Today’s workout of the day was:
5 rounds for time of:
5 Back Squats (225)
10 GHD Situps
Not for time, just maintaining continuous movement, unbroken GHD sets, minimal rest before getting back on the bar.
The CrossFit Open WOD 13.1 will be announced today. Here’s to a fun and exciting 2013 season! Good luck to all of you that have registered!
This is an awesome way to start developing the skills and timing necessary to getting a kipping handstand push up. Carl Paoli does an awesome job of developing and explaining this progression. Check it out and get practicing!
According to http://www.breakingmuscle.com contributing author, Andrew Read, overtraining can kill you. Read defines training not only in context of work in the gym or garage, but also as rest. So in other words, training = work + rest. Think about this for a second and how your training habits or lack thereof fit into the equation. Are you overloading either work or rest to the point of diminishing returns overall in your training?
For enthusiastic athletes, overtraining and under-resting is easy to do. For many people, getting into the gym is a form of stress-release, not just a workout. The solution? Find other things to do to release stress! Walk the dog, do a puzzle with your kids, play an instrument like the drums, write a blog or read a book.
Read distinguishes between three stress adaptation stages of overtraining that are important to recognize – You should check out his two-part article here: part 1 , part 2.
If you are experiencing any of the symptoms of the three stress adaptation stages Read describes, you might want to think about including more rest days in your programming, with additional tweaks to your daily diet, sleep, and stress management.
When you think about this issue from a primal living perspective, early humans probably weren’t constantly exposing themselves to strenuous activity. This energy was most likely reserved for running from predators or hunting, right? Rest is an important part of a well-balanced lifestyle. Embrace it!
Are you currently dealing with an injury, major or minor? If you are an active person, an athlete, a CrossFitter, etc…there is a good chance that you deal with injuries on a pretty regular basis. It’s how we react to these injuries that shapes our mental well-being, and ultimately affects our recovery.
Has anybody ever told you something like “a 6-pack is earned in the kitchen” or “weight-loss is 80% diet”? Well in my experience, there is a lot of truth in these statements! The good news is that struggling with a muscular or skeletal injury doesn’t have to prevent you from eating right.
Here are a few ideas to keep in mind when dealing with an injury:
1. Don’t be a hero, let your injury heal by resting the effected area fully. Create a list of movements that you can safely do and program your workouts around them. You will be able to get back to your old ways eventually, don’t push it!
2. Focus on diet. If you’re spending less time in the gym, it may be a great opportunity to hone your meal-planning/cooking skills!
3. Re-visit your goals list. Are your strength/conditioning or weight-loss goals still attainable despite your injury? Should you create a new list of short-term goals associated with your injury? By creating some new goals, we can feel better mentally about smaller accomplishments as we heal instead of focusing on what we can’t do.
4. Try new exercises. If you can’t snatch due to a thumb injury (my current status), try cycling, running, squatting, pistol squats, swimming, GHD situps, or anything you can think of that you may not normally do. Just because you can’t use your thumb doesn’t mean you can’t use this time to develop other skills! You could come out at the end with a new strength!
5. Whatever you do, stay positive. Getting down on yourself for having to cut movements/volume from your programming will lead to compounded negativity, which in turn might lead to bad-decision making fueled by depression. Find things to do throughout the day that make you feel satisfied and accomplished!
Dealing with an injury doesn’t have to be a deflating experience. Using the steps above, find ways to stay focused and positive. The lessons you learn will ultimately help you gain discipline and develop your mental toughness!
“Research is now showing that the disease (Multiple Sclerosis) can be reversed by adopting a paleolithic diet (primarily meat, veggies, and nuts), optimizing vitamin D levels, and avoiding artificial ingredients, especially aspartame.”
This is a cut from an article today at Food Matters, found here. The article discusses the benefits of eating a paleo diet while at the same time cutting out non-paleo foods and aspartame, an artificial sweetener that is about 200 times sweeter than sucrose, breaking down to amino acids, aspartic acid and phenylalanine, and methanol in the body. Check out http://www.aspartame.org/ to see what pro-aspartame parties are saying about the sweetener (part of developing an informed perspective is getting both sides of the story, right)?
If you are a consumer of this site’s content, you are probably not new to the paleo-diet or personal testimonies of others that have battled seemingly terminal/irreversible diseases with food. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Put junk in one end, junk will compound. Put jet fuel in and experience top performance.
