SHR

How have you been feeling lately?  Great? Sluggish?  Experiencing chronic forgetfulness?  Not recovering from your workouts like you used to?  These are all questions that can be answered.  How you ask?  Well, let me ask you, when was the last time you had your blood tested?  We all take supplements to stay healthy and to ward off aging.  We also exercise to keep our heart healthy among many other reasons.   Is what you’re doing working?  Of course, we can monitor our symptoms but why not use every tool that is available?  Having blood work done can yield surprising insights into your health and well-being.  It can also highlight potential problems allowing you to make informed decisions about your course of action.  I recently had my blood work done. My doctor and I have discussed my lifestyle so luckily he knows what to include when writing out the prescription for my blood...

You tell me. See any linkage? The USA is racing to the bottom of the longevity scale while our pharmaceutical drug use is more than any other developed nation and increasing. At best, the Big Pharma Agenda isn’t working and at worst it’s fueling shorter life spans. Either way, the medical orthodoxy needs to stop using the “we’re living longer” excuse for why so many American’s are sick and dying. If that was true we’d be living to 120 year old by now as we’ve always been able to live into the 7th, 8th and 9th decade of life well before Big Pharma started saving us. Don't believe me? Go visit any historic cemetery in America and you find plenty of headstones that show people who regularly lived to be 80 or 90 dating back to the 1700’s and 1800’s.    

Are you still paying the high prices for high protein peanut butter? Make it at home in minutes literally.   So easy you can make it one-handed in minutes. 2 cups of roasted peanuts 1 to 1 1/2 Tbsp. of raw organic coconut oil 1 to 1 1/2 tsp of sea salt Blend in food processor till smooth but gritty Add flavored protein powder 2 to 4 scoops depending upon total protein per serving desired Blend until smooth Place in ball jar and refrigerate till firm Spread and eat! For this example I used Divine Nutrition’s Pound Cake flavored grass fed whey protein. You can use any flavored whey you choose. You can also include dried fruits like raisins. And spices like ginger or cinnamon powder. If you add 4 scoops of Divine Nutrition’s whey you'll end up with close to 100g of protein per jar you make. A jar will...

Almond milk is a great alternative to dairy, if you’re lactose intolerant or simply want to switch it up.  With Almond milk you won’t have to worry about the estrogenic side effects as you do with Soy Milk and let’s face It, Almond milk just tastes great.  Have you ever looked at the ingredients of most store bought brands?  Do you even know how much almond milk is actually in your brand?  As for the list of ingredients let’s take a closer look at one store bought brand- Ingredients can include: Almond milk (Filtered Water, Almonds), Cane Sugar, Sea Salt, Natural Flavor, Locust Bean Gum, Sunflower Lecithin, Gellan Gum. Calcium Carbonate, Vitamin E Acetate, Zinc Gluconate, Vitamin A Palmitate, Riboflavin (B2), Vitamin B12, Vitamin D2. What does that mean to you-“Ingredients can include”?  Also, nowhere do I see the amount of Almond Milk listed.  Last year a lawsuit was filed against...

It drives me crazy when I watch people do cardio at the gym. We’ve all seen it. The guy or gal who ramps the  Model: Alex Leaf treadmill incline all the way up and then hangs on to the control interface or the side rails in order to stay on the treadmill. I’ve asked people over the years why they do this. I’ve gotten many answers. Most say “I’m burning more calories” referring to the calorie counter on the treadmill. One gal said “I’m toning my glutes” explaining that she read an article that walking or running up a hill works the glutes. One older gentlemen told me he was trying to improve his balance. In all of the above cases what evades these trainees is that these effects are only conferred if you’re actually working to walk up the inclined surface unassisted. Not holding on for dear life! Your glutes...

I recently saw a post on Face Book depicting a video of some very hard working muscular women. A particular comment caught my eye. The poster simply posted the word “gear”. This post angered me. I have to go back to 2008 in order to understand why. Back during the Anabolic Steroid Control Act hearings in front of congress, then Senator Joe Biden complained that he wanted to become a pro baseball player but was convinced that every athlete that outperformed him was using performance enhancing drugs. Even though he had no proof of this. He told congress that his inability to make it pro was directly tied to his unwillingness to use drugs. This assumption by then Senator Biden is a slap in the face to every hard working athlete in the world. To simply reduce his or her ability to make it pro to drug use and having nothing...

So here’s the plan. Train early and train fasted. Then have 75% to 80% of my food intake after my training over the course of a few hours. Taper intake into the evening focusing on getting the majority of my fat and some protein. Here’s my thinking. In the book Dove’s Diplomats and Diabetes - A Darwinian Interpretation of Type 2 Diabetes and Related Disorders by Dr. Milind Watve (book here – SHR interview here), the good doctor explains what can be the only evolutionary scientific mechanism that influences nutrient timing and the ensuing partitioning to fat or muscle. He illustrates that as hunter gathers our brains were influenced by the tasks of getting food in the first place. That influence programmed the body as to what it would use that nutrition for – creating fat or muscle mass. The act of going out into the dangerous unknown was possible because...

Regardless of your goals – weight loss, improved health, disease management, performance enhancement, and gaining muscle mass – nutrition is the cornerstone and quite possibly the most important factor. It’s for this reason that most who are serious about their goals make food preparation a priority. And those who fail to make food preparation a priority quite often never reach their intended goals. For most, food preparation is something we do several times a week. It can include cooking of your chosen foods, portioning, packaging and making these finished meals portable. Entire blocks of time are set aside to perform these tasks. I stumbled upon something recently that a friend of mine, Ravi Reddy, showed me that he does for his food prep. It’s actually elegantly simple. Ravi prepares all of his meals in one crockpot the night before and then brings this with him to work then next day. I’ve...

January 4, 2017 Shoulders I never trained shoulders exclusively since I’ve always believed that they got hit pretty well on back and chest training movements but have since rethought this. So now I have dedicated a specific training session to shoulders each week. I make it the end of my training week since it’s a fairly small muscle group and I’m already pretty spent by the end of the week. Giant sets for shoulders look like this… Seated shoulder press machine + upright dumbbell rows + front raise using 35 lb. plate + reverse pec deck. Yes you counted right. This Giant Set is comprised of 4 movement instead 3. What do you call a 4 movement Giant Set? Hhmmm.. Maybe a Super Giant Set? NOTES: The shoulder press machine I use places the weight “per hand” so the weight stack is per hand not spread across both hands. When doing upright...

January 3, 2017 Back & Bi’s Giant sets are the corner stone of all of my sessions currently and so my back session looked like this. T-Bar Rows + Rear Delt Dumbbell Raise + Pulley Hammer Curls (using rope handle) 5 circuits of these three movements. All movements were done with no rest but some amount of rest in between each giant set. T-Bar Rows: 1 plate x 25 reps; Rear Delt Dumbbell Raise: 45 lbs. x 15 reps; Pulley Hammer Curls: 50 lbs. x 25 reps 2min T-Bar Rows: 2 plates x 20 reps; Rear Delt Dumbbell Raise: 45 lbs. x 15 reps; Pulley Hammer Curls: 60 lbs. x 20 reps 2min T-Bar Rows: 3 plates x 15 reps; Rear Delt Dumbbell Raise: 45 lbs. x 16 reps; Pulley Hammer Curls: 70 lbs. x 12 reps 3min T-Bar Rows: 4 plates x 12 reps; Rear Delt Dumbbell Raise: 45 lbs....