Distinct’s Ultimate Health & Conditioning

For all of you who are sitting around gloating that you laid off the booze last night, learning what happened when you downed all those sodas instead might make you a tad regretful…

I stumbled upon this site which claims the following things happen to your body when you drink soda:

• In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.

• 20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get its hands on into fat. (There’s plenty of that at this particular moment)
• 40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dialate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.
• 45 minutes: Your body ups your dopamine production stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain. This is physically the same way heroin works, by the way.
• >60 minutes: The phosphoric acid binds calcium, magnesium and zinc in your lower intestine, providing a further boost in metabolism. This is compounded by high doses of sugar and artificial sweeteners also increasing the urinary excretion of calcium.
• >60 Minutes: The caffeine’s diuretic properties come into play. (It makes you have to pee.) It is now assured that you’ll evacuate the bonded calcium, magnesium and zinc that was headed to your bones as well as sodium, electrolyte and water.
• >60 minutes: As the rave inside of you dies down you’ll start to have a sugar crash. You may become irritable and/or sluggish. You’ve also now, literally, pissed away all the water that was in the Coke. But not before infusing it with valuable nutrients your body could have used for things like even having the ability to hydrate your system or build strong bones and teeth.

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I always see lots of references to running around the ‘net, but never any references on how to run! Running is simple, yet it is certainly possible to do it badly if you’re either not used to it or just impatient in your learning and adapting (as with any sport of course)…

I know a lot of my readers abhor endurance sports, some of you even claim they cause cancer. Well, that’s not what this little blurb is about. I don’t care if you want to run marathons or just do sprint intervals; your feet will thank you when you remove your shoes. Many of the reasons why some of you consider running to be bad totally become non issues when you remove your shoes (such as knee and back pain, foot deformities, etc.) Wait! Before you hit that back button I urge you to check out Ken Saxton’s incredibly informative site RunningBarefoot.org, it’s really informative even if you plan to leave your shoes on. Hey, at least you’ll know how to run well. Here’s a snippet from his “beginning” page:

Many of you may be suffering from chronic running related injuries. I won’t tell you that Running Barefoot will cure everything wrong with you, or magically make you the fastest runner in the world, or that you will never cut your foot while Running Barefoot.

What I will say is that those chronic problems are practically non-existent in societies that do not wear shoes! So, why are you wearing your shoes? You probably believe they are protecting you from injury, and if you have knee and back pains from running with shoes, you imagine that the impact contributing to these problems must be even worse without shoes!

However, what we often forget about Running Barefoot, especially if it has been many years since we ran, or played, barefoot, if we ever did, is that it is only comfortable to land with impact, while wearing shoes.

Continue to Running Barefoot–>

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Five rounds for time of:
400 meter run
95 pound Overhead squat, 15 reps

This one makes me feel better about the wine I’ll be having later. Damn near puked up lunch!

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Today I was truly fatigued and so I did 45 mins on the bike trainer and a bunch of bodyweight stuff like push-ups, handstands, squats, calf raises, jump rope, etc. Oh yeah, by fatigued I mean weak… I still seem to have plenty of endurance left. I am now (after 5 days) fully, undoubtedly in ketosis and liking it.

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Ketogenic Diets, Protein Sparing Modified Fasting & Low Carbs - oh my!
Well folks, I usually abhor dieting as a fad and can honestly say that 98% of the crap I’ve read in books, magazines and websites has not only been crap but is likely to do you way more harm than good. I’m not denying that I sometimes diet. I have done it in the past for various reasons, typically experimenting on myself for many reasons such as lack of conclusive data on the effects of specific dietary modifications. I haven’t dieted to drop body fat percentages in a while though, because it sucks and while it works I find it’s not worth it psychologically in the long run. I prefer intermittent fasting for controlling my bodies fat distribution and which you can read more about here.

The exception starts now! I keep hearing more and more about low carbohydrate & ketogenic diets lately and the theory behind them ties in with a lot of my personal nutritional theories. Namely that fat isn’t evil, cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease and that processed carbs & insulin resistance equals obese people with mood disorders. After reading various studies, a few of which can be found here & here, I decided to give it a try. Below I will list my goals, theories, modifications to diet and a brief synopsis of what ketogenic dieting actually is.

Loosely defined, what I would like to achieve through reduced caloric intake and ketosis is any combination of the following:

1) A reduction in body fat from the range I currently am (13%-10%) to something more defined and ripped looking (sub 10% - hopefully 8% or lower). This is temporary, as I am most comfortable at 10%. I will probably try to keep myself between 8 & 10 for a while.

2) A general detoxing of my body by the mobilization & eventual removal by utilization of years worth of crap stored in my fat. It’s a pretty solid theory which is proven in many respects that certain of your fatty tissues are being used by your body as mini toxic waste dumps, as it were. The only theory really is whether or not I have anything substantially harmful stuck in there. Given that I smoked for a few years, I most likely do. I know many consider bodily detoxing something that ought to be confined to the realms of quackery and pseudoscience, I would like to add that even if that were so, I enjoy the psychological & physical results of fasting, caloric restriction &/or healthy dieting enough to justify it on those grounds alone.
3) Maintain as much muscle mass as possible. This is why I lean towards protein-sparing modified fasting and achieving ketosis through extremely low-carb eating as opposed to straight out fasting with water, juices or other highly dubious methods. I only utilize fruit fasting when I am ill with certain diseases.

