Your Colon & YOU!!

It's hard know how to begin. The subject is rather delicate. Sort of a private thing. Almost taboo. No, actually taboo. But that doesn't mean it should be ignored. The usual Youtube field just won't do. No, you can copy and paste the links. That way it's entirely on you. The management and stockholders of the FitWorks Corporation, International can take no responsibility for any potential untoward emotional or aesthetic consequences.  On the other hand, never mind ... cut and paste is too much hassle.

So HERE is a colonoscopy vid, of various patients.  Some healthy, some pathological. It doesn't seem to be impacted fecal matter, "like spackle or paste" to quote a common radio commercial, but it's slimed on there in a manner and to a degree that is clearly desperately unhealthy. Diet diet diet.

The woman at 3:35 pretty much clinches the case: the colon is highly correlated to overall health. Did that incredible mess of a bowel cause her cancer? That would be overextending the evidence. But it's obvious that her colon is utterly toxic. The product ads for fibers and herbs and cleansers and hoses have a marketing agenda. The research seems not to have been done, regarding toxins absorbed to cause disease. But a sick colon is symptomatic of a sick diet, which is, frankly, the cause of virtually every lifestyle disease. It's shortsighted to address the symptom, be it either colon or cancer, without addressing the cause -- diet.

On the other hand, the colon of someone with a healthful diet is a veritable garden of delights. That's an article of faith, for most people, but it must be so. A high percentage of plant-based foods is colo-riffic! Animal cells, you see, have a membrane, whereas plant cells have a wall. The membrane is just fat, and dissolves when digested into something like, well, lard, providing no roughage, as grandma used to called it -- nothing for peristaltic motion to act effectively upon; the wall is cellulose, undigestible, and gives rocket power to all your elimination needs! It's the difference between scrubbing on the one hand, and on the other constantly slathering the lumen with fetid slime.

Something is indeed going on, with the large intestine. Take this guy for instance: just a little freaky, wanting to share what he shares, but illustrative.

Hey, you were warned.

A mass of algae-looking mucus in his toiletbowl after a six day fast. But, if it's true, we really should know about it, in a general sense. It's just the specifics that are sickening. So you just hurry out right now and buy some fiber, eh? Please? And drink water, like a lot.

As for worms, unless it's some sort of CGI effect, behold.  And behold again.

Now, hospitality is a very fine thing. Good old-fashioned values. And didn't St Francis teach us to be kind to animals? But this is going a bit too far past the extra mile. No matter how moonbeam someone might be, loving the earth and being kind to all the growing things and all that hippie stuff, uh, KILL THEM!!!

Upshot: John Wayne did not have 20 pounds of impacted fecal matter in his colon. Well, maybe he did, but we don't know about it. No autopsy. Lies lies lies. Elvis on the other hand did have a desperately sick colon: fully half of it was "jam-packed" with dried chalky feces. The drugs did that, and his bloat-making diet. So we know crud gets stuck, in a more than constipational way. There are autopsy colons of incredible size and weight. These are pathological, of course, and turning on an internal firehose might have done some good, but so would surgery. Neither would be a cure, for a poisonous lifestyle. But the first would certainly be an easy way to buy some time -- like draining a boil. Doesn't really matter if a boil is poisoning the body -- it just needs to go.

As for those hideous colonoscopy vids, this is what we've suspected all along. It's not brittle, not dry, this fecal mucous or mucosal feces. But it is stuck. Like cheese, then. You are just chock-o-block full of cheese. And algae. And worms. Why do you do this to yourself. So sad.

Well, a certain silliness of tone is not entirely amiss. It's an uncomfortable topic. Colons. Yick. But we are made out of what we eat. How is this relevant to fitness? Well, duh. FitWorks has a primary focus on increasing health and functionality through exercise, which is, after all, far more manageable and rational than diet. But you are made out of food, and diet is at least as important as exercise. Look at it this way: a city is only as healthy as its sewers.  If you've ever used a Tijuana outhouse, you know it's true.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Paean

This royal shape of kings, this scepter'd trunk,
This bodiment of majesty, this form of Mars,
This other ecstasy, demi-delight,
This figure built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of time,
This happy sight of men, this total world,
This precious sinew set in a tonéd build,
Proof against the envy of less happier men,
This blessed form, this flesh, this frame, this Body.

 -- Dick the Second, Act II, scene I (Shakeboody)

So?  Be excellent!


FW

Stretching

Stretching isn’t about being able to do splits. It’s about avoiding chronic and/or acute pain.

 Skeletal muscles can do only one thing -- contract. Well, relax too, but that’s just part of the one thing. Every muscle attaches at each end to a different bone, across a joint. A muscle cell, a fiber, sort of reels one end of itself in toward the other, the opposite of a rubberband -- it’s a sort of hand over hand tug-of-war process, as if two caterpillars met head to head and then walked along each other’s belly. Confusing, eh? Point is, the ends get closer together.

 We get stiff, inflexible, muscle bound, stooped, when muscles reset themselves into a contracted position, so that too-short becomes the new norm. Spend 8 hours working at a desk, or 12 hours watching a Twilight Zone marathon, or 16 hours playing, um, Tetris, and you’re teaching your hamstrings that short is the healthy way to be. When we try to pull them out again into a longer, healthier full-range position -- what we’d call stretched but which is really just relaxed--this is perceived as an abnormal stress on a joint, perhaps even dangerous. Joints are higher than muscles on your brain’s list of things to protect, so there is automatic resistance to any stretch beyond the habitual. And what you do for 8 hours straight, your body considers the norm.

That’s the stiffness -- a signal from your muscles to you that you’re getting dangerously ambitious, what with your bending over to tie your shoe like that. How dare you disrespect your body so flagrantly. Back off, sweet child, you’re flying too close to the sun. Stiffness. The reaction may be violent, in fact, if the danger seems grave, and the muscle reacts like a finger flinching from fire -- spasms, pulls, tears. Better a torn muscle than a damaged joint. Problem is, there was no danger. You just haven’t been doing your stretching, your relaxing. Your body is a domesticated animal: you may think it’s a fierce boar, but it’s a pig … that may be an unflattering analogy. You think it’s a wolf but it’s a dog, and it learns what you train it to do. Teach muscles to stay contracted, hour after hour, and they will obey, and enforce the lesson with stiffness. Or with rips. Or with atrophying rigidity.

 So. Functionality functions most functionally when fully elastic muscles operate joints that are properly aligned. Your body is in its groove. Lots of body parts can slip out of their groove. Slumped shoulders, drooping head and neck, pelvis tilted forward or back (which rounds or sways the lower back), knees and feet pointed out or in (duckfeet or pigeon toes).

 These are all significant problems, which may never actually cause pain for some lucky folks, but will always increase the risk of injury. Consider: if a rubber band is already fully stretched, and then pulled even more ... injury. Whereas: if a muscle-tendon unit has sufficient and healthy range of motion, a fall or blow need not over-stress it -- there’s enough give and take to avert trauma. Thus: we want to preserve and recover healthy flexibility as a matter of prudence and responsibility. We don’t stretch so we can show off our splits; we stretch so we don’t have debilitating pain come out of nowhere and ruin our lives and destroy our optimism and transform us into bitter joyless recluses just waiting for the onerous burden of life to finally, at long and agonizing last, pass.

