3 Tips For Optimal Health

Public health is a huge concern of almost everyone in one way or another.  Everyone should try to optimise their own health. Nothing frustrates me more than seeing people struggle with their appearance, mood, mental clarity and energy to name but a few. At the same time their body fat levels show that they are borderline morbidly obese. Doesn’t it strike you as coincidental that more often than not it is fat, overweight people who rarely exercise and eat an inordinate amount of crappy unhealthy food are the one’s with appearance, mood, cognitive, energy and libido issues? More often than not it is these people who are chronically fatigued.  We are supposed to live until 100 years old not suffer from inordinate amounts of disease after just 20 years of life; we all need to work on creating an environment for optimal health.

I experienced parenthood for the last two days and I enjoyed it.  Of course I’m not trying to undermine how difficult it must be to rear kids but I will say that being highly active and eating a good, healthy diet played a big role in why my energy wasn’t zapped. Sleeping in is a luxury for parents with kids of school going age and I am under no illusion that the effects of being a real parent may accumulate over time but eating well and fitting in some exercise when you can will have a profound effect on your ability to stay healthy, energetic and keep in good shape.  Most parents health status is far below optimal I would imagine.

Do you wake up and feel groggy every morning?  Do you claim to need a coffee to get you going?  Do you dread the thought of getting out of bed?  If you answered yes to any of these then you need to make a change (Chek, 2009).

More often than not the reasons for these issues are so obvious it will make you sick. You could be eating foods that don’t work well with your body, not sleeping enough, not exercising, not exercising properly or under a lot of stress.  We are not all designed to eat the same types of food.  As an example; different cars take different types of fuel, right?  What makes you any different to a car?  Fill your body with the wrong type of fuel and it will tell you.  Just because you don’t break out in hives doesn’t mean all food is good for your body. Fatigue is the #1 example of how we react badly to different foods. Do you feel a little sluggish after a particular meal?  If so you will be best served to avoid it.  In my case pasta makes me extremely tired almost immediately after eating it.  Large amounts of low fibre carbohydrates in one sitting generally make me feel bloated and sluggish.  These are my body’s way of telling me it doesn’t want these foods (Chek, 2009).

Do You Get Enough Sleep?

Most people underestimate the value of adequate sleep and most people tend not to get enough sleep as it is. For optimal body function you need between 7-9 hours of sleep each night.  You may be saying to yourself you get enough sleep but just because you spend 7-9 hours in bed doesn’t necessarily mean you are getting quality sleep.  Sleep quality is far more important than sleep quantity.  You should not feel groggy after 7-9 hours in bed (Wilson, 2006; Chek, 2009; Holford, 2012).  You should wake up without an alarm and want to get at the day.  Fatigue can induce impaired gluconeogenesis (your body’s ability to use fat and protein for energy), rapid hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), sodium loss and potassium retention (Wilson, 2006). What’s interesting about this situation is due to the stress your body is under, despite having low blood sugar, there tends to be rather high levels of blood insulin meaning you are going to become progressively more overweight and at risk of type 2 diabetes. The net result of these is a miserable, tired feeling.  Small things can make an inordinate amount of difference in the quality of your sleep;

