The Lure Of “Fat Free”

So you are strolling through the supermarket in search of something healthy to snack on.  All of a sudden what catches your eye is a bag of your favorite potato chips brand and right on the front of the bag, with gigantic letters it reads ” Light”.  You grab the bag and look at the fat content (what most people do when they are looking for a healthy snack ).

As your eyes are scrolling the nutrition facts, you notice that these chips have a zero fat content.  And then right next to it, you also notice a sign: ” Same great taste  but with half the calories and zero fat “.  This is perfect, you think, and then you proceed to go home and finish the whole bag of chips.

The potato chips are just an example – have you ever wondered how these chips or other zero fat content foods are made?  I know I have, because the first time I saw a bag of chips or cookies and they were fat-free I automatically thought about a saying: “There is no such thing as a free lunch “.

How Do They Make This Magic Food?  

This is the question I asked myself the first time I saw a fat-free food.  All you have to do is to look at the ingredients, and most likely you are going to find an ingredient called “Olean” or “Olestra”.  Olestra is a non-fat cooking oil that is made by chemically combining sugar with the fatty acids obtained from vegetable oils.  To be honest, the only thing I truly noticed in the above sentence is ” Chemically combining sugar “.  You can stop right there for me and I will say – no thank you!  But some people need a lot more information to truly understand  what it is they are eating, and that’s why I will be going into further detail on why you should avoid eating foods containing Olestra or at least cut down on it.

Olestra has a structure of about 8 chains of molecules, where regular fat has only 3.  This makes Olestra indigestible by the body, pretty much like eating paper: your body has no way to digest it, so it just passes through your system unchanged.  This may sound like a great idea, but in reality what it does is deprive your body of nutrients such as fat soluble vitamins.

Nutrients Get Depleted

When we eat regular fat, many important nutrients in order to be absorbed have to attach themselves to fat.  If we are eating fat that cannot be absorbed by the body, the vitamins will still attach themselves to it, but your system is not going to get any of them.

I think in our modern way of eating, we cannot afford not to absorb any nutrients.  Most people I know are not exactly health nuts, so if you are not getting enough nutrients from your food, and the little that you do eat get’s carried away by indigestible fat, then you have nothing left.  If you are eating foods made with Olestra on a regular basis you may soon discover that your immune system is failing and may begin getting colds a lot faster than you normally would.  When this happens and the body is not getting enough nutrients it will have a tough time healing or repairing itself.

Get Something Healthy, Not Fat-Free

Other side effects of Olestra include vomiting and loose stools, but I think these are very small in comparison of vitamin depletion and an immune system failure. Well, unless you are on a date.

Next time you are strolling through the supermarket looking for a healthy snack, I would recommend getting something low-fat with wholesome ingredients instead of something fat-free.

Picture courtesy of Erich Ferdinand.

Rising Obesity Rates

Given continuously rising rates of obesity among children, it’s clear that things aren’t quite what they should be. Children today enjoy less physical activity than those 30 years ago, while simultaneously consuming more calories.

Offering nutritional education programs under these circumstances makes quite a bit of sense. But what about those in the age range of 6 – 18 that already spend too much time worrying about what and how much they eat, how that will affect their dress size and whose entire self-image is centered on these facts?

Eating Disorders

A poll conducted by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital asked parents about obesity prevention programs in their children’s schools and the food-related behaviors and activities these children exhibit. Of all parents polled, 82% reported that there was at least one intervention program taking place at school, ranging from simple nutrition lessons to those combining these with weight and height measurements and physical activities.

The problem is that 30% of these parents also told the researchers about at least one behavior in their children that could be classified as an emerging eating disorder: eating dangerously low amounts, laboriously studying food labels, not eating with the family and spending excessive amounts of time on fitness.

The Big, The Thin, The Unhappy

The first thing coming to your mind here may be underweight girls, for whom (nearly) anorexic stars serve as role models. More often than not that is the case, as Tatianna recently highlighted in an article.

But these days the problem has spread further: in my experience more and more boys fall into the same trap. The number of rather thin male adolescents who ask me about how much more weight they have to lose to have a six-pack is already legion.

Last but not least, we also have those that are overweight and who due to school obesity programs may come to feel extreme dissatisfaction with themselves: what happens to children that can’t manage their weight despite all these interventions?