 Ideal skeletal structure is symmetrical to such a degree that it can only be called elegant. Like Leonardo designed it. Brilliant, actually. The shoulder joints, hips, knees and soles are all equidistant, one from the next. Proper posture has ankles, knees, hips and (depending on body-type) shoulders all precisely parallel.

 From such a pinnacle, it’s all downhill. Splayed feet, which turns walking into a sort of skating.

 Only a moment’s thought will demonstrate the problem, the inordinate and chronic stress on the ankles. We don’t want to skate. We want to ski. And observe the knees -- pointing outward, which is what splays the feet. And the knees are just revealing the displacement of the hips. An obvious issue then, but not a simple one.

Again, slouching shoulders.

 The shoulder blades aren’t doing their job. The resulting pain need not be restricted to the logical places, neck and back. Pain migrates.

 The most common cause of posture-induced pain is a downward tilted pelvis.

 If everything is thrown out of balance, forced to realign, sacrificing proper function for simple balance, then muscles will of necessity be forced to do work they can but were not designed to do. Prime-movers become postural, and visa versa. It’s madness.

 The upward tilting pelvis looks as degenerative as it is. You’re old before your time.

And so on.   Listing

 … yawing

 … just ready to capsize, keel over, break in two and sink to the crab-scuttled floors of silent seas.

These oddities of posture are the virtually universal norm. All those computer games have twisted our bones as well as our minds, and souls.   Repent! With maintenance stretching, your bones don’t have a choice but to fall into healthy alignment. It’s not bogus. It’s excellent.

Seems like a smart thing to do.

Be excellent.


FW
CrossFit Burbank

Hey dude,

like I was totally waiting for you.

You said we were gonna work out together, do some CrossFit. Got my workout log, headphones, brought a kettlebell. But you never showed. What’s up with that? You are a total hoser, man. You should try  a lot harder to

be excellent.

FW

Recipes --

-- by which is meant the things you should do to increase the rationality, quality and/or hygiene of your life:

1. Never pet a stray cat with a wet tail.

2. If you shave your head, be sure to shave your back too.

3. Eat properly.

Okay, maybe those first two aren't all that universally practical. But eating properly is a "GOOD IDEA". Eat good meals. By "meals", we mean meals of excellent nutrition. Not just food -- nutrition. Anything you can eat -- that is, anything you can fit into your mouth might be called food. Yuck. By meals, we also mean meals of an appropriate quantity. Never eat more than you can carry. Never swallow anything bigger than your head.

An excellent breakfast is a berry smoothie. Very easy, and superb nutrition.  A pre-mixed frozen pound of  blueberries, blackberries, raspberries and strawberries ... cherries; if fat-loss is the goal, NOT mango, pineapple, kiwi, banana, sweet, tropical.  Blend it with however much water will give the consistency you prefer; NOT any other beverage, milk or juice (soy, almond, rice, apple, pomegranate...). Add protein powder, not more than 30 grams if it's for a single mean -- NOT whey unless weight GAIN is the point.  Some flax seed oil or Omega-3 fish oil, 2 or 3 tablespoons (NOT the pills -- liquid).  Those are the four major ingredients: mixed berries, protein, good fat, water.  Extras for nutritional benefit such as cinnamon, goji, probiotics, etc.

The ORAC value is off the charts (google "orac antioxidant"). Amazingly low in calories -- the oils bring it up, but they are essential. Flax seed oil is a precursor to the Omega-3 EFAs (google "efa epa dha", or just look at Wikipedia).  There are satiation receptors in the brain that monitor for fats -- they help you figure out you're not hungry.

Another meal, as often as you like, is a simple vegetable stew/stirfry/steam. Frozen broccoli, cauliflower, mixed peppers, green beans and string beans and carrotscorn and peas and whatever else catches your eye -- fibrous vegetables. Bring to a boil etc, chop in tomato, etc, and some protein to taste.

Pretty boring and not so flavorful. Add seasonings -- apple cider vinegar, a splash of extra-virgin olive oil, turmeric (anti-inflammatory), cayenne pepper (good for you ... hot), cinnamon (weirdly, it increases your insulin receptivity -- good), basil, oregano, parsley, any other herbs or spices that catch your eye, and something called Bragg Liquid Aminos -- very savory.

There's the hunger of an empty belly, which isn't hunger at all.  There's the hunger from an energy-depleted bloodsteam, no matter how much you eat, because of an insulin imbalance -- we'll look at that some other time. Then there's the hunger from not getting enough nutrients -- biochems that your body needs to build and repair itself. The standard American diet -- SAD -- is really good at causing high-calorie malnutrition. Empty calories.

Calories, from a responsible perspective, are not the defining characteristic of food. Nutrients. It's the difference between eating, say, sugar (all digestible carbs break down into glucose) on the one hand,  and on the other, (complex) veggies and fruits and berries, beans, nuts, etc.  One will, eventually, make you sick and kill you. Literally. The other can bring optimal health -- phytonutrients. Empty calories, opposed to nutrient-dense calories.

There are plenty of easy-to-read books on intelligent nutrition. SuperFoods Rx. Not moonbeam, not vegetarian. "How Not to Die." You don't have to be vegetarian. The point is, health is not magic. We build it, out of nutrients, and exercise and lifestyle. Health has to do with prudence. Food can kill OR sustain you. Be moderate, which means reasonable and responsible.  When you notice results, it becomes easier. Then it becomes the only way to be.

Exercise.

Diet is on you. It's like solitaire. You can cheat. Well ... go ahead. But play fair, too, most of the time. These are the compromises we make -- it seems like a good thing to make as  few as possible.

4. Never reply to an email from an exiled Nigerian bank president.

5. Be excellent.


FW

Lower Body

A meaningful exercise program will exploit the fact, even if it's not consciously understood, that the body can be divided into three large functional units: the upper, pushing-pulling structure of the arms and shoulders; the middle, bending-twisting structure of the trunk; and the lower, standing-stepping structure of the legs and hips. It's a FitWorks organizing principle -- a little thought should reveal its truth and usefulness.

Just a few words on the lower body. It steps and it stands. That's it, in terms of major functioning. By stand, we mean vertical movement -- standing, sitting, jumping, and anything else of this sort you can think of. By step, we mean horizontal movement -- walking, running, lunging and so on.

In terms of exercise, the simplest effective movements would be the squat and the lunge. These two functional motions address it all. How very very simple. Do these two things, and you're about 98% done with it -- using the tried and true proof of instant phony statistics. But it's only the stat that's phony. The overwhelming effectiveness is real. So what about toe-raises and calf-raises and heel raises and, uh, leg presses and donkey kicks and ham curls and all those other fancy machines we see in the chrome and glass gyms? Aren't they ever so useful and necessary too?

Yes, if you're undergoing physical rehab for an injury. Yes, if you're a professional bodybuilder looking to isolate that one odd little muscle in your posterior chain that hardly anyone knows the name of but the judges look at. Yes, if you're running a Curves gym and want to make a lot of money by luring people in with your glitz and manifest overhead costs.