The real litmus test is simply asking yourself, what has worked for me? If you have struggled with weight your whole life, when were you able to lose the weight and keep it off? If you have never struggled with weight and are a junk-eater, what other issues do you have that may be alleviated by a diet change? Don’t knock it ’til you try it, the paleo diet has not only helped me reach my goal weight over the past three years, but has left me feeling energized, acutely aware, prepared, strong, and more able to spend time with my family than ever before. If you don’t believe me, try it for 30 days. If it doesn’t work for you then at least you’ll know you gave it an honest shot!
Here’s a clip from the original food matters site of Dr. Terry Wahls describing her struggle and eventual successes in overcoming MS. It is well worth the watch! Remember, every time we eat is an opportunity to make a decision. Make a decision to promote a healthier you!
Here’s what we’re making today! A cod recipe from the website www.topsecretrecipes.com. This is a simple whitefish recipe by Todd Wilbur, and it sounds awesome. If you’re strict paleo and want to stay away from the grate Parmesan, so be it. We try to include more fat in our diets and don’t seem to have much of a problem with certain cheeses, so we will use it! Instead of rice, however, we’re going to prepare some (a lot) of asparagus to go with this dish. For those attempting a low-carb lifestyle, veggies always win as a carb source. Also, try using grass-fed or pastured butter, which is available at many grocery outlets now. We get ours (Kerrygold) from Costco.
Ingredients:
Spice Blend -
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon paprika
dash black pepper
dash cayenne pepper
1 1/2 pounds fresh cod fillet
1 tablespoon butter, melted
juice of 1/2 lemon
2 small tomatoes
2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
Instructions:
1. Combine the spices in a small bowl and set aside.
2. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Cut the fish into 4 equal portions (2 per serving), and arrange the fillets in a 9×13-inch baking dish or pan.
3. Melt the butter in a small bowl in the microwave for 10 to 20 seconds. Brush the top of each fillet with butter, drizzle a little lemon juice on the fish, then sprinkle the spice blend evenly over the top of each fillet.
4. Arrange 2 to 3 tomato slices over the top of each fillet.
5. Sprinkle grated Parmesan cheese over each tomato slice. Each slice should be at least 50 percent covered with the cheese, and it’s okay for some of the cheese to fall on the fish.
6. Bake the fish, uncovered, for 8 minutes, then turn the oven to a high broil and continue to cook for 6 to 8 minutes or until the cheese on the tomatoes begins to brown. Serve two pieces of fish per serving with rice (ASPARAGUS) on the side.
Serves 2.
Just watched a documentary with Stephanie called “Hungry for Change” on Netflix. While talking about the human perspective on dieting, the narrators offered this challenge: to change your nutrition paradigm from “I want that food but I can’t have it” to “I can have that food but I don’t want it.“
Joe Cross, the protagonist from “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead” was a part of the narrator entourage for this film. This is another documentary (available on Netflix) about two men coming to terms with their obesity and making changes toward a healthier lifestyle.
The “can’t have it” vs. “don’t want it” paradigm is at the heart of what so many successful weight-losers and trainers advise. This is a fundamental lifestyle change that requires time, patience, and grace. You have to be able to pick yourself back up after falling off the band-wagon in order to achieve long-term success. To reach a goal weight and maintain that weight over the course of a lifetime is a lifetime endevour.
We’ve all heard it, there are no magic pills, no shortcuts. The only way to become and stay healthy is to:
1. Educate yourself using quality research and remain skeptical regardless of what you may already know.
2. Make decisions based upon what you know to be right every single time you eat. Decisions to eat the righter things may be hard at first, but the more you make those decisions, the easier it becomes.
3. Make a higher percentage of good decisions over the course of your entire life.
4. Stay open to new research and information. One of the main problems in America is that everybody thinks they know what healthy eating looks like based on studies released by the FDA or found on mypyramid.gov. When we get tunnel vision, we lose the ability to see the whole picture. Broaden your horizons.
While 30-day food challenges have value in teaching us how to manage our food intake, the 31st day is really the most important when it comes to how you apply what you learned and how you continue your quest for a healthier you.
Let’s talk about step 1. The internet gives us the ability to research any topic we can think of in the matter of seconds. Consume this research, digest it, compare it to other research, and make your own conclusions. Ask questions constantly about what you are reading.
If high-fructose corn syrup really isn’t bad for us, why are we experiencing such high-obesity rates in a country where this chemical is in almost everything on the grocery store shelf?
Research is just the beginning. What motivates you to make better decisions about what you eat? Have you gone through this journey already or are you thinking about finally making some changes? How can you change from wanting to not wanting the foods that put you in a less desirable place?
