeating or binge drinking – all significant factors as well.

But the single biggest premature ager of them all is stress.

Chronic stress!

Chronic stress is not the type that enables you to instantly spring into action to avoid being tiger food, but the type that hold’s onto you all day, and all restless nightlong.

Hank Green now enters our stress story with a fun introduction to the biochemistry of stress in his SciShow video, “anxiety”. (Yeah, anxiety is stress.)

The Cortisol/Telomere Dance

We need to drill down into cortisol and telomeres, because when they join hands they can bring you down to your old, achy knees.

Cortisol is the major reason that I suggest you moderate your consumption of coffee. 

Yes, it’s true that some recent research suggests it can be healthful, given that those with poor diets may get most of their antioxidants from coffee. But, using coffee as your primary source for antioxidants may be a high price to pay:

–> Drinking one cup drunk at 8:00 AM and your cortisol levels will be elevated till about 10:00 PM.

[If coffee, red meat or saturated fats are topics of interest, read: What You Need To Know About Coffee, Saturated Fat and Red Meat.]

Cortisol has earned its nickname, “The Death Hormone.” Elevated cortisol has long been known to do various nasty things to you, such as altering immune system responses and suppressing the digestive system, the reproductive system and growth processes.

But cortisol does something else that’s far more pernicious, which has only recently been proven, and was significant enough to win Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn a Nobel Prize in 2009.

Before I tell you what she discovered, you need to know about telomeres.

Telomeres are nucleotides found at the end of chromosomes that keep them (the chromosomes) from deterioration subsequent to each cell division. Telomeres are commonly compared to the plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces; without them, the shoelace would fray and eventually become useless.

As telomeres shorten, we age. In fact, scientists can accurately determine lifespan by measuring the length of your telomeres.

Back to Dr. Blackburn…

What Dr. Blackburn discovered was that the enzyme that keeps telomeres intact – called telomerase – is compromised by the elevated cortisol existing in a particular population, that of long-term care givers.

Turns out, this was the ideal group in which to measure consistently high cortisol levels. Long-term caregivers, such as those with both elderly parents and children to care for – and let’s add in a job – are under constant, if low level, stress.

Their adrenals are not making them sprint up a hillside to avoid the tiger, which would be fine (assuming the getaway was successful), because the cortisol pumping into the body would be temporary in this situation. Instead, the issue at hand here is the chronically elevated cortisol, which leads to reduced telomerase activity, and premature telomere shortening.

Next up, Physicist Michio Kaku talks telomeres and the one proven (and unpleasurable) way to extend lifespan:

Reduce Stress This Way

Have you heard the proposition that stress exists only inside your own head?

The idea here is that we each have a conscious choice about how to react to any external event that may intrude upon us.

The typical example is how two people could react completely differently to the same traffic jam. Person A leans on his horn, sticks his head out the window to hurl invectives, sweats and cusses. Lotsa cortisol pumping for Mr. A. Whereas, Ms. B is rocking to the music on her radio. She notices the pretty day, and gets a kick from watching Mr. A turn red, a really pretty shade of red, she thinks.

Our goal is to be B.

Integrating the right attitude into our consciousness is the first thing to do. (Remember, your thoughts and emotions constitute your attitude).

Other stress management activities include:

• Eating a healthy diet and getting regular exercise and plenty of sleep
• Practicing relaxation techniques
• Fostering healthy friendships
• Having a sense of humor
• Seeking professional counseling when needed

The payoff for reducing stress is pretty darn big. Beyond peace of mind, we’re talking a longer, healthier life.

UPDATE: Dr. Mercola just posted a good review of the damage stress does and his video reviewing some stress-busting ideas right here.
 

What’s Your BioAge?

As long as we’re on the topic, know that Dr. Oz, Dr. Rosen, and others have put together a questionnaire that measures your BioAge, or “real age” as they term it.

They also say that stress is the biggest ager of them all.

I recently watched a Dr. Oz show, which I think was called, “Drop A Decade”, where he shared some aging stats.

Here are some activities and the amount of “real age” reduction they enable, according to Drs Oz and Rosen:

- Meditation, 1.7 years
- Social Interaction, 8.5 years
- Daily Walk of 30 Minutes, 12 years
- Vitamin D, 1,000 IU/day, 2.6 years
- Daily Flossing, 6 years

I suggest that you don’t regard these numbers as set in stone, but estimates; still they give an idea of the relative merits of each activity.

If you’re curious about all this, you can go to the RealAge site, answer a comprehensive set of questions, and get an estimate for your real age.

Also, you may wish to read one or more of these posts pertinent to the subject at hand that live right here on this very site:

The Anti-aging Effects of Exercise

5 Common Injuries of 4 Aging Athletes

Here’s Why Exercise Slows the Aging Process

Boost Your Testosterone Naturally

Fellas, How Sturdy Is Your Morning Wood?

Ray Kurzweil’s 100+ Pills per Day Age Defying Fight

How To Live To 100 – Watch

Boost Your Human Growth Hormone In 20 Minutes!

Nine Reasons To Drink Tea and Limit Coffee

Why Coffee May Be Good and Bad For You

The Surprising Reasons Your Kids Should Care About Your Genetics

What A 50-Year Old Volkswagen Can Tell You About Your Lifespan

Yeah, that’s quite a list, but I assure you that there are some pearls in each of the above linked posts. If you have no time now, come back.

And with that, I bid you adieu.

Yep.

Related posts:

1. Beware Stress…
2. Four Solutions to Antibiotic-resistant Super Bed Bugs

When you age, a whole cavalcade of biologically and behaviorally based things happen that can make you stubbornly hold on to fat. If you want to be svelte, you need to tackle fat with some smart and consistent actions, which I outline in this “Baby Boomer’s Guide to Trimming Body Fat” post.

(Click to Enlarge)

I’VE NEVER been very overweight, but I have been softer than I’d like, perhaps 15 pounds or so away from a decently muscular and trim visage.

Many of my peers are quite stout, or skinnyfat (thin, but still having a high percent body fat). Among them, I’m considered fit. Part of the reason for that is that I got immersed in health stuff early in life, and did not do some of the typical things that can add stress and absorb time, such as get married, have kids and work for 30 years without a break.

You know, the usual stuff.

Sure, I’ve missed out on some amazing experiences and feelings, but the silver lining is that I’ve had more time to devote to self-experimentation than most.

The upside is that now well into my fifth decade, my body has transcended its age – at least at the moment.

What I mean is that my biology does not = my chronology.

Part of the reason is diet: food, drink and supplements.

I could wax and wane till you’re bored silly about diet stuff, but instead I’d like to drill down to something both tangible and implementable. (Yes, it’s a word, even if an awkward one.)

This post delves into the weekly rhythms of my fat-loss focused dietary life.

As you’ll see, I don’t enumerate much about specific foods, but rather underscore specific principles.

After they’re laid out, I’ll turn to how these principles are applied in my weekly dietary regimen, and then offer a quick summary. So, this post is organized thus:

· The Seven Principles for Losing Body Fat
· My Weekly Dietary Regimen
· Summary

This is a long post, so I’ll be kind and suggest to those of you with little interest in this, or little time to devote to it, scroll down to the bottom Summary. If that tweaks your interest, you can always read more.

 

MY SEVEN PRINCIPLES FOR LOSING BODY FAT

These seven have been chosen because they are fairly hot topics on the Web and blogosphere, sometimes fiercely debated. So, here I’m adding my two cents, as well as what my experience suggests is worth exploring.

#1. Carbs Are Bad

Carbohydrates from grains, particularly high glycemic carbs, impair optimum insulin/blood sugar/leptin response and thereby have a tendency to make you fat unless you exercise a lot, such as doing long bouts of cardio.

I underscore “cardio” (exercises that tax your cardiovascular system) because you need to ingest carbs to fuel you for, say, an hour of cardio exertion, but you typically don’t for anaerobic exercises.

If you have any doubt about this, check out my post, What’s Making Us Fat and Sick, which starts out like this:

(The above link will also bring you to a discourse on high glycemic carbs and how insulin resistance begins the malevolent cycle of turning high glycemic carbs into body fat.)

Perhaps you’ve heard of “slow carbs“, a term that self-experimenter, Tim Ferriss popularized, or the more commonly used term, “complex carbs”. They — as do “low glycemic carbs” — refer to carbohydrates that digest slowly and do not cause glucose and insulin levels to surge in response to eating them.

If you want to eat carbs, stick to those that are slow. A good rule of thumb is to avoid carb foods that are white (pasta, bread, rice) and live in boxes (various processed food and cereals).

Over time, a diet devoted to fast carbs will desensitize insulin, making it resistant in its response to ingested carbohydrates, which eventually can cause diabesity, a term popularized by Dr. Mark Hyman that refers to the unhappy combination of diabetes and obesity.

I primarily eat carbs after workouts, and mainly they’re of the slow variety.

#2. Fat Is OK

Eating fat is less apt to make you fat than eating carbs, assuming about the same level of calories consumed. In fact, fat has had a resurrection in popularity of late, given that recent studies challenge the long-standing assertion that one particular type of fat — saturated fat — is not the evil cardiovascular-impairing fat it once was thought to be.

That said, your aim is not to be unmindful of your consumption of saturated fat; rather to ensure that the butter or meat or coconut oil you eat were, or were derived from, no-hormone, grass-fed critters in the case of the first two, and organic/cold pressed in the case of the third.

What remains unchallenged is that trans fat (found in processed foods) is bad, and omega-3 fatty acids are good, so focus on eliminating one and increasing the other. Foods rich in omega-3 fats include avocados, sardines, salmon, fish oil, flax seeds, chia seeds, hemp seeds, walnuts, Brazil nuts and the like.

The omega-6 fats from olive oil are fine, but the balance between them and omega-3s are important. Since most of us get far more 6s than 3s, given the prevalence of olive oil over, say, fish oil, this balance is out of whack for most people. So, again, focus on ingesting more omega-3s.

#3 Coffee is OK

But there are conditions.

As Dave Asprey over there at the Bulletproof Executive will tell you as he describes his Bulletproof Coffee, it must be organic, grown at high altitude, air dried and contain no mytoxins. (For more about this, go here and scroll down to “Dave Asprey”.)

Another condition is the amount you drink. Caffeine may be a beneficial stimulant, but it also raises cortisol levels, which has a negative cascading effect on your health.

Although cortisol is essential to enable our bodies to maintain stability and balance during acute periods of stress (short bouts of fear, physical trauma, physical exertion), excessive amounts of cortisol can destroy the immune system, shrink the brain and other vital organs, decrease muscle mass, increase inflammation throughout the body, and cause thinning of the skin.

As Dr. Nicholas Perricone puts it:

“In the anti-aging field, cortisol is known as the death hormone because it is associated with old age and disease” (Source)

If you drink one cup in the morning and leave it at that, the benefits of good coffee (as above described) may out weigh the benefits (read this debate), but if you ingest more than one cup, do something to mitigate its pernicious effects, such as taking systemic stress reducing adaptogens like Rhodiola Extract and Ashwagandha Root Extract.

