Thursday, January 28, 2016

It's a Shame...


Fact or Myth:Eating Raw Eggs Carries a High Risk of Salmonella

FACT OR MYTH:
EATING RAW EGGS CARRIES A HIGH RISK OF SALMONELLA



The fact that I got so many questions on this subject surprised me. I would not have guessed this subject would have been high on anyone’s list. I’m not sure where this question came from. Maybe because there is a new “Rocky " movie being released. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone eat raw eggs since Rocky I.

However, there is a long list of warnings put forth by mothers and others about the risk of eating certain common foods like “You’ll get salmonella from the raw eggs in that raw cookie dough.”

Here are the facts:

USDA, 2002(Risk Analysis April 2002 22(2):203-18)

Only 2.3 million out of 69 Billion eggs produced annually are contaminated with salmonella. That’s 0.003%. Looked at another way, the average person would come across a contaminated egg once every 42 years.


On a separate but related note, lest everyone run out and start gulping raw eggs like Rocky Balboa. Tests results indicate that the digestibility of   protein in uncooked eggs is approximately 51% while the digestibility of protein from cooked eggs is closer to 91%.



Verdict: MYTH




 QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS? USE THE COMMENTS SECTION BELOW OR EMAIL ME AT alphaedgefitness@gmail.com





Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Trust Me...I'm a Licensed Chiropractor


Why You Aren't Getting Stronger or building Muscle_part 3

WHY YOU AREN’T GETTING STRONGER OR BUILDING MUSCLE
(Part 3- Workout Mistakes)


There are a lot of workout programs and routines out there. Magazines, the internet, books and endless suggestions from your friends, relatives and complete strangers flood you with programs. Unfortunately most won’t fit your goal or situation.  Programs that work for pro’s and intermediates may not work for beginners (at least not for very long) and vice versa. A workout that works for someone else may not be for you.
Learn the basics and stick to them but learn to adjust as you go.


Make Sure Your Program fits Your Goals

Different goals require different workouts. Sets, reps, weight, rest periods and frequency are very different for strength gains than for muscle gains or stamina. And it can be very hard to chase two goals at the same time. Often you end up failing at both. Find a program that matches your goals, your body type, your schedule and works best for you. Not someone else.

You’re doing the wrong exercises

 Usually, the lifter is either doing too many isolation exercises and not enough compounds, or only doing exercises they “like”.
Big compound movements recruit the most muscle fibers and place the most stress on the body. You’re not going to get bigger or stronger without them. Want bigger arms? Do dead lifts and squats.
 You have a muscular “system” and a nervous “system” and a endocrine (hormones) “system”. Not a bicep system and a quads system. Compound movements work the whole system.
Make sure these exercises are in your routine. Then add isolation exercises.
1.     Dead lift
2.     Wide grip pull up
3.     Chin up
4.     Rows
5.     Bench press
6.     Dips
7.     Shoulder press

You’re doing the Right Exercises but Doing Them with Poor Technique

Bad technique leads to muscle imbalances, ineffective workouts and, very often, injury.
Good form is paramount. Practice good form first, especially on the compound lifts, and then add weight.  If you move a higher weight by cheating on the movement you’re just fooling yourself and stroking your ego. You will fail. Besides that, you look foolish.

You’ve been doing the same Workout too long

When you find a program that works stick with….until it doesn’t.
Your body adapts very quickly and eventually you will hit a plateau. The body needs new and/or different stimulus to continue to grow stronger. At about 4 weeks (for most people) you’ll start to see some slow down in progress. Usually a few tweeks to your present program will get you over those. See some examples HERE
At around 10-12 weeks most people will need to make major changes to their programming to fight the “Adaptive Response” and spur additional gains.

