With this being our first blog post, I just wanted to start by saying WELCOME and thanks for reading!
It is our every intention to make this blog very informative when it comes to the fields of health & wellness, the human body, performance training (exercise), injuries (what they are and ways to prevent and treat them), nutrition, and supplements. Sometimes these posts will be very simple and easy to read and sometimes they may require either a little research or even some expertise in the field. This blog will also be used to inform people as to all the things we have going on over at the Refined facility. Enjoy, and try and learn something new everyday, it will help keep you young and your mind sharp!
Some sound advice concerning your health and exercise training
Tips for maintaining/improving your overall health and your training
1. Breathe. Did you know that it has been clinically proven (Dr. Herbert Benson at Harvard) that you can reduce high blood pressure through breathing correctly! And this is just one of a whole host of benefits to breathing correctly. Most people breathe incorrectly and are mouth and chest breathers. Your mouth was not meant for breathing, your nose is. By breathing through your mouth & chest and not your nose & stomach you are limiting how much of your lungs that you are using (not to mention the fact that your nasal passage works as a filter and humidifier to the air entering your lungs). Oxygen is the key to keeping every cell in your body operating and is thus the reason we are alive! Conscious, relaxed breathing is one of the main keys to many disciplines (i.e. yoga, deep water diving, and many martial arts) and it is key to you having a healthy, long, and happy life.
2. Don’t eat so often or so much. Most people eat too often! Research has shown that limiting your eating to a 12 hour window or less can result in weight loss and significant improvements in other bio markers even when calories and type of food consumption is the same. In other words, your digestive track and other organs that help you to breakdown the food you eat needs time to rest just like other parts of your body. So give it a break! In particular, make sure to not eat at night. Try and keep all food consumption to before 6:30pm (this kind of depends on where you live). Time restricted eating (which is what I just mentioned above, in addition to fasting and intermittent fasting (which is getting a lot of buzz right now) are very good for you and almost more important than the type or amount of food you eat. And they can have a whole host of benefits depending on when and how you do them, including increasing amounts of Human Growth Hormone in your body which is vital for increasing muscle mass, increasing connective tissue and bone strength, and cutting down on body fat, just to name a few. And though your timing of eating, hormone levels, food quality, and food nutrient density is more important, the amount of calories you consume still does matter. As an example, if you exercise a lot then you need to eat more to fuel that, if you don’t you need to eat less. A great example of this was Olympic Swimming Gold Medalist Michael Phelps who was reported to have consumed nearly 12,000 calories a day while he was training for the Olympics, and just look at how lean he stayed!
3. Move everyday and often. The less you move the closer you are to not moving at all ever again (this is called death!), so LIVE and move your body daily. 20 minutes of brisk walking (or doing 5000-10000 steps per day) would be the minimum per day of physical activity your body needs to be healthy, and even better would be to do 2 days of high intensity interval training in addition to doing daily brisk walking. But that doesn’t mean just sit or lay down the rest of the day (give it a try and watch your health plummet). Unlike what some “fitness professionals” might tell you, your body needs more than 2 days of 30 minutes of physical activity. Things like “6 minute Abs” are just gimmicks trying to take your money. You need to commit to trying to stay off of the couch and be active daily.
4. Quality movement and training is better than movement quantity, plus it will help to keep you from getting hurt and allow you to improve faster. Your body learns by doing. And if you do something poorly/inefficiently then that is what your body learns and will repeat. For example, if you go out and swim everyday, but do so with bad technique you will never become very good at it. But if you learn proper and efficient swimming technique(s) you can flourish and constantly improve at it and in much less time. Understand, there ABSOLUTELY is correct, more efficient ways to move your body that will minimize inappropriate stresses being put on your joints and connective tissues and that will allow you to make performance (strength, power, speed, quickness, etc…) gains significantly faster. In fact, many people are almost better off to not engage in weight training, running, and other types of resistance training at all then to go out and do them incorrectly. People who exercise with poor, inefficient movement patterns are much more likely to create injury problems (such as arthritis and other soft tissue problems) then those who don’t exercise at all. Does this mean you shouldn’t exercise? No, not at all, especially given the multitude of benefits it entails, but it does mean you should learn how to move efficiently and learn about your current movement deficiencies. “If you don’t have the time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over.” John Wooden
5. There are MANY types of STRENGTH! Know what types you should be training based on the goals you have. These types of strength are skills that can be specifically trained. And lacking in certain strength types/qualities can be leading you to injury. If you would tell me “I want to get stronger”, I would then ask you “Stronger at what?” The human body is very interesting in that it will get “strong” very specific to the muscles we are using, the movements that we are doing (read number #4 above), to the rate at which we move, the total time in which we move, etc… So if you are trying to get faster at something then you will need to train fast. If you are trying to improve muscle/movement endurance then you will have to train that. If you are trying to improve Maximal muscle strength then you will need to be trying to move the maximum (or very close to it) amount of mass that your body can. Now, that doesn’t mean there isn’t some carry over from certain types of strength to others, but that carry over will have limits as training continues. A simple example is the guy/gal who can lift the most weight usually isn’t the fastest, and the fastest usually doesn’t have the best endurance, and the one with the best endurance usually isn’t the strongest. So don’t get fooled into exercising only one type of strength (only doing long duration cardio, only doing heavy lifting, only doing yoga, etc…). When you do this some of your other strength qualities become lacking, and then when that strength quality is needed and your body can’t handle the force that is when you get hurt. I will elaborate more on different types of strength and strength qualities in later blog posts as this above explanation is actually very simple.
6. Get Outside, smell the plants, and even go barefoot! Many plants give off aromatic compounds that when we breathe in can result in a whole host of health benefits. One big benefit is how they can increase our immune system’s ability to fight off viruses and cancers by increasing certain types of white blood cells that will protect us. Though “Earthing” has become quite popular as of recent, I am not saying go barefoot for that particular reason (even though their may be a possibility of it having a positive effect on you). We need to walk barefoot and even run barefoot (only do this if you are advanced in training this way) because our feet have nerve receptors similar to our hands that tell our brain how we need to use (contract/relax) all the of the various muscles of our body in relation to the stresses we are perceiving and sensing. Though shoes are necessary, they are like wearing thick rubber, not very mobile gloves on your hands all day. As you can imagine this would really restrict you from doing the fine motor tasks that we do with our hands on a daily basis. And if you did this daily with your hands you would lose the hands abilities to do those tasks because the muscles would become weak and the nerves less myelinated. We thus do the same thing to our feet when we constantly restrict them from moving and feeling with some of the shoes we wear. If you watch a person born without arms use their feet (plenty of YouTube videos) you will see what your own feet would be capable of if you trained them to be and didn’t restrict them so much. One of the biggest problems I see with people that is causing significant dysfunction in their bodies is their inability to attain even minimal movement capabilities with their feet that results in them using significant compensation patterns that then create stress into the knees, hips, and/or back depending on how they are compensating. The more often you walk barefoot the better your body gets at using and moving the feet, so do it as often as you can!