What We Stand For And Against
While we encourage diversity in our content, it’s important we also maintain a consistent message on our blog. With that in mind, here’s what we believe to be true regarding fitness, nutrition, and natural health. Please make sure you read this before submitting content ideas to us.
What We Stand For
Fitness:
Train movements, not muscles.
Doing so better prepares you for real world and sporting situations and makes it easier to burn fat. The reason for the latter is that big movements involve more muscle and more muscle requires more energy (ie. calories) to do the work, which leads to faster fat loss.
Workout less, move more.
When it comes to working out, training smarter is the name of the game. That often means training less. Doing so forces you to workout more intelligently and challenge your body to the point where it needs to recover. 3-4 solid workouts per week is all you need. The rest of the time should be focused on play, daily movement, and staying supple.
Start with bodyweight.
If you’re a beginner, start by mastering basic movement patterns like lunges, squats, push-ups, and a basic plank. You can always add more reps or time to increase the intensity of bodyweight workouts. Once you feel comfortable with bodyweight exercises, then you can start adding in resistance in the form of free weights.
Lift heavier for fewer reps.
If strength and leanness are the goals, then lifting heavier weights in the repetition ranges of 4-8 reps is what’s required.
Lifting heavier weights recruits more muscle fibers, thus more energy/calories. It also forces your muscles to get stronger without necessarily getting bigger.
Lifting weights in the 10-20 repetition range is what causes muscle growth… so women don’t worry if you’re lifting heavier in the lower rep range (plus you don’t have enough testosterone to cause any significant growth)
Fitness – Abs Training:
Sit-ups don’t burn belly fat.
Sit-ups, crunches, and other isolate ab exercises do nothing more than strengthen a very small group of muscles. That’s why they don’t have any metabolic/fat burning effect, even within the stomach area.
To burn belly fat you’re really burning total body fat. And that boils down to using bigger, full body exercises that recuit more muscle and thus calories.
Stability before movement.
Most ab exercises place large and unnecessary loads on the spine because of the excessive amounts of hip and spinal flexion involved in their execution.
Instead, everyone should start by strengthening the deeper core muscles through stability exercises like planks, side planks, and bird dogs. These stability exercises strengthen the core and all of the supporting structures around the spine, hips, and shoulders.
Without this foundation development, any ab workout is like building a house on quick sand.
Visible abs are made in the kitchen.
For those who want to see their abs, diet is the most important component. To see abdominal definition men need to have a bodyfat of less than 10% and women less than 18%. This is mostly influenced by one’s diet. See my dietary philosophy for what this entails.
Fitness – Cardio:
Long duration cardio should be used sparingly and mainly for recovery.
Running or doing any form of long distance cardio more than 1-2x/week is a waste of time and overly taxing on the body.
Longer, lighter duration cardio should be used mainly as a recovery tool and even at that 20-30 minutes is plenty. Long, low intensity cardio reduces testosterone levels (and thus muscle and strength) and doesn’t really improve cardiovascular endurance.
Use interval training instead.
Interval training involves repeating bouts of high and low intensity. Doing so, allows you to spend more time near your maximum heart rate, which is essential for burning more calories and improving cardiovascular endurance.
Weight training CAN be your cardio.
Setting up a weight training routine in a circuit fashion where you go from one exercise to the next with little rest in between is a fantastic cardiovascular and fat burning workout. If your heart rate is pounding and you’re huffing and puffing, then you know you’re getting a good cardio workout.
Nutrition:
We believe clean eating and focusing on whole foods (not obsessing about calories) is the foundation of great health. Our approach promotes plant-based food with a healthy inclusion of animal products, if necessary, to meet individual preferences.
We’re not fanatical, but we also believe each individual should discover what works best for them.
In general, recipes we post on our site…
- Have been made from scratch with real ingredients
- Contain little to no refined sugar
- Are allergen-free (no gluten, dairy, soy, corn, etc…).
- Take less than 15 minutes to make
- Taste amazing
Natural Health and Healing:
Whether it’s the common cold or preventing common diseases that now plague our population, there are many natural remedies that are likely more effective and safer than what your doctor might prescribe.
We prescribe food-based and herbal/natural remedies for common ailments as first resort for our readers. We also help our readers understand that inflammation, toxicity, and acidosis are the 3 big fundamental problems at the root of health issues. These can be corrected by eating the right foods instead of relying on dangerous medications.
What We Stand Against
(Thus, don’t rave about these in your articles. If anything, show their drawbacks.)
Caffeine:
- Includes coffee and energy drinks, even green tea. Here’s why.
- Choose Swiss water decaf or herbal tea instead
Artificial Sweeteners:
- Here’s why.
Allergenic Foods:
- Gluten, dairy, soy, corn, etc…
Carbs for Breakfast:
- This includes oatmeal, pseudograins, etc. (only in small amounts, if at all)
- Here and here is why
- Instead, choose a protein-rich breakfast or fasting
Calorie Counting:
- We’re all about focusing on quality, not quantity of foods. When you eat real foods, the amount is less important.
Extreme Low Carb:
- Other than the occasional Low Carb day, we don’t want to scare readers away from eating healthy carbs because of their importance of thyroid, leptin, and other hormones.
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