If you sweat or feel slightly nauseous when drinking coffee, it may be a sign that you don’t digest it well. Do yourself a favor – drink tea instead.

#4. Red Meat Is OK, But Salmon Is Better

Hey, if you like meat, odds are you’re committed to it. What I’d like to do is tweak your meat-eating habit a bit by suggesting that you:

· Not eat it everyday, but mix it up with other sources of protein;
· Choose no-hormone, on-antibiotic, grass-fed meat; and
· Eat some fish, such as Alaskan salmon, Pacific herring, cod, halibut, etc.

What’s great about salmon is that it’s high in protein and omega-3 fatty acids. The protein builds muscle and the omega-3 fats help reduce stress and inflammation.

(Two posts that wade deep into the meat debate are: Is Meat Good For You? 8 Experts Chew On It, And 4 Spit It Out, and What You Need To Know About Coffee, Saturated Fat and Red Meat.)

Personally, I have to fight a tendency to consume all my protein via various powders.  They’re quick to prepare and exacting in terms of quantity of protein consumed.  The issue for me is that they’re processed, another example of manufactured food.  That said, you can find some pretty righteously made, high-quality protein powders, but I still think that other non-powdered sources are a good idea.

It’s pretty clear that eating protein with your meals and snacks will help with satiation, so you’ll eat less overall.  Not to mention muscle. Protein helps build muscle. More muscle = a higher basil metabolic rate = more fat burning.

(Read: How to Measure Your Basil Metabolic Rate, and Why It’s Important That You Do.)

#5. You Need To Disrupt Homeostasis

What I mean here is that our marvelous bodies are very smart and they know how to survive, and so if you suddenly reduce your caloric intake and sustain this low level, your body will eventually stop losing weight. It will change its basil metabolism and other systems in order to maintain fat, which evolutionarily speaking, protected us from burning too many calories during famine.

In order to keep the body from adjusting to its caloric input, in order to consistently lose body fat, it’s a good idea to be consistently inconsistent with the amount of calories you eat, and perhaps even when you eat certain macronutrients, such as carbs.

This distills down to two things that you might try:

1. Chose one day per week as a “cheat day” where you eat whatever you want; and
2. You eat most of your carbs after you workout.

For this to work, you have to know yourself.  You can’t say, “Oh I just ate a gallon of ice cream… I guess today will be my cheat day.” And then two days later, “Geez, well, that pizza sure went down nicely… today’s a cheat day too!”

One cheat day per week is good for a person who can suspend their desire for gratification, knowing that each week, there will be a day designated for it.  If you can’t do that, forget about this homeostasis disrupting tactic.

This also applies to designating a particular time for eating carbs.  If you find that you’re eating them both before and after your workouts, obviously, this tactic is not for you.

If you don’t exercise, consider eating most of your carbs during lunch. Ayurevdic Medicine is a multiple-thousand year old Indian tradition that says that your digestion capabilities are strongest mid day and that it is then that you should eat your heavist meal.  Non-exercisers might try that.

#6. You Need To Build Muscle

This goes for you women as well.

It has nothing to do with looking like a body builder, unless that’s your thing.

The simple fact is that without some sorta resistance training, the average person can lose as much as 3 to 5% of their muscle mass per decade after age 30. This is called Sarcopenia, and you don’t want it to happen to you.

You build, or maintain, muscles by using them; meaning, making them resist certain forces applied to them, such as gravity.

YouTube is stuffed with “how to” exercise videos. On this very site, I show how you can apply resistance to your body without the use of weights in what I’ve called, The Homestead Workout. (Yeah it’s goofy, but you’ll get some ideas.)

#7. You Need Reset Your Hormones

If you’re younger than 40, read this anyway, because if you’re lucky, someday you’ll want to know why you’re feeling old. When that happens, this information will be handy to know.

We live in an estrogen-producing world of food and chemicals. The result is that men often have too much of it. With women, it’s more complicated, but often after menopause, many have too little estrogen and too much testosterone.

For men, too much estrogen produces similar symptoms to too little testosterone: Belly fat, listlessness, low sex drive, muscular atrophy, etc.

Naturally, women need and thrive on more estrogen than men, but too much, sometimes referred to as “estrogen dominance” can imitate other syndromes such as metabolic syndrome, fibromyalgia, lupus, peri-menopause and anxiety. (Source.)

There’s more to hormones than testosterone and estrogen, but suffice to say here that it’s a really good idea to know your hormone numbers via a blood (preferable) or saliva test.

When I got my blood work results back, I was much surprised. (Here’s the story on that.)

You can “reset” your hormones to youthful levels by going to a doctor and getting a prescription for the bio-identical hormones you’re deficient in, or ingest certain supplements and foods, which continues to be my course of action to increase my testosterone.

Now that we’ve covered the six “principles” for losing body fat, I’ll next share with you how I apply them during any given week.

MY WEEKLY DIETARY REGIMEN

You may recall that at the beginning of this post, I mentioned that I’ve never been much overweight, but to fine tune that statement, let me state that there’s some relativity embedded in that declaration.

In my twenties and thirties, I hovered between 10 and 14% body fat. In my forties and fifties, my body fat increased to the high teens, even touching on 22%.  (Check out the body fat percent pictures above and see what your number might be.)

I still looked OK enough, because I also had a decent amount of muscle on my body, and – relative to my peers – was doing just fine.

Or so I thought.

Then one day a couple of years ago, my sister and I were visiting friends who have a house right on Stinson Beach, just north of San Francisco. The ocean was inviting. I went in and splashed around, one eye scanning for one of those White Sharks that harass the surfers once in a while.

When I emerged from the ocean, sis snapped a pic. Later, she showed it to me. And I said something like, “Holly hell, I’ve gotten fat!”

I appeared fatter in the picture than I thought I was, and I intended to do something about it.

It just took awhile to really get serious.

A few months back I began to seriously chipping away at the chub. I developed a pattern, a weekly pattern, which I share in the table below.

Joe’s Weekly Food and Exercise Cycle

The physical stuff enumerated in the box above has a better chance of happening as planned if I begin my day on the right foot, sorta speak.

Here’s how a typical day unfolds…

Gratitude

How you begin your day can influence the quality of your day.

I position myself to have a great day while still in bed. As I break away from sleep and enter that hypnagogic state before full wakefulness, I:

· Silently utter a series of mantras, or affirmative statements, as I visualize them; and
· Review in my minds eye what I wish to accomplish this day.

Since I’m trying to lose body fat, a good portion of this bed time reverie is focused on what I intend to do this day in support of that objective.

I then get up, patter to the kitchen, heat some purified water, squeeze a lemon in it, face the window that overlooks Richardson Bay, take in the glory of the sun rising over Angel Island, toast it all, and then slowly drink down the warm lemon water as I recount all for which I’m grateful.

Even if things kinds stink, there’s always something to be grateful for, and the more of them you find and focus on, the sweeter smelling will be your world.

Mobility

All the fluff fluff done, I continue with my patter, this time to the living room where I do a series of mobility exercises that last for about 5 minutes, warm up my body, articulate the joints and get some blood flowing.

The estimable Mike Mahler demonstrates some mobility exercise that I like, many of which I do every morning:

(Commercial Break: Maintaining/increasing mobility (aka full range of motion in your joints) is a key to enjoying your life as you age. Would you rather walk around humped over and staring at your shoes, or prance around like Madonna?)

Breakfast

I used to be in the camp that shouts, “You must eat breakfast!”, for a whole host of reasons that are still, I think, mainly true. But what I now understand is that breakfast can take many forms.

What’s true is that most of us will do better if we get some nutrition in our bodies in the morning to help fuel our day. However, there are different ways of going about this depending on your goals.

If you want to lose body fat, as I do, then one tactic is to prolong your fast.

“Who’s fasting?”, you inquire.

Well, at the moment you wake up, you have – you’ve fasted from the moment you last ate the prior night till when you woke up, perhaps a total duration of 10 hour.

You can keep it going for a while if you want to adopt a particular method for losing fat.

Some call it “Intermittent Fasting”, and although there are several different ways to go about it, what it basically means is to select periods of time intervals when you don’t eat, or eat very little.

Conversely, another way to think of Intermittent Fasting is that you eat all your meals during a prescribed time range, say 1:00 PM to 9:00 PM, an eight hour period, leaving 16 hours of fasting.

In the recent past, I ate a decent sized breakfast, particularly since I wanted to get about 30 grams of protein in me within ½ hour of awakening.

If you’re consistently breaking down muscle tissue (catabolism) doing activities such as weight training, you need to be ingesting protein (anabolism), on a regular basis, as this helps repair and grow the muscle.

Ingesting protein first thing in the morning feeds the body this important repair/building macronutrient, and also helps control hunger throughout the day.

That said, besides wanting to feed my body what it needs to recover from the exercise I do, I’m also trying to lose body fat, right.

This Intermittent Fasting method I’m experimenting with requires that I extend the evening’s fasting period so that my body becomes better at using its fat storage for energy.

I try to strike the balance between ingesting enough nutrition, protein and fat (no carbs) to feed muscle and fight free radicals, inflammation, etc. –all components of aging – and keeping the calories low enough as to not yank me out of a fasting zone.

I’ve read that the calorie limit for maintaining the fasting state is 50, but I wind up ingesting more than that in the morning. By time I load up my morning protein/nutritional shake with various goodies, and then add the coconut butter I blend in my coffee — which I’ll get to in a moment — well, now that I do the math, I’ve probably taken myself out of the fasting zone.

Yeah, looks like all in, I’m eating just under 300 calories in the morning — less than a typical breakfast, but more than is required to keep me in a fasted state.  The good news is that Intermittent Fasting comes in many incarnations, so experiment with it.

Morning Nutritional Shake Ingredients:

- 8 oz of pure Water
- 4 oz of Aloe Vera juice (helps absorption, digestion, etc.)
- 4 oz of either organic Coconut Water or plain organic Almond Milk
- 1/2 teaspoon concentrated Trace Minerals
- 2 tbls Chlorophyll (binds to and helps purge heavy metals)
- 1 tbls of grounded organic Flax Seed (omega-3 and fiber), or Chia Seeds or grounded Hemp Seeds (omega-3 and fiber)
- 1 teaspoon Pine Bark Extract (reduces inflammation, boost kidney function, etc.)
- ¼ teaspoon of Hyaluronic Acid (helpful for joint health)
- 1/4 teaspoon of Cinnamon (regulates blood sugar, etc.)
- 1 teaspoon of Turmeric (reduces inflammation)
- 1/4 teaspoon of Black Pepper (makes the tumeric bioavailable)
- 1 heaping tbls of Spirulina powder (extremely nutritionally dense)
- Scoop of Raw Protein powder (18 grams protein)
- Scoop of Whey protein powder (9 grams of protein)

(Product links for some of this is at the bottom.)

Note: Start out with just two ounces of aloe vera juice, and 1/4 teaspoon of pine bark extract and see how it affects you.  I supplement with Curcumin concentrate in capsule form, but the Turmeric spice (which contains Curcumin) is thought to be more bioavailable, says Dr. Weil.