You’re Not Focused on “Progression

Progression simply means continuously increasing the stress on the body so that the body continuously adapts by getting stronger or bigger or both.
Progression is what makes the whole fitness thing work. Without progression you won’t grow bigger, or stronger, or faster or more athletic. Progression is what tells your body “you have to improve to adapt to this new stimulus”.
Try to progress in some manner every week; more weight, more reps, more time under tension, a different range of motion, a different exercise. If you don’t you’ll quickly stagnate.
It sounds silly but the fact is without progression you will not progress! Is that so hard to understand?


Your Workout is Too Long

If you workout runs more than 60 to 75 minuets you may be exceeding your body's ability to maintain the necessary intensity and/or the body's ability to recover properly.

At 60 minutes or so you testosterone(muscle building hormone) level starts to drop and Cortisol(muscle breakdown) hormone increases. When cortisol  level exceeds testosterone level you start breaking down muscle. In addition, your glycogen  level can drop rapidly causing fatigue, loss of mental focus and a rapid drop in energy. In short, you lose the ability to maintain the intensity needed.

Or you are simply wasting too much time between sets and exercises.  You're just going through the motions and accomplishing nothing. To put it in simple terms, “Half-Assery”

Read "More Exercise Is Not Always Better"

Get your nutrition right, then your recovery and you’re 90% closer to growth in size or strength or fat loss. Then the workout.
Miss any of those pieces and it will be slow going.

Questions or comments? Use the comment section below or email me at alphaedgefitness@gmail.com





Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Why You Aren't Getting Stronger or building Muscle._Part 2

WHY YOU AREN’T GETTING STRONGER OR BUILDING MUSCLE
(Part 2)
More Nutrition Problems and Recovery Mistakes

We covered some major nutrition mistakes in Part 1 but nutrition mistakes make up the majority of reasons you are not getting stronger or gaining muscle. It doesn’t matter how good your workout program is or how hard you work if you nutrition is screwed up.
You Cannot Out-train a bad Nutrition Plan.

So here are a couple of additional nutrition issues you need to address.

Your Pre-Workout Nutrition Stinks

Carbs are the key to fueling a good workout. There are 2 types of carbohydrates, simple and complex. Simple carbohydrates (sugar, fruit juice, milk, yogurt) are quickly converted into energy but usually contain high amounts of sugar and won’t provide fuel for very long. Complex carbs take longer to digest, but provide you with long lasting energy. Complex carbs should be what you use to fuel your workouts. (Nuts, seeds, Whole grains, rice, potatoes, legumes)
What you eat 1.5-3 hours before your workout is going to affect how much energy you have. Without the fuel you need your workout is going to stink too.
Without the proper fuel you simply will not be able to maintain the intensity level and focus you need for an effective workout.

Your Post-workout Nutrition Stinks too.

When you finish your workout you have depleted most of the glycogen stores your body needs for fuel as well as much of the protein. Your workout has prompted muscle building hormones to kick into high gear. Without a good post workout nutrition boost how do you suppose your body is going to get glycogen for running your body?
 It’s going to start breaking down muscle tissue to create fuel!
After your workout eat like you are trying to get stronger. Get a full balanced meal within the next 1-4 hours.

You’re not Allowing for Enough Recovery Time 

Your workout program does not allow for adequate rest. Building muscle and strength do not occur in the gym. Your workout is just the stimulus that makes you body adapt and grows stronger or increase muscle.  The actual muscle building (repair and growth of new muscle tissue) takes place out of the gym, when you’re resting and sleeping.
 It’s not just the muscles that need to recover, it’s your whole neurological system, tendons, joints, and even your brain needs rest.
Large muscle groups such as quadriceps, hamstrings, chest and back may need up to 72 hours between heavy training sessions focused on those groups. Smaller muscle groups should have up to 48 hours between sessions.
Be aware of which smaller muscle groups’ support which larger muscle groups too. For example, if you are training triceps the day after your chest workout you are training your triceps two days in a row.
And if you don’t get at least 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night you are probably limiting your gains too.
Nutrition and Recovery make up at least two-thirds of building strength or mass.