A Child Is An Individual

Accordingly, Dr. David Rosen, one of the researchers behind the poll, commented that the effects these programs have need to be closely monitored:

When obesity interventions are put in place without understanding how they work and what the risks are, there can be unintended consequences. Well-intentioned efforts can go awry when children misinterpret the information they’re given.

I agree with this assessment. It simply does not do to deploy these programs and hope for the best. Every child and every teenager has individual strengths and weaknesses and addressing them is a responsibility that needs to be shared between schools and parents.

Picture courtesy of André Mouraux.

Clamps, Collars, Locks

Whatever you call the little things keeping plates in place on a barbell, you have to know when and how to use them. When doing barbell biceps curls, put them on. If you do deadlifts, yes, please, put them on. But leave them off when you do benchpresses without safety equipment, especially when you train at home:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Important At Home And The Gym!

This is of very much importance for those of you training at home, but in my opinion it won’t hurt to do the same at a gym. Even if you have a spotter, rare is the one that can catch a 200 lbs barbell without it impacting on your chest or neck.

Don’t worry if leaving them off for benchpresses will sometimes garner you a belittling “dude, you didn’t put the locks on” from someone thinking of himself as a “pro”. The misuse of locks and collars is so very much widespread, that someone using them correctly is the exception and not the norm.

Seeing Food Is Enough

If you watched my video from last week, you may remember that in there we said that the best way to avoid eating is keeping your mind off of it and food out of sight, instead of trying to actively force direct resistance against munching something down.

Now scientists tackled the subject from a different angle and proved that just seeing pictures of food can have tremendous impact on our cravings: in an experiment, they showed participants pictures of either edible or inedible objects and measured hormone levels related to hunger.

They found that the concentration of the hormone ghrelin in the blood increases specifically in response to stimulation from food images. Ghrelin plays a key role in hunger regulation – the higher its level, the hungrier you are. The people being shown the neutral images experienced no change.

Avoid Visual Stimulation?

Petra Schüssler, one of the people responsible for the study, remarks on the institute’s homepage:

The findings of our study demonstrate, for the first time, that the release of ghrelin into the blood for the regulation of food consumption is also controlled by external factors. Our brain thereby processes these visual stimuli, and the physical processes that control our perception of appetite are triggered involuntarily. This mechanism could prompt us to eat a piece of cake just two hours after breakfast”.

She goes on to recommend “that individuals with weight problems should preferably avoid looking at images of appetising food”.

Which is easier said than done, Mrs. Schüssler. You drive home from work, you see food billboards. You turn on your television, you see food commercials. You open a magazine, you see food advertisements.

Picture courtesy of Steve Snodgrass.

From Extreme To Extreme

The other day I wrote an article about the image of overly thin women that is being fed to us by the media. As I was writing it, I realized that the other extreme and the idea of ” Big Is Beautiful” seem to be just as wildly popular.

Before I start to analyze that concept, I would like to say that being too skinny is also very unhealthy and I am definitely a supporter of meat and muscle.  On the magazines and runways we see women who are in a big need of a good meal. But we also see plenty of programs on TV that tell us to embrace being big.

When Plus Size Models Argue

The scenario that got under my skin was two plus size models. One of them was a size 10, looking healthy and very proportionate to her body. The other was a size 14 and she definitely looked very overweight and not so healthy. The healthy looking model was telling her story and her struggles with weight. She also said she lost about 50 lbs and now is finally happy with how she feels about her self.

Then the two models started arguing who should take the job. The size 14 model said that she deserved the job because she was a truly plus size model and she doesn’t think it’s right to give the job to the other model because she wasn’t “embracing” being big and that she herself loves being big, that this was her natural size, she didn’t want to lose weight because “big is beautiful”.  She also added that she works out on a regular basis and eats healthy foods in small portions throughout the day.

You see, this is where I had a hard time believing her words, because her waistline was the biggest part of her body and, in my opinion, she looked extremely unhealthy. To be honest, I don’t think it’s possible to workout on a regular basis and eat small portions of healthy foods and be a size 14 – I simply don’t believe it can physically be done.

You may think of "big" as "beautiful", but is it healthy?