These ingredients get some pretty powerful “superfoods” in me that are filled with antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids, protein and fiber.

I admit that if this is all I ate in the morning, I’d be hungry well before my next meal, but there’s one more thing I do which has less to do about nutrition and more to do about stoking the fat burning process of the body and sustaining energy without hunger till the afternoon.

I’m referring to coffee with coconut oil blended with it, a simplified, and not fully conforming version of already-mentioned Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof coffee.

Dave’s BP coffee contains the righteous coffee described above + MCT oil (a concentrated form of coconut oil) plus grass-fed butter, blended into a froth of delicious smelling stuff.

Why drink your coffee this way?

The idea is that the MCT or coconut oil and butter in the coffee will keep you alert and energized well into the afternoon, particularly if you have more than one cup, which I would be careful about, as mentioned, due to how it raises cortisol.

I amend the BP coffee formula by skipping the butter and using coconut oil rather than MCT oil that, by the way, stands for “Medium Chain Triglyceride”, which is what coconut oil is, even though it’s a saturated fat, and saturated fats typically contain long chain fatty acids.

Armed with my Morning Shake and my version of BP coffee, I keep my overnight fast going, more or less, until about 1:00 when I have my first meal.

Before we head to lunch, one more point about a liquid breakfast:

If I wasn’t on a program to lose body fat, I might still opt to skip the typical breakfast in favor of liquids, but rather than the shake described, I’d add two handfuls or kale and/or spinach, and a cup of blue and/or blackberries, and blend it all up. I’d also add more than one of the three omega-3 seeds mentioned (flax, hemp, chia) and eat a few Brazil nuts.

Yes, this additional stuff would bump up the calorie count, but in this case, I wouldn’t be trying to maintain a fasting state, which we just learned above that I’m probably not doing anyway, given those nearly 300 morning calories that find their way down my gullet.

Lunch

Lunch can be anything as long is the ingredients are high quality, there’s at least 20 grams of protein in it, and the carbs are from vegetable sources.

On exercise days, in addition to freshly made veggie juice, or a salad, I’ll allow a piece of high fiber fruit, such as an apple, as the fiber slows down the blood glucose uptake.

(Watch: Juicing so Simple, A Child Could Do it. And Does.)

The fat sources for lunch come typically from organic, cold press olive oil, nuts or half of an avocado.

The protein can consist of any number of protein powders (hemp, raw sprout, pea or whey), left-overs (chicken, fish, or lentils) or eggs.

So, for instance, when at home, lunch is often two whole eggs, two egg whites, zucchini, red onion, perhaps sliced mushrooms too. No bread, unless except it’s a workout day, and then it’s one slice of densely seeded whole grain bread, like Trader Joe’s European Bread.

When out and about, I have to be discerning. Yesterday, I was in San Francisco during lunchtime. The options for food where overwhelming, most of them containing way too many carbs in the form of grains or grain byproducts.

I found a place that offered the option to mix three different salads together, and I choose the lentil salad + the homemade cole slaw salad + the vegetable salad. Although lentils are a great source of vegetable protein, this meal was a bit protein-light. If I had been better prepared, I could have brought along a thermos of whey, or raw sprout protein powder mixed with water, or almond milk.

Snack

If I snack between lunch and dinner, I want the quality high, so I’ll refrain from food-in-the-box crap, and go for any assortment of odd stuff, such as:

- A cup of organic yoghurt mixed with a scoop of whey protein powder
- A few celery stalks laden with almond butter
- A couple mouthfuls of sunflower seeds
- An apple, sliced, again with almond butter
- A high quality food bar, like Raw Organics
- A cup of left-over lentils and a few tbls of Greek Yogurt

You get the snack idea: protein + something else, not carbs from grains.

Dinner

Dinner is any high quality protein source, mostly fish or vegetable based, like high-protein lentils + a bunch of steamed and raw veggies and/or steamed or baked sweet potatoes + avocado, feta cheese or nuts as typical fat sources.

Except for workout days.

On workout days, I allow myself some carbs with dinner, although they’re usually high quality, low glycemic carbs.

I rarely eat pasta, but if I did, it would be after a workout and it would be whole wheat pasta, not white.

The idea behind eating most of the carbs on workout days after the workout is that carbs, in effect, transport protein to the muscle, a concept referred to as “carb backloading” and honed into a fine science by a guy named Kiefer. (Check out his site.)

Workout Feeding

I typically workout in the late afternoon before dinner. Before and after the workout, I have a shake, the ingredients of which are determined by the workout.

Aerobic workouts

If it’s going to be over an hour and include a lot of aerobic activity, it’s useful to ingest carbs so that my muscles have enough glycogen in them so as not to bonk mid way through the exercise session.

In this case, an hour before the exercise I may eat a cup of oatmeal with 10 grams of protein alongside, or mixed in it. Or, if ill prepared, I may eat half a banana and/or a couple of dates just prior to the workout.

After an aerobic workout, I’ll drink a lot of water and wait for dinner to get my post-exercise nutrition, which, as mentioned will include carbs, which are minimized, if eaten at all, in non-workout dinner days.

Anaerobic workouts

These are either resistance training with body weight or weights (dumb bells, barbells, kettle bells) and/or high intensity interval training.

Because I put much more intensity into my anaerobic workouts than the aerobic ones, and given that they also break down muscle tissue far more substantially, I’m more careful about how I prepare and recover from them.

Typically, I prepare a shake and drink half of it about ½ to one hour before anaerobic exercising, consisting of:

- 16 oz pure Water
- 5 grams of BCCA powder (Branch Chain Amino Acids)

I drink the rest of it during the workout.

I haven’t done so lately, but adding Creatine to the mix is a good idea. It’s about the most studied muscle-building supplement that exists and has a good reputation. The reasons include improving workout intensity, recovery and methylation. (Source.)

After an anaerobic workout, the muscles need feeding. Even if dinner is just an hour away, with a half hour after the exercise I’ll be drinking a post-exercise drink, which then has the added beneficial effect of reducing my appetite for dinner.

Post-Anaerobic Exercise Blended Smoothie

- 12 oz pure Water
- 4 oz Almond or Coconut milk
- 4 oz of Promegrande or Cherry juice
- 2 tbls of Fish Oil (omega-3 fatty acids helpful for stress and inflammation)
- 2 tbls of some combo of organic Flax Seed (omega-3 and fiber), Chia Seeds or grounded Hemp Seeds (omega-3 and fiber)
- 1 teaspoon Pine Bark Extract (reduces inflammation, boost kidney function, etc.)
- ½ teaspoon of Cinnamon (regulates blood sugar, etc.)
- 1 teaspoon of Turmeric (reduces inflammation)
- 1/2 teaspoon of Tribulus Terrestris extract powder (potential testosterone builder)
- 1/4 teaspoon of Black Pepper (makes the tumeric bioavailable)
- ½ frozen Banana, (potassium and carbs)
- 1 cup of Blue or Black berries (phytonutrients and carbs)
- 3 scoops of Whey protein powder (27 grams of protein)

None of these quantities are sacrosanct – you may want more or less depending on your size, the intensity of your exercise and your thirst for experimentation.

By time dinner rolls around on an exercise day, I’ll let myself be more liberal than usual about what I eat, particularly with respect to carbs. But the good thing is that after the post-exercise drink, I’m not very hungry, so I’ve already curbed any likely damage from potential excess feeding.

One Day of Pigging Out

This concept has already been addressed in “Principle #5. You Need To Disrupt Homeostasis”.

One day put aside from the normal routine where you can eat to your heart’s content, as well as one day put aside for a juice cleanse (addressed next) should do the job of keeping your body from mainlining homeostasis, whereby it adjusts your metabolic rate down in response to less calories.

Although on this one day, I’m free to eat what and when I want, out of habit, I maintain the low calories, consuming just the morning drink till 1:00, or so, but then I’m off the meter. I eat whatever and how much of whatever I want.

It’s a good idea to schedule your “pig out” day on a strong exercise day. That way, these extra calories have somewhere to go; meaning, at least some of them will be rebuilding muscle etc. after being battered by the exercise.

One Day of Juice Cleansing

As already mentioned in this post, Intermittent Fasting is a concept, not a precise formula that embraces just one specific period of eat/no eat time periods.

I’ve already shared how I’m applying my version of Intermittent Fasting to five of the days in the week, where I typically subsist on a Nutritional Shake taken in the morning until about 1:00, which – given that I stop eating at 9:00 PM the previous night — puts me in a fasted, or very reduced caloric state, for 16 hours during each of these five days.

To this we add two days that disrupt the other five days of consistent caloric input. One was described as “pig out day”, and one is devoted to juice cleansing. Thus, I have two days each week devoted to confusing the homeostasis setting mechanisms of my body.

To help me deal with hunger pangs, I try to stay on a pretty set schedule of ingesting stuff.

Juice Cleanse Day Schedule

· Shake: eliminate fish oil and hemp/chia; the flaxseed is enough fat for Juice Cleanse Day
· + 1 hour: Psyllium shake (described below)
· + 1 hour: Hemp, Pea, Raw Sprout or Whey Protein + 8+ ounces of water
· + 1 hour: Veggie juice (see how I do it)
· + 1 hours: Psyllium shake
· + 1 hour: Veggie juice
· + 1 hour: Hemp, Pea, Raw Sprout or Whey Protein + 8+ ounces of water
· + 1 hour: Veggie juice
· Before bed, Detox Bath (see below)

There’s noting magical in this sequence, per se, and I repeat the sequence as desired. The idea is that you rotate protein, veggie juice and a psyllium shake throughout the day and night till bed.

The psyllium shake helps reduce hunger. The bentonite in it absorbs toxins that are then passed from the body. The juice nourishes. The protein helps ensure that I’m still feeding the muscles I catabolized the day prior.

The Psyllium Shake Recipe:

· Pure or distilled water, psyllium husk powder (fiber), bentonite (a liquid clay) and lemon juice (one or two lemons). This absorbs toxins and helps with elimination.

· Wait a bit and down eight or more ounces of water.

Drink the Psyllium Shake no sooner than one hour before or after your juice and protein ingestion so they are not absorbed by the shake.

Detox Bath

Before bed I take a detox bath. This is very powerful. You need hot water in a tub, drinking water with lemon, baking soda, ginger powder, sea salt and a loofah. The instructions are at the bottom of this post called, Detoxifying Your Way to Nirvana.

SUMMARY

To summarize yet another overlong post…

· I’m using seven principles to guide my attitude and how I eat to lose body fat.
· The ingestion of most of any day’s calories is concentrated after workouts.
· The ingestion of any day’s carbs is concentrated after workouts.
· Principles of Intermittent Fasting are used to confuse homeostasis by reducing calories consumed.
· Principles of overeating are used to confuse homeostasis by increasing calories consumed.
· One day each week is a juice cleanse.
· One day each week is carte blanche.
· Protein and resistance training are consistently used to promote muscle and reduce fat.