Part 3 will cover mistakes made in the gym that are limiting your gains.

Leave comments below or email me at alphaedgefitness@gmail.com


Monday, January 25, 2016

Exercise in the Morning....


Why You Aren't Getting Stronger or Building Muscle_Part 1



WHY YOU AREN’T GETTING STRONGER OR BUILDING MUSCLE
(Part 1)

“I work out several days a week and take supplements but I can’t seem to gain any muscle or get stronger. I’m 49 years old. Is it too late for me?

“NO!”

“I am 66 years old and I can still gain both muscle and strength. Some of my biggest lifts were at 50 years old.”
___________________________________________________________________

This was part of a conversation recently on a group forum but, actually, you could substitute almost any age into this conversation. This forum member was making reference to the fact that testosterone typically declines as we age but that is probably not the problem. (Have the simple blood test to check if you want to eliminate that possibility if have other signs of low T) Our metabolism also slows as we age but only at about 0.5% per decade. (You can’t blame it that any more!)



There is a whole list of reasons you may not gaining strength or muscle mass but lower testosterone and slowing metabolism would both appear somewhere near the bottom of that list.

There are so many reasons, in fact, that a single article covering them all would run way too long. So, over the next week or so I’ll run a series of articles covering them.

Most people are surprised to find that over half of the reasons have nothing to do with their workout.

Let’s start with the most common reason today.

You’re not getting enough calories

Not getting enough calories is the problem about 90% of the time. Especially for people who are trying to lose fat by gaining lean muscle mass. They, somewhat logically, think that if they are trying to lose weight they need to eat fewer calories. That’s true if your goal is to be “skinny-fat”.



“Skinny-fat” people appear thin from a distance or fully clothed but they have lost muscle and still retain a high percentage of fat. Usually the most dangerous kind of fat, the kind that surrounds their organs. Becoming “skinny-fat” also damages and slows your metabolism, making it easier to gain back more fat and gain it back  faster.


 You can gain muscle and lose fat at the same time but you cannot do it by eating less.

How many calories should you be getting? It’s fairly easy to estimate.

Your body needs calories to survive. Breathing, digesting food, heartbeat, maintaining you body heat, even thinking and walking to the fridge requires calories. Those calories make up your Basil Metabolic Rate. (BMR) If you take in more calories than your BMR you gain weight. If you take in less you lose weight.

BMR can be estimated using you age, weight, height, activity level, etc. Just use the easy calculator at Bodybuilding.com
To gain about one pound per week you need to add at least 500 calories per day to your BMR.(1 pound=3500 calories)

Most people underestimate their BMR by a substantial amount. And most people overestimate their activity level.

You’re eating the wrong foods

Sorry, but “a calorie is a calorie” isn’t entirely correct. It’s true that any excess calories from any source may be converted to fat by your body. But some are converted to fat more easily than others and your body doesn’t use all nutrients in the same way or at the same time or same rate.

Hundreds of thousands of books have been written about nutrition. Some are excellent sources of information and most are pure hokum. But what you need to know at this point are the basics.

For muscle growth probably the best ratio is to consume 30% of your calories from protein, 50% from carbs and 20% from fat.This applies to both men and women.

Let’s assume your daily goal is 3000 calories per day
Protein-3000x 30%=900 / 4 (calories of protein in 1 gram)=225 grams of protein per day (about 1 gram per pound of body weight or more)
Carbs-3000x50%=1500/4(calories in a gram of carbs)=375 grams of carbohydrates
Fats-3000x20%=600/9 (There are 9 calories in a gram of fat-more than 2x the number in protein and carbohydrates) =67 grams of fats

Read "Eating for Your fitness Goals

Probably the best database I’ve found for tracking you nutrition is “Myfitnesspal.com”. It’s free, easy and usually accurate. Don’t make tracking your nutrition a lifetime job. Just do for a few weeks and you’ll get a pretty good idea how this works.  You’ll be very surprised at what you find on food labels so make a habit of looking.
 "Healthy Foods that Arn't healthy"

DO NOT GO ON NO/LOW CARB DIETS OR NO/LOW FAT DIETS-
Both carbs and fat are vital to your body. 