1. Turn off all electronics.  Yes this includes your phone.  With the advancements in phones of late almost everybody has some sort of notification waiting for them every morning be it from email, twitter, instagram or your ‘hardcore’ friends posting annoying late night Facebook updates and photos.  If you leave your phone on at night your are more likely to be woken.  Turn it off, whatever it is can wait until the morning.  For those of you that use your phones as alarm clocks Invest in an alarm clock (preferably a battery-powered one) (Gooley et al. 2011;Chek, 2009).
2. Have no lights shining.  That even means covering the red LED from your alarm clock. Get curtains that leave the room in complete darkness.  You may not think it but light from the night sky also affects your sleep quality.  I can never understand how people can sleep without drawing their curtains (I have a few people in mind) (Gooley et al. 2011; Chek, 2009).
3. Stop playing video games or doing anything that gives your brain a lot of stimulation. You should be winding down an hour before bed.  Ever find that your brain won’t stop going when all you want to do is sleep?  Try and read before bed and dump all your work or college thoughts until the next day. Many people worry about what they have to do tomorrow.  A good technique I have starting doing lately is making a list of everything I have to do in order of priority in the evening.  It is often referred to as a ‘brain dump’, it helps you to forget about what has to be done until the morning (Chek, 2009).
4. Have a cool room temperature.  This one might sound a bit ridiculous to some of you.  A cold room is far more conducive to high quality sleep than a warm room.  Your body temperature naturally drops through the night. The cooler your body is the better your sleep will be. Try taking a cold shower before bed. This is ideal for anybody that works out late at night.  And no you shouldn’t be wearing socks and a hoody to bed that’s just downright ridiculous.  Unless you live in a house with below freezing temperatures, then you should wear a hat to bed, I’m speaking from experience here from my poor student days.
5. Eliminate caffeine after 3pm.  I am a culprit for this one myself.  You may think having a coffee after your dinner is not problem as you fall asleep just fine. Again, I come back to the sleep quality issue. You may fall asleep easily but caffeine is a stimulant and will in fact continue to stimulate your central nervous system throughout the night this upsetting your sleep quality (Chek, 2009).
6. Eliminate high carbohydrate meals 3 hours before bedtime. Remember that carbohydrates cause a large spike in blood sugar which in turn gives you a boost in energy.  Try a moderate protein and fat meal is you want to eat close to bedtime (Richards, 2005).
7. Go to bed earlier.  Midnight is not a good time to go to bed.  You should be sound asleep by 10.30 at night (Richards, 2005). 

Exercise

Find me someone who exercises PROPERLY and eats relatively well that doesn’t feel good.  Unless they have some other underlying health issue then you won’t find one. Even if you do think you find someone you will never know unless they change their diet and exercise regime to see if it makes them feel better.With regard to exercise let me clarify from the beginning; walking is not exercise, it’s locomotion, meaning it’s something you have to do for life.  If you feel like crap, are tired don’t think walking will fix your problem. Granted it has it’s place for overall longevity but for health & fitness purposes you may as well just stay in bed if walking if your medicine. For those that are short on time, all you need is 10-15 minutes a few days each week. Everyone has this time; it;s just a matter of allocating it to exercise.  You may feel like you don’t want to exercise but you have to force yourself at the beginning.  Examples of the initial benefits for those with chronic fatigue and health complications include (Wilson, 2003; Harrower HR. 1922);


1. Increased blood flow which helps prevent plaque accumulation in your arteries and stimulates your liver which enables it to perform its 3000+ daily functions more effectively
2. Exercise will also help to normalise cortisol, insulin, blood glucose, growth hormone, thyroid hormones among others
3. Drives oxygen to your brain.
Do some HIIT at home e.g. pick an exercise like burpees, mountain climbers, squat jumps etc, do it as fast as possible for 15-30 seconds, rest for the same time and repeat for 10-12 minutes. Try it out and tell me it was easy.




Diet

Your diet is the overall key.  Reduce or eliminate sugary foods e.g. biscuits, cakes, sweets, ice cream, pastries.  Also eliminate poor carbohydrate sources like pasta, white rice, almost all breakfast cereals and most breads (except spelt or rye for example) (Pollan, 2008). Base your meals around proteins such as; chicken, turkey, salmon, tuna, herring, mackerel to name but a few, include a large base of vegetables and highly fibrous, slow releasing carbohydrates such as; quinoa, oatmeal, beans, brown rice, basmati rice and cous cous (Taubes, 2009).  If your main meals are in check then you will see and feel amazing improvements. Make small changes at first and build on them over time rather than instantly changing your entire diet.  Remember that you must aim to eat REAL FOOD.  Things with wrappers and more than three ingredients aren’t food rather they are diseases disguised as food (Gussow, 2003).  Check out this recipe site, that shows you how to cook healthy versions of your favourite desserts.



Closing Thoughts

Make some of these changes to your life, you will reap the rewards.  Remember, nobody is asking you to be perfect.  Just make small changes and you will see the benefits.
1. Sleep Better
2. Exercise Smarter
3. Eat Better
4. Eliminate Needless Stressors in Your Life (This basically encompasses every one of the above four points)

10 Mistakes Women Make In The Gym

Here's what you need to know...

•  Too many women, because of poor exercise choices or practices, end up building a body that's "skinny fat," a condition where they appear thin in clothes, but actually have a higher body fat percentage than they did before they started exercising.

