Filed under: A New Site, Blogroll, Breathing, Essential Reading, Food Preparation & Recipes, Full Books, Further Exploration, Grains, Health, Injuries & Recovery, Lifestyle, News and Announcements, Nutritious Nutrition, Rhabdomyolysis, The Library, The Lumber, aging, bodyweight, fitness, gymnastics, scientific papers, sleep, training/workout examples
Well, it’s official. I am now going to fully stop posting here and will solely update the new site. Visit me at www.distincthealth.com! I am still finalizing everything, but the site itself works, looks good and has all of the functionality as this one. More to come!
I assume you’re reading this article because you desire to know the ’secret’ to doing tons of pull-ups, or to doing well any exercise for that matter. Well I’ve got a method here thanks to Pavel Tsatsouline over on DragonDoor that will have you making Marines cry in a matter of months.
Here’s the thing though, it’s not some crazy secret supplement or new training method. In fact, it’s common sense! To be able to perform rep after rep, just do more of them, more often!
Pavel writes of an experience where he uses this method to enable his father-in-law to break his old Marine Corps personal record:
Just a couple of months earlier I had put my father-in-law Roger Antonson, incidentally an ex-Marine, on a program which required him to do an easy five chins every time he went down to his basement. Each day he would total between twenty-five and a hundred chin-ups hardly breaking a sweat. Every month or so Roger would take a few days off and then test himself. Before you knew it, the old leatherneck could knock off twenty consecutive chins, more than he could do forty years ago during his service with the few good men!
It’s amusing and quite easy, but it works extremely well. Most people don’t think of such obvious solutions. They’re sitting around doing reverse curls and cable pull-downs until the cow’s come home and not achieving any worthwhile results. He claims the five keys to success are intensity, repetitions, volume, frequency and exercise selection. Sounds redundant, but it’s not. He lays it all out simply and with much humor in the actual article, entitled ‘Greasing the Groove‘, so go read it!
I found an incredibly entertaining read on sleep today by A. Roger Ekirch and thought I’d share it with you all.
During the first days of autumn in 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson, at age twenty-seven, spent twelve days trudging through the Cévennes, France’s southern highlands, despite having suffered from frail health during much of his youth. His sole companion was a donkey named Modestine. With Treasure Island and literary fame five years off, Stevenson’s trek bore scant resemblance to the grand tours of young Victorian gentlemen. Midway through the journey, having scaled one of the highest ranges, he encamped at a small clearing shrouded by pine trees. Fortified for a night’s hibernation by a supper of bread and sausage, chocolate, water, and brandy, he reclined within his “sleeping sack,” with a cap over his eyes, just as the sun had run its course. But rather than resting until dawn, Stevenson awoke shortly past midnight. Only after lazily smoking a cigarette and enjoying an hour’s contemplation did he fall back to sleep. “There is one stirring hour,” he later recorded in his journal, “unknown to those who dwell in houses, when a wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping hemisphere, and all the outdoor world are on their feet,” men and beasts alike. Never before had Stevenson savored a “more perfect hour”—free, he delighted, from the “bastille of civilization.” “It seemed to me as if life had begun again afresh, and I knew no one in all the universe but the almighty maker.”
Aside from spending the night outdoors, no explanation sufficed for the wistful hour of consciousness that Stevenson experienced in the early morning darkness. “At what inaudible summons,” he wondered, “are all these sleepers thus recalled in the same hour to life?” Were the stars responsible or some “thrill of mother earth below our resting bodies? Even shepherds and old country-folk, who are the deepest read in these arcana,” he marveled, “have not a guess as to the means or purpose of this nightly resurrection. Towards two in the morning they declare the thing takes place; and neither know or inquire further.” Unknown to Stevenson, his experience that fall evening was remarkably reminiscent of a form of sleep that was once commonplace. Until the modern era, up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness midway through the night interrupted the rest of most Western Europeans, not just napping shepherds and slumbering woodsmen. Families rose from their beds to urinate, smoke tobacco, and even visit close neighbors. Remaining abed, many persons also made love, prayed, and, most important, reflected on the dreams that typically preceded waking from their “first sleep.” Not only were these visions unusually vivid, but their images would have intruded far less on conscious thought had sleepers not stirred until dawn. The historical implications of this traditional mode of repose are enormous, especially in light of the significance European households once attached to dreams for their explanatory and predictive powers. In addition to suggesting that consolidated sleep, such as we today experience, is unnatural, segmented slumber afforded the unconscious an expanded avenue to the waking world that has remained closed for most of the Industrial Age.
Read the rest of this article here!
A few updates:
First of all, everything’s going great and I’m adapting really well. I feel more alive and alert all day, and am getting more stuff done than usual and it’s not just because of the extra waking time. I’m going to begin phasing out the alarm clock permanently soon, and will do a ‘test run’ during tonight’s 4.5 hour sleep block to see how that works out.
Also, I found another interesting article on sleep which might interest some of you.
Filed under: Health, The Lumber, bodyweight, fitness, gymnastics, training/workout examples
Yesterday’s bout of death was a crazy 30 Muscle-ups for time, or 120 pull-ups and 120 dips if you cannot do the MU or don’t have proper equipment. I’m not sure whether I agree that 4 pull-ups and 4 dips is an effective replacement for 1 muscle up for me personally, as I can do 1 muscle-up (however silly I may look) and the level of exhaustion feels more like 2 explosive dip/PU combinations. Needless to say, I only did half of the RX’d substitution explosively and by bringing myself back from the dead many times. I am the new Lazarus of bodyweight training.