You’re not drinking enough water 




About 80% of people do not drink enough water.

There is old adage of drinking “8x8”-Eight ounces of water eight times a day. That’s an old adage simply because it’s easy to remember. Not because it’s correct.

 For most very active people you probably need at least two times that amount
About one ounce of water for every pound of body weight is a good target to shoot for. That’s about three gallons for a 200 pound man. Most people should be somewhere in between.

Some things to remember:
·        If you feel thirsty you are already dehydrated
·        Coffee and Tea don’t count. They are diuretics making you require even more water. Decaf is not so bad.
·        If your urine is anything other than clear you are dehydrated (or have an infection)
·        When you first wake up drink at least 12 ounces of water immediately
·        The easiest way to stay hydrated is to carry a water bottle everywhere you go and sip on it throughout the day.


There's more:
In Part 2 we’ll take a look at other nutrition mistakes and recovery problems.

Give me your questions or comments below or email me at alphaedgefitness@gmail.com









Thursday, January 21, 2016

10 Great Things about Lifting Weights

Hilarious explanation on the advantages of weight lifting for men and women. by T.C. Luoma of T-Nation. 

(Sorry about overlap in spacing)


10-great-things-about-lifting-weights

Here's what you need to know...

  1. Lifting weights allows you to overcome your genetic constraints.
  2. Contrary to what non-training people think, a great female butt isn't formed by some lucky random distribution of fat, but muscle.
  3. When you lift weights, food becomes emotionally satisfying because you're eating with a purpose.
  4. There are no mental troubles that iron can't help cure.
  5. Weightlifting turns female wallflowers into empowered badasses.
  6. When you lift weights, you start to fear fewer and fewer things.

1.  You Get to Flip Your Parents Off

3 Lifters
Lifting weights is great because it lets you overcome your genetic constraints. It doesn't matter if your father was a Moscow circus dwarf and your mother was Ludmilla the juggling pinhead, you can still change your body with weights.
Are you narrow shouldered? Spindly armed? Maybe your chest is so sunken that it makes emphysema patients look robust in comparison, or your legs look remarkably like that of certain waterfowl.
None of it matters because you can use weights to sculpt any or all of those shortcomings into glorious, functional muscle.
Granted, some people have bigger chromosomal hills to climb and some will never look like a cast member of the latest gladiator movie, but it doesn't matter, put some work into it and you can still look pretty damn good naked.

2.  Weightlifting Gives Women Asses To Die For

Pull Up Female
Screw Helen of Troy. The face that launched a thousand ships? Phooey. You see some of the gym-trained posteriors walking around these days? Why, many of them would not only launch a thousand ships, but probably several dozen fighter squadrons, a few marching bands, and maybe even a couple of circus bears riding tricycles.
Contrary to what non-training people think, a great ass isn't formed by some lucky random distribution of fat, but muscle, and muscle is to an ass what the wooden frame is to a house – it gives it scintillating shape and structure.

Related:  More on glute training


Building a great behind isn't even that tricky because the harder you work it, the rounder and more appealing it gets. Just add in exercises like squats, deadlifts, hip thrusts, kettlebell swings, and Prowler drags a few times a week.
And don't worry about overtraining it because the muscles that comprise it are among the largest in the human body and it's a veritable workhorse. So, load it up, work it out, work it out, load it up, Rawhide!

