Preganant?

 #26


Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb. -Austin Kleon


Fit Tip: Chase Health, Aesthetics Will Follow

A lot, if not most people are motivated to start working out and eating better in an effort to look better. It is fine if part of your goal is to achieve a certain look, but be careful focusing on only this goal. The best way to achieve a good-looking body is to create a healthy body. If someone is highly motivated to lean out with little consideration to their overall health, they might run themselves into ground with exercise and eat too little to recover. They might regularly sacrifice sleep to get more workouts in thinking this is the grind that will get them the look they want. They will burn out and get set back repeatedly. Or they may even find 'the look' but end up screwing up their body in other ways. If health was the main goal, exercise and diet would still be considered, but they would fit into a healthy lifestyle. The exercise would support health and strength and avoid injury. The diet would be aimed at gaining nutrition to support the body and not simply restriction. You have goals to look like a statue, but you are a machine! Chase health, aesthetics will undoubtedly follow. 


Exercise During Pregnancy

How much or what kind of exercise should one do while pregnant seems to be a commonly debated topic even to this day. In this systematic review nine randomized controlled trials were used to evaluate the benefits of strength training during pregnancy. Some of the proven benefits of strength training during pregnancy include: mitigating excessive weight gain, alleviating low back and sciatic pain, enhanced mood, enhanced quality of life, strength, sleep quality, decreased pelvic pain, decreased anxiety, and increased energy. It was even shown that heavy exercises that require breath bracing (Valsalva maneuvers) were not harmful and even beneficial to pregnant women. It is expected that common sense is to be used when considering exercise during pregnancy. Some pregnancies have complications that require the mother be less active. One should not be chasing any personal records or going harder than they know they can handle in their training while pregnant. I might add that ideally one is strength training before they are pregnant. You are about to go through something quite stressful on the body; may as well be as durable as possible ahead of time. 

Note to the dads: you ought to be strength training before your wife is pregnant too. Research shows that a father's lifestyle can affect a baby's health. Look up information on epigenetics to see how this works. 

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40230063/ 






June Challenge: Fasting

The challenge for the past few weeks has been to complete at least one fast of 16 hours. I think the easiest way to accomplish this is to quit eating after dinner and delay your first meal of the day. For example, finish dinner at 6:00 pm and wait to eat breakfast until  10:00am the next day. A fast this short could be done every day. If you want to attempt something even longer, go for it, but don't feel like you have to do a 20+ hour fast often. 
While fasting has physical health benefits, keep in mind that traditionally fasting was performed in an effort to greater focus on one's spiritual life. Skip the meal, not the prayer time. 



Win the weekend!


Brad


Durable Dad Training


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cereal is Dessert, Change My Mind

 #24 "What a blessing it is to be tired in the pursuit of a challenge of your own choosing" Fit Tip: There is No Specific Exercise You NEED Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned lifter, there is no one exercise that you MUST include. There are certainly exercises that are fantastic and may provide a lot more benefit than other moves. If these are intimidating and keeping you from lifting weights at all, then relax and forget about them. I also bring this up as a popular social media tactic is to post a short video with this kind of message: "The ONE exercise you need to be doing!" These kind of taglines can make you feel like you are far from optimal and maybe even wasting your time training. Remember, they are just fishing for clicks . If you simply have goals of getting stronger and healthier (aesthetics naturally follow) then no one specific exercise is going to keep you from that. Do what you are comfortable with for a while and progress to other moves as you...
Read more

Core Memories

Issue #14  Core Memories If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain . -Irvin Yalom Welcome back. I hope this Friday’s fit tip changes the way you workout your core. I have dedicated a fair amount of time to building a strong core, and an equal amount of time avoiding crunches. Recently I have even made a workout plan that completely revolves around strengthening the core. The Iron Core workout (name open to change) has zero traditional situps and is fun and challenging even for an intermediate or advanced weight lifter. Fit Tip: How to Effectively Work the Core Traditional exercises that work the abdominals are often uncomfortable and dreaded by most. The only time I do a crunch is if it is followed by ... wrap supreme . Not only are the endless situps and crunches annoying, they are also ineffective at training the core. Many are using their hip flexors instead of engaging the core when doing situps. Your abs are more than just a poolside aesthet...
Read more

Cold Case

Image
  #18 "Man cannot remake himself without suffering for he is both the marble and the sculptor" C.S. Lewis     Fit Tip: Get Uncomfortable Sometimes There are a lot of things about our convenient modern life that we have found to cause poor health: our lack of manual labor that allows for a sedentary lifestyle, our highly-processed hyper-palatable foods, our smart phones that support a lifestyle lacking real social interactions or moments of boredom. One often overlooked modern convenience is our temperature regulation . We can move from one perfectly conditioned room to a conditioned car to another temperature regulated building every day. Much like hard physical work, our bodies were made to adapt according to conditions far outside of 72 degrees. Your body should be able to regulate temperature well enough that you are not reaching for a blanket if it falls below 65 degrees. While saunas and cold plunges are becoming all the rage, there is proof that even something as si...
Read more