I also don’t  believe it’s healthy for younger generations to think that it’s ok to be so overweight and embrace it. In my opinion, people who say that “big is beautiful” don’t truly believe in their own words. I’ve seen the expressions on those women’s faces, they don’t look as happy as they say they are. What I don’t understand is why there is such a need to lie to our selves as well as others. I guess it’s easier to say, “embrace being big ” instead of saying: “Yes I am overweight, and I struggle and it’s not healthy “.

What Do You Think?

It may be beautiful in some people’s eyes, but it’s definitely not healthy. I would like to remind you that being overweight causes high blood pressure, elevation of bad cholesterol, elevated blood glucose, heart disease that could lead to heart attack or heart failure, different forms of cancer, reduced immune function, etc, and these are just few of the symptoms.  So why in the world would some people promote the beauty of being overweight?  Is this the example that we should show to our children?  Should we just tell them it’s in their genetics and let them accept that?

I  personally stand for creating a healthy future for upcoming generations, because from what I’m seeing so far it’s not looking very good.  People seem to run from one extreme to the other.  I think instead of promoting “big is beautiful” or “skinny is beautiful” we should focus on a healthy life style in general, such as  choosing the right foods, learning more  variations of physical activity and keeping  active overall.

Do you think it’s OK to accept being overweight and proclaim that it’s beautiful?

Pictures courtesy of Tony Alter and Emilio Labrador.

Intro

I have absolutely no interest in bodybuilding nutrition, whatsoever. I still know more of it than most trainees out there, but it just doesn’t spark my curiosity, thus I have no desire to think on it and play around or experiment.

I am a Nutrition Minimalist – I eat in such a way that my gains don’t suffer, but at the same time, want to stay in my comfort zone, which saves me from detailed calorie logs, watching how much saturated fat am I taking in this time of day at this meal with these other macronutrients, and how much unsaturated, am I having this percentage of complex carbs in this meal that is this much away from my workout and that much away from my sleep, etc.

Yet, I greatly admire people who can make page-long discussions on things related to nutrition: simply all the knowledge and understanding of the processes involved that are required for such feats of intellect. And I also admit that my approach and attitude is inferior, as I could probably get a nice edge if I were watching my nutrition more closely. But I don’t, I’m too lazy to do it, and I don’t run from that fact nor brag about it.

My passion is training. I study all things that relate to it in great detail, and, consequentially, know a few things on it that the training majority misses or misinterprets. And, naturally, my type has our own mirror images, the Training Minimalists, who, for some reason, almost universally consider that their stripped, barren, basics-only approach somehow outshines and outperforms the detailed one that I endorse.

Basics only?

The reasons why I disagree with such attitude are obvious and blatantly biased, but I believe that I have a couple of objective arguments that tilt the scales in my favor. This rant-masked-in-an-article will attempt to convey them as simply as possible, focusing on important things in general training. All the section titles below (except the “Analogy” one) represent true statements that any natural trainee ought to follow, and which Training Minimalists have absorbed well, but have, in this quest for simplicity, taken them to extremes which, in the end, don’t work as good as they could, if a more sensible approach were taken. We’ll take a look at where are the limits to interpretation for each of those, and where do facts and detail come into play.

So, to make it clear, (most) minimalist routines work better than majority of garbage thrown around in the fitness community. I just resent the notion that they differ in effectiveness from more elaborate routines by measly 1-5%. But enough talking, let’s start playing with real life examples.

An Analogy To Begin With

When faced with a Training Minimalist, I usually hear complaints that my work is overly complicated. Fair enough. But, in my eyes, this resembles complaining that modern airplanes are overly complicated, and thus unnecessary, since any hot air balloon can essentially do exactly what they can – fly you from one place to another. But the question arises – how far, how fast, and how bumpy will the ride be? Don’t take these questions as mere tools of the analogy: they translate very directly into training world.

Here are a few examples, all of which will be discussed in more detail later in the text. How far – most minimalist routines stop yielding results after the so-called “beginner strength plateau” is reached. They try to compensate by further reducing frequency and volume, which partly constitutes a step in the right direction, but they often take it too far so that overall volume becomes too low for further progressing, and they can’t increase it because they want as few compound movements as possible, which, again, they can’t recover from.

In for a ride?

