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Fitness recovery isn’t only about rest. Certain techniques offer faster, more effective recovery after endurance or high intensity training—a big plus for those who compete or follow more intensive fitness programs like CrossFit. By the way, if you missed this week’s feature, Rest and Recovery: A Whole New Perspective, be sure to check it out.

Now onto those techniques…

Cold therapy can help speed recovery by delivering a refreshing psychological sensation and recalibrating the central nervous system and muscle metabolic activity back to calm, cool resting levels. Full body immersion into water at 50 ºF to 60 ºF (10 ºC to 15 ºC) for five to ten minutes, is believed to be the optimal strategy for post-exercise cold therapy.

The old injury treatment protocol of RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) is being replaced in the eyes of many experts with ECM (Elevate, Compress, Move). Icing of injuries can retard the natural healing process.

Compression wraps or garments act like pumps to squeeze blood vessels open with force, allowing more blood and oxygen into the area and improving removal of waste and excess fluid. Studies suggest reduced muscle soreness and improved performance using compression garments.

Movement is also an important element of recovery. Athletes should refrain from prolonged stillness periods after workouts, and throughout the day. Over time, efforts to move more will result in improvements in the familiar morning stiffness that many athletes experience.

Self-myofascial release is an effective recovery technique. Using rollers or balls, you can apply deep pressure to trigger points that represent the origination of stiffness and mobility problems, which possibly refer pain elsewhere. Self-myofascial release delivers the added benefit of stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, allowing you to truly unwind after workouts.

— From Primal Endurance: Escape Chronic Cardio and Carbohydrate Dependency and Become a Fat-Burning Beast 

For more fitness recovery techniques, check out Primal Endurance and “7 Things You May Be Doing That Impair Workout Recovery.”

The post Primal Action Point: 5 Fitness Recovery Techniques appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.

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Day 284 Of 360

If sets require interruption, make as minor an adjustment as needed and complete the next uninterrupted. When the scheme is listed as “5 x 5″, it always refers to “Sets” x “Reps”.

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“Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you if you’re young at heart.”

Frank Sinatra

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Our hearing is just one of those things we take for granted, up until the day when it begins to decline. A lifetime of loud noises, ear infections, poor diet and other adverse lifestyle factors can all contribute to hearing loss, and by the time it starts to go it’s often already too late to […]

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Remember a time when you didn’t have to rush to the toilet every 20 minutes? You could go for long walks in the hills without needing to eye up the nearest bush for an emergency pee, au natural-style. You could enjoy a party or social gathering without looking like a total weirdo, spending half the […]

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Chicken and turkey are popular for being high in protein and low in saturated fats making a mealtime staple for athletes as well as in many healthy eating households. Falling back on the same old recipes starts to become mundane and a little too routine.

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Families across America have been bracing for an especially harsh flu season. First, health officials have been warning about the “Aussie flu,” which has killed hundreds and hospitalized thousands in Australia in recent months. Closer to home, in the United States, a 10-year-old boy from Connecticut and a California mom are among the latest victims […]

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Half of all Americans are at risk of a heart attack, but is President Donald Trump one of them? This week, CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta sparked controversy when he concluded that Trump already has heart disease “like most men of his age.” “Trump has a common form of heart disease, relatively easy […]

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Last year I was talking with Brad Kearns and Dave Dolle when Dave said something really interesting: he was using neurotransmitter analysis to build personalized training programs for his athletes. By giving a short written T/F test called the Braverman test, he could determine whether a client was dominant in dopamine, acetylcholine, GABA, or serotonin—and then use the results to determine their ideal training regimen. It was one of those instances where you hear something you know you’ll be chewing on for the next few months.

These neurotransmitters exist. They each have different effects on our personality and our physiology, which can alter our response to different types of training. Though we’re most familiar with the effects of neurotransmitters on brain function, they also have peripheral effects throughout the rest of the body.

