A
healthy mind in a healthy body
A healthy body means a longer life. It means feeling better. It means being able to do more things than if you are ill or unfit. Not being ill is what matters most: The difference between a sick bed and a walk in the sunshine is greater than the difference between a walk and an athletic feat.
So when I pursue adventure and physical excellence I make sure I treat my body well, so that I do not endanger my basic health. But life is more than existence, and thus mere basic health is not enough when more is possible.
This page is about both basic health and my own choice of "more". As an illustration of what I mean: See my tiger's leap into Crater Lake in Oregon. Seductively blue water - but goddamn cold!
Food Everybody knows that it matters what you eat. "You are what you eat," right? As cartoon cat Garfield concluded: "Avoid fruits and nuts!" - or as almost everyone else have concluded "Avoid fat!" That erroneous belief has probably caused as many fat people as the popular indulgence with fried and over-fat food. The body counts the calories for you, and what it gets in excess it stores as fat, whether it started out as fat, protein or even those beloved slow carbohydrates. Getting your fat from the body's own fat conversion factory is not a good idea, as Udo Erasmus explains in his book Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill. The body is only capable of making saturated fat from carbohydrates. That is: The bad fat, the kind that sticks inside your arteries. It also heightens your blood triglycerides, another major factor in heart disease.
So you need to add fat to your diet. Good fat. Unsaturated fat. No need to overindulge. 15-20% by calories is probably just right. See Clarence Bass' web page for good and detailed discussions. But beware snake oil: Most commercial food oils are of poor nutritional quality. "Unsaturated" on the label does not mean healthy. For there are two types of unsaturated oil: The one type ("cis") is produced in nature and is available from plant food and fatty fish. The other type ("trans") is the product of heat treated "cis" unsaturated oils. The cis oils are very healthy for you. The trans oils are even worse for you than saturated fat. If the oil you buy is not certifiedly cold pressed, you are buying poor health, not good health.
The best bet for good food oils is extra virgin olive oils. Not only are they good for your heart; they taste yummy as well. In addition to that you should consume at least a tablespoon of w-3 oils like flax seed oil (see Udo's web page) or hemp seed oil. Yep, I said hemp seed oil - the oil from the same plant that gives you hashish and marijuana. The hemp seed oil is free from the psychoactive ingredient THC, though, and so is actually just food. But anti-cannabis paranoia has lead to a scarcity of this excellent food sourse. Sad, isn't it? You might also see some margerines advertising themselves as "no trans fatty acids" - and that's good. If they are full of w-3 unsaturated fatty acids as well you have a good source of the healthy fat right there.
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There are two basic schools of strength training: The Volume approach and the Intensity approach. The Volume approach emphasizes "total work", which typically means frequent work-outs, many exercises per body parts, and many sets per exercise. The Intensity, or HIT approach emphasizes peak intensity and recovery, and typically consists of infrequent work-outs and minimizing the number of exercises per body part and the number of sets done for each exercise. You find proponents for either type of training among the elite powerlifters and body builders.
My own first experience was with Volume training. While it gave me good initial stength gains, it soon led me into overtraining, and ultimately - injuries. This despite that I trained "only" once per day. The champions of Volume training train twice as often and for longer sessions. The injuries I brought upon myself seemed both unhealable and inexplicable until I came across Stuart McRoberts variety of HIT training, the Hardgainer system. He urges far fewer work-outs per week, fewer sets, but harder work. He also advices intensity cycling ('poundage progression') to make the body used to intensity before you work full-bore. This system has worked very well for me, so my current training schedules follow the HIT system with intensity cycling. I train strength once or twice each week. I choose exercises among the big basics:
I do 1 or 2 sets of each exercise on my schedule, working the set to or close to complete exhaustion, and the total sets stay below 15 for each work-out day. This way I have become stronger - and injury-free.
Motor skills are the other side of the coin for the athlete. Motor skill consists in training the nervous system, and is therefore of a different nature than the part of training that is aimed at improving muscle strength and size itself. The nervous systems seems to fare best on a regimen of lower intensity but more frequent repetition. The body learns by rote. This is important for the strength athlete as well, and so training the competition exercises at a lower intensity will improve performance in the competing athlete. This is why we often find powerlifters doing three work-outs per week: One hard work-out for strength and two lighter ones for motor skills at the specific lifting movements.
Stretching is actually a type of motor skill. It has little to do with the length of ligaments but a lot to do with the nrevous system's response to muscle lengthening. Stretching can be done in many ways: Ballistic, dynamic, static active, isometric and static passive. This field is far less contentious than the field of strength training - maybe because there is not huge amounts of money involved. When did you last hear of anyone selling a Stretching Hyperbolic Optimizer Powder(TM) or the like? So the whole rap can be found either in Thomas Kurz' book Stretching Scientifically, or in this amazingly complete web article. The basic idea to consider is that stretching a muscle is not like stretching your old jeans or any other piece of fabric. Rather, it is a form of strength exercise and neural adaption in extreme joint positions. This does is reflected in that the two most efficient forms of stretching is the dynamic and the isometric kind of stretching. Since strctching is in extreme joint positions, you must take even more care of doing the exercise right than when you are close to normal positions. This means that it is better to train while you are relatively fresh; if you are totally exhausted, do at most some easy passive-static stretches. Kurz recommends that the stretching is worked into your work-out so that the order explosive -> technical -> strength -> endurance -> relaxation is never violated. This means that dynamic stretches are best done as soon as you are warm, isometric stretches as the last part of a strength or technical routine, and after an endurance work-out you only do relaxed stretches.
The strength part of stretching, isometric stretching, is something I do HIT style: Once or twice per week. The neural adaption part, dynamic stretches and relaxed stretches, can soccesfully be done far more frequently, and I try to start the day with a set of dynamic stretches.
Relaxing is as important for the body as stimulation. Meditation, listening to music, studying clouds. Doing Nothing. It is an art in itself, and I hope you will find some good ideas for that in the rest of my web.