Posts Tagged: Exercise

Part II – The Maffetone Method

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Maffetone Method

Time to jump right in to the continuing series on the case for low-intensity exercise.  As those who are familiar with me know, my stance on exercise has moved continually in the direction of higher intensity exercise after looking at everything from the vantage point of metabolic rate.  And, more and more research continues to pour in that shows that vigorous exercise will give you a lot more in terms of fitness, strength, fat loss, sex drive, aerobic capacity, growth hormone, and other factors associated with youth and athletic performance.  With a narrow and limited hormonal research perspective, there seems to be no compelling reason to do light activity at all.  In fact, it looks like something that should be avoided at all costs to get the best results.  Indeed… Read more »

Heavy Weights Low Reps

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heavy weight low reps

I don’t have much time to post today, but I received an email from a girl just the other day, and she mentioned jumping back into Crossfit after resting and refeeding for about a month.  Not good.  She experienced major insomnia as so often happens when doing really grueling exercise, which seemed to only worsen as she continued.  Research and ideas I came across touting the benefits of high intensity interval training managed to seduce me a couple of years ago.  While it may be true that higher intensity exercise (like Crossfit or HIIT) yields certain benefits, the fact of the matter is that really hard, grueling exercise has some negatives too – and I just don’t find it very sustainable.  There’s only so many times that you can realistically motivate yourself… Read more »

10 Health Reasons to Spend Time Outdoors

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great outdoors

This summer I toured around the Rocky Mountains with my girlfriend and her daughter, showing them many of the remarkable places and doing many of the remarkable things in the outdoors (like crapping in a hole) that I’ve been extremely privileged to experience.  In the past I have reaped many health rewards from spending a lot of time in the outdoors (I’ve experienced some health detriments as well, from overdoing it with physical exertion and underdoing it on food). I think the near-miraculous health benefits I have experienced from spending a lot of time outdoors in the past was one of the major catalysts for my interest in health.  The only problem was that the quantity of time spent outdoors to achieve that effect was extreme – not something any “normal” person… Read more »

Childhood Obesity

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childhood-obesity

Recently I had an interview tentatively set up on the topic of childhood obesity.  As soon as I knew about the interview I started thinking about what I wanted to say and got really excited.  Then the interview got canceled.  Well, I had too much that I wanted to say floating around in my head to just let it die.  Below is a faux interview on the topic.  For those that don’t have the time to listen, some of the main points covered are…. Most factors that control a person’s susceptibility to store excess fat when entering into the modern environment is set in motion during the first few years of life and BEFORE life.  Most think purely in terms of genetics, but I’ve always thought of genetics as a misleading term, because there is a great deal that we inherit that… Read more »

Eccentric Training

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eccentric

Getting back to our conversation on High-Intensity Training (HIT) and Body By Science, today is a little primer on one of the basic fundamental principles of this form of exercise… The idea behind the exercise is to present the muscle with a new, and greater challenge each time you perform each exercise.  When the muscle gets fully exhausted, and is presented with a challenge that it cannot meet, there is a strong message sent to the muscle that it needs to get stronger.  This change to become stronger is referred to as an adaptation.  This adaptation is what allows exercise to be productive, and bring about real change. But to comprehend what full muscle exhaustion is, you have to examine how the muscles work.  With each exercise that you perform, there is… Read more »

Mercola Interview with Doug McGuff

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mcguff

Joe Mercola’s exercise journey has been one of the most captivating things to happen over the last couple of years in the internet health underground.  Well, I think so at least.  I like it because it has taken some of the focus off of the neurotic obsession with nutritional minutiae, and put the focus on something far more basic and simple.  Like myself, one of Mercola’s first eye-openers was reading Pace, by Al Sears.  This led Joe to doing maximum intensity interval training under the guidance of Phil Campbell - a form of exercise I discuss at length in the book, Diet Recovery. But Mercola’s interview with Body By Science author Doug McGuff in December was something that really had me re-questioning a form of exercise that I had sloughed off too easily in the… Read more »

Healthy Ways to Lose Weight & The Importance of Exercise

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Diet and exercise are the healthy ways to lose weight,right? Not entirely.Exercise, in moderate amounts and at reasonable intensity levels helps us to be healthier, but it’s certainly not something to become totally infatuated with. The idea behind getting a lot of exercise was spearheaded mostly by a man named Jean Mayer.  He noticed that people were getting fat, a problem of taking in too many calories and burning too few – or so he thought.  Instead of telling people to eat less, he put more of his focus on the importance of exercise and the link between exercise and weight loss.  I will say, if having to choose between the two, I’d definitely pick overexercising over undereating any day of the week. However, physical activity, although a healthy, invigorating… Read more »

180 Degree Metabolism: 2011 Edition

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Kicking the New Year off right, I’ve added an additional 20% to180 Degree Metabolism: The Smart Strategy for Fat Loss.  The addendum covers topics such as the role of stress in body fat accumulation, a discussion on types of exercise that encourage fat storage vs. the types that discourage fat storage, and more – including going over what I believe to be some mistakes made in the first version and what I now feel is more accurate. If you’ve already purchased 180 Degree Metabolism or the full 180 Collectionwhich includes all 180 materials, the link you were sent will take you to the new version, which was updated earlier today.  Send me an e-mail at sacredself@gmail.com if you have misplaced this link and I’ll get it to you within a day… Read more »

Don Gorske Big Mac Prediction

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Truth be told, I’m a little bit of a Don Gorske groupie. In November, on a trip to visit Aurora’s extended family in Wisconsin, I did go so far as to have a Big Mac in Gorske’s home of Fond Du Lac. I looked for the Mac Daddy, did not see him unfortunately, but took great comedic pleasure in enjoying my first Big Mac in about a year at a location in which perhaps the most prestigious fast food eater on earth has eaten literally thousands of Big Macs. Gorske, born in 1953, had his first Big Mac in 1972. From that point on, Gorske has had a Big Mac nearly every day – and has now consumed roughly 24,000. He got married at a Mickey D’s. He has saved… Read more »

Summer Recap Part I

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My summer has been a flippin’ whirlwind. Apologies for the many highly-engaged followers who had many a question fall on deaf Matt ears. I’m back though. Full-throttle. I thought it would be interesting to give some highlights to what I’ve personally been doing and thinking about over the course of the summer – and how my health has been affected by my actions. This, of course, is not to be interpreted as any kind of incontrovertible proof – no different from my infamous FUMP experience. My personal adventures in diet and lifestyle certainly have an impact on my thinking. How could they not? Anyway, here’s what I’ve been up to. To make some extra bucks, and take a little reprieve from the computer screen, I took up another summer of… Read more »