1% Weight Loss Challenge - end of week 3 - Whoops!

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Whoops!

This weeks results don't look to good. Inexplicable. Must be something wrong with the scales - or the food intake and elimination cycle! Whichever way you look at it, it's not a pretty result. But we live in hope and there's always next week to which we can look forward.

Trained hard for 1050 aerabytes of high density exercise.

In the meantime stay tuned, highly tuned, lay off the garbohydrates and exercise like buggery.


John Miller

http://www.hourglassdiet.com

1% Weight Loss Challenge - End of Week 2 - So Far So Good

A single swallow doesn't make a summer, nor does losing a few kilos at the start of a weight loss program amount to much more than a hill of beans, but it's a start.

Like most races it's the finishing line that's more important than the starting line.

Here's last week's results.

 

If you'd like to download the Aerabyte Fitness Tracka - aerobic fitness diary - an essential tool to accompany any weight loss program - click on the link:

http://www.johnmiller.com.au/aob/tracka.pdf

In the meantime stay tuned, highly tuned - and cool.


John Miller

1% Weight Loss Challenge - End of Week 1

I read somewhere this week that Sydney University is calling for customers to enrol in a fat loss research program to try and work out the most effective way to lose weight. You'd reckon by now that nutritionists the world over would know that the most effective way to lose weight is to exercise like buggery and lay off the garbohydrates.

Whilst attending Biggest Loser classes would seem to be the best shot most people will ever have to get back closer to their ideal weight, I doubt that the  Sydney University nutrition department has this form of weight loss regime in mind.

A very, very high percentage of people don't have a clue how much exercise they need to do to get themselves back into good metabolic health of which being overweight is the most visible sign.

In my (vast) experience I've never met anyone who exercised with aerobic vigor for 40 minutes a day who was in poor metabolic health and 30KG over weight. You can put down the glasses, close down the research institutes, the results are in, all cut and dried, done and dusted.

'Exercise like buggery' is not strictly a technical term, but it means getting 1000 aerabytes of vigorous aerobic activity every week.

'Lay off the garbohdrates' means restricting your intake of flour and sugar; on their own, mixed together or combined with fat - the typical junk food diet.

Anyway, to cut a long story short this week I got to 1210 aerabytes, most of it on the stepper with heart rate of 130 plus. And the results are:

But it's early days yet. Talk is easy.

In the meantime stay tuned, highly tuned, exercise like buggery and lay off the garbohydrates.


John Miller

1% per Week Weight Loss Target

We're right at the start of 2014 and it's the ideal time to think about getting both fitter and thinner. If you're thinking about dropping a few kilos over the next couple of months feel free to download a copy of my 1% per week weight loss target from this link:

http://www.johnmiller.com.au/hgd/index.htm

Any surplus fat around your body is going to peel off quicker if you up your exercise, both aerobic and strength training. I can't think of any better guide than the CompleteFitnessWorkout.

Nor can I think of a better set of guiding principles for eating wisely in a junk food world than the Hourglass Diet.

My fitness week starts on Mondays and starting on Monday the 6th of January I'll be commencing my own weight loss program.

For aerobic exercise I'll be working out on the stepper and aiming for 1000 aerabytes a week.

You can join me on the Health Blogarithm to see how I go and join in the fun with your own reports.

In the meantime stay tuned, highly tuned and focus on losing 1% of your body weight each week.

Watch this spot.

John Miller

Painfully Tight Calves - the Unequal Burden

Do you need to warm muscles up before giving them a massage?

Probably, but when you think about it, 98.6F sounds sufficient!

When it comes to loosening stiff muscles rolling isn't the complete answer. You usually have to keep rolling.

You roll the knots out of a muscle and by the next morning the knots have come back again. It's a never ending saga; you loosen the muscle, it tightens itself back up again, you loosen, it tightens ... Is it true  that the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result?

If a particular muscle is stiff and sore it's highly likely that it's bearing too much of - or an unequal share of - the burden of locomotion because a muscle (muscles) elsewhere have pulled the skeleton out of alignment.

For instance if you're a runner and you have a tight and persistently painful right calf the cause may be tight left buttock or hamstring or hip flexor or quadratus lumborum ... that has slightly twisted your pelvis.

The level of uneven burden may be so slight you can hardly notice it - but your right calf does. You rub and roll the calf, but to no avail. It's always painfully stiff. you need the human body equivalent of a wheel alignment.

In my own case I notice it when I'm working out on the stepper. My right foot is always an inch and a half behind my left foot. I've assessed the cause of the problem as being a tight left buttock, which I work on persistently, but I'm of an age where a lifetime of rotating to the left to kick and throw (I'm right handed) might have led to permanent rotation of the pelvis.

On the other hand, my diagnosis may not be correct. I could be just plain ignorant of what's causing the pelvis to rotate and what needs to be done and would appreciate some help from readers more knowledgeable about this 'complaint' than I am. I'm more than willing to defer to a 'higher power'.

The principle then is that the cause of the pain is unlikely to be the point where it's painful.

We're fascinated by and attracted to the spot where the pain is - not where the cause of the pain is. It's why when it comes to lower back pain, radiologists want to X-ray the lower back and therapists want to rub, crunch, heat and vibrate it.

The second principle sort of follows on from the first and derives from the dualistic way we look at things. The medical industry is dogged by the fascination with the part, not the whole. Hence if you have a headache it must be because something inside your head is 'not right' rather than the whole body is not right.

So, when you have stiffness in one part, stand back and look at the whole musculo-skeletal ecosystem - chances are it's a system problem, in which case you'd take up yoga or some other form of general movement 'therapy'.

A final word; the particular muscles (and indeed whole musculature) may not be strong enough to do the job expected of it.