Today’s workout is easy and something I never thought I’d see from CrossFit: Run 5k!
I think I’m going to do 5 – 10 miles on my road bike instead.
Well, I’ve started my experiment in biphasic sleeping and even though it’s been two days I’ve had just as much energy and what not as usual. I thought the intial week would be hell, but it’s proving to be just mildly annoying. I say this because I still haven’t “reprogrammed” myself fully yet and so my body keeps on showing signs of not being aware of what the heck is going on. It’s adapting though, and I feel better today than yesterday, and expect to feel even better tomorrow…
What I am basically doing is going to bed around midnight and getting up at 5 (for a total of three 90-minute sleep cycles and an allowance of 30 minutes to fall asleep and/or get up if need be). My body wakes me up earlier if it finishes those cycles before five, and I’ve already experienced the joys of waking up a few minutes before the alarm. I then take a 90 minute nap around 1 or 2 PM. After the first week I wont need the alarm at all, but feel more comfortable using it while I’m getting used to the new scenario.
Filed under: Food Preparation & Recipes, Health, Injuries & Recovery, Nutritious Nutrition
This isn’t a comprehensive article on post-workout nutrition, though I wish it were. Perhaps I’ll have to add that to my huge list of pending articles which I WILL someday get to. I just wanted to share what’s working for me on particularly intense training days as far as a post workout shake is concerned. Basically, it’s just a small protein source mixed with fruit. Simple and effective. I’m fond of milk, a couple of cage-free eggs and a bannana (which can be frozen for the dessert effect). It’s actually a mini-meal for me, though I realize that some of you eat protein like so many particles of air inhaled. Scrapping one of the eggs and adding peanut butter works wonders to make it stick to your ribs, as it were, as does cooked oatmeal.
Anyways, that’s not the main point here. What I wanted to mention all along was that although this really worked well for me, I really started feeling great and recovering much faster when I added the contents of a 500mg cap of taurine to this mixture. After about a week or two doing this, I feel much stronger and generally more relaxed as well.
Well, I am surely pleased with my current diet and especially with my exercise. The pic below is a progress pic from September 9th to November 9th. I started doing my current exercise routine in late August, so it’s a pretty good ‘before/after’ comparison. I may still be ’skinny lookin’ to some of you, but I am very impressed with my progress and especially my strength (although not with my crappy posing)… I’ve never before in my life been able to do more than 1 or 2 chin-ups with my palms facing away from me, and now I can do over 20. Shit, soon I’ll be doing muscle-ups as easily as a Marine does pushups!!
Having stumbled across a thread on a forum I frequent on polyphasic sleep, I decided to look into it. What I’ve stumbled upon sounds rather interesting, and for more reasons than I care to get into right now (ironically, I’m tired).
I will soon post information on what exactly polyphasic sleep is, as well as the details of my own little experiment for all of you to enjoy. To put it briefly, you are just breaking sleep up into many chunks rather than one solid block. There are MANY theories from sleeping 20 minutes every hour to breaking your sleep down into two phases. This biphasic sleep is what I will be trying. I will also try to convert myself to become an early riser. My desired shedule will be to fall asleep around 12:30, rise at 5 AM and then take a 90 minute nap at 1:30 PM (perhaps earlier, depending on how I feel and how things evolve.) I got these numbers from the theory that the average sleep cycle is 90 minutes. I will probably end up taking a nap and timing the length of it to attempt to figure out what my personal cycle actually is. To make things more interesting, it appears they change over time.
Anyways, look foward to next week when I’ll throw some links up here and detail my plans.
Here is a quote from Glen Rhodes‘ site in which he desrcibes his method, from which I derived mine:
“Studies show that the length of sleep is not what causes us to be refreshed upon waking. The key factor is the number of complete sleep cycles we enjoy. Each sleep cycle contains five distinct phases, which exhibit different brain- wave patterns. For our purposes, it suffices to say that one sleep cycle lasts an average of 90 minutes: 65 minutes of normal, or non-REM (rapid eye movement), sleep; 20 minutes of REM sleep (in which we dream); and a final 5 minutes of non-REM sleep. The REM sleep phases are shorter during earlier cycles (less than 20 minutes) and longer during later ones (more than 20 minutes). If we were to sleep completely naturally, with no alarm clocks or other sleep disturbances, we would wake up, on the average, after a multiple of 90 minutes–for example, after 4 1/2 hours, 6 hours, 7 1/2 hours, or 9 hours, but not after 7 or 8 hours, which are not multiples of 90 minutes. In the period between cycles we are not actually sleeping: it is a sort of twilight zone from which, if we are not disturbed (by light, cold, a full bladder, noise), we move into another 90-minute cycle. A person who sleeps only four cycles (6 hours) will feel more rested than someone who has slept for 8 to 10 hours but who has not been allowed to complete any one cycle because of being awakened before it was completed… ”
Diet, Aging, and Muscle by Joe Friel
Reprinted from:
http://www.ultrafit.com/newsletter/january01.html
Popeye was right: eating spinach can make you stronger and more muscular, especially if you’re over age 50. Let me explain.
It’s apparent that as we grow older muscle mass is lost. Although this loss is slowed somewhat by weight lifting and vigorous aerobic exercise, it still happens. Even athletes in their 60s typically demonstrate considerably less muscle than they had in their 40s.
Now there is research that shows why (1). Nitrogen, which is an essential component of muscle protein, is given up by the body at a faster rate than it can be taken in as we get older. This is due to a gradual change in kidney function that comes with aging producing an acidic state in the blood. Essentially, we are peeing off our muscles as we pass the half-century mark in life. (more…)
