http://www.thealternativedaily.com/

[…]

http://www.thealternativedaily.com/

[…]

http://www.thealternativedaily.com/

[…]

http://www.thealternativedaily.com/

[…]

http://www.thealternativedaily.com/

[…]

https://www.girlsgonestrong.com/

There was a time in my life, years ago, when I was an ambassador for that foolish ‘More is better’ approach to exercise. I was teaching Spin at 6 a.m., yoga at 7 a.m., running on my lunch break, lifting weights at 5:30 p.m., and then icing it all off with a 90-minute kickboxing class at 6:30 p.m.

That was my schedule on most days, for years. I erroneously believed that she who did the most exercise would win the grand prize. Boy, was I wrong.

What I did get out of all that madness were a wonky cortisol rhythm, chronic exhaustion, and a lot of colds. As if all of that wasn’t bad enough, my body composition wasn’t changing for the better. As a matter of fact, I distinctly remember my body fat going up for awhile, undoubtedly due to the combination of high stress and the voracious appetite I developed thanks to the insane of amount of exercise I was doing.

I eventually learned my lesson when I made my switch to strength, but a quick glance at my social media feeds shows me that women (and men!) continue to work themselves into the ground, training too frequently and/or too intensely. They’re bragging about how they almost passed out or vomited, or that they managed to push through even though they were sick, stressed, or exhausted. I cringe when I see all the ‘Likes’ and cheering these types of posts get, and I constantly have to refrain from typing (with my caps lock obnoxiously on):

THERE IS A BETTER WAY.

Throughout years and years of training and coaching clients, I recognize that their lackluster results rarely stem from a lack of intensity or frequency in their workouts. Quite frankly, in women who work out regularly, it’s almost always the opposite. The reason for lack of progress is typically because women are training too hard and too often!

I want to be clear: there isn’t anything wrong with working hard, so long as you’re being smart about it.

Tilling your garden with a soup spoon is working hard, but digging that dirt up with a shovel is a prime example of working hard and smart. You’ll get better results, in less time, and with substantially less pain. You’ll never hear anyone boasting about how hard they worked to excavate their yard with a spoon, because that unnecessary labor doesn’t make sense. It’s not rational when it comes to training, either.

The Sweat and Soreness Myth

Neither sweat, nor soreness, is necessarily indicative of an effective workout.

It can feel good to work up a sweat, and a bit of soreness can serve as a nice reminder that we moved our bodies. However, the sad truth is that neither of those things means much, if anything, with regard to how beneficial the workout was. Those things may feel nice emotionally, but they don’t always have a solid physiological carryover.

I can stand in my yard and wave at the neighbor for three hours straight in the blazing sun, sweat like a maniac, and experience crippling soreness the next day. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I burned fat, or got stronger. It simply means that my arm and shoulder performed the same movement a bazillion times in a row and it was hot outside.

Out-Training Your Diet

A lot of people see an increase in their weight when they begin working out. That’s often because they dive into exercise a little too aggressively, lifting weights several times per week and doing cardio like crazy, kicking their appetite into overdrive.

When it comes to fat loss, the only thing that a ton of really intense training will do for most people is make them voraciously hungry.

If this is you, step back and evaluate how you’re feeling. Are certain training modalities or activities causing intense cravings, or an insatiable appetite? If so, consider reducing the intensity of your workout, and see how you feel.

It’s crucial to fuel your training properly, and there’s a possibility that you aren’t eating enough—but that’s a topic for another article. In the context of this topic, if your training is turning your stomach into a bottomless pit, consider backing down the frequency and intensity of your activities.

Stress is Stress is Stress

Maybe it’s because we’re naturally inclined to assume that if some exercise is good than surely a whole lot more is better. Or maybe the old adage, “Go hard or go home” is to blame. For the record, we’d actually advise you go home than go unnecessarily hard, and that is because of what it does to your hormones.

The body treats training as a form of stress and reacts to it the same way that it reacts to anything else that’s stressful—sick kids, a looming work deadline, or being chased by a bear. Training can feel good emotionally, but stress is stress is stress, and cortisol will always respond accordingly.

The stress brought on by a lot of intense training can be absolutely fine, assuming that your stress levels are in check in all other areas of your life.

Here’s a tough question: how many of us can say with confidence that our stress levels (family, work, relationships, financial, etc.) are, indeed, “in check?”

Unfortunately, not many of us can say that. It’s critical to take this information into consideration when planning the frequency and intensity of our training. This is a tricky situation because for many women, when we experience stress, our first inclination is to go “work it out” at the gym, essentially pouring fuel onto the fire.

Do not sacrifice your health for the sake of fitness.

When stress levels spike, the first thing I ask my clients to do is back off a bit (or a lot) on their training, and temporarily trade it in for some other type of therapeutic movement, such as walking or yoga. I then encourage them to focus a bit more on nourishing their bodies with good food, and aim to get more sleep. During these times, training falls to the bottom of the priority list, and that’s perfectly OK.  My goal is to keep my clients safe and healthy, and teach them to train a way that they can maintain for the next 10, 20, or 30 years.