But no, in terms of fitness and athleticism and functional movements and feeling and performing better -- no, they are not necessary. What's necessary is doing with purpose and directed intelligence what the human body wants to do because of the way joints move bones. So, squats and lunges. That's what the body does, and that's what you should exercise. Not only these, but these. And these, only safely.

There is a difference, almost never noticed, between kneeling and squatting. Kneeling is knees-forward -- you're going to land on your knees if you go far enough. Nothing wrong with that, per se. But it's not a squat. Squatting is behind-backward -- if you go far enough, you land on your bottom. So what? When we say squat, that's what we mean.

There is no power in kneeling -- it is, after all, the position we beg from. Whereas all the upward power of your posterior chain is accessed, in the squat. Again, kneeling bends the foot -- squatting grinds the heel. The ball of your foot is for transferring power forward -- the heel is for focusing power upwards.

Thus, a distinction between squatting and lunging, upward and forward, heel and toe, backside and knees. Different emphasis because of different purpose and function. This has practical importance because of safety issues. If you lift things upward (squat) while using a forward movement (lunge) -- well, it's hard on the knees. Injury. So that's why training properly is important.

No need to go into how the isolation machines place unnatural constrictions on the joints. We all follow a similar human pattern, but our joints have a lot of idiosyncratic variability in them, which the machines don't accommodate. They are pretty much a one-size fits all sort of thing, for all that there is a little bit of adjustability. No need, again, to go into that. Why would you use a machine? All strapped in and ready to let it do the work, battling alien giants maybe? Hm. Seems so scientific, if this were 1963.

So that's a general rundown on the lower body. Very simple, and yet sort of complex. Understand though how important it is. Two-thirds of most people's muscle mass is below the waist. We burn fat by using muscle. That's why they're always trying to get you to do cardio. You don't really care that you might be able to run a 5K. You just want to burn the calories. It's those big weight-bearing muscles that do it. But using them is only part of the picture -- the other part is building them. Strength training. Necessary. Safely.

Does any of it matter? Yes and no. Depends on how rigorous a steward we want to be, how faithful a custodian of the particular temple God has given us. Sometimes temples lapse into ruins in a single generation. Sometimes they endure through the centuries. Why? Because someone has demonstrated resolved stewardship, or its lack.  There really are so many responsibilities, so easy to ignore, to be ignorant of, and the consequences take so long to show up.  We can forgive ourselves of our guilt feelings.  But physics, and physiology, are unforgiving.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Dances with Polar Bears

There is no difference between animal and plant fat. At pharmaceutically refined levels, pure, the oleic or palmeic acid in pork is the same as that in olive or coconut oil. They are chemically identical. No difference. So the willowy vegetarians don’t have that particular high horse to look down their long noses from. If there is any meaningful health problem with meat, it isn’t the fat content. Which it isn’t.

The problem with meat must lie in one or both of two areas. The first problem is in the gut: as the effect of noxious corpse-eating bacteria and all their ghastly toxic waste products; and as the lack of fiber, which clogs you up and lets the putrifiers have an extended two-day fiesta cruise down your alimentary canal. The other problem is in the bloodstream -- the toxic effect of undigested animal proteins that leak  through the gut wall. In the blood they are treated as invaders, attacked with antigens, which may learn to attack one’s own proteins, leading to autoimmune disorders. To be fair, the leaky gut is caused by refined carbs -- yeast infestation.

There are other problems, not controversial. Meat is the end of the food chain, and therefore it is the garbage dump of every environmental pollutant in the system -- strontium and pesticides and dioxins and bovine spongiforms. And then there’s the byproducts of the animal’s metabolism itself -- urea and feminizing hormones and adrenalin and so on. No one can think these are good. Almost no one.

But Eskimos don't get scurvy. The claim that they eat no plant products, in their traditional diet, seems unlikely. One of the thing vegetarians think they know is that the first thing Eskimos eat when they kill an animal is the contents of the stomach and intestinal tract. Plants, don't you know. Organs too. They throw the meat to the dogs. So the story goes. The other story, though, is that they eat no plant material. Let's just accept the fact that both are true, and not argue.

The fact that the Kenyan Maasai eat very much dairy and hunted meats, and have the worst life expectancy in the modern world may be due to dirty drinking water. That their life expectancy for men is 42 years could be due to the fact that they live in, well, Africa. That they have had, historically, less than a 50% chance of living past 60 is, um, racist. Blood diamonds.

Let's not trouble ourselves with having to defend or attack bigtime meat-eating. Because the issue is not whether or not humans can eat a lot of meat, or solely meat. The issue is, what is optimal.

Let's grant that meat provides every known necessary nutrient, including Vitamin C and glucose (via muscular glycogen). How about the unnecessary ones? Does meat have any meaningful antioxidants? Because meat makes them more necessary. Heat is generated just because digestion occurs. It's called diet induced thermogenesis, DIT. Protein is most wasteful in this regard. It's fuel to the flames, and where there's fire there's smoke, and, uh, smoke is pollution.

Tests show that fat digestion wastes only 0 to 3% of its calories as heat; carbs waste 5 to 10%; protein wastes 20 to 30%; alcohol wastes 10 to 30%. Healthy subjects with a mixed diet burn about 10% of their calories as heat. Protein and fat are most closely linked to satiety -- knowing when to stop. For fat, this would be because FFAs in the bloodstream create a buffer, that allows the body to know there's no famine. It's safe to stop. For protein, perhaps that the sheer amount of work it takes to digest these most difficult molecules creates a signal to stop eating -- enough already -- perhaps through the excess waste heat, or perhaps through the digestive cells themselves, and their depletion of energy.

So, back to what is optimal. Does exhausting your digestive system seem like a good thing? Does making more pollution in your body? -- via the free radicals produced by wasted effort? Does it seem wise to increase the need for the antioxidants that damp down this pollution, while at the same time refusing to eat the plant sources that are so rich in these nutrients? Does it make sense to be the carrion eater? The best place on the food chain to be is the place where you don't get eaten, not where you eat all the other animals. The best place is where you can choose wisely, apart from appetite.

It's bad to eat refined, industrial carbs because they cause a hysterical and eventually pathological insulin response. It's also bad because glucose results in glycerol, which is the glue that holds blubber together. But blubber isn't everone's problem. Should they then eat more meat? Or any at all? Clearly, clearly, an Atkins-like diet will almost always result in the loss of from one to three pounds a week of fat. Calorie restriction, semi-starvation, diets with "carbs" result in hunger, lethargy, fatigue, muscle wasting, depression, self loathing, guilt, futility, failure, etc. But even so, Atkins and his ilk are wrong.

Wrong because it isn't carbs that's the problem. It's nutritionless, fiberless carbs. Most especially, such carbs poured into an already disrupted bloodstream. In extreme and very rare cases, a meat-only diet is  supportable -- if the whole foods vegan diet somehow fails. But that must be a small fraction of a small percent of the human population. Anyone that sick is close to terminal. Short of that point, however, a healthful diet should be rich rich rich with "carbs" -- not starches, not refined grains, nothing powdered. All of that is either predigested, or almost digested. Might as well open a vein and sprinkle in sugar. Real food. Like what Adam would have eaten. You remember Adam? He's the guy God made to live in and tend a Garden, with associated trees.