They also miss out the individuality and specificity principles in the process. How fast – because of the aforementioned fallacies, besides a few others which we’ll mention, it usually takes for people who insist on bare-basic routines twice as long to reach advanced status and make any progress at that level. How bumpy will the ride be – I saw a minimalist routine recently that had bench press as its only pressing exercise, done for 10 sets in a workout. God save that man’s poor shoulders, because he obviously doesn’t give the slightest damn about them.

I could go on here, but it’s better if we start examining these problems in a more structured and detailed manner. So, onto good training principles taken to the extreme:

Compound Exercises Are The Staple Of Any Training

I needn’t explain this one, I hope. If you aren’t about moving weights on big compounds, you aren’t training properly and can’t hope to achieve your goals in muscle mass (if they’re above-average, of course), and Training Minimalists, luckily, know this well. The problem starts when they start viewing this simple principle as the be-all and end-all of weight training. In fact, it’s as fundamental as notion that you have to eat food in order to gain muscle. Because, simply, isolation-based (or isolation-filled) routines don’t work, at all. I’m not making this up, I’ve seen many times, on forums and in blog comments, statements like: “That routine is too complicated, just do compounds, and you’re covered.” In other words, do compounds, and you don’t have to think about anything else training-related. Right.

Compounds: No training should be without them

More on-topic, this tends to extent into rejections of any isolation work, whatsoever. I gave my view on this subject in this article series, and listed isolation exercises which I feel that should be done by almost any trainee, and which are rejected by the minimalist crowd because they’re non-compound and take away from the simplicity the strive for. (Notice that this story recurs in almost all discussions of this sort – real arguments are confronted by a principle that must be strictly adhered to. This kind of extremism is actually widespread in lifting community, e.g. the supposed necessity of eating multiple small, well-balanced meals that ends up being defended by all sorts of ludicrous statements, or the infamous group of HIT Jedis, who can’t think of any type of training that doesn’t include having 80% of your TUT done beyond failure.)

This story goes beyond these few isolations that I explained in the “Important Isolations” series, which I recommend doing for sake of balance and injury prevention. For in bodybuilding world, there’s another kind of balance that is very important: the so-called issue of “lagging bodyparts”, where some muscles could use additional work not because they lack of development that would disrupt joint stability and lead to injuries, but because it messes up one’s symmetry and aesthetic qualities of the physique. Here’s an example that I’ve seen numerous times – triceps lagging in chest-dominant pressers who focus on bench press alone (or devote an unproportional amount of time to it). Not that they lack triceps development at all, it’s just subpar compared to other parts of their body. This is most often a consequence of two things: poor M2M connection, and the fact that poor exercise utilization has lead to chest massively overpowering triceps and taking much of its work, even on exercises such as dips or CGBP. The solution – isolation work in hopeless cases, and a semi-isolation like California press for the rest.

The real issue with training minimalism (or any approach generally that seeks to base its operation on as few rules as possible) is its maladaptiveness. This first section gave an example of inferior physique results in intermediate trainees that result from kicking all isolation work altogether from a routine. Next stop: relying on a single exercise to get the job done and keep you injury-free.

Fewer Exercises Is Better Than A Lot Of Them

Doing a ton of exercises is unnecessary and takes away from training results by inserting too much overlap that impedes recovery. In other words, there’s no need for you to do flat, low-incline, and decline bench press in your routine. However, there is a limit under which you shouldn’t go. For example, I’d never go below doing 2 upper body pressing exercises in a routine – viable options are something like incline BP and parallel bar dips, or overhead press and decline DB press. Just observe the exercise choices and you’ll get a hint of what I’m aiming at. On the other side, the Minimalists usually have one press for entire training microcycle, and that’s almost universally flat BB BP.

When choosing exercises, you need to find the right balance between too much and too little

This time, for the sake of variety, I won’t pull out the physique argument, although it’s valid in this case as well. The issue here is more serious, and deals not with training muscles, but movements and planes of motion. Strengthening just one exercise, with its unique movement and range of motion, is a recipe for joint weakness and muscle imbalances. This gets slightly worse if you’re using fairly unnatural exercises, such as the bench press, in which your scapulae are pinned against the bench and can’t (nor shouldn’t) move, unlike basic pushups, in which you can protract them at the top of the movement. On top of this, you need to consider the danger of overuse injuries, which are common with all the problems which are over-reliant on a single movement patter (such as GVT).