•  Women generally need to use heavier weights. Stop with the delicate little flower thing. Your muscles won't grow – won't get curvy – if you're pressing, squatting, or curling with weights that have roughly the same heft as your iPhone.

•  The one exception to working with heavy weights is the waist. The waist is comprised of muscles and muscles respond to heavy weights by getting bigger.

•  It's virtually impossible – no matter what you eat – to gain any fat in the post-workout period. While gaining fat during this period is highly improbable, it's highly probable that you will build some muscle during this same timeframe, provided you give your body the protein (and calories) it requires.

For anyone knowledgeable about exercise, walking into a public gym is kind of like stumbling into a nudist camp – you quickly just want to slap on some horse blinders because there's so much that you don't want to see. In the case of the nudist camp, it's usually a lot of flabby, pasty-white guys that should never be naked, even when they're alone in a secluded cabin on a mountaintop. In the case of the gym, you want to restrict your view because people are often doing the lamest, silliest, most illogical exercises and practices imaginable and it hurts your sensibilities as a fitness expert.

Guys are probably the biggest tools in the gym because they're driven by ego instead of logic, but women make their own share of mistakes that are unique to their sex. Women are torn between what they read in Shape or on some insane aerobic queen's blog, their unqualified husband's or boyfriend's pontifications on diet and exercise, or society's conflicting and confounding expectations of what a woman should look like. It's no wonder women can't decide between lifting weights, becoming a Crossfit wind-up toy, doing aerobics until they're thin as a waif from Oliver Twist, or practicing so much yoga that their seven angry and overworked chakras pack up their things and go to Cabo for a weekend of volleyball, sun, and suds.

Too often women end up blending elements of all those practices and as often happens when you combine too many recipes, that dish won't cook. Women make little progress and often end up looking worse than when they began, sometimes developing a body that's "skinny fat," a cruel, paradoxical condition where they appear thin in clothes, but actually have a higher body fat percentage than they did before they started to exercise because they lost muscle instead of body fat.

I'm going to assume that one of the reasons women go to the gym is to look better, and looking better usually means becoming leaner and/or acquiring more curves. Bodies, at least the most aesthetically pleasing ones, are a combination of convex and concave curves instead of straight lines. You're a delectable and enticing mammal, not a tree. As such, you want to build muscle to build or accentuate convex curves. If you're already blessed with convex curves, you want to createconcave curves by losing fat. You accomplish either or both by smart weight lifting. Plenty of women have accepted this wonderful reality, but I still see stuff that makes me want to wear blinders. Here are some of the regrettable practices I see women making all the time.

1. Fear of Appearing Butch

You've heard this one before, but it doesn't look like it's sinking in. You need to evolve beyond using rubber-coated dumbbells that have a clump of iron the size of a baby's fist on either side. In other words, you need to use heavier weights. Stop with the delicate little flower thing. Your muscles won't grow – won't get curvy – if you're pressing, squatting, or curling with weights that have roughly the same heft as your iPhone. Say hello to the 20 and 30-pound dumbbells, aspire to the 40 and 50-pound ones. Use weights that allow you to do between 8 and 15 repetitions.

And don't play the age-old, "I don't want to get too big" card. Unless you're the one woman in a million that has such high Testosterone levels that female horses start to whinny nervously when you walk by, you're not going to suddenly sprout muscle from your ears and everywhere else. Neither will your muscles grow beyond your aesthetic ideal unless you start feeding them a lot more. Muscles don't grow out of thin air; you've got to supply them with protein and carbs. That's why men who lift weights eat barnyards of fowl, ranches of cattle, rivers of fish, barrels of protein powder, and vats of Cocoa Puffs. If you don't eat that way, you won't get "too big." (See mistake #9 for advice on when you should eat big.)

2. Fear of Making an Ugly Face

We just discussed using heavier weights, but we didn't discussintensity. When you're lifting weights, you shouldn't be able to maintain the same facial expression as when you're getting a mani-pedi. Too many women just don't get down and dirty. There's rarely even a grimace or a bit of semi-feminine grunting. Look, building muscle requires some discomfort; it requires some pain. You might be able to look all pretty and composed for the first few reps, even while using an appropriately heavy weight, but you're ultimately going to have to make an ugly she-wolverine face on the last few highly-productive "money" reps where you coerce muscle into growing. No ugly face, no curvy muscle. No ugly face, no increased strength. Tank your outdated views of femininity. Screw how it looks or what anyone thinks.