Why so extreme. Everybody needs glucose, and glycerol, and triglycerides. Everyone needs as many antioxidants as they can get. Nobody needs refined carbs, and hardly anyone needs meat. Because it's not about what we can get away with. It's not about the absence of actual disease in Eskimos or their Caucasian Dances with Polar Bears interlopers. It's about longevity accompanied intimately by vitality. Eskimos are not noted for the number of their centenarians. Maybe it has something to do with unnecessary nutrients.

So much about diet, here, now. What about exercise? Both matter. Diet is about health. Exercise is about fitness. Both matter. There's a great deal of overlap. And both, really are easy. What's hard about being sensible? Hardly anything. It's just that emotion and ignorance get in the way. Rationality helps with both.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Carbs, Inc, Etc.

Food as medicine. We already know it's a drug, but how about its ability to actually make us well? What does a lifetime of having gooey putrefaction oozing sluggishly through your digestive tract do? -- feeding and breeding toxic bacteria so you can absorb their waste products. Brr.

Consider, N, a very serious athlete, working toward world-class status. He understands that diet is utterly pivotal. He's eating far fewer carbs -- by which we mean, mostly, grains. The math of his diet works out to 430 calories from carbs (almost all from fruits and vegetables) -- 22%; 500 from protein -- 28%; 970 from fat -- 50%. Total calories, 1900. Aprox.

That's A LOT of fat. A lot of protein too. And yet. And yet it's working very well. "All of my fats,” he says, “are derived from nuts, olive oil, coconut oil, avocados and occasionally flax or organic butter in smaller quantities. I don't count fish oil supplementation into my daily fat intake. If I drop my fat, I immediately feel it and am hungry. I find it impossible to eat any more carbs unless I eat a lot of fruit." Don't you wish you had that problem?

"I've been doing it for 3 weeks and have leaned out more, increased my output and my heart rate has steadily dropped. I weigh in consistently at about 183 but am as strong (actually stronger) as I was at 203. I have very strong mental clarity and focus."

Other athletes, less cognizant of diet, wake up feeling like they've slept in a cement mixer.

"I think post-workout nutrition is way overlooked in terms of recovery. When my PW nutrition is solid, I never get sore. My PW meal doesn't count towards my day blocks."

See? It's rational. It's purposeful. And most of all, it's effective. The way doctors fiddle with a patient's medication dosages? The same thing is possible with food. It's just a matter of being methodical. Problem is, nothing is as emotional as food. Might as well tell an addict to be methodical with his heroin injections. They're not called dope fiends for nothing. They are still called dope fiends, right? Donut fiends.

"Right now I have one cheat meal a week on Thursday nights. I have everything dialed in so specifically it's ridiculous; but it's so easy now -- second nature. After I eat my one little cheat meal my veins stick out like crazy. Also, since I don't binge on my cheat meals anymore, I don't have a noticeable increase in morning heart rate or the bodyweight fluctuations anymore."

Veins sticking out is a sign of metabolic stress. Why would eating stress you that much? Imbalance, of course.

N mentions a supplement called Resveretrol. It "activates the same genes that calorie restriction does [which increases longevity], only without the calorie restriction. It's taken from stressed grapes that fight off molds and fungus. In eating the stressed grape skins, we activate the genes that are responsible for survival, mimicking the benefits of calorie restriction." Could be. Calorie restriction is the only proven method of vastly increasing vital longevity. There must be genes responsible for that.

Here's the things. Animal proteins are sort of poisonous. If there is such a thing as auto-immune disease, animal products are a major factor. And they are very hard to digest -- like using your gas just to make your motor hot, rather than make it go. Indeed, we do not need protein at all. We need amino acids, the building blocks of protein. We don't need them just to make tissues -- we need them as peptides, as hormones, as neurotransmitters. If we could get that ratio right, well, it would be ideal, the way right things are ideal.

Same with carbs. All carbs break down into glucose. That's a lot of eating, just for the sugar. A lot of health problems, too. It's not the carbs. That's the wrong emphasis. It's the phytonutrients, the chemicals in plants that do all that protecting against mold and bugs and viruses and, uh, cosmic rays. Get those in the right amount, and you will be sure to get all the carbs, the glucose that you need.

Same with fats. Fats are just calories, which is just heat. Heat is, usually, the enemy of an engine. It's not about the calories. Calories are not a problem in our society -- not too few calories, anyway. It's the kind of fat. Point is, there are essential fatty acids from which your body makes hormones. If we get too much of one sort of fat, we get too much of certain kinds of hormones. We get too much omega 6 -- substrate of the inflammatory hormones. So use no vegetable oils unless you think inflammation is a really good thing for you, and use much much more omega 3 -- because anti-inflammatory hormones make you feel so good.

See? We've been propagandized, or at least miseducated, into thinking in terms of proteins and carbs and fat, when it should be amino acids and phytonutrients and omega 3. We think about calories instead of nutrients. If we think of nutrients at all, it's only as vitamins and minerals -- the stuff you can get in superscientifical formulas from the futuristic Atomic Age of the ultra modern Nineteen Fifties, when nutrition was invented and all our food was pills!

It just seems a bit unthoughtful, though, doesn't it? Think of it this way. Almost all of the nutrients that a cow eats are not available to you by eating its flesh. Yes, some of the vitamins and probably more of the minerals are transferred to you through the bloodburger, but all, all, all of the phytonutrients have been used up, burned up, by the cow to make its own flesh. Nothing left for you but the flesh, and you can't build out of ashes, if you get the point.

It’s not about being vegetarian. That’s not for everyone. Be happy. But be sensible too. A big heaping plate of spaghetti -- does this seem sensible? A thick slab of beef meat -- does this seem wise on a daily basis? It’s about the nutrients. You are made out of what you eat. If you’d like some help, getting things in order -- well, no one else can change your diet. No one can do the exercise for you. But if you’d like the information and the expertise, that’s what we do.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Wrong Theories

The Good Thing About Damage...

Gym coaches are still telling their students that the way muscles grow is that first muscles get torn down by exercise, damaged, and then they build up again, repair, only stronger. Yep. Damaging something makes it stronger. Like mutations and Evolution. Uh huh. Cuz that’s what the body does, y’see, when it gets big muscles. Something to do maybe with scar tissue.

No. It isn’t the damage that makes us stronger. The damage comes not from doing enough, or from being effective. Damage comes from doing too much, from overtraining, and from foolishness. Yes, it can accompany muscle growth, the way busted gaskets can accompany reckless driving. But jumbled in with all such associations is a profound tendency toward the post hoc logical fallacy. Correlation does not support causation. No duh.

The actual “cause” of muscle growth is hormones -- not movement, not exercise, not sets and reps and routines. None of these things could have any beneficial effect, without the hormonal signal to add protein to muscle cells -- whereas new size can be added if the hormones are there, with only a token amount of exercise. Effort stimulates hormones, but effort does not build muscle -- hormones do. Keeping it simple, of course. Steroids? The needle replaces the effort, so the same amount of work produces much bigger muscles. Smaller testicles though. An acceptable tradeoff, one must suppose.