There are, of course, more subtle things that actually show the difference between blunt and detailed in a clearer way. You see, the Minimalists stay away from complicated exercise names. “The less the better,” they say, and use vague names such as “curl”, “bench press”, “row”, referring, most of the time, to most basic variations of these movements. Let’s overlook the fact that “curling” can hit a lot more than your biceps alone, and focus on more direct consequences this generalized exercise naming approach has on training.

Firstly, you loose the necessary specificity and individuality components of training – there are no exercises that are good and safe for everyone in the same amount, and this becomes more evident and important as a trainee clears his beginning training levels. I can name dozens of row variations, and have an application for each of them based on the individual, but also because different combinations of exercises (different exercise choices in routine designing) require different variations to be used. For example, let’s say a trainee is doing trap bar squatlifts as his main leg movement, and doesn’t do other types of deadlifts. This pulls along picking a rowing variation that is closer to perfect horizontal pulling as possible, in order to add more necessary emphasis on upper-to-middle back. Likewise, if a trainee has improving his overhead press as his main goal, I surely aren’t putting incline presses in there as well, and, most likely, I’d shy away from any other type of barbell pressing as well, and focus on DB work. And so on, and so on…

A barbell benchpress is not equal to a dumbbell benchpress is not equal to an inclined benchpress is not equal to...

Second reason stems from the fact that subtle variations in exercise performance can yield different and/or better training results. E.g., doing triceps extension on decline bench leads to higher fiber recruitment in the triceps. Doing leg curls on a humpback bench reduces lower back involvement. Doing DB rows with an arc trajectory targets different part of the back than regular, up’n'down DB rows do. And I won’t even start talking about all the variations of squats and unilateral leg work you can do to correct quad imbalances and accommodate for differences in height, torso to limb length ratio, lower back vulnerability (or the lack of it), etc.

Low Volume Is Better Than High Volume

Mainstream bodybuilding routines are hypervolumized. They put in too many exercises for too many sets in (almost exclusively) higher rep range, all for the sake of “trashing the muscle properly.” Of course that this is a dumb recommendation, since neither does the muscle need to be trashed to grow (quite the contrary, chronic stimulus always beats acute stimulus), nor can a regular, natural trainee recover from that much volume. But, again, our Minimalist friends take this one too far as well, and rarely go beyond recommending 2 or 3 sets per exercise. And yes, it’s most often just number of sets, no mention of rep range or anything similar.

First of all, as I have said already, number of sets is a consequence of prescribed rep range, therefore it makes no sense to make it first, prioritized volume indicator (and even less to make it the only one, of course). Different rep ranges for different exercises call for different number of sets. Doing sumo deadlifts for triples in bodybuilding-oriented, submaximal routine calls for something like 10 sets to get adequate exercise volume. Front squats, done for sets of 5, call for 4 to 6 sets. Regular DB bench pressing for ten reps, three sets is fine. But then, lateral raises done for sets of 15? 2 sets at best.

Furthermore, less is not better – better is better. You can push past the beginner plateau by reducing volume, but it’s not the best solution. The proper way to do it is to restructure the workout, and, if necessary, define a periodization scheme that will alternate priority of movements during a cycle, and all of this is done without sacrificing volume at all, because, after all, you need some amount of volume to trigger hypertrophy (as I talked about here). This is the part where most discrepancies between oversimplified and more elaborate routines start occurring, since the former can’t provide their trainees with sufficient amount of work without jumping out of their abbreviated template.

Do you have to "trash" your muscles?

Have More Rest Days Than Training Days

You need to recover from your training. Being natural means you need more time to recover. Having suboptimal lifestyle conditions (work, family, stress…) means even less time to recover properly. But again there is a limit. Most trainees can train at least three times a week, some four, if that is necessary at all. If you can’t handle it, you don’t resort to training three times in ten days, as the Minimalists suggest, for the simple reason that it messes up your training frequency. Training so seldom throws you into maintenance mode at best. Some people can retain strength levels by having 10 days between same sessions, but most can’t, and experience de-training.

