Thalassotherapy, heliotherapy, balneotherapy - they’re Greek words actually: sea therapy, sun therapy, mineral-dense water therapy.
A quick internet search for "healing properties of visits to the sea" returns piles of articles ranging from case studies to anecdote dating from thousands of years ago to the present. Just stepping in with my daughter this second day in Greece revived me. It has been known for a long time that trips to the sea cure a variety of health issues. The dense mineral content of the sea has no equal in fresh water lakes, rivers, and streams. We know this, which is why we try to reduplicate it with Epson salt baths, Dead Sea salt spa treatments and so forth. As often as you can, commune with the life-giving water.
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Glycemic index is the rating of blood sugar impact for a given food; the higher the number, the more volatile and unhealthy the glucose variability.
The more elevated and volatile glucose is, the more rampant inflammation and consequently all degenerative health conditions get. Whole grain has one of the highest glycemic index ratings. Some white bread rates lower. Snickers rates lower than most bread. All meat = ZERO. No opinion. Just scientific facts. In the US the soil is depleted. Lookup soil depletion stats, and you’ll find great articles in Scientific American about how an orange today has less than a tenth of the Vitamin A which oranges in 1910 had.
Walking through the village of Ancient Messene, you see figs and oranges and pomegranates just hanging off of trees all about you. In the family garden, there is every vegetation you can imagine. And they’re fed by a mineral-dense mountain spring, pouring forth nutrients in to them all the time. And you can tell you feel different (better) when eating food here. I’m as opposed to relying on supplementation as much as the next whole food advocate. But once you experience how you feel with real food from real sources, you realize that vitamin and mineral supplementation in the US is a necessity. Or post-doctoral neurophysiology and psychotherapy. Or... other non-fundamentals which you are using as a sophistry to avoid working basic steps.
I’ll hear clients get lost in a sea of soliloquies about 5-alpha-reductase type 2, when they need to just track their food for 6-9 months at 95% compliance. I’ll gladly discuss protein digestibility-corrected amino acid scores (PDCAAS), but maybe you should just hit sufficiency first. I’m as excited as the next guy about protein kinases mTOR and AMPK and how they manage autophagy via inhibitory phosphorylation. But maybe just... like... you know... stop gaining body fat. I love deep science and minutiae. LOVE. But I also encourage people to check themselves and return to fundamentals. Sometimes just take note of your food, perform some weekly strengthening and conditioning, and... that’s it. I‘ve come across some super super smart people, double PhDs from the University of Chicago, MD PhDs, Alzheimer’s researchers, MIT researchers, CERN contributors, and authors published in highly respected academic journals. Sometimes they confuse themselves by thinking that outrageously informed minds are somehow absolved of the fundamentals. You never outgrow fundamentals. Are there benefits to micro-detail on the periphery of scientific discovery? Of course. But they don’t supersede fundamentals. This Achilles heel doesn’t just reside in the hyper-specialist, by the way. The every day layperson has a tendency, likewise, to talk ad nauseam about their genetic or mental health limitations, throwing hands up in exasperation or seeking some futuristic mega pill to magically quell their woes. How about... go for a walk every day? How about... eat sufficient protein, vitamins, and minerals, so you have a fighting chance to seek basic baseline fundamental healthiness? How about... contract skeletal muscle once in a while? "Nahhh,' people say. We "need" a sophisticated equivocation. They'll say, "we need a detox; we need a cutting edge psychotherapy paired with drug therapy paired with codependency" and yes-men enablers. "We need workout videos" piling up in our living rooms (or in our cloud storage). Might some of those have benefits? Sure. But they don’t contain the capacity to skip over fundamentals. You don’t get to bypass life and never endeavor for fundamentals. A few people won the genetic lottery, born into a level of health or wealth which landed them on third base while they think the same lucky break means that they invented the game of baseball. Don’t be like them. Don’t yearn to be gifted unearned home plate arrival. Do you really think you want to be regaled with a grand slam home run when you don’t even know how to hold a bat? We could talk about the chemical composition of turf all day. We could discuss the ideal baseball bat engineering. And some people will do exactly that. How about... practice taking a swing? Nahh. “I’m not built to swing a bat - it doesn’t come naturally”, people say. “There’s no point - can I just run the plates?” “Can you just completely revise the whole point of the game so that I don’t have to practice any of the fundamentals of the game?” Health and fitness isn’t going to work that way. Cry till you’re blue in the face. Litigate against the unfair laws of biology. Invent sophisticated excuses which sound great. Or... simply show competency in a single fundamental of health and fitness before getting lost in the peripheral minutiae. You must give your mind a break in order to thrive in health and fitness. This trip was long overdue. I managed to avoid social media and email for about 10 full days before I had to answer some inquiries.
And this isn’t the only way I manage myself. You’ll notice that on IG I don’t really include much of my personal life. I keep it pertinent to how people can improve health and fitness. Even here, my kids are cropped out. In fact, I don’t have Instagram on my devices and haven’t for over 3 years. I batch my time spent on social media all the time, keeping it to a maximum of 15 minutes per day and that’s mostly to do with business-related efforts. It keeps me positive, productive, and in control of my state. . In the same way that you must get your mind away from daily problems on a vacation or holiday, you must stay mindful of that to which you subject yourself all the time. It’s critical to mental health. And THAT is critical to all else you want to accomplish. How are you going to end up some place new or different if you keep traveling the exact same road to the exact same exit every time?