So far I’ve lost 10 pounds with this regimen over a period of about eight weeks.  Yeah, I get that this is not a blistering pace, but there’s two things to keep in mind:

1. I’ve been tweaking this over the weeks, and have only being doing this enhanced version you here for about three weeks; and

2. The closer you get to your ideal weight, the slower it goes. For me, losing these last five pounds will be hard earned.

If you’ve done something like this, or wind up trying it, or want questions answered, etc., drop us a line in the Comments section below.

Thanks for reading!

Yep.

Product Links

These are affiliate links for the specific products I use. I experiment with different manufactures for the other products mentioned.

Aloe Vera Juice

Fish Oil

Raw Protein Powder

Whey Protein Powder

Rhodiola Extract

Ashwagandha Root Extract

Organic Food Bar

Related posts:

1. Two Unemployed Boomers Endeavor to “Be Here Now”
2. How To Sculpt Your Body Like Schwarzenegger
3. Metabolism’s Role in Burning Body Fat

The “No Meat Athlete” runs on plants, 100 miles at a time. Matt Frazier’s just a regular guy who has learned to do extraordinary things. Along with nutritionist Sid Garza-Hillman, he tells you how.

EVER SINCE I began this blog sometime back in 2009, I pondered what it should be about.

Given that there are 389 posts here, being unclear what this blog is about is startling.

But it’s true. Just amble about… I’ve blogged about nearly everything within the “health” rubric, and that’s a wide assortment of topics, from health policy to telomeres.

And that’s a mistake!

It’s a mistake from the perspective of providing readers with an immediately definable brand or, in effect, a value proposition clearly discernible upon landing on the site.

Visitors may come to a site via some Google search result, and read the corresponding post of interest, but if they don’t effortlessly ascertain what the rest of the site is about, and its relevance/usefulness to them (the “value proposition”), then off they go, quickly.

Which brings me to a fella with a site that gets it right, not only from this branding aspect, but also in terms of value offered his readers.

He’s currently traveling the country promoting his new book.  Last night, he spoke to a group of avid fans in San Francisco.  I skipped over the Golden Gate Bridge to listen. I wanted to buy his book and meet the man.

Meet the “No Meat Athlete”, and Sid

Vegan Ultramarathoner Matt Frazier is the guy.  His blog, as well as the name of his book, is the No Meat Athlete.

Think about that for a beat or two – “No Meat Athlete”.

I happened upon the site soon after beginning my own.  I immediately grokked the difference between our blogs.

Matt’s was laser focused and powerfully branded.

Mine was diffuse and meandering.

“Garma On Health” is fine if the “Garma” part is some well-known person and readers want to know what his views are regarding health.  But that’s not the case, and since it’s not the case, what’s smart is to have your site branded so when people come to your site they say:

“This is me.”

The reaction, “this is me”, is more powerful than:

“This is for me”.

For instance, again, consider “No Meat Athlete”.  In those three words, Matt Frazier has branded his site for two strong self-identifiers.

People who do not eat meat are not equivalent to people who eat soup.

When you practice vegetarianism or veganism, your self-concept identifies with it: You are a vegetarian; you are a vegan.  Soup eaters, however, do not self-identify with eating soup, and do not refer to themselves as “soupeatarians”.

People who exercise intently, committed to a schedule,  for a specific event or sport are not equivalent to people who exercise here and there.

The first group consider themselves athletes and they will say, “I am an athlete”.  The second group will say, “I exercise”… there’s no “I am” in this self-expression.

So, do you now see the beauty of the blog name, “No Meat Athlete”?

If you’re a vegetarian/vegan, this site’s for you.

If you’re an athlete, this site’s for you.

If you’re both, this site is you.  You park there. You join the tribe, cause these are your people.  And Matt Frazier becomes a guiding light.

Now, although I eat mostly like they do, I’m not a vegetarian or vegan, and am no longer an athlete.  Nonetheless, I am a fan because there’s value in those pages – lessons, ideas, protocols and stories useful for anyone with a pulse.

Including you, presumably.

Here’s what was said at last night’s San Francisco gathering… listen up…

Pearls of Wisdom from Matt Frazier and Sid Garza-Hillman

Sid addressed us first.

That’s Sid over there on the right.

Sid Garza-Hillman is Certified Nutritionist and Weight Management Coach, and the Program Director at the Mendocino Center for Living Well.  You can find him online at Transition to Health, where he serves up podcasts and blog posts about transformative practices to achieve and maintain health.

Here’s the kernel of what Sid shared with us, as interpreted and reconstructed by my imperfect memory:

• Assess where you are and what you’re reasonably willing to do most of the time to improve your health.
• If you love meat and bread, the first step is to eat grass fed meat and whole wheat bread.
• After you have firmly implanted a new behavior, then acquire the next one that brings you closer to your goal.  Just keep moving along the continuum: good, better, best.
• The best food is the most nutritionally dense and easiest to digest.  That would be plants.
• Maintaining healthy habits 80% of the time is sufficient.

I was impressed with Sid and purchased his book, Approaching the Natural: A Health Manifesto, to which he inexplicably was able to get Twitter Founder Biz Stone to write the Foreword.  I’ll let you know what I think of it once it’s read.

Sid handed the baton over to Matt.  Matt’s over there on the right under Sid.

Here’s the kernel of what Matt shared with us, as interpreted and reconstructed by my imperfect memory:

• Right-size your goals. They can be big, but you must believe they’re achievable, and you must put a plan in place to get there, step by step.
• Run slowly most of the time.  Less injury, faster recovery and more energy for those all out efforts a couple times per week.
• When it comes to running, a three-step per second cadence is the most efficient and injury-free pace.
• When it comes to exercise recovery and sustainable energy, eat plants.
• Vegans do need to supplement with B12, but everything else is in the plants, including sufficient protein.

I guess it comes to no surprise to tell you that I was impressed with Matt and bought his book, No Meat Athlete: Run on Plants and Discover Your Fittest, Fastest, Happiest Self, even though Matt did not get Biz Stone to write its Forward. That honor, however, was given to the esteemed Ironman stand-out, Brendan Brazier.

Once I’ve read Matt’s book, I’ll let you know what I think of it.

So now I guess Sid will soon be heading north to Mendocino and Matt will drop down to southern California before he works his way back east to eventually return to his home in North Carolina.

If, perchance, you’d like to hear about how this self-described average guy can run 100 miles, fueled by  plants, check out his schedule and see if he’ll be heading your way.

Over and out.

P.S.  Oh, would make sense to circle back to how I began this post… the subject of branding.  Suffice to say that I’ve learned quite a bit on this topic from Matt’s No Meat Athlete blog, and am actively whittling away at ideas on how to make Garma On Health more focused and relevant to its readers. That would be you!

Related posts:

1. The Problem with Dr. Oz’s 4-Step Butt-Blasting Plan

The post Vegan Ultramarathoner, Matt Frazier, Step by Step appeared first on Garma On Health.

Binge eating during the holidays happens to nearly all of us. In the moment we push back thoughts of gluttony and chow down with abandon. Afterwards, as the burping, acid reflect and bursting guts ensue, we’re contrite. Well, get armed and fight back those impulses with this simple recipe to stop holiday binge eating.

ABOUT 15 minutes ago, I returned from my weekly grocery shop at Trader Joe’s.  With Thanksgiving right around the corner, the place was stuffed with turkey and people soon to be stuffed with turkey.

As I pushed the cart around and selected my usual foodstuff, I wondered how many of my fellow shoppers would be binge eating this holiday.

Judging by the overflowing shopping carts, I’d say quite a few.

Now, if you’re of the mindset that the whole point of Thanksgiving and other holiday-based meals is to binge on food and drink till you groan in some twilight stupor, then binge on.

But after all those past holiday meals, you look back and say to yourself something like,

“Hey, I would have been completely satisfied with just that one heaping plate of turkey, mashed potatoes, ham, sweet potatoes, carrots, gravy and asparagus, rather than the two I wolfed down”…

then I have a simple recipe to stop your holiday binge eating.

This recipe pivots on preparation.

One distinction about holiday meals is that they’re typically not spontaneous.  Lots of time and preparation goes into them.  And so – whether or not you’re making the meal — you have time to prepare yourself to withstand the siren calls of delectable food and drink that lead to binge eating.

What you need do is to audition for the big event.

A Simple Recipe To Stop Holiday Binge Eating

Do the following three things and you’ll eat less and congratulate yourself the next morning, marveling at your self control and peerless preparation:

1. One hour before your holiday meal, eat some celery with peanut or almond butter on it. Three or four stalks, on tablespoon of your favorite nut butter on each should do the trick.  If this is unpalatable, eat a whole avocado. The idea here is to get some satiation going by consuming healthy fats.

2. One-half hour before your holiday meal, drink 8 ounces of lemon water with psyllium husk powder, and then follow that with another 8 ounces of water several minutes later.

It’s unlikely that you have psyllium husk powder lurking somewhere in your cupboard, so you’ll get some prior to the holiday meal. (It’s available in most health food stores.) The idea behind the psyllium husk powder is that it expands in your stomach, thus helping to make you feel full, or at least take the edge of your humongous pre-holiday feast. If you aren’t interested in buying some, just drink the lemon water. The juice of one whole lemon will do nicely as it curbs appetite and is cleansing.

That’s it.

If you’re human and you do either of the two suggestions cited above, you should sit down to the holiday dinner table much less ravenous than if you did nothing to curb your appetite.

Yeah, I know this advice is hardly novel or insightful (unless you’ve never heard of psyllium husk powder before), but that’s not the point or the value of this particular post.

The benefit to you is to simply do these simple tips. Let this post be a reminder that with a bit of preparation, you will not gain weight this holiday season, nor beat yourself up for losing all control and binge eat like a ravenous wolf.
 

Extra Credit: Supplement and Exercise

To those of you who are still muttering how inane is the advice just rendered, well, have I got a challenge for you.

You want something novel and tough?

OK, I submit for your examination two posts, one inspired by self-promoter (and I say that admiringly), life style hacker extraordinaire, Tim Ferriss, and the other by renown strength coach, Charles Poliquin.

By reading and following the suggestions contained in both of these posts — This Holiday, Overeat And Gain No Weight and in Tips To Avoid Getting Fat This Holiday Season, — you can minimize the damage (ie body fat creation) that excess calories will do by ingesting specific supplements and doing certain exercises pre and post binging.

(Thank you Tim Ferriss and Charles Poliquin for the inspiration.)

The strategy has three principals:

• Minimize the release of insulin
• Get the food out quickly
• Perform brief, multiple-muscle contractions throughout the binge

This extra credit will be well earned because this strategy takes some study, requires buying some supplements and takes effort, but – what the heck – at least go click on one of the two links above and check it out.

So now you have both a simple and not-so-simple recipe to stop and/or prevent your holiday binge eating from messing with your body.

Good luck, and let us know how you fare in the Comments below.

Bon appetite!

Related posts:

1. Tips To Avoid Getting Fat This Holiday Season
2. This Holiday, Overeat and Gain No Weight!
3. Tips for Holiday Eating and Being

The post A Simple Recipe To Stop Holiday Binge Eating appeared first on Garma On Health.