Speaking of priority lists…

The Hierarchy of Fat Loss

Any time my clients get stuck and stop seeing progress, I’ll look at a few other pieces of the puzzle before looking at their training. I believe that the list of priorities for fat loss and optimal health looks like this:

1. Nutrition
2. Sleep
3. Stress management
4. Movement
5. Training

Sound nutrition, plenty of high-quality sleep, stress management, and daily movement should, in my opinion, precede training when it comes to fat loss and optimal health.

This is a tough concept for many people to wrap their heads around, and I understand that. Training is enjoyable, but like anything else, it has its time and place. Improving nutrition, sleep, stress control, and overall movement will have much more of an impact, than simply increasing exercise.

Minimum Effective Dose

Exercise develops physical strength and mental fortitude, and offers a slew of other benefits, but you don’t have to give up your life or go crawling out of the gym after every session in order to reap the rewards.

We are big fans of using the Minimum Effective Dose. This means doing the type of training that provides the most benefit, in the least amount of time, and just enough of it to get the results that we want, without a bunch of added stress.

For most people, this means:

• strength training 3-4 times per week
• 1-2 short-duration, high-intensity interval training sessions (HIIT) per week
• 1-2 moderate-intensity cardio sessions for 30 minutes or less per week

The rest of your results will come from nutrition, sleep, stress control, and overall movement.

If you find yourself constantly hungry or experiencing a loss of appetite, fatigued, perpetually sore, retaining water, or have an elevated resting heart rate, these can be signs that you’re overdoing it with your training.

Training is meant to enhance and optimize. It’s a way to develop strength to enable you to better engage in, and enjoy, life and all that it has to offer. The most effective training is smart training, not unnecessarily hard training.

What’s Next?

If you want to:

• Feel empowered by your training – not held hostage by it
• Heal your relationship with food and your body image
• Rock a healthy lifestyle

… and you want some support as you work your way there, our Strongest You Coaching program is perfect for you.

This is a 9-month coaching program that we only open up to new clients a few times a year. Strongest You Coaching includes customized training programs and habit-based nutrition coaching from your Girls Gone Strong Coach, to whom you have direct access six days a week.

Strongest You Coaching is about more than physical change. It’s about changing your inner dialogue, and finally healing your relationship with food and your body, all with the help of your personal Girls Gone Strong Coach, and your fellow Strongest You Coaching clients.

If you’re interested in our Strongest You Coaching program, make sure you get on the pre-registration list here. These limited spots fill up quickly when we open up, and if you’re on the list, you’ll have the chance to register 24 hours before registration opens to the general public.

This entirely online program is for any woman who wants to become the strongest, healthiest, most gorgeous person she can be – inside and out. The women who enroll in this program are busy moms and professionals. Some have never worked out before. Some are women who have worked out hardcore all their lives. Others are simply trying to get back to feeling healthy and fit.

Pre-Register here today.

http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain

Pin it

One of the best fall events near San Francisco is the Half Moon Bay Art and Pumpkin Festival, and I finally braved the crowds and went a few years ago. The main draw? The annual contest to see who can grow the largest pumpkin.

READ MORE »

http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain

Gluten-Free and Vegan Chai-Spiced Pumpkin Bars

Pin it

Open Slideshow

We know you can’t escape pumpkin in the fall, from the piles of pumpkins outside grocery stores to the towering cans of pumpkin purée inside. And while pumpkin is used in a lot of sweets and baked goods, we love how it can be used just like other hard squash in stews and chilis. Here are 20 recipes to help you eat pumpkin all day long!

READ MORE »

http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain

Pin it

Whether you adore your roommates, or merely co-exist, so many heated disputes in a shared household come down to one question: “Who made this pot dirty?” And then, of course, the inevitable follow-up question, “Who’s doing the dishes?”

Today we’re looking for some crowd-sourced knowledge to answer this question — or better yet, prevent it from needing to be asked in the first place. What are your best tips, most surprising secrets, and hard-earned pieces of advice for keeping a kitchen clean when you live in a house with roommates?

READ MORE »

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/

For years, we’ve thought that hunter-gatherers slept like babies: long and hard. They’d drift off as the sun dropped, lingering around the ubiquitous campfire only for a short time, sleep a good 8-10 hours, and waking up at first light bright eyed for the next day. For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m examining a study that calls these assumptions into question. What if hunter-gatherers don’t actually sleep any more than us? What if the absence of artificial light doesn’t lead to a ten hour session of blissful repose under the stars?

Let’s go:

Hi Mark,

I just saw media coverage of a study on hunter-gatherer sleep habits. According to the reporting, hunter-gatherers don’t actually sleep any more than modern people living in the developed world, despite not having smartphones and other emitters of blue light. Does this mean artificial light isn’t a problem?