This popped up from 2 years ago; and it couldn’t have been more timely. There is a caveat though: sometimes, for the moment, you have only the same exit available. What I mean by that is I once took the idea that people should prioritize sleep as a sign of moral failing and character weakness. Through a series of health issues I was personally confronted with the damage, starkly, in 2011. For years I had been overworking myself at school, then work, in workouts, and at home. Apparently, this is a bad idea without performance enhancing drugs. Consequently, I had some incredibly suboptimal labs. That led me down a path in 2012 of attempting to prioritize sleep as best I could given the many health issues with our son at the time. Just that tiny fractional improvement in sleep corrected many lab values, including doubling my total testosterone and tripling my free testosterone. I felt good. 2013 the experiment continued. I prioritized sleep and stress management, working out less than 90 minutes PER WEEK from January until July. Despite many sleepless nights at the emergency room, just the intentionality made a big difference. I could tell. I’ve continued the experiments on minimal programming which people can realistically integrate into their busy lives forever. Summer of 2018 I worked out only 27 minutes per week. I now know viscerally, through personal experience, but also through observing thousands of individuals (and all apropos research on the topic) how critical recovery and sleep is. I no longer view someone’s effort toward it as a weakness or moral failing. BUT... I have kids. I have a wife. I have a house. I have a business. So I get it. Life will not always provide the new exit. Sometimes you have only the same exit, in my case, sleeplessness. Even though I understand palpably the benefit of rest and preach about it, there are genuine constraints. My daughter has been sick for three weeks. My wife and I have logged maybe 2 decent nights of sleep since October 30th. Last night specifically, I held my daughter upright for 6 hours to help her rest while her coughing flared again. Is that optimal sleep? Heck, is that half way decent sleep? I’m not an automaton. I’m not a robot. I get it, folks. We have many genuine life challenges often preventing us from taking that new exit. The new exit is closed for construction. The new exit is blocked by a car crash. The new exit hasn’t been completed yet. However, you can have a terrible run, a bad day, a bad week, a bad season, a bad year, a bad decade. But eventually there will be a new exit. Take it. And if there isn’t, well, sometimes just go off-road. 33 Pull-ups by my count (video here: https://www.instagram.com/p/B1ykkCpDQO7/).
I didn’t have time to train it this year, certainly did not train anything like I did last year. And I’ve been working really diligently on lower body. Thus I knew I was going to be “carrying” more weight. How did I outperform myself yet again with less training? I came in lighter. I didn’t eat for a day and then sweat some weight out in the morning. For bodyweight movements of aerobic duration (45+ seconds), your body mass is a make or break it proposition. This is why we may one day see an elite 100m sprinter over 210lbs of weight; but we will never see an 800m sprinter over 170, and the 1600m records increasingly belong to increasingly lighter individuals (120s at last check). Keep this in mind when self-assessing, as people will get frustrated at improvement in one strength skill while worsening in others. The summer of 2019 did not work out as expected. It was better, busier than I could handle. I’ve been overbooked since Fall of 2018. But, as a consequence, I’ve felt run down more days than not. Plenty of swimming and fun with the kids has been great. But work hours have exceeded 60 more often than not, leaving much to be desired with sleep and workouts.
. So I’m not as lean as I expected. I’m not as strong as I wanted. It would be easy to say, “why bother?” at the opportunity for any given workout. But sometimes just pump out some reps, any reps, some light reps, any light reps, some movement, any movement. Move lymph. Contract skeletal muscle, if only a single set at far below your capacity (video here: https://www.instagram.com/p/B1tnF9FDoTF/). It would be so very easy to say “why bother?” while looking at how you aren’t where you’d hoped to be. Many times over I've seen clients want to throw away all of their hard-earned strength and function simply because they didn't get leaner yet. You could easily let things really get away from you by thinking that way. Instead, think about how you’re only as fit or lean as you are because of working the steps. Work some steps. If you take your foot off the pedal altogether, things would erode. . Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Everyone is one tiny step away from something even when we think we’re light years away. A minor loss of focus on the road from any driver and we’re dead. An unexpected hospital visit and someone is bankrupt and homeless. One interruption to immune system regulation and the many errant/precancerous cells we make everyday turn into full-blown metastatic cancer.
In fitness, I’ve seen thousands of times where someone is the tiniest step away from breakthrough or breakdown. Oftentimes, as people are lining up variables for success, quite literally one more day of consistency per week begins to move the needle toward making them into an athlete. And one less day moves the needle toward osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, and a more difficult journey in the long run. But this is where logical thinking separates the winners from losers. The emotional brain will say, “I’m doing TOO much already - I give up.” The rational brain will say, “it’s never TOO much until I’m TOO successful.” Dispassionately give credit for all the positive steps you’ve taken. But be sharp enough to acknowledge if you want more result you require more investment. Because you could be just one more step away from the tipping point in either direction. And most likely you are. Wherever you are in life, you’ve gathered tens of thousands of hours of highly specialized skill/understanding in something or some thingS. It can save others A LOT of troubleshooting and frustration. It can’t be found in a Wikipedia article or a scientific journal. It’s in YOUR head. So share.
It’s not entertaining. It's not sexy. It’s seldom or never going to be popular. But it can change the world for someone somewhere who’s blindly groping in the dark and struggling to get it right. About 2 years ago, I took 4 minutes to make and post a video on YouTube about a commonly misdiagnosed orthopedic issue. I had no intent other than my usual: just gift something valuable to the universe; if it helps one single person it’s a worthwhile expenditure of my time. It’s bad angles, no filters, no production, no pitch, no call to action, no promo or promo code. I forgot about it. Then, much later, our webpage got slammed. I didn’t know where this came from until I saw all of these comments on the YouTube video with over 12k views (and now over 43,000 views) about how it had changed people’s lives. Just a couple minutes, no prep, no thought of benefit to me, improved the lives of people. Share some value. |
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