The point is, how do we stimulate the clearest hormonal signal? Intensity. Major muscle mass engaged in powerful effort. The brain reads this as a call for more strength, and provides it. Damage? The brain reads this too, and sends out reparative hormones, to clean up the mess. The mess, however, does not make you stronger. It’s there because the workout was foolish. Coach was wrong.

So that’s one sort of wrong theory, arising from the wrong theory of isolation exercises, where doing bodybuilding, which is entirely about appearance, is supposed to make people more fit. Fit for what? In actuality, fit for standing on a stage in a thong, chemically bronzed, slathered with baby oil, glinting in the spotlight. Oooooh. The correct theory, we modestly asseverate, regarding how one might attain fitness, is that it is achieved by treating the whole body as a unit, rather than as a collection of mostly independent parts.

There's more to say of course, and perhaps it will be said. The future is such a hypothetical thing. What is certain is that under normal circumstances sensible exercise and sensible diet bring reasonable results. And who would want unreasonable results? Reasonable fitness goals, of energy and strength and weight and appearance, are not just honorable.  They're intrinsically rewarding. And personal excellence is a reasonable goal.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

GI Tractate

This is just some basic stuff. The glycemic index, GI, tells how fast a given food turns into bloodsugar, on a scale of 0 to 100. Lower is slower, which is better. It's like octane for fuel. Higher is hotter. The raw score however doesn't tell us much of practical value. How much after all of the food, or fuel, do we have? No info. GI tells you about how fast a carb turns into bloodsugar, whether a gram or a pound, not about how much of that carb -- how many calories -- you've eaten.

So the practical approach involves glycemic load, which calculates the bloodsugar effect of a carb serving you actually might use. Honey, for example, has a fairly low glycemic index, but if you eat a bowl of it, it's not so good -- the load would be very high indeed. The index is an unchanged absolute, a constant; the load varies with appetite.

Glycemic load then, GL, takes into account serving sizes, the same way gallons count when we talk about fuel. In thinking about miles per gallon, both miles and gallons matter. Each GL point corresponds to the body's response to one gram of glucose. A typical diet includes about a hundred GL points each day, ranging between 60 and 180. Lower is better. For an individual food, a score of  under 10 is low, good, between 10 and 20 is moderate, and over 20 is high, bad.

Spaghetti has a GL value of 21 (GI of about 50). Brown rice 16 (≈ 70 GI), white rice 30 (≈ 75). You can see that rice white or brown looks pretty much the same from a GI POV, but it's twice as bad in its actual effect on insulin, for amounts you are likely to eat. A "serving." Carrots, grapes, 7 (and both about 45 GI). A donut, 17 (≈ 75). Do you eat just one donut? Three donuts is a GL of 50, and the GI is still 17.

Raisins 28 (≈ 65). Strawberries 1 (≈ 40). Brocolli, califlower, peppers, nuts -- zero.

Here is an index for GL values. This is a site that gives GI values. This is a site that lists too many values for GI and GL. Just more foods than most of the world has ever even heard of. This is that same info, in spreadsheet form. Most of the world don't know nothing about no spreadsheet, but some people seem to think it's useful.

They're crazy of course, but it takes a village.  Don't be crazy.  Be civilized.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Communication

They say some large percentage of communication is nonverbal. Indeed, even some small percentage of this, written communication, is purely visual. Length of sentence and of paragraph. Typoes and missplelings. Letters that rise above or do not fall below the median. Abbrs. How much more, the ideographic scripts. As for face to face, doesn't that rather depend on line of sight? But even, say, perceived proximity carries its own subtle meaning -- a sort of silent body language, affirming the powerful fact, someone is near someone else.

It's words, though. Not that words are what they mean. Hysteria: the wandering of the womb throughout the body -- cf hysterectomy. And then it took on other meanings. Well might Freud have wondered, 'what do women want' ... he clearly didn't have a clue. But womb-wandering has a male counterpart in East Asia and in Africa: koro, Buginese for "wrinkled", and more felicitously, Malaysian for "turtle-head" -- the belief (hysterical) that one's penis is shrinking into the body. Fertility, male and female, depends so much on bloodflow. Of course we have a word for eating your own hair -- trichophagia. It only sounds Greek. So there you go then.

Words shape perception. We all know of the dozens of words the ice-dwellers have for snow. Albanians have 54 words, equally divided, meaning mustache or eyebrows. Vietnamese has 18 words for 'you,' yet we had to get rid of thou. Japanese marks the gradations of bowing, from the reserved 15 degree nod of eshaku to the epileptic groveling of pekopeko. On the other hand, a Liberian language has only ziza for red/orange/yellow, and hui for green/blue/indigo/violet. That's a pretty narrow rainbow.

Some of it just makes you laugh. The French coined ordinateur to spare their lips from the vulgarity of "computer": con is slang for "vagina" and pute is slang for "prostitute". Talk about your Xbox. Bakku-shan is Japanese for a girl you think will be pretty when you see her from behind, but in front, not so much.

The tune that you can't forget: in German, ohrwurm, "ear worm". Scratching your head to remember: pana po'o, in Hawaiian. Words, like the predictability of the human form, remind us that we are all the same. We count our babies' fingers and toes, and are relieved.

There's the Bantu word, considered the most untranslatable in the world: ilunga -- who'll forgive anything once, tolerate it a second time, but oh, the third... There's German's torschlusspanik -- the fear of diminishing opportunity as you age; most apropos in childless premenopausal women. There's the French esprit d'escalier -- the thing you think to say, too late. There's an Inuit verb, iktsuarpok, that means "to go outside often to see if someone is coming." The sound isn't beautiful, but the meaning tears at your heart. And if you say it slowly, as three hard and lonely syllables, it sounds like what it is.

Such a history of fragility. What words do we have, that for their familiarity have lost their power or poignancy? Anguish. Rage. Loss. Lost.

That's how we communicate. With words. With our bodies. With the arrangement of images and of objects in space. And why?

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Convergent Evolution

It's great when things say what they are. Simplicity. How refreshing.






Yes, it's true, sadly.  These cats look like Hitler.



















But it's great too when things look like other things. Say what you are, but look like something else.

Sorry though. This last one is Fatler. And some of them look like Groucho.  Nevertheless, while we don't wish to be judged for our looks, we very well may be.  Hitlercats being an example.  So have a care.  Be as lean as practicality allows.  Be strong, but merciful.  Optimize.

No big point.  Nothing too preachy.  Eat right, do useful exercise.

Be excellent.


FW
CrossFit Burbank

Everything There Is to Know about Diet, Part Two

Perhaps, as is the bias of some incomparably knowledgeable authorities, a purely vegetarian diet is likely to be optimal for some large fraction of humanity. Indeed, ideally, only nutrients that can no longer be found in plants should or could come from animals, if any. Are there any? -- any essential nutrients that can come to us only via animals? Well, vitamin B-12? But that's from a bacteria, and only secondhand through animals. Even so, if that's it, that's it. But it's in Brewers yeast. So that's it.