Dopamine is the motivating chemical, promoting drive and ambition and a winning attitude. It’s also the moving chemical, interacting with the areas of the brain responsible for conscious movement. Parkinson’s disease, whose sufferers have great difficulty making basic movements, is characterized by low dopamine levels and activity.

Acetylcholine promotes focus, memory, and cognitive prowess. It’s also necessary for motor neurons to fire and make muscles move.

GABA relaxes us, calms us, and counters excitibility in the brain. Without it, we’re tense. Our muscles tense up with low GABA levels, too, as the neurotransmitter is responsible for muscle relaxation.

Serotonin is the “feel good” chemical, and deficits play a big role in depression. In the gut, it’s the “good bowel movement” chemical, regulating gut motility.

Even if it’s not measuring body levels of neurotransmitters directly, the results of the Braverman test do indicate general trends in personality and neurotransmitter levels which can affect how you should train. As someone who’s been marinating in the fitness world in a professional capacity for most of my life, I’ve seen how personality affects and even determines optimal training. The Braverman test lines up pretty well.

I’m also well-aware of just how important neurotransmitters are to the physical side of training. Take dopamine, for example, the best-studied:

• Folks with greater genetic dopamine levels tend to carry more lean muscle mass.
• Higher dopamine during exercise protects against fatigue-induced hits to exercise tolerance and even eye function.
• It’s especially helpful for performance in uncomfortable environments, like extreme heat. Endurance athletes benefit from higher dopamine levels due to increased heat tolerance and better thermoregulation; they can go harder and longer without their body telling them to stop.
• One potential reason for the dominance of African athletes in endurance events is their genetic proclivity toward increased dopamine synthesis and slower dopamine clearance.

First, take the Braverman test. It takes 15-20 minutes. Don’t fret too much over getting every answer perfect. Choose what feels more true or more false before your brain starts trying to justify this or that answer.

The point of all this isn’t to get a specific reading of your neurotransmitter balance. It may well serve as a rough or even precise barometer of whether you’re dopamine-, acetylcholine-, GABA-, or serotonin-dominant, but it’s unverifiable. What you can use it for is to get a sense of your strengths and weaknesses, then apply them to your training.

If You Have Dopamine Dominance…

You’re always on. Motivation isn’t an issue. Mental energy isn’t a limitation. “Psyching yourself up” before a heavy set is often unnecessary.

You thrive on high intensity. Without sufficient intensity, you’re likely to get bored.

You don’t do high volume. Higher reps doesn’t allow for sufficient intensity, so you prefer lower reps.

You like variety. You get bored doing the same program.

You like explosive movements and heavy weights. You live to conquer them.

You can go too hard. Your brain can handle it, your nervous system can handle it, but your body has its limitations. Joints and muscles can still fail without adequate rest.

If you’re an endurance junkie, your ability to push through discomfort and ignore the body’s signals can win the race but land you in chronic cardio hell.

If you’re a strength junkie, you’ll feel like you can handle yet another heavy day of squats and deadlifts, but your physical tissues may suffer.

If You’re Acetylcholine-Dominant…

You can handle intensity and volume, but you need rest. You need your sleep.

You can stick to the same program for longer. You’re good at focusing, at honing in on and really sinking your teeth into a routine.

If You’re Serotonin-Dominant or GABA-Dominant…

You may have difficulties pushing yourself to train.

A major benefit of exercise is that it prioritizes the delivery of tryptophan into the brain for conversion into serotonin. If you’re already swimming in serotonin, that’s one less reason to exercise. You don’t need the increased brain tryptophan uptake it provides, and I suspect that this partially explains some people’s aversion to exercise.

Another benefit is stress reduction. If you’re so relaxed from an abundance of GABA, you don’t need that effect.

Play is probably more your style. The benefits of exercise still apply to you, so you may have better luck training through play.