3. Absession

Absession is not a new scent from Calvin Klein. Rather, it's being obsessed with working the abs or the waistline in general. Here's a shocker: everyone has a six-pack; you just have to whittle away enough fat so that it shows. Granted, you may want to build the abdominals so they're more pronounced, but stop thinking that you need to dedicate half your workout or more to working abs. Three or four hard sets of 15 to 20 – using resistance or using more challenging angles as necessary – a few times a week is all you need. Spend the rest of the time building overall muscle and doing activities that burn fat in general.

4. Working the Abs Like a Powerlifter

I know mistake #1 said to use heavier weights, but ab work is the one exception. For some reason, a lot of women already use heavy weights when working the midsection. Oddly, they think that working the waist with heavy weights is somehow going to make it smaller. Maybe... if we all lived in the Bizarro world. The waist is comprised of muscles and muscles respond to heavy weights by getting bigger. If you want a waist that's as broad as a tree stump, then have at it. If, however, you want the mythical wasp waist, stop working your abs with heavy weights. As mentioned in the previous tip, stick with weight or resistance that allows you to do roughly 15 to 20 reps. Most importantly, don't use weights while working your "side muscles," otherwise known as the obliques. The surest way to build a blocky waist is to do side bends while hanging onto dumbbells. Instead, work your obliques by doing a few sets of side planks a couple of times a week.

5. Balancing on the BOSU

I'll grudgingly admit that the BOSU ball probably has some merit in developing balance. As such, it might be useful for Cirque du Soleil performers. It also makes for a lovely post-modernist style chair. Beyond those functions, I see little use for it.

Okay, I'm being overly snarky. Yes, the BOSU has some application for abdominal work or rehab work for people with hinky ankles and it can probably help with balance issues, but somewhere along the line, exercisers, most often women or their enabler-slash-trainers started using the BOSU as a weight-training accessory. They either put one foot on it to use with lunges or they put both feet on it while doing any number of traditional weight training exercises like dumbbell curls, lateral raises, overhead presses, or squats. Some morons have even taken this a step further by doing these same movements on a Swiss ball. (If you see someone doing the latter, feel free to hip check the ball and send them crashing to the ground.)

The thinking is that lifting weights on an unstable surface makes the muscles work harder to keep you from doing a face plant, but balancing isn't the type of muscular effort that builds muscle. And, in order to keep your balance, you have to use lighter weights than you would otherwise.

Lifting weights – even light ones – while standing on a BOSU will make your muscles fatigue much faster, forcing you to abort the set earlier than you normally would. You end up missing out on the "money reps," those reps at the end of a set where you activate the muscle fibers most responsible for growth. If all of that falls on deaf ears, consider that none of the major studies conducted on the BOSU have found it to build muscle any faster than doing the same exercises on solid ground.

6. Too Much Aerobics

I've got a question for you: Have you ever see a marathoner or even an accomplished jogger with a really good body? Probably not. They're either slightly emaciated, have a body with very few curves, or are plagued with the skinny-fat condition I talked about in the intro. They also have really ugly feet.

Without going into all the hormonal or evolutionary permutations, let's just accept the scientific fact that the body would generally, during caloric deficits, rather sacrifice muscle than fat, and what is excessive endurance exercise but an artificially induced caloric deficit? Regardless, women especially are saddled with the myth that the more aerobic exercise they do, the better they'll look.

Remember, you want muscle, and excessive aerobic exercise is death to muscle. There are far more effective ways to burn fat. Going for a brisk walk first thing in the morning is incredibly effective and it saves muscle. Similarly, brief bouts of high-intensity exercise in the form of sprinting or Tabata-style exercise-bicycling or weight training build muscle and burn fat simultaneously. In case you're not familiar with Tabata, it's a simple but brutal protocol where you do an activity as fast and hard as you can for 20 seconds, rest 10 seconds, and then do another exercise/rest cycle of 20 and 10 seconds. You do this for 4 minutes straight and then collapse into a spent but proud heap. You can do Tabata workouts with kettlebell swings, dumbbell squats, stationary bicycle sprints, or any number of other exercises.