3.  Weightlifting Changes Your Relationship With Food

Steak
You gotta pity the normal people. For them food is nothing but pleasure.
Their social activities are mostly based on feasting. Lunch and dinner aren't biological necessities, they're excuses for gastronomical Roman orgies, lacking only the sex and the purging. Eating is just something they do with friends. Birthday parties, tailgate parties, funerals! All just excuses to eat.
And the type of food? It doesn't matter to them. It's all cotton candy – a rapidly evaporating sensation of taste and then... nothing.
It changes, though, when you start lifting. Suddenly, food becomes emotionally satisfying and useful because you're eating with a purpose. You start to think more like a Native American Indian in that you think about your food with almost a spiritual sense because you know that what you eat is going to become part of you, hopefully in the form of muscle.
You become aware of types of protein, types of carbohydrate, and types of fat. You become aware of the quantity of food and how often you need it. And because food now has a purpose beyond recreation, you actually enjoy it more than the normal people who eat purely for pleasure.

4.  Demons Fear Metal

curl
There inevitably comes a time in everyone's life when the bad stuff comes. It could be in the form of the death of a loved one, unrequited love, or legal or financial trouble. No one is immune.
Some handle the pain gracefully and heroically, realizing that time heals all and happiness, too, is inevitable. They seek solace through religion or spirituality, counseling, or the sturdy shoulders of good friends.
Others resort to destructive behavior like drugs, alcohol, or abusing the body and soul in general, while still others suffer perpetually, never quite ridding themselves of various demons.
But there's one little-known therapy that's remarkably effective and it's good ol' weight lifting. There are no ailments that iron can't help cure. A hard, teeth gritting, grimacing, sweat-flying workout is the best therapy of all, and pushing something heavy so hard that it makes you cry out in pain is better than all the tears in the world.
Who knows if it's chemical, psychological, or spiritual, but it gets rid of the demons.
Granted, the demons might come back later in the night at the wolf hour, as they're wont to do, but you just get up the next morning and exorcise them through exercise all over again. Eventually, they look for a new home.

5.  And Then There's That Health Thing

Push up
Weightlifting makes you healthier. You invariably lose fat. You get a healthier blood profile. Your arteries get as wide as the Keystone pipeline. The reliability of your ticker starts to match that of certain expensive German-made automobiles.
Cancer thinks twice about messing with you, as does diabetes. Vitality increases to the point where you can make love to two or more women while digging a fencepost hole. That kind of thing.

6.  Weightlifting Makes Life Easier

Dave Tate
To guys like Jim Wendler, Dave Tate, and Amir Sapit, the world must seem like it's made out of paper mache.
"Sorry ma, I accidentally ripped the door off dad's safe while picking up a Jujyfruit."
While the vast majority of weightlifters will never attain that level of Hulk-ish strength, they'll all get considerably stronger, oh yes they will, and physical strength makes life a lot easier. It's downright useful to be able to move things, lift things, or unscrew things.
Ask any guy who's got a weightlifting wife and ask him if his life's easier. You want to move a sleeper sofa or, I don't know, erect a barn? You don't have to wait until your Amish neighbors get home from the buggy races, you've got a strong wife who can tote that barge and lift that bale.
And sometimes, the strength can actually save your life. You can probably imagine just as many scenarios as I can about how being able to bust open a door, dislodge a heavy object, or just grab onto somebody to immobilize them could be pretty useful.
But the physical strengths pale next to the mental strength weightlifting gives you. It takes iron will to go to the gym several times a week and deliberately inflict pain on yourself.
And the good thing about that iron will is that unlike airline tickets, it's transferable. You can use it to tackle and overcome just about anything life throws at you, physical or emotional.

