PHILOSOPHY

Movement

Your Body is Meant to Move

Movement is natural for humans. As we age, we should be able to perform all 6 functional movements without pain. We implement these functional movements within all client programs – Push, Pull, Hinge, Squat, Lunge, Carry.

We have three main focuses for maintaining utility and function into older age – Stability, Strength, and Energy System Training. Depending on your biological and training age, you may be sufficient and/or deficient at some of these.

In order to be balanced, it’s important that you have a proper foundation of stability. As a general rule of thumb, strength without stability often leads to injury, which is exactly what we want to avoid when working with clients.

Everyone likes to do the fun, sexy exercises first, but in order to maximally express all types of contractions, a base level of absolute strength is required. This is why beginners should never start off with Olympic Lifting or max-effort Sprints.

Aerobic exercise requires oxygen, and is usually done at an intensity that you can do while maintaining a conversation. Building your aerobic capacity improves lung and heart function, as well as your metabolism and other bodily functions.

Anaerobic exercise requires glucose from your body, and is done at high intensity. Due to the high recovery demands, anaerobic workouts only need to be done once or twice (if you really enjoy it) a week for general function.

 Below is a table on how we implement Energy System Training in practice.

Nutrition

Food is Medicine

Nutrition is a very complex topic, filled with a lot of baggage and negative associations for most people. The unfortunate reality is that our relationship with nutrition is the result of food manufacturers and their optimization problem gone wrong – known as the Standard American Diet.

This inevitably results in food that is cheap, high in sugar and fat, mass produced, shelf-stable, transportable, microwavable, and never expires. This is yet another reason why lower-income demographics disproportionately suffer from chronic diseases. While the intention was right, the outcome missed the mark.

There are three main levers we can restrict to optimize Health and Longevity. Our goal with nutrition is to always pull at least one, often two, and occasionally all three. These three levers answer our aforementioned questions.

Nutrition is a sticky topic for many people because everyone is unique. So it’s important to recognize what works for your best friend or mother may not necessarily work for you. That’s why whenever you approach a new dietary change, you should:

• Determine your desired goal before beginning,
• Measure your progress (either daily or weekly),
• Give your new plan at least a month before reassessing, and
• Be ready to abandon a plan if it’s not working for you.

Sleep

The Foundation of Health

Sleep is a state that happens to almost every living creature every 24 hours and it accounts for roughly one-third of our lives. We all understand to some extent that we need sleep, but the importance of sleep, especially on your Cognitive and Emotional Health, cannot be understated.

Our body has it’s own 24-hour biological clock known as your Circadian Rhythm. While our wake-sleep cycle is generally regulated by light and darkness, modern technology has artificially extended our days unnecessarily.

Sleep is essentially your body’s life support system and is the closest thing we have to a natural performance enhancing drug. Instead of thinking of sleep as something you have to do, think of it as something you want to do.

As mammals, humans have two main components of sleep, which can be illustrated in 5 stages – Non-REM and REM.

As conscious beings, our responsibility is to make sure we spend enough time in each stage to recover our body and detoxify our brain.

Modern Humans and Sleep

Our poor relationship with sleep is a key reason for most our modern health issues. Interestingly enough, humans are the only species that will purposefully deprive themselves of sleep. The only other time we see this in the wild is when animals are under starvation conditions – but in humans, this self-imposed sleep-deprivation leads to a fake starvation signal which increases appetite (through the production of ghrelin).

Sleep deprivation causes the quickest reduction of health, and chronic under-sleeping (which most Americans suffer from) will lead to a negative feedback loop on your health.

When you start to layer on lack of motivation and energy from sleep-deprivation, combined with increased appetite (from the “fake” starvation signal), increased cortisol, and a Standard American Diet, it’s very easy to understand why so many Americans suffer from Obesity. This is a systemic and cyclical issue many Americans deal with everyday and think is normal.

Stress

The Silent Killer

Stress is probably one of the most important and misunderstood health issues that modern humans deal with. While the topic of Stress can seem like fluff to some, it is grounded in science and is critical to your Emotional Health.

Increased Stress causes changes in hormones in our body – the two most important are:

1. Adrenaline– It increases blood flow to muscles and raises blood sugar levels. Adrenaline is a first-responder during times of Stress.
2. Cortisol– It increases your brain’s utilization of sugar and turns off non-essential bodily functions (like digestion, growth hormone, and reproduction). It follows 30 seconds or so after Adrenaline.

Stress and Cortisol have a synergistic relationship and are incredibly important in life or death situations, but Stress can also arise from everyday modern living. We want to emphasize that everyone has a different response and tolerance level to stress, though the side effects are clear:

• Too much cortisol will kill you eventually, and make you miserable during the entire time.
• Too little cortisol will kill you quickly.

The key is that we don’t hate stress. We hate the wrong amounts of stress. Indeed, too little stress can be boring and uninspiring, and too much stress can lead to a complete burn-out or meltdown from anxiety. But when we have an optimal amount of stress, it can lead to peak performance.

That said, stress can be useful in acute situations, but detrimental if chronic.

Acute Stress helps us overcome short term obstacles by kicking us into high performance mode, however

Chronic Stress can lead to increased cortisol in the body, which can negatively impact your performance and health.

Importantly, Chronic Stress can lead to the decline of your Emotional Health, which will inevitably weigh on your Cognitive Health, and inadvertently cause a decline in your Physical Health. These three components of your Healthspan are inextricably connected.

Without getting into the specifics of each pillar – Meditation has been proven to be one of the most comprehensive ways to combat Modern Day Stress. The point of meditation is not to feel any specific way – it’s to feel whatever you’re feeling right now, so that you learn how to not let your feelings push you around.

By connecting to your consciousness and understanding your thoughts and emotions more clearly, you can take control of your Mental Health and drastically improve your overall Longevity.

Habits

A Little Extra “Kick”

We won’t spend too much time in this section because these are fringe issues and may not apply to everyone, but it’s still important to bring up as part of your overall health and longevity plan. When we think about external substances being put into our bodies, they really break down into two buckets:

Drugs

Our relationship with Drugs, both recreational and prescription, can either be constructive or destructive depending on how we use them. As with all things, understanding your intent is critical before using. If you are an irresponsible human, anything can be dangerous.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation and cultural bias built into our perception of drugs. However, if we look at the potential dependency and active/lethal dosages of different substances, we can better inform our personal usage (if any).

Meanwhile, prescription drugs are often prescribed by a physician to counteract an underlying medical issue. If this is the case, it’s always best to consult with your physician when mixing compounds or supplements together.

As part of our intake process, we will ask that you disclose your drug use (both recreational and prescription) so we can better evaluate on how to proceed with your specific programming.

Supplements

For the most part, we are against pushing supplements. It’s not that they don’t work (some of them definitely do) – the problem is that most people view supplements as their health entrée rather than icing on the cake. The fact is that most people aren’t at the point where they need supplements. Until you are doing the following consistently everyday, you probably don’t need to be wasting your money:

That said, the following could be useful additions to your nutrition protocol if you really want to do something extra:

Finally, exogenous hormone use would be one the last frontiers of supplement use – though this is never part of our protocol because we are not medical doctors. If you feel have low testosterone for example, it’s best you first consult with your physician and get tested.

Thanks for sticking with us.

We hope this gave you something to think about. If you’d like to talk to a coach, click the button below and we’ll get in contact with you. Otherwise if you found this helpful – share it with a friend. Take care!