Again, the cure for ensuring consistent strength (and thus size) gains after the rapid beginner phase isn’t in mindlessly reducing the frequency to bare minimums, but choosing priorities and scaling down the amount of impact generated by major compounds. Adopting a more intermediate frequency plan, such as an upper/lower split done 4 DAW, is an example of such a solution. You can no longer train your legs thrice a week, but can do it twice, and to divide those days between squatting and deadlifting. This major work is complemented by accessory (still compound) work, which ensures enough training stimulus. So again, no need to hide into training so rarely that you workouts coincide with changing of seasons (“Oh, look, winter is coming, time to do my half a set of deadlifts.”)

Conclusion

This was a rant, and not an article, and like all rants, it was highly personalized and biased. I admit it, and can’t escape it. I actually wrote all of this not so much to prove my point, since I neither blame Training Minimalists nor encourage them to adopt my approach to training (I know that I’d hit someone with a barbell if they suggested me to start weighing my apples ), but to have a collection of arguments to present when someone asks me why am I devoting so much time and effort to making training routines as elaborate and optimized as possible. But I also sincerely hope you learned something in the process. Stay well, train well!

Pictures courtesy of Johan Bichel Lindegaard, Benjamin J. DeLong, Eric Lim, Jon Clegg, “winnifredxoxo“, Jason Lengstorf and Channone Arif.

Staring Down Temptation

Many people believe that eating less is a question of willpower: you face the temptation and just say no to it. In reality, this almost always leads to failure, as the more you try to force resistance, the stronger the temptation becomes.

Instead, you have to stop actively resisting the temptation of food and instead occupy your attention with something different that fills up your mind:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why Does It Work?

The reason this more often than not works is simple: We have a limited capacity for attention. Try reading a complicated magazine article while simultaneously solving difficult math problems in your head – chances are that you will find it very hard to do both simultaneously.

The marshmallow experiment vividly shows that for our own benefit we can have some say where we direct that attention to. When it comes to eating, there is a chance you already experienced the effect yourself or know someone who did: being so busy solving a difficult problem that your forgot it was lunch time.

Picture courtesy of “Father.Jack“.

Day 2 – Upper Body & Interval Training Cardio

For this workout you will need a set of dumbbells, a chair, and an interval timer. Similar to the first part of the split, Day 2 is divided into two parts.

Part One

Repeat 3 – 4 rounds of the following, rest 1 minute after each round:

 
Part Two – Interval Training Cardio

Now the second part. You do a total of 8 – 10 rounds of the following, with 10 – 15 seconds rest between rounds and each round being 40 seconds under maximum effort:

 
You are done! To finish things off, I recommend you do 15 minutes of light stretching (see this article, toward the middle).

Your Weekly Schedule

When looking at your weekly workout schedule, you should alternate between the two days (“splits”) of this workout and there are two ways you can go about it. There first is what I generally recommend, the second is if you really want to push yourself:

 
If you decide to go for for the first schedule, you should start the next week with the the part of the workout you didn’t finish the last week with. In the plan above, for example, you finished the week with the Day 1 workout, so next week should start with the Day 2 workout and then Day 1, Day 2 etc.

Picture © Lovingfit.com.

How Does This Workout Work?

This workout is a 2-day-split, which means it divides the body into two areas that are handled on different days: Workout 1 and Workout 2. I like to use splits in workout routines because they give our bodies an opportunity to recover and we can also work more muscles per workout.

To do the routine you will need a chair, a set of dumbbells (I was using a set of 10 lbs ( 5 kg) each), and a stopwatch to time it. We should always time our workouts, this way when we repeat the routine we can see how much we’ve progressed.

If you aren’t familiar with any of the exercises, no worries: Most of them I demonstrate in the videos you’ll find below or there will be a link to an explanation.

Warm-Up

Before you get started, you should warm up, as this prepares your muscles for the tasks ahead. I recommend you do ten minutes: Five minutes of freestyle jump rope to increase cardiopulmonary activity and five minutes of workout-specific movements. Those are movements that mimic the actual exercise movements you do later on. For an in-depth explanation of both concepts, have a look at this article.

Workout 1 - Lower Body, Cardio & Core

On to the first workout of the split. It is divided into three parts, which means we’ll finish one part and then move on to the next. The three parts together make up the complete workout 1.