 Anything else supposed to be unique from animals? Omega-3? Well, yes and no. We make it ourselves. But the health benefits are very real indeed. Someone with an ideal diet, however, wouldn't need to supplement with fish oil. Anything else? Think hard.

 The rest of it, re the philosophy of diet, of functioning and performance, and common sense and ethics, well, these are easy. Whatever works.  The China Study  tells  tells us that animal products are powerfully correlated to degenerative diseases.

That's functioning. Performance is a more difficult issue -- it seems clear that protein is a performance enhancer, and animal products are an easy if not actually dense source of amino acids.

 Common sense? Ahem. Yeah, it's good to eat something that will kill you if you leave it in the sun too long. Something that stinks to make you puke is really good food. The deader the better in fact ... put thick woolly hair on your chest ... make you strong like bull! 

 Ethics? Let me kill you and eat your body because, well, because I like the way you taste. Yum.

 Is it demonstrated, conclusively or by inference, that animal flesh, its "high-quality" protein, results in better performance? One is unaware of such evidence, although the argument is common. Perhaps it's true though? Never argue with reality. The reason for such an outcome, if true, would be that subclinical putrefaction is mildly toxic, and excites a moderate stimulatory stress response in digesting organism -- which would augments performance, short-term. It would be a seasonal benefit with a delayed downside, as in precipitated degeneration in later decades. Like WWII pilots using methamphetamine on long-range bombing runs. Meth saved the world from Hitler. That doesn't make it good.

 Type two diabetes is the over-stress and eventual disruption of pancreatic function. Adrenal fatigue, likewise, of the adrenals. Digestive decline as well ... decades of abusing the enteric system with hard-to-digest consumables lead to a middle- and old-age filled with gastronomic nightmares.

 What we know is that here is a lot of nonsense involved in the whole area of nutrition. Lots of emotion, lots of extremely shoddy thinking. Diet is a profoundly religious thing. We know that disease has a number of causes -- bacterial and viral, genetic and chemical -- but that a if not the major cause of disease in our own culture comes from a diet that is nothing but slow poison. Too many carbs, and too much animal stuff.

 So, does it matter, talk about apemen or Eden? -- matter in some way other than philosopho-religio-theoretically? We want an open mind regarding what is best for our health. False assumptions might lead us to healthful conduct. True assumptions seem more likely to. But anything that closes our minds to behavior that would improve our lives, is a thing to be avoided. Track records matter; long-term results matter. Success is a convincing kind of authority. Find models of success, and copy them.

 Health and performance, and physical beauty and power, are not merely the outworking of genetic happenstance. We can't change our bones, but we can help what hangs off of them. We can't help our features, but we can preserve youth -- that is, delay decay -- with the due diligence that we owe to our progenitors who cared for us enough that we've gotten as far through life as we have, and that we owe to our offspring, who will grieve for our ill-health at least as deeply as we would grieve for ourselves. Health is a duty.

 Rule Five: "You may freely eat of every thing that you can fit into your mouth and swallow, but many of them will kill you, fast or slow." (See Rule Two.)

 Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

 FW CrossFit Burbank

Everything There Is to Know about Diet, Part One

It's not as much as one might suppose. Let's see. History, functioning, and common sense/ethics.

What is the ideal human diet. That's a history question, depending on whether we were Created by God Almighty, Divine Protoprogenitor ,  or Evolved through Random Chance from Primordial Slime which Itself Appeared from Virtual Potentialities for No Reason. That's the philosophical heart of the matter. Did we Evolve via Naturally Selected Haphazard Mutations, that whatever nutrients were available were what we adapted ourselves solipsistically  to need? -- and what wasn't available we Evolved out of a need for? Or were we Designed, as by some God, Superlative Architect of the Cosmos, to need whatever it is we need -- and sometimes we get that and sometimes we don't, but it's a fixed need, with only a fixed, genetically-determined capacity for variability?

If Evolved, then the "Paleolithic Diet" is correct or nearly so -- determined by observations of what modern but tribal, hunter-gatherer societies have access to. Because modern stone age cultures would be reasonably similar to ancient ones --  ignoring any ice ages or other actual millennia-long climate disruptions -- and from such cultures we would have Evolved. If it's true, it's true. Never argue with what's true. Is it? If so, what is the evidence, for this dietary theory? The evidence is  the fact that modernday hunter-gather cultures eat as they do. In other words, the argument begs the question, and the reasoning is circular.

Well there's hardly any other option.  What, God!? -- in a Garden!?!  LOL. We are far to sophisticated and scientifical to believe in that sort of hokus pokus.  Really.  Please.   Space aliens then -- much more logical  -- genetically manipulating us in a lab on the mother ship from behind the moon?  But, har dee har.  Um, breaking through from some other universe or dimension, uh, and somehow, er ... well, that one's not going anywhere.

Upshot is, origins are irrelevant. Philosophy is irrelevant.  Results matter, which are dependent on behavior.  But if there were an ideal diet that was meant to sustain the species, we might feel, from our modern bias and custom, that it was not a hunter-gatherer diet, of grubs and beetles, tapir, sloth and shrew --  nor was it an agricultural one of powdered grains. Something else, entirely.

If we suppose there are rules -- sort of the opposite of randomness -- that, say, the space aliens embedded in our genome, Rule One might be thus: "I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food." Things that grow on the ground and have seeds; things that grow in trees and have seeds. Cucumbers; tomatoes; squash -- herbs that have seeds ... they are fruits.

Rule Two: "You may freely eat of every tree, but there is some type that will kill you." So we have free will, regarding what we may eat -- but not everything that may be eaten, should be eaten. Diet affects our health. You heard it here first.

If there are rules  as from a rule book, then human food would be tree food and  ground food, with seeds. As it were, fruit. Coincidentally, fruit and berries and less obvious fruits are purposed, unlike virtually every other food, to be eaten. That's the deal the plant makes: you can eat my fruit if/because you spread my seeds. Pretty clever, eh?

Leaves are meant to convert sunlight into sugar, and may be eaten. Vegetables are meant to be the body of a plant, and may be eaten. Roots are meant to pull up water and minerals, and may be eaten. Tubers are meant to store energy for the plant, and may be eaten. Grains/seeds/nuts are meant to grow into another plant, and may be eaten. Flesh is meant to be the body of an animal, and may be eaten. Eggs and milk ... well, you know.  Contrariwise, the purpose of fruit is to be food.

Cucumbers, tomatoes, melons, pumpkins, lychee nuts, dates, chili peppers, nuts -- they are fruit. Apples? Alas. We have the same needs as always, but not the same resources nor even the same world.  We do not after all live in a garden.  Apples nowadays, as with so many commercially grown foods, are hybridized for flavor and appearance and shelf-life, not for nutritional content.

And behold, Rule Three: "You shall eat the herb of the field." Thus, the invention of agriculture. The orchard-tender, or again the berry-eating shrew-like scampering underbrush creature, becomes a farmer.  Still plant-based, but second-best. as we knew  anyway: too many carbs/grains will make you fat.