Remaining lean once you are lean is more about managing your head than figuring out the lean-making plan. Life will hand you plenty of opportunities to ditch your lean-making habits.  Here’s my perspective.

LIKE ANYTHING hard to achieve, getting lean is a process of two steps forward, one back, along a meandering trail that consistently needs remapping.

If you’re steadfast and guided by the right map (food, drink, exercise), you’ll eventually get there.

Congratulations.

Now the challenge is staying lean, a process of two steps forward, one back, along a meandering… well, you get the idea.

And so it is with me, I thought, as I stared down at those numbers on the scale this morning, five more than were there the last time I weighed myself.

I know what happened.  I picked up those five over the course of a ten-day visit with my mother. Gaining half a pound each day is quite an achievement!

Here’s the recipe for gaining five pounds in ten days:

• Go somewhere where your good habits are hard to maintain
• Don’t do enough to maintain them

Yeah, well maybe these are more like principles than a recipe, but you get the idea, which is:

Getting lean and staying lean is all about sticking to the habits that got you lean to begin with.

Obvious, yes, but sometimes it’s the obvious that needs reinforcing.  Because when I looked down at what the scale revealed to me this morning, I had to remind myself that during those ten days at my mother’s home, I busted up the habits that keep me lean.

The Recipe for Gaining 5 Pounds in 10 Days

Already cited were principles for gaining five pounds in ten days, but I kinda suggested there’s a recipe too.

Here’s how I cooked it up… you just put all of the following into a big bowl and stir, preferably while spooning down ice cream whilst laying back on the couch:

It was freezing outside, unusually so, and thus I did very little of the daily calorie-burning yard work that I typically do on Mom’s five acre spread. Instead, I sat around. A lot.

There’s no exercise equipment there, and not much room in the house to do an effective calisthenics program, so I exercised little.

Bending to someone else’s routine disrupts my own, one that schedules certain time periods for exercise and eating. Rather than push back and make it happen, I surrendered.

I consumed more calories than normal that came from food not selected for optimizing muscle growth and fat burning, ie: for staying lean.

The bottom line is that I sat around too much and ate too much.  And, when a few neighbors came over for a visit, I drank too much beer, sat around too much and ate too much.

Does any of this sound familiar?

My overarching point is that if you live in the industrialized world, the cards are stacked in favor of you being over-fat.  We sit too much, move too little, drink too many calories (soda, alcohol, flavored coffees) and eat too many simple carbs.

(“Simple” carbs, as opposed to “complex” carbs, refer to carbohydrates that have so little fiber that they quickly boost blood sugar (glucose). This causes insulin to spike so that your body can utilize the glucose just ingested.  The uptake in glucose causes the body to store more body fat.  For an excellent explanation, read this.)

It takes knowledge, a plan and effort to live your life in a way that supports being lean, because running sitting with the herd will do the opposite, as proven by the widely broadcast statistic that about 65% of Americans are overweight or obese.

The Recipe for Getting Lean Again

There will always be a reason to abandon hard-won habits, and you will. That’s the one step back.  But don’t beat yourself up; rather, let the abandonment be fleeting… quickly sprint back to the habits that got you lean to begin with, and get on with it.

Unfortunately, it will take more time to lose these five pounds than it took to gain them, not to mention effort. (Boy, does that beer slide down the gullet easily.)

For me, this means getting back to the following lean-making habits:

• Drink 30 grams of protein and spirulina powder along with my blended kale and orange-flavored fish oil each morning.

• Drink a cup of organic, high altitude, air dried coffee blended with cold pressed organic coconut oil instead of cream.

• Make and throughout the day drink a quart of vegetable juice consisting of kale, red chard, broccoli stems, carrots, garlic, ginger, lemon, lime and apple.

• Have protein with every meal and snack.

• Ingest most of my carbs after exercising.

• Sprint stairs as part of my high intensity interval training.

• Do compound lifts thrice per week (weightlifting with multiple muscles at a time, such as a squat press).

In my case, there’s also a hormonal issue.

Yeah, sounds like something a menopausal woman would say, but do realize that men’s testosterone levels begin to decline in their third decade, and by the time they’re gliding into old age, it’s a mere fraction of what it was in their youth.

Happened to me.

Getting Hormonally Fit

As I documented in Boost Your Testosterone Naturally and How I’m Boosting Testosterone and Blasting Fat, I finally figured out that my (formerly) low energy, encroaching chubbiness (despite eating well and exercising regularly), moodiness and all around low mojo was due to low testosterone.

The Life Extension Foundation’s Male Comprehensive Hormone Panel Blood Test I took gave me the details.  A doctor suggested that I supplement with DHEA, and I did.  My own research caused me to add Aggressive Strength Testosterone Booster (affiliate link) and other supplements to the mix.  Gradually, slowly, my testosterone numbers improved, although this fight is not over, as my testosterone numbers are not yet ideal.

I’ve introduced hormones here for your consideration, because it’s often the case for both genders that the mix of testosterone and estrogen is out of whack, to put it in technical terms.  The older you get, the truer is that declaration.

Among several negative consequences of hormone sub optimization is the propensity to gain body fat.  I’ve known men who begin testosterone supplementation prescribed by their doctors and quickly begin losing body fat without changing anything else.

Getting on the bioidentical hormone replacement therapy bandwagon is not how I wish to travel to the promised land of hormone optimization.  My choice is to continue experimenting with various supplements and dietary inputs (such as protein) that have a decent chance of improving my body’s capacity to produce more testosterone-oriented hormones.

Unsurprisingly, exercise also has a role to play in hormone optimization, particularly strength and muscle building exercises. This is a two-way street, in that testosterone makes resistance training more effective (faster strength and muscle gains), and in the other direction, resistance training amps testosterone production.

In A Nutshell

A summary of what I’d like for you to get from reading this post goes like this:

1. Fitness, leanness, whateverness is a cyclical thing.

Assuming you even reach your ideal state, staying there is a whole other ball of wax, because even for the best of us, life will have it’s way with you.

2. Given #1, go with the flow, but aikido it.

You know, something (the “vagaries of life”) is always ready to charge at you and will mow you down if you just stand there. You need to deftly step aside and try to deflect it a bit, retarget it a bit, kinda like what scientists are thinking to do to whatever asteroid eventually goes on a collusion course with Earth — just explode a bomb on it and it will take another trajectory.

So, the key here is to recognize that you’re off plan but keep it in reach… keep it close enough so that you can continue on plan once whatever knocked you off your trajectory eases up.

3. In your quest to get lean and stay lean, be mindful of your diet, exercise regimen and hormones.

If your hormones are too far from optimized, getting lean will be a struggle even if your diet and exercise regime is on the mark.

Given that Christmas is just three days away, I will not be able to lose these five unhappy pounds before yet more opportunities seek to plop my ass down for some epic eating and drinking.

That’s OK.

The Holidays are among the frequent challenges to getting or maintaining leanness. Sometimes these challenging periods in life will push us back a step. Let’s all remember that the key to not falling back and on your back is to resist it some and to aikido it a bit.

Remember what the good habits are, and keep some of them going during those inevitable moments of epicurean hedonism.

Then once it’s all over, press forward, two steps at a time.

Yep.

Supplements Mentioned In This Post

	Aggressive Strength Testosterone Booster

The post How To Stay Lean Once You Are appeared first on Garma On Health.

Take these three tests that are predictive of lifespan right in your own home all by yourself. If you’re overweight and/or out of shape, do yourself a favor and read this post.

TYPICALLY, IN order to get a handle of on your mortality you need to go to some medical practitioner who will poke, prod and draw some blood.

Your HDL level (the “good” cholesterol), triglycerides, blood pressure, and the granddaddy of them all – telomere length – can do a decent job of predicting lifespan.

A medical person could run tests to measure all this and more.  But you can get a pretty good fix on your probable life expectancy right at home all by yourself with three tests.

The three indicators that have some pretty good odds of predicting lifespan are:

1. Waist circumference,
2. Pulse rate and
3. The sitting-rising test.

Let’s dive into each test, with the aim of enabling you to do them.  For those of you with unhappy outcomes, there will also be an intervention plan.

#1 Waist circumference

What’s your waist size?

If you have a tape measure it’s easy to figure out, and is worth doing because waist circumference is an indicator of life expectancy.

(If you don’t have a tape measure, simply wind a string around your waist – just below the navel – mark where one end overlaps and then measure this distance along a ruler.)

Your waist measurement should be no more than half the length of your height.

Before we jump into waist circumference as a predictor of lifespan, let’s take a quick look at what it replaced – BMI.

“BMI”, or “body mass index” has been a quickly measured, maybe-accurate indicator of where a person body mass ranks on a scale from lean to obese, and by extension, a person’s lifespan.

BMI is calculated as a person’s weight divided by the square of their height.

BMI, however, is fraught with issues, not only as a predictor of lifespan but as a measurement of fatness, as I describe in Just Exactly How Far Are You Anyway?.

The problem with BMI is that people with more muscle than average will weigh more than their un-muscular brethren, and thereby have a higher BMI number. They will not, however, actually be fat for the simple reason that muscle weighs 40% more than fat.

So, say you and I both are six feet tall and weigh 200 pounds. Our BMI would be 27, which is in the “overweight” category. (The BMI calculator is in this article.) But, if you eat fish and veggies, and weight train four times per week, and I eat Doritos and couch surf, it’s likely that your extra weight will be muscle and mine will be fat.

In this case, our BMI number will accurately predict my fatness, but will overestimate yours.  For the very short, the very tall, or the muscular, BMI is as useful to determining healthy weight, as is a bicycle to a fish*

Turns out, waist circumference seems to be a much better way to predict your lifespan than BMI anyway.

The American Cancer Society Study of 100,000 People

The conclusion of the American Cancer Society study of more than 100,000 people over nine years is that…

Irrespective of your weight, your waist size is the key to health.

Having a large waist size doubled the risk of dying from any cause during the nine-year period of the study as compared to those with smaller waits, and this was true whether the person was of normal weight, overweight or obese.

What are the key metrics here?

• For men, a waist size of 47 inches or larger.
• For women, a waist size of 42 inches or larger.
• For anyone, your waist should not exceed half the length of your height.

Now please note that these lofty numbers are not good, but are the limit of girth before havoc ensues.

As measured just below the belly button, a waist size of 47 inches or larger for men and 42 inches or larger for women doubled the risk of dying during the nine year study period, compared to those with smaller waists, which were 35.4 inches for men and 29.5 inches for women.

Keeping your waist circumference to less than half of your height can help prevent the onset of conditions like stroke, heart disease and diabetes and add years to life, researchers said.

Specific to height, and varying little as compared to the above cited averages for all heights, using the “one-half of height rule” means that a man six foot tall, needs a waistline smaller than 36 inches, while a five foot, four inch woman should have a waist size no larger than 32in.

Having a larger waist was associated with a higher risk of death whether the person was normal weight, overweight or obese.  Moreover, a large waist size doubled the risk of dying from any cause during the study period compared to those with smaller waists.