Part 1

Set your  stopwatch and get ready. There are 3 exercises and you do them for a total of 3 rounds:

 
Part 2

For the second part, set your timer for 2 intervals: 30 seconds and 50 seconds. The total is 5 rounds with two exercises you will do back and forth:

 
Part 3

On to part 3, where we handle core strength. Rest 1 minute between the sets:

 
Videos

Here is a video of me doing the exercises. Notice how I always try to keep proper form, which is what you should do too:

Click here to view the embedded video.

 
Sounds complicated? It really isnt. Here is a longer explanation of it:

Click here to view the embedded video.

 
Moderate Cardio & Bridge Lifts

I always recommend performing moderate cardio after each resistance training routine. Interval training is great to burn fat, but we need moderate cardio as well because not only it also burns fat, but it helps us to achieve an overall training effect, which is why we exercise. Take your time here, you don’t have to be in a rush, and repeat 3-4 rounds of the following:

 
After your workout, perform 15 minutes of light stretching (see middle of this article).

Day 2

Remember, this was just the first day and one half of the total workout! We are not finished yet! Take a breath and prepare for Day 2, which you can find right here!

Picture © Lovingfit.com.

This Is Good, This Not

Chances are, if you live in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah or Wyoming, you already noticed it: Local supermarket chain King Soopers just introduced a food rating system in their 143 stores in those four states. Beside the price tag, customers now find a numeric score coming from rating company NuVal, telling them how nutritional the product they are looking at supposedly is: from 1 (very bad) to 100 (excellent).

Already in August last year, Lowes Foods, with 107 stores active in North and South Carolina as well as Virginia, started using NuVal’s system. Others are sure to follow. NuVal itself currently shares the market with one more company, Guiding Stars. Together they are said to now serve 3,000 stores nation-wide.

How Do They Rate Foods?

The question is: How exactly do they rate foods? What gives a food a high rating? Standards by which the quality of foods can be measured are as wide as the ocean, ranging from “only organic is good” to “as long as it isn’t contaminated, it is fit for eating”.  NuVal themselves explain it like this:

NuVal Scores summarize comprehensive nutritional information in one simple number between 1 and 100.  Each NuVal Score takes into account more than just the nutrition fact panel.  It considers 30-plus nutrients and nutrition factors – the good (protein, calcium, vitamins) and the not-so-good (sugar, sodium, cholesterol).  And then it boils it down into a simple, easy-to-use number; a number you can trust to make better decisions about nutrition in just a few seconds.

Well, this strikes me as a bit oversimplistic, as no nutrient is per se “bad” or “good”. Let’s take the above mentioned sugar and vitamins as examples: Sugar is a simple carbohydrate and those are the body’s most important source for immediate energy. Some fruits contain quite a bit of them, which certainly doesn’t make them bad. Vitamins, on the other hand, are sprinkled so liberally over various foods during production, that some people may easily reach much more than the daily amounts deemed healthy.

Besides that, we could also imagine that NuVal’s calculation goes as follows: A food gets subtracted ten points for high fat content, but the manufacturer fortifies it with vitamins A, B, C, E and D, each worth two points on the scale. Therefore, if the food started at 70, we have 70 -10 + 10 = 70.

A Pre-Emptive Industry Measure?

Maybe I’m overly cynical. But it does stand out that supermarkets heavily invest in food rating systems – neither NuVal nor Guiding Stars do their assessments for free – just at the time when the US government works on a food rating system of its own. One that, according to the report I read, would focus on evaluating foods based on their content of saturated fats, trans fats, sodium and added sugars. Although the whole concept so far is only preliminary, it to me seems to paint a more realistic picture than NuVal’s system.

It also looks very similar to a labeling system that was proposed in Europe and was heavily fought against by the food industry. The so-called “Food Traffic Light” would have labeled fat, saturated fat, sodium and sugar either green (low), yellow (medium) or red (high) (PDF). Consumers polled on how useful they found this system where overwhelmingly in its favor, but after heavy lobbying from the European food industry, the EU’s parliament decided against making it obligatory on packagings.

NuVal,we should therefore mention, is a joint venture between Griffin Hospital of Derby, Connecticut, and Topco LLC, a business alliance of smaller retailers in the food industry.

Picture courtesy of “Dan4th“.