MovNat Training

Looks like fun. Short post today, I’m tired.

Todays workout was: Five rounds of hang power cleans 95, 10 burpees, 60 single unders on the jumprope (or 20 double unders if you could do them. I knew I wasn’t good enough at them to do it, so I just opted for the 60 singles). The full level 3 prescription is 185# power cleans. I have a ways to go, that’s for sure.

I did it, though, in 12:40. Not shabby. Not great, but not shabby.

This is a fascinating set of four videos on how to defend yourself and survive (not win) a street fight.

* Punch Defense

* Chokes

* On The Ground

* More on the ground

Pretty awesome. I’m looking into more of Ferriss’ stuff. He has a new book out called “The 4 Hour Body” which is very intriguing to me, as well as his other book The 4 hour work week”. Anyone have any experience with either book? I’d love to hear comments on the books.

Friday is the last day of Crossfit:Fundamentals for me. I’m pretty excited about how much progress I’ve made. The addition of the paleo diet cycle is also adding to the progress.

How well are you progressing?

As I have been slowly moving in the direction of a more ‘Paleo’ style diet - eggs, lean meats, lots and lots of non-starchy vegetables, seeds and nuts. Everything a thriving caveman needs to survive.

One of the things conspicuously absent from the list above is dairy. I have never really been a big fan of milk, but my fondness for cheese knows no bounds.

As I have been slowly moving in the direction of a more ‘Paleo’ style diet - eggs, lean meats, lots and lots of non-starchy vegetables, seeds and nuts. Everything a thriving caveman needs to survive.

One of the things conspicuously absent from the list above is dairy. I have never really been a big fan of milk, but my fondness for cheese knows no bounds.

A strict paleo dieter does not eat dairy, nor do they eat breads or other starches. I don’t know that I will ever push it as far as that, but I do see myself limiting my intake of both. The following link introduces some facts and insights about dairy and why it may not be the best thing in the world for people to have (especially in the quantities we have it in).
Dairy Insights

As often happens, things on the internet seem to run in circles. So it was amusing to run across an article on proper vitamin D supplementation and how the Institute of Medicine seems to be indicating that despite new scientific research, they are only raising the daily RDA for vitamin D from 400 IU to 600 IU. The article goes on to describe this as insufficient.

Dr Joel Fuhrman recommends the following limits.

Vitamin D in the blood should be at a minimum of 30 ng/ml and may help prevent hypertension and colorectal cancers. This can usually be achieved with supplementing between 1,500 and 3,000 IU daily, and still falls below the Institute of Medicine’s upper limit recommendation of 4,000 IU daily. He notes that the scientific studies (and subsequent literature) have found that a concentration between 36 and 48 ng/ml is the optimal range for disease prevention.

The most important thing to remember about Vitamin D intake is that there are several factors which need to be taken into consideration when moving into supplementation, including skin tone, sun exposure, sunscreen usage, geographical location, etc. Because of this, it is important to get an idea of where your current concentration levels are in order to determine supplementation needs. Additionally, it is recommended that you continue to monitor your vitamin D levels and to note that behavioral changes based on season can also affect your personal vitamin D creation (it’s sunny in the summer, so you are out more, the sun is at a different angle in the sky, etc). The article also makes note of some interesting findings on calcium, and how we may be taking too much, and that it may be less helpful in preventing fractures and osteoperosis than once thought.

The article ends with some prescient advice for vitamin D supplementation:

Guidelines for safe and effective supplementation with vitamin D:

• Find out your 25(OH)D level
• Adjust supplementation accordingly to remain in the range of 35-55 ng/ml
• If you do not yet know your 25(OH)D levels, approximately 2000 IU is a reasonable dose of vitamin D to take until you can get your levels tested.

Good luck, and get some sun. It’s good for you!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-fuhrman-md/vitamin-d-recommendations_b_800468.html

So, being as I am terrible at actually blogging, I’m going to make a more concerted effort at doing so. I have started moving into the crossfit/paleo regime of fitness and health. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Paleo? WTF is that - you might ask yourself, if you spoke to yourself like you were sending yourself a text message. Well, let me give you a little background on the whole thing (lol).

Paleo-fitness. Fancy words for lifting rocks and logs and people, running around barefoot, and generally behaving in a manner that would be roughly congruent with ancestral human behavior. Seeing as how we (modern day people) are the same as they (pre-historic people), it makes a hell of a lot of sense that the things that kept them fit (running from danger, chasing down prey, hauling a kill back to camp, building a shelter, etc) would keep us (modern day folk) quite fit, agile, and healthy as well.

http://outsideonline.com/fitness/travel-ta-201101-sidwcmdev_153323.html

How to eat like a caveman - What did a caveman eat? Not only that, but theoretically a caveman was pretty healthy, right? Let’s watch and find out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCFZoqmKf5M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGXep32_qiI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv1naIENqcE

So all that stuff seems pretty interesting, you might be thinking to yourself. But no cheese? No bread at all? That sounds radical.

I couldn’t agree more. I know that I am bound for failure if I go cold turkey - it’s not how my head works. I think that a lot of people out there are the same. So what to do?

Start limiting the things that you feel are not good for you. I’m fairly certain that I will not stop eating dairy completely. I already don’t drink milk (just not a fan), but I love cheese. So I’ll continue to eat cheese, while taking less and less of it in. Easy.

Another concern of mine would be setting myself up for a problem if the situation were to arise where I was not able to eat anything but carbohydrates or cheese (carbs especially are easy to preserve and are therefore found everywhere). So I don’t ever want to be in a position where I can’t eat something or that if I eat something it will make me violently ill. We all have to survive, after all. And we do take after that caveman guy, and he was all about storing as much energy as he could, just in case. We have better ways of doing it, so we’ll take advantage of them. But when we can, let’s enjoy lief the way a caveman did - as close to on the hoof as you can possibly stand!