And ladies, take note of this:

The association between women’s waist size and mortality risk was strongest among women who were at normal weight.  Among normal-weight women, the risk of dying increased about 25 percent for each additional four inches of waist size.

That implies that waist size is at least as important to monitor and control as weight.

The lead researcher in the study, epidemiologist Eric Jacobs said,

“Even if your weight is normal for your height, if your waist size is increasing, if you’re moving to a bigger pant size, that’s a warning sign that it’s time to start eating better and exercising more.”  (Source)

A thick waist has long been considered a risk factor for heart disease, but now we know that it also increases risk for dying from cancer, respiratory failure and other causes.

Having a large waist is correlated with large amounts of visceral fat around the abdominal organs, which can cause inflammation, high cholesterol, insulin resistance and other problems linked with poor health.

So, take out that tape measure and get your waist line number… it may just be the extra incentive you need to eat better and start exercising, even if it’s only walking… which I’ll dive into below.

#2 Pulse Rate

What’s your resting pulse rate?

If you have two fingers, it’s easy to figure out, and – as I remarked about waist circumference – is worth doing, as pulse rate is an independent predictor of life expectancy.

Even in healthy people in good physical condition!

This conclusion comes from a Danish study published in Heart where researchers tracked 2,798 participants’ heart rate and oxygen consumption data from 1986 thru 2011.

After controlling for physical fitness and other health and behavioral factors, they found that the higher the resting heart rate, the greater the risk for death.

Compared with men with rates of 50 beats a minute or less, those at 71 to 80 beats had a 51 percent greater risk. At 81 to 90 beats, the rate of death was doubled, and over 90 it was tripled.

People with resting pulses of 80 beats per minute die four to five years earlier than those with pulses of 65 beats per minute.

Does a higher resting heart rate translate to an earlier death even among those who are healthy and exercise regularly?

The researchers found that the answer is “yes”, that resting heart rate is not just a marker of fitness level, but an independent risk factor.

According to previous research by Jensen and his colleagues, people with resting pulses of 80 beats per minute die four to five years earlier than those with pulses of 65 beats per minute.

What’s crazy about that stat is that this is the same difference in life expectancy, in the same individuals, as having a lifetime cancer diagnosis or not.

“If you have two healthy people,” said the lead author of the Danish study, Dr. Magnus Thorsten Jensen, “exactly the same in physical fitness, age, blood pressure and so on, the person with the highest resting heart rate is more likely to have a shorter life span.” (Source)

What’s Your Pulse Rate?

The easiest way for me to take it is simply to put two fingers against my carotid artery, like this fella demonstrates:

You can count the pulse beats over 30 seconds and multiply the result by two to get your pulse rate per minute, or just be patient and count during the whole 60 seconds.

Make sure you’re at rest, meaning that you’ve been sitting or lying down for a while – you want to measure your lowest non-sleeping heart rate.

Once you have the number, you can go to the Life Expectancy Estimator by Hearth Rate site, type in your resting pulse and, magically, predict your lifespan.

This is what mine looks like:

(Click to enlarge.)

#3 The Sitting-Rising Test

Yeah, sure you can lie on the floor and then stand up, but can you do it without leaning against anything or touching the floor with a hand or elbow?

Like this:

 (Click to enlarge.)

The “sitting-rising test” measures your fitness at the most basic level. It not only tests muscular strength, but also flexibility, balance and motor coordination. All of these attributes are essential for day-to-day living, and for maintaining your independence as you age.

I asked a four of my friends to try this test.  All were collegiate athletes once upon a time, and all currently exercise consistently.  Only one was able to do it, albeit quite wobbly.

They all had the required strength, but what was missing was mobility and flexibility.

Kelly Starrett’s MobilityWod site has a good definition of mobility:

“[Mobility] is a movement-based integrated full-body approach that addresses all the elements that limit movement and performance including short and tight muscles, soft tissue restriction, joint capsule restriction, motor control problems, joint range of motion dysfunction, and neural dynamic issues. In short, mobilization is a tool to globally address movement and performance problems.” (Source)

If we don’t consistently stretch and do mobility exercises, with age comes tightness and restricted mobility.

Nearly any child can do the sitting-rising test and it’s not because they’re strong.

In his no frills video, “Coy Boy” demonstrates how most of us will perform the sitting-rising test.  Notice the difference between how Coy attempts the test with his tight lower back and hip flexors compared to the children:

Need an incentive to learn how to accomplish the sitting-rising test?

Well, a Brazilian Study determined this:

• How well you can sit and rise from the floor, without using assistance from your hands, knees or other body parts, may predict your risk of dying prematurely in the next six years.
• Those who scored the lowest, requiring the most assistance to sit and rise from the floor, were 6.5 times more likely to die during the study period than those who scored the highest.

The study scores a person’s ability to stand up off the floor based on how much assistance they need.

As Coy Boy in the above video referred to, a score of 10 is given to those who can sit down and rise up from the floor without any assistance from some inanimate object, a friend, elbow or hand.

Each time some assistance is needed, the score is reduced.

- Those who scored 0-3 were 6.5 times more likely to die during the study than those who scored 8-10.
- Those who scored 3.5 to 5.5 were 3.8 times more likely to die.
- Those who scored 6 to 7.5 were 1.8 times more likely to die.

Want the details, and don’t mind reading subtexts?  Here’s the Brazilian study:

Let’s Take A Walk

If you’ve measured both your waist circumference and pulse rate and are now about to make out your Last Will and Testament, take heart and heed this:

Improving both your pulse rate and waist circumference can be accomplished by doing one thing three times a weeks.

According to Dr. Mike Evans, this one intervention will:

• Reduce Knee Arthritis discomfort by 47%
• Reduce the incidence of Alzheimer’s and Dementia by 50%
• Reduce the incidence of Diabetes 58%
• Reduce the incidence of Hip Fractures in postmenopausal women by 48%
• Reduce Depression from between 37 to 47%
• Reduce the risk of Death by 23%

Do yourself a favor of taking a look at Dr. Evans entertaining, informative and useful video, “23 1/2 Hours”:

Some Concluding Thoughts

If you sit all day, have a high pulse rate and your waist is bigger than you are tall… well… isn’t it great that now you know that you need to do something about it.

What to do?

First realize that it took a long time to get where you are, and it will take some time to get someplace else.

Next, work on your Mindset.  Nothing will happen if you will not change your attitudes and habits.  If you need a leg up on how to form habits, check out these posts:

Humiliation or Rejection – What’s Holding You Back?
How To Change When Change Is Hard
How To Make Tiny Habits Big

Once you get your mind primed to make some lifestyle changes, shape the path. What I mean by this is to make sure that what change you attempt is doable.

If you want to lose some weight and begin walking, for instance, consider beginning this way:

1. Add water.  Before every meal, drink so much pure water that you begin to feel full.  At this point, don’t worry about eating differently. Just add water.  This will cause you to consume fewer calories. Tackle the quality of your food after water drinking becomes habitual.

2. Stop eating two hours before bedtime.  If you get hungry, drink tea.  If you’re also on a resistance training program (weight lifting), drink a glass of water before bed mixed with branch chain amino acids (“BCAA”). This will feed your muscle during the sleep time fast period.  Over time, increase the two hours to three.

3. Start walking.  Find the time to do it — morning, noon or night.  Find a buddy to accompany you.  As you get accustomed to walking, walk up hills. If there are no hills, pause several times during your walk and do squats.

4. Start doing mobility exercises.  Challenge yourself by trying to accomplish the sitting-rising test.  Check out some of the mobility exercises in the post, Get Strong, Muscular and Mobile (Fast).

You can extend not only the quantity of your years, but also the quality, by making these few simple changes to your lifestyle. Make it so that in a few months when you again do these tests to predict your lifespan, you’ll be cruising to a healthy old age.

Go for it!

Yep.

* This is derived from the joke, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”.

P.S. One last thing… get some inspiration right here:

The post Three Easy Ways You Can Predict Your Lifespan In 10 Minutes appeared first on Garma On Health.

Low testosterone can make you feel old and fat… not to mention clobber the libido. Learn about the three things that most of us do each day that lowers testosterone, and the remedies.

FOR THE reader who wants the bottom line rather than wading through the “whys and wherefores”, these are the three things most of us do every day that lowers testosterone:

1. We eat too many blood glucose-spiking sugars and “simple” carbohydrates;
2. We eat insufficient protein; and
3. We ignore our muscles.

You can now scroll down to the end for the conclusions.

For the rest of you, what follows is why these assertions are true and what you an do about it.

#1. We eat too many blood glucose-spiking sugars and “simple” carbohydrates

“Nay, not me… I don’t even have sugar in the house,” you mutter in protest.

But, alas, you do!

Walk over to your kitchen cupboard or fridge and open it.  Peer in.  Grab nearly any container of food – can, bottle, box.  Read the ingredients.

On the “Ingredients” label will be listed protein, fat and carbohydrates, among other things, like sugars.

Carbohydrates include sugars, starches, cellulose and many other compounds found in living organisms.  They are not all the same.  Some are wicked.

Carbs from vegetables are good, and can be consumed with abandon; in fact, the more the better.  These are referred to as “complex” or “slow” carbs because they are slowly absorbed into the blood stream and do not cause insulin resistance.

Carbs from starchy plants are good, assuming you can digest them well. Focus on these, according to Chris Kresser’s Your Personal Paleo Code: Sweet Potato, Yam, Butternut Squash, Acorn Squash and Russet Potato.

Carbs from grains are mostly bad, and should be consumed in small amounts, ideally timed with exercise.  From a molecular point of view, sugar is simplest of carbs.

The worst carb is sugar and most sugar substitutes.  They should be completely avoided, unless of course, you happen to run into some sultry 80% cacao bittersweet chocolate.

Italian researchers discovered that excess glucose in your blood will reduce your testosterone levels. The more simple carbs you consume, they more glucose is produced.  This means more insulin needs to be made by the pancreas so that it (insulin) can shuttle the glucose somewhere — either to energy-producing cells or to fat cells if this energy is not required because you’re couch surfing.

The Italian experiment indicated that the gonadotropin-releasing hormone (“GnRH”) has a key role in the body’s release of testosterone, and that high concentrations of glucose reduce the release its production.

High simple carbs = low GnRH = low testosterone.

Back to our kitchen cupboard…

If you happened to have a box of Vanilla Almond Granola cereal in your cupboard, and took a look at the list of ingredients, you’d note:

Serving size:            55 grams (2/3 cup)

Total carbs:             34 grams, of which 3 are dietary fiber and 12 sugars.

Now, pull out a can of Black Beans:

Serving size:            130 grams (1/2 cup)

Total carbs:               19 grams, of which 4 are dietary fiber and 0 sugars.

Quiz:

Will the cereal or the beans spike your blood sugar, require an abundance of insulin to shuttle the simple carbs to your cells to produce energy, the excess — the amount not required for energy — to be stored as fat?

Yep, the cereal it is.