4) Learn more about how my body works & responds with further experimentation & research.

5) End the year with a test of strength and will and to bring in the new year with a revitalized passion for learning and living an extremely healthy, active and spiritual life that I suspect fewer than 100,000 people on earth probably achieve.

6) Though this is slightly redundant, I wish to emphasize my desires to learn and share with all of you so that I might help you in some subtle way.

Keto: What the hell is it anyhow?

The ketogenic diet is a very high fat diet that relies on inducing a state of ketosis. It is typically something like 88% fat, 10 percent protein and 2% carbohydrates. I have modified it considerably and am doing something that averages to 70% fat and damn near 30 % protein, as I’m only consuming between 10 and 20 grams of carbs daily most of which is coming from unavoidable sources like my cheese and sparse veggies. I’d like to take this opportunity to emphasize using a source of fiber while doing this, as you’ll get bound up for eternity if you don’t. Here is a summary I stole from bodybuilding.com’s forums. They were posted by the user Man2kx in this thread. This site is full of info on lifting weights, but is next to worthless when it comes to proper nutrition and damn near anything concerning supreme health. If you are willing to do anything to your body to gain stressful amounts of muscle mass while putting yourself through torturous bulking cycles and crash dieting, I suppose you may learn something there. I’d also like to mention that aside from that, there are a number of well intentioned folks there whom I respect, even though we disagree. The following excerpt if fairly simple and a surprisingly good introduction to the principles of ketogenic dieting. Read more..

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And Happy Holidays to all of you, have a great new year! Saturday’s workout was:

Complete as many rounds as you can in twenty minutes of:
10 Pull-ups
7 Handstand Push-ups
Rope climb, 15 ft
7 Ring Dips

And today’s Christmas Eve workout is a nice, easy 5k run. I’ll probably substitute it for 25 minutes on the bicycle trainer.

Take care everyone!

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First, let me say that I didn’t do a very hardcore workout today and I’ll give a bit more detail in the update that follows. Here’s the workout:

6 rounds of 1 minute rope jumping, averaging 100-200 jumps per minute, varying the style such as double-unders, alternating feet, two feet at once, knee to chest, etc.

2 sets of max rep pull-ups (hands foward, then hands facing me. done on a ledge, not a bar. There being nothing to wrap my hands around, I end up being flat palmed.) Achieved 20 first, 10 second though I think I dropped too soon on that last one.

1 set max reps hanging straight leg raises. I’m not sure of the name of these but what I do for future reference is hang from my roof so my back is against a wall, my hands facing me grasping the ledge. I then raise my feet up until they touch my hands trying as hard as possible to do so solely by bring my abs together. Eventually, one has to use the hips. I don’t mind, so long as my arms and legs do not bend.

1 set max rep push-ups. Lost count after 80.

Random active recovery (jump rope, trunk twists, windmills, etc.) 10 mins stretching.

Basically I am trying to preserve my existing muscle. I still do not feel up to my normal self and theorize I may still be recovering from Lyme disease. Apparently it does quite a toll on the body, and may not even have been cured depending on the length of time it was in my body before presenting.  Something has also been screwing with me and giving me extreme exertion headaches that are equal in pain to the migraines I used to be prone to, and which last anywhere from a half hour to a full day. I am not sure what is causing that but am investigating. For the time being I am dropping certain supplements one at a time in an attempt to rule them out.

I am making up for my lack of strength training by suffering my fiance through vigorous routines like an evil drill sergeant from hell.

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Five rounds for max reps of:

Body weight bench press
Pull-ups

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As many of you might have figured out based on my choice of daily exercise, I am a big fan of intense interval training of all flavors. The sort I’ve found most likely to make you keel over and puke is often referred to as “Tabata intervals” and requires you to work for 20 seconds, rest for 10 seconds, rinse & repeat.

I have also found (more like noticed) that doing manual labor is really freaking tiring, that’s why I sit around on my ass all day at this computer. All moronic witticisms aside, whenever I’m doing the many articles of yard work that living out in the middle of nowhere requires, I finish off the day with a hot shower reflecting on just how much of a great workout I received as a bonus. Often I have been inspired by those who train with such things as sledgehammers, but have found I prefer more traditional iron & body weight training to be more my style. That is, until I found the site of Ross Enamait. I particularly like his article on Tabata-style sledgehammer training. Just watching the video makes my back & sides flair up in pain! It’s stuff like this that constantly reignites my passion for physical conditioning and keeps me from throwing in the towel out of boredom. I am going to incorporate this and similar features into my workouts on the rare days when I’m not sufficiently “worked out” after my typical training.

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Today’s workout was to complete as many rounds in 20 minutes as I could of:
Run 400 meters
Max rep Pull-ups

I didn’t keep track of how many I did, but I can tell you the pull-ups were insanely difficult after sprinting a quarter of a mile. They’re definately improving after having done them daily for the last few months though (save for the time I was ill and couldn’t do anything).

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