7. Workout Monogamy

Mating for life, as swans, wolves, turtledoves, and Catholics are wont to do, has some biological advantages. Mating to your workout for life, however, has none. Too bad so many women ignore this fact. Whether it's from a lack of imagination or a misguided belief that "exercise is exercise" or that "there's only one way to lift a weight," some women keep doing the same routine year-in and year-out. They may have torn it out of a Shape or Cosmo that was lying in the doctor's office and since they've been healthy and haven't gone back to the doc's office and read some new magazines, they're still doing the same routine a year or two later.

That's unfortunate because the body adapts to workouts whether they be weight workouts or aerobic workouts. That's why there are so many fat aerobics instructors. They've done the same routine for years and their neurological system is so accustomed to it that it costs them little in calories or effort to complete the workout. You need to cycle your workouts every four to six weeks. Emphasize legs in one cycle, shoulders or arms the next. Get new routines from articles right here on T Nation.

8. Workout Promiscuity

The opposite of the workout monogamist is of course the workout slut. While much more common among males, there are plenty of women who can't stick with a workout for very long. They try out a workout a few days, see that it hasn't yet given them an NFL cheerleader body, and then try something else. One manifestation of this is "CrossFit Fever." These women, not entirely sure of what constitutes CrossFit training, do a bastardized version where they perform non-stop, often non-sensical, semi-aerobic, semi-anaerobic conditioning work for 1 to 2 hours for no apparent reason, save to exorcise or exercise some professional or personal demons.

In either case, their workouts are chaotic and ultimately produce rotten results. Find a logical, progressive workout that addresses your particular needs, builds muscle, burns fat, and makes you the queen of curves and give it 4 to 6 weeks to work. Then and only then should you change it up, even if it worked well (see step #7).

9. Fear of Food

Ready to have your dietary beliefs shaken, Jell-O like, to their core? Okay, here goes: It's virtually impossible – no matter what you eat – to gain any fat in the post-workout period, which is roughly defined as the hour-long timeframe after you finish lifting weights. While gaining fat during this period is highly improbable, it's highly probable that you will build some muscle during this same timeframe, provided you give your body the protein (and calories) it requires.

It all has to do with insulin, the hormone that carries glucose and amino acids to muscle cells. Broadly speaking, insulin has two choices, it can either shuttle glucose and protein to storage in fatty tissue and the liver, or it can deliver those nutrients directly to muscle cells where they're used to fuel, repair, and grow muscle. The path it takes is determined by exercise – if you're lifting weights or just finished lifting weights, insulin will take the nutrients directly to muscle instead of storing it.

Muscle is particularly sensitive to insulin during this workout/post workout period, so if you want to build muscle/curves, it's imperative that you eat during what we call the "peri-workout" period, which is comprised of the period just before, during, and after a resistance workout. So temporarily forget your calorie fears. Temporarily forget your carb fears, too, because this is when you definitely need to provide your muscles with the material it needs to build those curves. In general, have a protein/carbohydrate drink about 45 minutes to an hour before a workout and a substantial amount of protein and carbohydrates after a workout. In an ideal world, you'd also sip a protein/carb drink during the workout, too, but at the very least, make sure you don't skimp on that post-workout meal.

10. Juicing

No, not juicing as in steroids. I'm talking about the plastic cups of pulverized, Osterized, barely palatable concoctions of kale, seaweed, wheat grass, and whatever other obscure vegetables or fruits the juicer is able to buy at a discount that so many women have permanently affixed to their hands when they walk into the gym.

I know it seems contrary, even heretical, to suggest you stop or limit your consumption of these drinks, but hear me out. Vegetables and fruits contain simple sugars and more complex, harder-to-digest carbs. No problem there. However, when you blend up fruits and vegetables, you're breaking down all those normally hard-to-digest carbs into infinitesimally small pieces. Drink that stuff down and you're virtually bypassing much of the digestive process. All those sugars are presented to your bloodstream like flowers to your momma on Mother's Day. They get absorbed super quick, and your pancreas releases a surge of insulin to counteract all that sugar. It's virtually the same effect you'd get from shot-gunning a 24-ounce 7-11 Slurpie.