Compare the beans to the cereal.  Even though they have well over twice the grams, the beans have only about half the amount of carbs, have more fiber… and 0 sugars.

Yes, the cereal has 12 times more sugars!

The moral of the story is to read labels and to recognize that you want to eat food that is both low in total carbs and sugars, but high in fiber.

Fiber slows done blood sugar absorption, increases satiety and helps digestion and regularity – all good stuff.

“OK, so “simple” carbs are bad, but what does that have to do with my plunging testosterone?”, you ask.

Please bear with me… I have more to share about carbs, dietary fat and some history.

Low Fat, No Fat = Big Bucks

Sometime in the 1970s, a bunch of people who should have known better decided that consuming dietary fat makes us fat, so let’s make all food low or non-fat and not worry about how we have to bump up the carb count to compensate for the decline in taste.

On the face of it, makes sense: eat less fat = get less fat.

This was great news to the food industry because it meant that the industry could expand exponentially as more food products were created that would be altered in the lab to contain less fat.

Think about it.

What was food 100 years ago?  Pretty much it was whatever came off the farm.  What is food now?  It’s every conceivable sliced and diced, remanufactured derivative of something that once grew on a farm.  This meant more products to sell.  And among them was a long list of low/non-fat foods.

I wrote about this in an article entitled, What’s Making Us Fat And Sick? . It began thus:

“Is sugar evil? Here I examine why sugar and other high glycemic carbohydrates have been eviscerated, and examine if this is deserved. A nation now eating 20+ times the amount of sugar than in the late 19th century, with a concomitant spike in obesity, needs to know the truth”.

I presented a lot of data, mostly in the form of graphs.  Here’s one eye-opener:

The above chart was among many in the article that dramatically demonstrated how America’s overweight/obesity rates began to skyrocket after the introduction of low/non-fat food.

High fruit corn syrup and other sweeteners (along with salt) were used to enhance the flavor that would have been compromised by the reduction of the dietary fat content ordinarily found in the now adulterated food.

So, if you track overall sugar (and sugar substitutes, like high fruit corn syrup) consumption along with weight gain, you get charts like the one above.

Now, before you shout out, “but this doesn’t prove causality”, let me admit that it does not.  Yet, whether you measure childhood obesity, severe obesity, the growth rate of different BMI categories, or carbohydrates consumed per day per person compared to obesity rates – they all track in lockstep to the introduction and growth of non/low fat food and drink.

[Check out the graphs here .]

What does sugar consumption have to do with testosterone levels?

(Yes, I’m finally am getting to it!)

Quite a bit.  It goes like this:

High sugar (carb) consumption = More body fat = Lower Testosterone.

There are several ways that body fat lowers testosterone, but suffice to say, there’s one that covers a lot of territory.

Your belly.

Belly fat is of the biologically active variety; it converts testosterone into estradiol and neutralizes androgen DHT.

Yeah, that’s a mouthful. What it means is that the enzymes in body fat, particularly subcutaneous fat (like belly fat), makes men more womanly from a hormone perspective.

(Not that you get a break with visceral fat – the stuff between your organs, as it has been linked to metabolic disturbances and increased risk for cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.)

For men being overweight is so detrimental to testosterone production that those taking supplemental testosterone may not benefit from it, and even may even develop side effects.  (See more here.)

For women the story’s a bit different. Although testosterone is also linked to sex drive for women, their primary issue when it comes to the sex hormone balance between testosterone and estrogen is typically the inverse.

To explain this, however briefly, I must take a detour from the “what lowers your testosterone” motif of this article, and then continue with the second thing we do each day that lowers testosterone… [DETOUR]…

As women go through their middle years, their proportion of fat to body weight tends to increase more than it does in men. Especially at menopause, extra pounds tend to park themselves around the midsection, as the ratio of fat to lean tissue shifts and fat storage begins favoring the upper body over the hips and thighs.

Even women who don’t actually gain weight may still gain inches at the waist, as I’ll get to in a moment.

The amount of testosterone and estrogen in our bodies has a profound effect on much of what differentiates the sexes.

As boys move into their teenage years, testosterone surges and helps create the attributes associated with the male gender relative to females, such as a deeper voice, more muscle, facial hair and the like.

As girls move into their teenage years, estrogen surges and they begin to develop the distinguishing phenotype of women, such as more fat on thighs, hips and the development of breasts.

With menopause comes a reduction of estrogen and a tendency for fat to be redistributed onto the abdomen, even if there’s no net weight gain.

But there usually is… the weight gain I mean.

That’s because as they grow older both men and women tend to become less active and get fatter.  That extra “biologically active” fat supercharges the naturally declining testosterone and increasing estrogen in men, and declining estrogen in women.  [END OF DETOUR]

So, the main takeaway from the first of the three things we do everyday that lowers testosterone is to:

• Strive to eliminate sugars
• Eat as few grain-derived carbs as you can
• Eat as much carbs from veggie and starchy plant sources as you can
• Don’t substitute low/no fat items for full fat if the sugar/carb load is higher in the low/no fat version

On to the second thing…

#2. We Eat Too Little Protein

If you do some searching around, you’ll find several different formulas for the amount of protein to consume, typically measured as grams of protein per body weight.

Sometimes the formula differentiates total body weight from lean body mass (what you weigh without any fat), and sometimes a different formula is suggested for women.

My suggestion is not to wade too deep into these waters.

What you need to know, whether you have a baby-making capacity or not, is that your body needs protein and the amount is dependent on catabolic impact.

Protein builds up what was, in effect, torn down during your use of your body, referred to as catabolism. (Not to be confused with “cannibalism”.)

A body mostly at rest requires little protein.  A body engaged in vigorous exercise, particularly exercise intended to exhaust muscles, needs more protein than had it (the body) been parked on the couch.

If you don’t exercise, just make sure you get a handful (literally) of high protein foods with each main meal.  Not manageable?  Then get a good protein supplement powder and mix it into some water or almond milk.

I use Garden of Life Raw Organic Protein whenever my meal could use some protein, and ProHealth’s Undenatured Whey Protein after workouts, as the whey is more quickly absorbed than most forms of protein and thus starts feeding those worn-out muscles quickly.
If you do exercise casually, the protein suggested in the paragraph above will be fine for you.

If you exercise with intensity, you need to ensure that this level of catabolism is met with a similar level of anabolism, which is the cellular process of building up organs and tissues, aka, muscle.

Proper anabolism requires good sound sleep, rest between bouts of muscle-taxing exercise and protein at regular intervals, like with each meal and ideally after exercising.

How much protein you may need is pretty individualistic, but shoot for 0.75 grams per lean (no fat included) body pound.

Don’t know your lean mass?  Well, relax… unless you’re a body builder, just make sure you get a palm-sized portion of protein with most meals and drink 20 to 30 grams of a protein powder supplement after muscle-thumping exercise.

And that, dear reader, nicely segues to the #3 thing you do every day that lowers your testosterone…

#3. You Ignore Your Muscles

Some youngsters just sit around all day, just as their seniors may do.  But on average, you were more active when in your youth than when grey flourished like weeds in your garden, threatening to overtake the fecund fruits of your labor.

Activity is muscle making, and in it’s absence things get a bit flabby.

Movement requires muscle and if the movement is under resistance – hauling your body up a hill, or lifting a barbell – then even more muscle is required.

Muscle and testosterone have an interesting relationship.  It’s as if neither can decide whose in the driver’s seat.  That’s because you need testosterone to make muscle, but also the more muscle-making activity performed, the better

The cause and effect dynamic is hard to untangle. What is clear, however, is that that the two go hand-in-hand:

“Training to build muscle mass elevates testosterone, and elevated testosterone helps build muscle mass,” says Gary Kehoe, CEO of Dreamspan Product Innovation.

The type of exercise is important.  Aerobic exercise is a good thing, and you’re cardiovascular system will be happy with you, but it will not do much to build your testosterone levels.

To increase testosterone levels, you need to exercise to build muscle.  So, go do some push-ups, pull-ups and squats.  The next day, you should be a bit sore.  Eat protein.

[Here's more exercise options than you'll ever need, but some that will strike your fancy.]

How do you know if you have low testosterone?

There’s a long list of symptoms for both men and women. As with many such lists, the stuff on it could apply to many health issues, particularly those associated with various hormonal deficiencies.

Naturally, the smart thing to do is to get tested, typically via blood or saliva.

Check out an intro to blood letting + links to my experience here.

Men’s Low Testosterone Symptoms

Endocrinologist Dr. Spyros Mezitis estimates that about a quarter to a third of the men he tests for testosterone have levels below normal.

“Sometimes it is testosterone, sometimes it is the thyroid, and sometimes it’s something unrelated to hormones”, says Dr. Mezitis.

So, as with women, the list of symptoms I’m about to share is related to low testosterone but do not definitively indicate low testosterone.  For that, as said earlier, you need a blood or saliva test.

The bottom of a man’s normal total testosterone range is about 300 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dL). The upper limits are 1,000 to 1,200 ng/dL.

On average – all other things being equal – testosterone declines with age.  What level is acceptable to you is up to you, assuming you’re willing to intervene to increase your number.

As I reported here, my last blood test put my total testosterone at 438 ng/dL, which is within the target range for my age, but well below what’s acceptable to me.

Medical doctors will argue this point, but I agree with the likes of Dr. Life who believe that it’s perfectly safe to resist nature and amp up your testosterone.

Dr. Jeffrey Life is a 70+ year-old medical doctor who transformed himself from this…

… to this…

He did it by using bioidentical testosterone, resistance training (building muscle) and diet, which I dig into here.

Unlike Dr. Life, I’m currently disinterested in using testosterone gels, patches or shots; instead, I’ve been taking various supplements that may be useful to helping the body produce more testosterone.

These articles are filled to the brim with suggestions about how you can pump up your testosterone:

• How I’m Boosting Testosterone and Blasting Fat
• Boost Your Testosterone Naturally
• More Muscle, Testosterone and Calm with Ashwagandha
• Fella’s, How Sturdy Is Your Morning Wood?

Here’s Dr. Life’s list of low testosterone symptoms:

Declining sexual and physical energy
Decline in the frequency of early morning erections
Decline in the number of spontaneous erections
Disturbed sleep
Emotional swings, irritability, anxiety, depression
Foggy thinking, memory lapses
Increased cardiovascular issues
Loss of strength
Poor skin tone and saggy, wrinkled skin
Reduced lean muscle, higher body fat
Weak bones, osteopenia, osteoporosis (Source)

Women’s Low Testosterone Symptoms

This list comes from a Buzzle.com post. Remember that stuff on this list may be symptomatic of something other than low testosterone.

Moreover, remember that the whole testosterone subject is very sketchy for women.

Yes, it’s commonly agreed that a woman’s libido is affected by testosterone, but rarely is testosterone supplementation prescribed for women, and if it is, it’s a very smart thing to be under the supervision of a medical doctor who is a hormone expert.

