8 February 2010
Your success in life depends on your attention to detail
Posted by Matt Shannon under: Fitness .
Rest Day
Today I want you guys to think about all those times you couldve eaten or slept better.
I’ll just use myself as the example here. This past Friday I did a 1RM test for deadlift. It was the same as it was about 2 months ago but my technique this time was a LOT worse. Why? I don’t know. Training my hips to be higher than necessary and having my shins more vertical from RDL training Im pretty sure but either way if my technique were better Im sure I could have pulled 440 or maybe even 450. But I really pulled 425 off the ground basically as a RDL. No rounding of the back at all…almost completely stiff-legged.
The point here is imagine how much more I could have lifted if my technique was better. Imagine how much your strength to bodyweight ratio would be up if you chose to eat better or gone to bed an hour earlier. Don’t be satisfied with marginal gains. Try and maximize the return on your investment in your training.
As James OPT Fitzgerald is fond of saying, “Nothing tastes as good as being lean feels.”
So, if youre coming in and putting in a lot of time, effort and energy into your training don’t sabotage your hard work by making bad choices in your fuel intake.
Recommended reading:
Universal Characteristic #4: A Moderate Fat Intake Dominated by Monounsaturated and Polyunsaturated Fats with Balanced Omega 3 and 6 Fats
If you are like most people, the message you have been receiving loud and clear for decades from so called nutritional experts, physicians and even the government is to cut the fat in your diet. No matter how well intentioned is this message, it is flatly wrong – period! It is not the total amount of fat in your diet that raises your blood cholesterol levels, increases your risk for heart disease, cancer and type II diabetes, but rather the type of fat. The typical western diet is dominated by cholesterol raising, artery clogging saturated fat. Secondly, we consume too much omega 6 polyunsaturated fats at the expense of the healthful omega 3 polyunsaturated fats. Finally most of us still regularly consume cholesterol-raising, trans fats found in margarine, shortening and nearly all processed foods. These are the types of fat you want to cut from your diet – the saturated fats, the trans fats and the omega 6 polyunsaturated fats. You want to restore the healthful monounsaturated and omega 3 fats that were the mainstays of Stone Age diets. By doing so, you will lower your blood cholesterol levels, reduce your risk for heart disease, cancer and other chronic illnesses. How did the typical western diet wander so far from the healthful fats our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate?
Fats in the Hunter-Gatherer Diet
In order to know how we got lost, we need to know where we started. What exactly was the balance of fats in humanity’s original diet? From hundred’s of computerized dietary simulations of Stone Age diets, as well as from numerous ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherers, my research team and I have been able to answer this question. In the graph below, contrasting hunter-gatherer and western diets, you can see that the big difference was in the total amount of saturated fat. Despite eating diets that were dominated by animal foods, hunter-gatherers ate about half the saturated fat found in the average western diet. Wild game meat is very low in both total and saturated fat as you can see in the table below comparing wild and domesticated meats. From the graph you can also see that healthful, cholesterol lowering monounsaturated fats comprised more than half of all the fats in the diet.
Read more at The Paleo Diet.
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