As you can tell, this isn’t an exact science. I’d call it an intriguing concept and a worthwhile tool, but it’s not something you’re going to submit to a peer-reviewed journal for acceptance and publication. That doesn’t matter for our purposes, of course. For us, it offers some useful feedback that can shed light on our training preferences and strengths.

The big lesson here is to do what feels right. I’ve spoken in the past about the importance of heeding your intuition and how failing to do so rarely goes well. Every time I ignore the little voice inside my head or down in my gut telling me to hold back, to cut the workout short, to try something different—things go wrong.

When I pushed past that voice to attempt a PR on the bench, I tweaked my shoulder and was out of commission for weeks.

When I lived a lie for decades, logging insane amounts of miles on the track, road, bike, and pool because it was “what I was good at” and “the harder I worked, the healthier I was” despite having no time for family or friends and my actual health suffering, I was a mess. In the end, it turned out well because it led me to the Primal Blueprint, to doing what I love and leading a life full of meaning. But, man, if it didn’t have some major downsides….

“Feels right” doesn’t mean easy. It just means “don’t fight your nature.”

The exercises we do should be difficult, challenging, and engaging. But they shouldn’t cause existential dread that we just can’t shake.

Training shouldn’t tank our sleep, ruin our quality of life, and make us crave junk food. Impending workouts should give us butterflies in our stomachs when we think of them, but not enough to prevent us from doing them. Our training should improve our quality of life, help us sleep better, and make eating healthy easier. Knowing ourselves—strengths and preferences—is part of that picture.

Now For the Giveaway…

Today I’m giving away a $50 gift certificate to PrimalBlueprint.com. Use it for Primal Kitchen products, supplements, books, a course—whatever floats your boat.

Just share your comments about today’s post topic and/or what future book  or publication offerings you’d like to see from Primal Publishing. Something on a certain area of health? More cookbooks? Calendars? What would you be interested in reading and recommending?

*Be sure to comment before midnight tonight (1/18/18 PST) to be eligible.

That’s it for today, folks.

So, let me know…how’d you score? What are your thoughts? How will the feedback inform your training?

The post Do “Dominant” Neurotransmitters Impact Training? (and a Giveaway) appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.

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Habit #2 of Highly Successful Hunter-Gatherers: Be Selfish

In our ancestors’ day, there was certainly a sense of obligation to the group, an expectation of contribution to the joint welfare. That said, in an economy of ample free time, a social network of extended kin, a culture nearly devoid of material ambition, no one was likely required or motivated to drive themselves to exhaustion.

I believe the “pack mule” mentality is a thoroughly modern neurosis. Why would any single person in a band ever accept grossly inordinate proportions of responsibility in our Primal ancestors’ time? With all members free to leave at any time in the natural ebb and flow of band to band interchange, why would any of them lived a wretched life of literal or approximated servitude? If you ran yourself into the ground healthwise in evolutionary times, you put yourself at risk. You were a liability to the group. What was the possible benefit?

 Yet, here we are in modern times making excuses for neglecting our health, giving away the chance (and true responsibility) for reasonable self-care and personal fulfillment. Part of the logic is the modern focus on the future. We’re planners, sacrificers for the sake of a presumed future security. It’s amazing what we’ll give up in the interest of a vision twenty years out. The result? We live in a kind of chronic self-debt. Yes, we’re seeking to serve our long-term good, but we’ve distorted that intention with the extremity of its terms.

This flies in the face of our ancestors’ culture of immediacy. There’s something to that living in the here and now rather than for the sometime-down-the-road. I think it’s possible to balance the two for the benefit of both, but it’s a deal with the devil to think we can continually neglect ourselves for the people and projected future of our lives. Our sense of balance must demand current and continual well-being for ourselves. When we are nourished and sustained today, we have more to offer to those around us and to our futures.

To read more, check out “10 Habits of Highly Successful Hunter-Gatherers” and Primal Connection: Follow Your Genetic Blueprint to Health and Happiness.

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