Rarely do we strengthen calves (or feet) in such a way that we build their capacity to manage the loads we expect of them.

My recent experience suggests that slow, very slow calf raises are an essential part of the runners/sportsperson's armoury: 5 seconds up, 5 seconds hold, 5 seconds down, 10 seconds hold. It will take 10 minutes not 1 minute.

 "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Medical Research Reaches New Lows

Too much medical science has been perverted by Big Pharma, where research focuses on the effectiveness of one drug against another without comparing the effectiveness of the new drug to the effectiveness of running round the block, eating one less block of chocolate, one less bag of chips and drinking one less bottle of soda pop a day.

Whilst there are, of course exceptions, what medical science has done is complicate the simple, make the cheap expensive and the transparent opaque.  (What the medical industry at large has done, with the support of the State, is built up the perfect closed shop, complete with its priests, bishops and cardinals. It's even engineered its own set of blasphemy laws to protect its pseudo-ecclesiastical power.)

Medical science has become a sacred cow.


(A physiotherapist reviewing my Musculo-skeletal Health program bagged it because I didn't have the scope of practice to diagnose the likely causes of lower back pain. Apparently only doctors have a license to diagnose the cause of a particular body system dysfunction. I can tell you one thing, when it comes to diagnosing the cause of low back pain most doctors definitely don't have a clue.)

In short, a lot of medical science is just plain baloney; busy work for the inmates of the sheltered workshops for the academically gifted.

It's a game that starts with pushing out the begging bowl, (masquerading as a grant application) snagging a stipend from either mug tax payers or Big Pharma, followed by a frenetic round of paper writing, seminar presenting, back slapping, head patting, brown nosing and champagne quaffing at international conferences.

If medical science was any good, the health, fitness and wellbeing of the community would be getting better, not worse; the percentage of GDP being spent on junk medicine would be coming down, not increasing. People would be walking around with a spring in their step, proud and upright - as lean as greyhounds, fit as trout and toey as Roman sandals.

This is a bloated industry, bathing in the reflected glory of Edward Jenner and Howard Florey, full of sound and fury.

If everyone did, every day, what The Great Ardell does, every day, doctors, physiotherapists, chiropractors and pharmacists would be sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

In the meantime stay tuned, highly tuned and don't go to doctors for things doctors can't fix and or for things you're quite capable of fixing yourself.

Back Pain Research

A lot of back pain research is selective-evidence-based because of its focus on and around the spot where it hurts, rather than taking a global, system-wide approach to its causes and treatment.
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Most people with low back pain have a pelvis that's out of alignment due to tight muscles attached to it, front, back and sides - but usually tight hamstring and buttock muscles - and maybe hip flexors.

There are a genre of people who are exceptionally aerobically fit and strong who succumb to back pain. Usually they're very inflexible. Bones in the back will usually already be out of alignment. You can test how far out of alignment but using this diagnostic procedure.

When the pelvis is out of alignment the bones above it move out of alignment. When the vertebrae move out of alignment ligaments, tendons and muscles attached to those bones are stretched beyond their pain threshold. The nucleus of one of more discs starts to get squeezed out. Then along comes an incident - often trivial - that 'tips the person over the edge' and the disc herniates.

The 'straw that breaks the camels back' usually gets the blame, whether it's bending down to pick up a leaf, swivelling round to pick up a phone book, cleaning your desk or lifting a bag of groceries into the car. It can happen to the best of us.

The bag of groceries is not the underlying cause of the problem, just one of the many straws that lob on the lower back. The groceries (the leaf, the phone book, the desk) get the blame.

This is an example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. (If A occurs before B then A must have caused B.)

Academic bio mechanics and physiotherapists want to scare us with selective-evidence-based science. For instance, Canadian bio mechanic, Stuart McGill warns against doing situps because they place HUGE forces at the spot where discs herniate.

 http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/01/19/the-man-who-wants-to-kill-crunches/

 However, a healthy musclo-skeletal system is designed to cope with the HUGE forces he rails against.

Blaming a sit up for herniating a disc is indeed a selective piece of evidence. How far the bones of the spinal column are already out of alignment, how inflexible some of the muscles attached to it are and how weak the muscles attached to the pelvis and spine are more important factors.

The body needs persistent flexibility exercises done in sufficient dosage to keep the pelvis and spinal column in good alignment. It needs persistent strength exercises to support the bones in good alignment. (The point I suspect McGill misses is the fact that a good strength training program will also support bones in misalignment.)

But just focusing on the strength of muscles attached to the spine 'somewhere' in the vicinity of the pain misses the point. The cause of the pain is rarely at the site of the pain

The fact that the medical and therapeutic industries are fixated on the site of the pain, has perverted the course of lower back pain research. It's a system problem, that manifests itself in the lower back, not a lower back problem per se.

This means a lot of the evidence as to the cause of lower back pain is selective and if the evidence is selective then we need to be careful not to rely on it too heavily.

As for yoga, if the Chinese have been doing it for 2,000 years, I'd bet on it. I wouldn't change it. It's a musculo-skeletal health program that focuses on the musculo-skeletal system as a whole and not just on one small segment of it. I wouldn't be scared off from doing some of the poses on the say-so of latter day bio mechanics and physiotherapists.

We're dealing with a system that goes from the bottom of the feet right up to the top of the head and just about all the muscles in this chain work together to keep the bones in correct alignment - including the bones in the lower spine.

Focus on the system, not just spot where it hurts. Keep the system strong and flexible and the chances of coming down with a crook back are quite remote.

If you're searching for back pain bogy men, you've got to look further than leaves, desks, bags of groceries and situps.

In the meantime stay tuned, highly tuned and diminish your risk of joint and muscle pain by keeping yourself strong and flexible.


John Miller

http://www.globalbackcare.com