In a harsh and uncooperative world, sadly, essential nutritional resources become rare or extinct. There have been mass extinctions.  There are droughts and floods and blights, and global warmings and coolings.  Thus, Rule Four: "Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. You are given all creatures, even as the green herbs."

What to eat, during an Ice Age or its searing hardpan Global Warming counterpart, or your short-term merely decades long deforestation events like lava floes and catastrophic floods? Eat animals, which can scavenge on debris and carrion.  Point is, we eat meat because we can, especially in the absence of something better. And some better things are certainly absent, cf mass-extinctions. Who can say what nutritionally superb fruits and herbs and seeds and fungi are now extinct. Who can say how much longer we'd live, with vibrant health, if these lost but essential nutrients were not extinct.

Maybe we came from apes and shrews and lizards and fish and germs and inorganic matter that was stuck by lightning. Sounds like a theory.  Maybe we came from dust and the breath of God, another theory.  No matter.  What matters is what works.

No matter if it;s a hunter-gatherer diet of grubs and sap and roots and reptiles and monkeys and bark and mold and algae and salamanders over hundreds of  thousand or millions of years, or a human diet of fruits and berries and herbs and agriculture.  Upshot is, there be an ideal human diet, optimal for health and performance. Diet can be optimized within existing if irreparable limits.

It's not about dogma.  It's pragmatism.  What works?  Do that thing.  Thus, CrossFit -- highly eclectic, completely practical, in theory devoid of theory, although, as people we do love our answers.  There is a CrossFit for diet, an optimal set of behaviors, hard perhaps to identify, and changing perhaps over time, but identifiable with experience and diligence.  Paleo, or vegan, or Intermitant Fasting, or some other thing or combination.  Be bold and resolute, and maybe and maybe not bloody.

Rough and ready definition of CrossFit: constantly varied functional movements at high intensity.   Works with nutrition as well: a wide variety of calorie-poor/nutrient-dense foods of high quality.  So there it is.  Serious people are serious.  Well?

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

An Ever-Expanding P-Factor List

I'm:

• hot
• digesting / hungry
• sore / sick / tired
• not focused / not there / not feeling it
• annoyed / distracted
• depressed
• weak
• old
• consumed with self-loathing and want to look bad
• very complicated, conflicted & contradictory
• dizzy / nauseous
• pregnant, I think
• pacing myself to the music
• not fully recovered from last time
• not being yelled at /  not being watched
• worthless / fantastic / good enough
• just doing a maintenance workout
• doing really well / working hard enough
• not going to be first anyway
• saving it for a strong finish
• working tomorrow
• me.

Long list. Good excuses, all of them. All excuses are automatically good, if they excuse us. Our motives would need to be a little murky, a little confused or conflicted, but that's just part of being human. Oh, there's another one. I'm only human.

What we will not be, if we excuse ourselves so easily, is excellent.  P-factor is all the reasons, the excuses, the lies we use to stop us from doing our best. It's the Permission to PHail PHactor. Not a good thing, in the long run.

The antidote to p-factor is honesty.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Industrial Carbs

If chronically elevated insulin levels have an almost one to one correlation to excess body fat, how do we account for thin diabetics? You can look at someone and know the state of their pancreatic activity by the size of their gut. Insulin is a storage hormone -- the storage hormone -- and the more you make of it, the more you are storing. That’s why it’s an imbalance. So how can there be thin prediabetics. The answer is  that despite the imbalance, they’ve found some sort of homeostasis in cells that are disproportionately insensitive to insulin.  Understand, without any insulin at all, diabetics would starve to death no matter how much they ate.

Consider the mechanism that allows starving people to digest all their muscle tissue, until they get to the heart, at which point the heart is catabolized, and they die -- all the while retaining body fat. They can starve to death and still be obese. Emaciated and fat, at the same time. Clearly the adipose tissue is morbidly, fatally dysfunctional. It has to do with pathologically raised insulin, that stands guard, as it were, outside a fat cell and forces free fatty acids back into the cell rather than allow them into the bloodstream.

The problem boils down to carbs. Not a great word, at all, carbs. Food is carbs. Carbohydrates are the ultimate source of all nutrients. Yeah yeah, sun and soil, but no, plants, and thence to animals. Common usage has determined that carbs refers to refined carbs, sugars and starches. And these are, indeed, the problem. A potato isn’t the problem. But potato chips and pasta and flour and white rice and grain flakes disguised as breakfast and coated with sucrose and fructose and syrup -- well, it’s a bit much. All of it comes from the factory. That’s the problem. Glucose shouldn’t be industrial strength.

Low cholesterol is  more a function of carb metabolism than of fat intake. Same with triglycerides. There are tests that directly measure insulin levels. A HOMA test.  An hsCRP test, for inflammation. An HbA1c test.  But it's easy to know.  Eyeball it. Visible body fat is a profound indicator of raised insulin.  Lower the industrial carbs and you liberate the trapped fat, that escapes into the bloostream, to be used by muscles.  See?  Carbs, bad carbs, industrial carbs are, well, they're not excellent.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Recovery Drink

For any endurance workout, or where there's been a lot of sweating, it is just necessary to replace not only the water you've lost, but the, yes, nutrients in that sweat.  One of our totally awesome and superamazing FitWorks athletes has been known to sweat fourteen pounds in a few hours of striving - all of which needs to be replaced during and within a few hours after the workout.  Proper nutrition will handle the oxidative stress, the free radicals and metabolites that vigorous exercise produces. But sweating isn't quite the same as metabolism. It's almost mechanical.

Sweat, the actual fluid, comes not from some big bag, some sac secreted away deep within the bowels. It comes from blood volume. Your blood becomes thicker, as in a heart attack waiting to happen, when you sweat excessively without replacing the fluid. That's why Gatorade™ is a billion dollar company, if it is.

But Gatorade™, while sound in concept, is flawed in execution. Chemicalized sugar syrup? How is that better than drinking ditch water? Quality control should include something more than the exclusion of rat feces. For this reason, make your own recovery drink. The research is out there. In fact, it's right here. So, a simple formula for a homemade 4 to 6 serving recovery drink:

One gallon water
250 gms carbs (1000 calories)
60 g protein (250 calories)
5 g each of:
   • potassium
   • magnesium
   • salt
   • creatine
   • glutamine
   • vitamin C & E
   • ALA (alpha lipoic acid)
   • for Paleo faddists: blood, fresh, to taste.

Tap water? Sure -- or purified, better. Carbs? Say, frozen fruit juice concentrate -- the whole can, usually more than a thousand calories, but who's counting. Get real juice, not the favored sugarwater "fruit drink". Quality matters, after all. (If you've got any jiggle that you don't want, cut back on the carbs -- in the recovery drink their purpose is to raise insulin, which will usher the nutrients into cells; skin fat indicates high insulin already.)  Protein powder. Which kind? Any will do, but pea protein is actually rather harmonious. To be even more thorough, adding branch-chained amino acid powder is a good idea. As for the 5-gram ingredients, they can be found as powders, which is a lot easier than grinding up pills or hoping a mixer will sufficiently disintegrate them. So experience shows.