Here’s the list for women:

Fatigue
Definite loss of muscle strength and mass
Accumulation of fat, especially around the abdomen
Anorgasmia or the inability to have orgasms
Depression
Increased risk of osteoporosis and related bone deterioration
Increased risk of cardiovascular disease
Vaginal dryness
Lack of interest in sexual activity
Painful sexual intercourse
Sudden absence of menstruation
Hot flashes
Anxiety
Irregular periods
Mood swing
Hair loss
Sore breast
Trouble sleeping

[Take Dr. John Lee’s Hormone Balance Test, both men and women.]

Just Remember This…

Men: help maintain your testosterone levels by eliminating sugar and reducing simple carbs, the main culprits in belly fat.  Muscle-building exercise and protein will help greatly.

Women: Resist the tendency for mid-age belly fat due to naturally declining estrogen levels by taking belly fat promoting sugar and simple carbs out of the equation.  Muscle-building exercise and protein will help greatly, not so much for the testosterone boost, but because more muscle increases metabolism.

Need help with the fat? Read the following…

• The Baby Boomers Guide To Trimming Body Fat
• How Joe Warner Got His 6-Pack In Just 12 Weeks!
• Can The Right Gut Bacteria Fight Obesity

That’s it… carry on…

The post The Three Things You Do Everyday That Lowers Your Testosterone appeared first on Garma On Health.

The reason you rarely see gym-goers improve their fitness is because they do not do the right exercises with the required effort. If you’d like to get strong, muscular, more flexible and improve your cardio, dig in and watch this six-part series.

Part 1 covers the six things a workout should do and ten Guidelines for your functionally fit fast workout.

Joe doing his thing.

Note: This is article 1, part 4 of my FREE four-part series about how to build a strong and youthful body. This is the first of a series of six on the "functionally fit fast workout".

RECENTLY, I visited two long-time friends in Washington, DC and Charlottesville, VA.  Those boys fed me plenty. Fortunately, they also gave me plenty of opportunities to exercise.

Kevin, my DC friend, plopped me on his spare bike and had me chase him all over the magnificent Capital Crescent bike trail. Gary, my Charlottesville pal, hauled my lazy butt to his gym nearly every day that I was with him where we would pretend like we’re weight lifters.

From time to time, I’d see Gary looking over at my weight lifting antics. On the third day, he wandered over, kindly waited for me to catch my breath, and asked me if I could put together a workout routine for him.

Gary is typical of the gym-going crowd who goes regularly, but doesn’t get much out of it. In his case, he’s gotten in decent aerobic shape by furiously pumping pedals to keep up with a comely bike diva that he rides with, but the muscle/strength thing was lagging.

“So, Joe, could you put me on a new routine that will get me in better shape?”, Gary asked.

Still panting, I nodded and blurted, “Sure, tomorrow.”

That night at his home, I penciled out the workout routine I’m about to share with you. My aim was to present Gary, and by extension, you, a workout that would do six things:

1. Grow muscle
2. Build strength
3. Improve mobility
4. Increase anaerobic and aerobic conditioning
5. Be flexible
6. Be progressive

If we had a video camera and were a little less shy, we could have taped what I showed him. Since we didn’t, I’ve hunted down similar exercises on YouTube. I used to have all these exercises on one long page, but soon discovered that the page was bogged down with all the video and loaded slowly.  So now it’s in six parts:

Part I — this very page you’re reading — gets you oriented to the workout, including the important “Workout Guidelines” and “Workout Routine”, which are presented below.

• Part 2  focuses on mobility, which is the full range of motion in joints, and flexibility in ligaments and muscle.
• Part 3 focuses on the back, glutes and calves.
• Part 4 focuses on the shoulder press, squat and bench press.
• Part 5 focuses on the back, glutes and calves.
• Part 6 focuses on the shoulder press, squat and bench press.

Before you jump to the videos, please read the following Guidelines. Without knowing them, confusion will abound.

Your 10 Workout Guidelines is Part 1 of the Functionally Fit Workout

1. Whole body each session

This training routine consists of five Compound Sets of resistance exercises for increasing joint mobility, muscular development and strength. The entire body will be exercised each session.

2. Workout session frequency

The routine will be done three alternate days per week to allow your body to recuperate. Muscles do not get built during the exercise, but when rested afterwards.

3. Sets and reps

“Sets” typically refer to the number of times you do a particular exercise, but here we tweak the term a bit by referring to a sequence of multiple exercises done without pause as a “Compound Set”. So, say, rather than doing 10 push ups and referring to that as one set, we will do a push up and some other exercises back-to-back, and call all those together one Compound Set.

“Reps” are typically the number of times you do an exercise to complete the Set. Same here: you’ll do some number of reps for each exercise within a Compound Set.

Aim for 12 reps for upper body exercises and 15 for lower. After a month or two of consistent lifting, you can cut the reps to 8 upper, 10 lower, as you add weight. Typically, high reps produces definition and cardio capacity, and low reps produce muscle and strength, although there are plenty of exceptions.

4. Exercise routine

The routine consists of some number of Compound Sets done without rest, followed by active rest. Before each Compound Set, focus your mind on what you’re about to do, and make sure that the equipment is ready so you can more quickly from one exercise to the next in the compound set.

5. Be here now

Be where you are, meaning do the number of Compound Sets and Reps that your body and mind enables without judgment. You will quickly improve.

6. Proper form is key

Proper form is exceptionally important. Unless you aim to be competitive, the amount of weight lifted is inconsequential as long as it’s heavy enough to tax you. If you can, see yourself in a mirror to ensure proper form. Stop the exercise when your form breaks down, such as rounding your back when dead lifting. Ideally, ask a fitness trainer to observe your technique.

7. Multiple exercise options

For most exercises here, multiple options are presented so that you may select one that matches your interest, ability and equipment. Remember #6 and do not overreach. So, if you have a “bad” back, do not choose barbell dead lifts.

8. Fresh and confused

Keep your routine fresh. From time to time, substitute the exercise you’re doing with an alternative offered. Not only will these keep your exercise sessions interesting, but present muscle confusion; meaning, your muscles will continue to be challenged by new stimuli.

9. Off day activity

If desired, do aerobic, yoga or HIIT activities on non-workout days.

If you wish to incorporate High Intensity Interval Training (“HIIT”) into your workouts, limit them to twice per week, and seek to do one on a non-workout day and one on workout day, but before it, and cut the number of exercises in the workout. (More on HITT here.)

10. Feed your muscles

Just prior to exercise, drink about 20 grams of whey protein with water, skim milk or almond milk. Within an hour after exercise, again consume the whey drink, but this time add some carbs and high quality fat to it, such as blueberries/blackberries, banana, 1/2 cup of Greek yoghurt, flax seed powder and chia seeds.

Be aware of total calories; you don’t want this post-workout drink to replace a meal.

Before bed, consume some casein protein powder. Casein digests more slowly than whey protein, so is ideal for feeding the muscle tissue you broke down during exercise as you sleep. Whey is digested quickly, and so feeds the muscle when you most need it — just before and after exercise.

Protein supplement quality is very important. The whey should be “denatured” and cold processed. Among the few brands that fit the bill are Dr. Mercola’s Miracle Whey Protein Powder, and Prohealth’s ImmunPlex Undenatured Whey Protein.

As Ori Hofmekler describes in If Your Protein Contains This – Throw it in the Trash, most casein on the market is garbage. Although Hofmekler does a great job of underscoring what’s bad in most casein supplements, he does not give recommendations for good brands to use, nor have I yet found any. So, know that a good alternative to casein is low-fat, organic cottage cheese.

[If you can recommend a quality casein protein supplement, please mention it in the Comments section below.]

OK, with these Guidelines in mind, let’s review some terminology…

The Workout Routines

-There are five Compound Sets, each consisting of three or more exercises.

-Go for 12 Reps for each upper body and 15 Reps for lower body exercise.

-If you can, do three circuits of each Compound Set before moving to the next one. But one is fine to start.

-Rest: During each Compound Set, you rest while doing the Calf Raisers. Once done with all the circuits for a Compound Set, try not to rest more than three minutes before moving on to the next.

-Duration: It may take longer to do this routine than you like at first, but as you become more accomplished, you’ll fly through it.

OK, you’re ready… first up is Warm-up/Core/Glutes in Part II.

Note: This is article 1, part 4 to my FREE four-part series about how to build a strong and youthful body.

The post The Functionally Fit Fast Workout — Strong, Enduring, Mobility (Part I) appeared first on Garma On Health.

This is Part II of a six-part video-based series on getting functionally fit fast. Functional fitness means being able to lift, pull and move your body through space over time efficiently and injury-free. If you’d like to get strong, muscular, more flexible and improve your cardio, begin with Part I and work your way here.

Mobility wizard Kelly Starrett holds court.

Part II focuses on Mobility = Full range of motion in joints + flexibility in ligaments and muscle. Make sure you’ve read the “10 Workout Guidelines” in Part I.

Note: This is article 2, part 4 to my FREE four-part series about how to build a strong and youthful body.

2. Warm-up/ Core /Glutes Workout

Before taxing your back and legs it’s important to warm-up your core, that part of your body extending from below your chest to your hips, front and back. While we’re at it, we’ll get the glutes fired up so you can have a better kinesthetic awareness of them during the next compound set.

2.1 Full Body Dynamic Joint Rotation

My recommendation is that you watch the videos in this section and begin your workout with the mobility exercises that will work with for you. The objective is to warm up all your joints, create a bit of perspiration and heat in your body so that you’re ready to put out some effort.

Don’t choose the simplest ones for you to do, for often the most difficult ones are those you most need.

Of the following 1.2 thru 1.8 that you chose to do, perform them without (or with minimal) rest, for three circuits (“3X”). This means you move from 1.2 to 1.3, etc., and after completing 1.8, do it again three times.

Expend some effort, with the understanding that if you push to failure on any one, the next will not be done very well since you’re not recovering (resting) between exercises.

2.2 Dead Bug

Make sure you press the lower part of your back, the lordosis, firmly against the floor, and stop the exercise once you now longer can keep your lower back flat against the floor.

2.3a Stability Ball Leg Lifts

Or

2.3b Leg Lifts

2.4a Stability Ball Crunches

Or

2.4b Floor Crunches

2.5a Stability Ball Glutes

And/Or

2.5b Floor Glutes

2.6a Back Extensions (with rear delt raises)

Or

2.6b Back Extensions on Floor

These next two are really good for people who sit all day, particularly hunched over a keyboard. The Scapula Pushup and Elbow Pushups will strengthen the muscles in your upper back that help hold up your head and have more upright posture.

2.7 Scapula Pushup

The Scapula Pushup is demonstrated at the 3:48 minute mark, so go straight to that mark, or watch the whole video for more ideas for warm-up exercises.

2.8 Elbow Pushup

OK, you’re done with warm-up and core exercises that should begin your every workout, with some upper back and glute work thrown in. Now it’s time to get to the stuff that will really task your large muscles…

… and for that we go to Part III.

If you liked this article and want to read the rest of the series, go here!

The post The Functionally Fit Fast Workout — Strong, Enduring, Mobility (Part II) appeared first on Garma On Health.