7.  Weightlifting Delays Being Put Out to Pasture

Old Bodybuilder
In the old days, once you hit 45 or 50 years old, you were toast – feeble, mottle-skinned, moldy toast with weevils in it. Your kids put you in the garage when friends came over. If your equally moldy wife wanted to have sex with you, it was just so she could time a soft-boiled egg.
Weightlifting, though, is the true fountain of youth. A long-time lifter in his forties or fifties is pretty much as strong as a lifter half his age. Sure, he's not as quick or agile, but strength wise, there's just not that much of a diminishing return.
For the most part, a veteran lifter can punch out some punk just as well as a 25-year-old lifter, only the veteran's scarred up knuckles leave more abrasions on the butthead's face.
So it's almost better.
Because of weightlifting, you're starting to see this weird phenomenon where for the first time in human history, you see old guys with bodies that look the same as those of young guys: same muscle size, same muscle tone, and often the same definition.
Sure, the older guys can't do much to young up their faces and they have to shave their backs more often, but you can't have everything.

8.  Weightlifting Gives You Satisfaction Every Day

Deadlift
In past millennia, humans were too busy – too challenged – to be worried about much of the stuff that bedevils us today. After hunting for food, fending off attacks from competing tribes or villages, and simply trying to survive each day, you went to sleep exhausted.
You didn't have modern day worries like job stability, finances, and your place in the world, or whether there's someone in the world who'll love you. Life was basic. Life was satisfying. Life was primal.
Weightlifting brings a bit of the primal back. We need battles – we need challenges – to tie us back into nature, to tie us back into the primal way of life.
Weightlifting allows us to be savage, to let go completely, to shut out all the noise and pit our bodies against a foe. By doing so, it provides meaning and purpose, two things that are prerequisites in pretty much any definition of a good life.
Because of that, there's only one thing better than lifting, and that'shaving lifted, because it stays with you like a bowl of chili and a hip flask of whiskey on a frigid, blustery day.

9.  Weightlifting Turns Wallflowers into Hellcats

Jelena
I've never met a female weightlifter who was meek, timid, or shy. Oh, they may have started out that way, but once they were seduced by Mr. Iron, they gradually grew more and more confident in themselves.
They became comfortable in their own skin. They no longer grimaced when they looked in the mirror. Nor do they feel the compulsion to dim the lights and run for the cover of the sheets when they take off their clothes so that you can't see their body.
Instead, they say, or at least act as if they're saying, "Ay Papi, go ahead and look. Give your eyes some candy, because you don't often see chicas that look this hot."
And if there's something they still don't like about their bodies, theyfix it rather than crying into a pillow about the inequities of the universe and why-o-why aren't they hot like Kate Upton, who, by the way, as a bikini model, could stand to get to the gym herself.

Related:  Redefining the Female Bodybuilder


This confidence in their body transfers over to other areas, too. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I suspect female weightlifters have better jobs, make more money, and don't have to worry about some office shithead harassing them because, well, they just don't take that guff.
They know that if Palmer, Spalding, or Blake gets overly crass or suggestive, they could take his head between their strong thighs and pop it like the festering boil it is.

10.  You No Longer Fear Bad Shit

Fight Scene
Maybe you used to be wary about trouble. If you were walking down a dark street at night and two or three guys were walking towards you, you might have put your head down and crossed to the other side. Like any normal person, you worried about criminals and thugs and evil mothers in general.
Then you started lifting weights. You started getting stronger. And while you realized that muscle and strength don't always win fights, you started to fear fewer and fewer things. While you used to be fearful, you now, just maybe, once in a while, even hope for some sort of confrontation.
C'mon, you won't admit this to normal people, but you're among friends now. Aren't you just a little bit disappointed when the guy in the tiny econo Beemer doesn't try to zip ahead of you and take your parking spot? Likewise, aren't you the least bit tempted to leave your door ajar, you know, to entice the occasional intruder?
Granted, looking for trouble isn't smart, but I understand it. You're fed up with a rude, mean world and once in awhile, you'd like to take that wrecking machine you built in the gym out for a little spin and teach Justice 101 to some miscreant.
It's okay to feel that way. In fact, it's a good thing. It beats being afraid. Just use some discretion. Don't act on these vigilante impulses unless you have to because the world is full of litigious lawyers and it sure as hell is okay to be fearful of them.
01/13/15