Insulin shuttles off some of the sugar to muscle cells and the rest are stored (in the liver or as body fat), but then insulin levels dip below baseline and you get hungry again pretty fast. If you give in to that hunger, you're ingesting more calories than you might normally have and extra, unnecessary calories get stored as fat. What's more, if you do the juice thing often enough, you may actually develop some insulin resistance, which is the first step down the path to Type II diabetes.

There's one more thing to consider, too. You probably wouldn't be able to eat all the fruits and vegetables that are in a typical fruit or vegetable smoothie if they were sitting there on a plate. They'd take up too much room in your stomach and even all that Spandex in your Lululemon pants wouldn't be able to flatten out your belly. However, pulverize all those fruits and vegetables down into primordial ooze and they, and all the calories they contain, fit in your stomach just fine. Juicing allows you to eat more than you normally could, which is never really good if you're trying to keep tabs on your body fat levels. 

Tabata Intervals: A Simple and Effective Protocol For Cyclists and Endurance Athletes

The recent interest in high-intensity interval training has seen the term Tabata applied to many different exercise regimens, but did you know that one of the original studies was performed on a bicycle? The training protocol of repeated twenty-second work periods coupled with ten-second rest periods was first introduced by Kouichi Irisawa. Irisawa was a head coach of the Japanese National Speed Skating Team. What would be the perfect workout? Short and effective? Well Tabata interval training might be just what you're after. The name "Tabata" gets thrown round an awful lot when talking about HIIT, but few people actually know what the original study consisted of. It has often been adapted to make their own less effective versions. In 1994, Izumi Tabata reported on training experiments that used this protocol on a cycle ergometer. Over a six-week period, his athletes underwent one of the following: 1. Moderate intensity endurance training at 70% of VO2 max for sixty minutes, five days per week. 2. Intermittent training intervals at 170% of VO2 max for 20 seconds with 10 seconds rest, repeated for seven to eight sets, five days per week. The endurance-training group showed increased VO2 max from 53 ml/kg/min to 58 ml/kg/min - a rise of 5 ml/kg/min or 10%. The endurance training made no significant difference to anaerobic capacity, which would be important in short bursts of activity (as you might expect given that this mode of training did not stress anaerobic energy production). The interval training increased VO2 max by 7 ml/kg/min, slightly more than the endurance protocol, and also increased anaerobic capacity by 28%. For each participant in the study a linear relationship between power and oxygen demand had been established, so this means that the above percentages can be used to approximate power gains, too. Breathing more oxygen might be interesting, but it’s of little use unless it can be converted into useful work. It is not necessary to go to the expense of having a full VO2 max test to work out the levels of effort required to undertake this type of intermittent training. An approximation to the power output at VO2 max can be established by a simpler functional threshold power (FTP) test. The FTP test estimates the average power that could be sustained over sixty minutes. A typical way to do this test is to use a power meter on a turbo trainer and work flat out over twenty minutes. You record the average power and multiply this by 0.95 to estimate the power for sixty minutes. (Or you can, of course, do the test for sixty minutes - if you can do that!) The intensity for the Tabata-type intervals can then be established by taking this FTP figure and multiplying it by 1.7. If you have a power meter or turbo trainer that can measure or estimate power you are all set. As this is a high-intensity exercise regime, you do need to make sure that it is suitable for you and that your bike and turbo are securely set up. A gym towel falling in the spokes during a twenty-second high intensity interval will certainly spoil your day. Based upon this study, an exercise program would by comprised of: 1. Warm up for ten minutes. 2. Perform seven or more sets of intervals of 20secs (at 170% FTP) and 10secs rest. 3. Cool down. Perform this five days per week. On the sixth day, perform thirty minutes at 70% and then do four Tabata-style intervals. Rest on the seventh day. Repeat for six weeks. If you measure your FTP before and after this program, you should see some useful gains. So, if you are emerging from your winter training and wish to put in some finishing touches before some early events or have only just started to think about training for the year ahead, this might be a simple and effective protocol for you. References: 1. Tabata, Izumi et al., "Effects of moderate-intensity endurance and high-intensity intermittent training on anaerobic capacity and VO2max." Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise Issue: Volume 28(10), October 1996, pp 1327-1330.