Thanks,

Jerry

This is a really cool study. Researchers looked at three groups:

• The San, out of southern Africa, living in villages 20° south of the equator but retaining their hunter-gatherer ways.
• The Tsimane, along the Maniqui River in Bolivia 15° south of the equator; they are hunter-horticulturalists.
• The Hadza, in northern Tanzania 2° south of the equator, the only fully nomadic hunter-gatherers of the three.

None of the groups had access to electricity, electronic devices, or artificial lighting. They certainly didn’t have the latest iPhones. The only light available after dark came from small campfires.

Despite the absence of late night Facebook updates, the groups all slept about the same as modern westerners: six and a half hours a night on average, or between 5.7 and 7.1 hours. They also spent roughly the same amount of time in bed. Sleep onset—when they fell asleep—varied more than sleep offset—when they woke up. Across all three groups people woke up at around the same time, so sleep duration was determined primarily by sleep onset. Most groups stayed up for a few hours after sunset.

Sleep duration may be similar between zero-electricity hunter-gatherers and electricity-addicted westerners, but the researchers found other, major differences in how we sleep:

All groups lived their lives in full exposure to the seasonal and temporal variations in ambient temperatures without access to heating or cooling systems. If it was cold out, they felt it. If it was hot, they had to deal with it. Rather than light, ambient temperature was the primary determinant of sleep onset. People usually stayed up past sunset, often going three hours into the dark, only heading to bed when temperatures fell. In the summer, the mean bedtime was 10:44 pm. In winter, it was 9:16 pm. Since wake time was similar throughout the year, they slept an average of 53 minutes longer in the winter.

Insomnia was almost absent. Neither the San nor the Tsimane even have a word for “insomnia” in their language. When prodded, 5% reported ever having trouble falling asleep and 9% reported problems with sleep duration. And only 1.5-2.5% reported having these sleep issues more than once a year. Meanwhile, 10-30% of people living in industrialized countries report chronic insomnia, and sleep disorders are so widespread in the US that doctors write over 60 million sleeping pill prescriptions each year.

They didn’t nap. Other than a few instances, the majority of San, Hadza, and Tsimane rarely napped. Folks living in industrial cultures tend to experience a mid-afternoon dip in energy, and naps are an effective way to recharge and even improve attentional capacity. Problem is we don’t get the chance to take them very often.

They usually woke right before sunrise. Contrary to industrial societies, where waking occurs after sunrise and people are likely to sleep in as long as they can (which usually isn’t very long), the majority of the hunter-gatherers’ only slept when it was dark out.

They got the majority of their light exposure in the morning. They tended to avoid a lot of light during the afternoon, probably because it coincided with sweltering tropical temperatures. This squares with clinical research finding that morning light exposure is effective in treating sleep and mood disorders. And since most people living in industrialized countries sleep past sunrise and remain indoors for those critical morning hours, they’re missing out on what may be a vital piece of hunter-gatherer sleep hygiene: maximal light exposure in the morning.

Stress increases sleep requirements (PDF). These people aren’t working 14 hour days. Heck, they may be working 14 hour weeks. They aren’t trying to convince their kids to complete their 3.5 hours of homework a night or stewing over a disappointing sex life. In short, the hunter-gatherers haven’t erected the manmade stressors that pervade our lives and make sleep such a necessary yet fleeting delicacy. This may explain why we need (but usually don’t get) naps and the Hadza, San, and Tsimane do not. Unlike 6.5 hours-a-night-sleeping people from industrialized nations, the people in this study were remarkably free of metabolic syndrome, diabetes, overweight/obesity, and all the other health conditions usually associated with inadequate sleep. They’re free to sleep more than 6.5 hours if they want or need it. They just don’t do it. 6.5 hours is, clearly, perfectly adequate for them. We want to sleep more than the 6 or 7 hours we’re allotted, but we often can’t do it.

The fact remains that artificial light negatively affects sleep in modern populations. I’ve covered this before, and the evidence is quite clear. This study doesn’t change that.

Ambient temperature is probably more important for sleep than we previously thought. We simply don’t experience the wide variation in ambient temperatures occurring, mostly because we’re no longer outdoors much. Plus, when we’re inside, we’ve got the heat going (if it’s cold) or the AC on (if it’s hot). We have the luxury of remaining at the same ambient temperature for our entire lives if we want. And boy do we want it.

For sleep to occur, body temperature must drop. If the ambient temperature is high, our body takes longer and works harder to drop temperature. If the ambient temperature is lower, it’s easier for our body to lower its temperature and sleep to commence. People with heated homes take longer and work harder to reach the necessary body temperature for sleep.

This is a great paper. I’m not sure it absolves our smartphones in the bedroom habit, though.

What’s your take on the paper, folks? What else do you have to add?

Thanks for reading, everyone. Take care and have a great rest of the week.