This particular formula is for during the workout, with the pre- or post-workout drinks being twice as concentrated. Rather too sweet for some palates. Really, it hardly matters. It's not about being theoretically perfect. It's about being reasonably responsible.

For a during-workout drink, use a half-full a liter bottle, or bigger, and put it on its side in the freezer. When it's slushy, shake it up so that when it freezes solid it won't be all separated. When it's time to get dangerous, fill up the rest with the drink, and it should still be icy by the time you're about done with it. Icy, because heat is the enemy, and cooling the core lets you exercise more. Get rid of the heat any way you can.

There it is. Just another way to be responsible.

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank

Burn

The wind blows, clouds flow, rain falls, sunshine, moonlight, wind, rain, hot, cold. We blink through it like coming out of solitary confinement, or stare it down like a mad dog, or find a hand to hold and stand side by side, for a moment or through the decades.

Yes, time is a fire. We don't want to put it out or slow it down though -- time is what life is made of. We burn through it, understanding there will be pain, and scars. There are caresses and embraces and quiet smiles and rollicking laughter and the swelling of our hearts with love and pride and tenderness. So it's more than worth it, the pain, if we do it right. Wait long enough and everything is calm.  Meantime, and all the while, we live in our bodies.

More pearls from the clam of ancient wisdom.

Be excellent.

FW
CrossFit Burbank

A Very Boring List of Overtraining Symptoms

• Morning pulse higher by five or more beats per minute
• Abnormal rise in heart rate upon standing, or pre- or post-workout
• Slower heartrate recovery after workout
• Poor posture, slouching
• Loss of drive or joy; apathy
• Lethargy, listlessness, boredom
• Desire to quit during competition
• Peevishness; anxious; easily irritated
• Unable to relax
• Inability to concentrate
• Changes in sleeping patterns; insomnia
• Unrefreshing sleep
• Loss of appetite / libido
• Poor coordination, clumsiness
• Increased thirst
• Dejected, drawn look, sallow, gaunt
• Prolonged sluggishness, heavy-legs
• Undesired weightloss
• Muscle or joint pain
• Persistent and increasing soreness
• Slow healing of minor scratches
• Lymph node swelling
• Gastrointestinal disturbances, diarrhea
• Increased headache, infection, allergies, injury
• Loss of menstruation
• Increased blood eosinophin count;
• Serial T-wave changes on the electrocardiogram
• Mild hypothalamic, sympathetic and adrenocortical insufficiency

Yes.  Very boring.  BOOOORRRRRIIIIIINNNNGGGGG.  So, uh, let's just ignore it?  Because it is insufficiently amusing?  Our ennui shall keep us safe?  This "responsibility" thing is so tiresome.  Worse than a wod, if such a thing is possible.  We will train unceasingly and progress infinitely beyond mere excellence.  For are we not superhuman?  Of course we are.  Yes.  Yes.  Ahhhhh.

No.  Be responsible.  Be merely excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFitBurbank

The Voices in Your Cells

Maybe there's no better analogy-- ones about the same, but no better -- so let's just go ahead and use it. Think of the food you've just eaten, the available calories, as fluid in a bucket. Let's say the bucket is your bloodstream. All those wet calories, waiting in the bucket of your bloodstream, waiting to be used.

Now let's suppose that the bucket has a bunch of tubes in the bottom, through which the calories are diverted to various tasks. There's a calorie/nutrient tube to the brain for thought, to all the muscles for movement, and tubes for bodyheat and digestion and libido, for the immune system, for growth and repair, for hair, skin and nails. Everything that needs energy has a tube to it. Of course there is a tube to bodyfat as well.

Now let's say that everyday the bucket is filled with 2000, uh, calories, and these calories drain down the various tubes in a predictable and healthy way. Homeostasis. Everything is going along fine. Sure, some calories pour down the adipose, fat tube, constantly filling up those fat cells -- but the fat cells do their job, and drain back into the bucket. Fat cells after all are just a storage system -- not forever, just as a buffer, a pantry.  For a few hours after a meal, there's too much available energy, so the fat cells sop it up, like a sponge, and release it drip by drip back into the bloodstream until the fat cells aren't sopping anymore, just damp.

It's a cycle, a healthy cycle, with adipose tissue expanding and contracting slightly to meet the needs of normal variation. So, uh, like, there's a bucket with tubes, and one of the tubes leads to a sponge that drips back into the bucket. Clear?

Now let's suppose that something goes wrong with the fat tube. The opening gets bigger, and more calories pour down it into the fat sponge. That means there is less energy in the bucket, fewer calories that can go down the other tubes. Because one of the tubes is bigger, the bucket drains faster and gets empty sooner. This means that less energy will have gone down one or some or all of the other tubes.

That's thermodynamics. Because, while more calories are entering the fat sponge, the sponge drips back into the bucket at the same, old, slow rate ... maybe even slower. The sponge gets bigger and wetter, more coming in than leaving. It's a ShamWow™ sponge, that really really holds  that mess! Such a deal! Act now!

Well? That's how obesity seems to happen. It's not that more is being poured into the bucket. You're not necessarily eating more. Calories are not being forced down that fat tube by increased pressure -- they are not forced into fat cells. The tube is bigger -- the propensity to store fat increases, for whatever reason.  (The reason is insulin.)

But now the other systems, via the other tubes, get less energy. They were getting what they needed, and now they are not. So the bucket needs more calories than before. If it got 2000 calories before, of which 200 went down the fat tube, but now 400 calories are, and sticking  -- well, then the rest of the tubes have to deal with a 200 calorie shortage. So appetite increases, as a homeostatic adjustment, and now the calories bump up to 2200. Great. Problem solved.

 Except the fat tube gets bigger again. So you either supply even more calories, or just put up with the shortage. Meantime, the fat tube keeps on shunting away too many calories that are not released, creating a constant shortfall for the other systems. Even if the problem doesn't get worse, 200 necessary calories are being misdirected, and simply hoarded. You are eating the same old amount, always hungry, and getting fatter. Lucky you.

So that's the analogy. Not elegant, not pretty, sort of mixed and casual, but see if you can do better.  It may make you famous on the internet!

What makes the tube bigger? Disrupted hormones, mostly insulin. What disrupts the hormones? Bad carbs, industrial carbs. If you try to fix the calorie shortfall by eating more bad carbs, you just make the fat tube bigger -- you disrupt hormones even more. Meanwhile, ignoring increased appetite, the body has to prioritize, trying to compensate for the missing calories by economizing in other areas.

Thought, movement, heat, digestion, uh, immune system, and all those other things. Libido. Hair. They get less energy. Foggy thinking. Lethargy and fatigue. Feeling cold. Illness. Going bald.  Meantime, the fat cells just hoard the treasure. It's not greed. The Bad Carbs are telling them to. Fat cells are very obedient.

People have so much more power than they think.  We are the gods of our behavior, and lords of the universe within our heads.  We might chose to think of it otherwise, but that means all hope depends on what other people do.  And people who think like that just give up.  So?

Be excellent.

Here: CrossFitBurbank.com

FW
CrossFit Burbank