Body Building, Fitness Nutrition

The Best Pre Workout Meal and Post Workout Meal

Posted on June 28, 2019March 5, 2023 by Travis Wade

28
Jun

The Best Pre Workout Meal and Post Workout Meal

These are the secrets behind getting the most out of your workouts!

By Travis Wade

Back in the day, the best pre-workout meal and post-workout meal were pretty straight forward. We used carbohydrates for energy and would bring fast acting carbs in the form of sugar to the gym to get us through the workout. Now the best pre-workout meal and the best post-workout meal are a little more complicated.

There are ways to improve our metabolism, including a ketogenic diet, intermittent fasting, and fasting. Those strategies are beneficial but complicated to incorporate into pre-workout and post-workout. I will talk a little about those strategies but please read my articles on these subjects before attempting them.

In this article, I will focus on the best pre-workout meal and supplements, how to supplement during a workout, and the best post-workout meal. We have different options for bulking up, cutting weight, or for elite high-intensity athletes.

The Best Pre-Workout Meal and Supplements

Carb Load

If you need to perform like Mike Tyson’s opponent, then you will need a carb-load. High-intensity professional athletes will have a hard time getting enough carbohydrates to keep their performance levels high. Having a carb-load before, and after intense exercise is crucial for elite high-intensity athletes.

Carbohydrates are said to be the second most effective legal ergogenic aid (performance enhancer). Carbs are remarkable for bulking up as well. Eat healthy carbs about 2-3 hours before a workout depending on how fast your metabolism is. The carbs have to leave the stomach, get absorbed by the body and deposited into the muscles for optimum performance. I recommend using nutrient-rich sources of carbs like sweet potato, squash, peas, green beans, or zucchini.

Ketones

Adversely, if you are doing low-intensity exercise for a long time, then a ketogenic diet will be your best bet. Marathon runners will use this strategy if they are on top of the trade secrets. When a person’s body runs out of energy from the fat they have consumed, they will burn fat from their body. Also, long-distance athletes use exogenous ketones to get them through—exogenous means external from the body, usually taken orally.

When you are cutting weight, a pre-workout meal could include C8 oil or Dave Asprey’s Brain Octane Oil. C8 oil metabolizes quickly to have ketones in the blood, and full ketosis will emerge in about a half-hour after two tablespoons. It’s like taking exogenous ketones. If you haven’t tried it before, then lower the dosage quite a bit the first couple of times, or you will get a toilet destroyer. Mixing C8 oil with other fats seems to help with this issue.

Whey and BCAAs

It is also essential to get protein. I recommend using homemade kefir or yogurt to get whey protein. Whey protein is important because it gets broken down into amino acids and gets absorbed into the blood in about 15 minutes. Whey protein also has all the essential amino acids we need. If you use homemade yogurt or kefir you will be getting very powerful essential bacteria in your gut as well.

Add about a half of a scoop of BCAAs (branch chain amino acids) during bulk up about ten minutes before a body building style of workout. Only use BCAAs for a few months at a time as it can be carcinogenic if used long term.

The most effective legal ergogenic aid is water. Be fully hydrated by the time you get to the gym. It’s tough to re-hydrate during a workout. When I am training I might train slightly dehydrated which is a stress on my body that demands more red blood cells to be produced and red blood cell count will increase in a matter of days.

If I want to perform well then I drink water mixed with salt before I have a big game. Our bodies have salt water in them. If we just add the water we don’t retain that water. It draws minerals out of cells to keep the PH of the water at our body’s PH. We need salt. It is the most abundant mineral in our body and it retains water keeping us hydrated.

According to Dr. James Dinicolantonio author of the book “Win”, sports performance goes up with one litre of water and 2 teaspoons of sodium chloride starting 90 minutes before the big game has best results. Sip the salt water over 30 minutes finishing it an hour before the game.

The Workout

Studies show that adding a source of carbs during a workout improves gains and prevents fatigue. This is why sports drinks were invented. The water, sodium, and potassium allow for easy gastric emptying and quick absorption, which prevents blood flow to shunt from the muscles to the digestive system. 7% of sugar in water is optimum for gastric emptying and absorption to the body. This is approximately ¼ sports drink and ¾ water. You need to replace water during your workout anyway.

One other notable benefit you get from adding carbs during a workout is it prevents your body from breaking down muscle tissue to use as energy. Indeed, your body will break down fats at this point, but you never want to lose fat at the expense of muscle. You can massively increase your fat loss by increasing muscle mass, and increasing muscle mass is the first goal in a weight loss program.

Another supplement you can add to your workout to enhance gains is BCAAs. Studies have shown carbs to be more beneficial, but adding BCAAs shows less muscle wasting as well. Try to use as clean as possible BCAAs, so you don’t add harmful toxins to your body.

Dr. Mercola’s Warning

“Isolated amino acid supplements and branched-chain amino acid isolates (such as leucine and glutamine) are dangerous and potentially damaging to your health — so stay away from them. Many contain “putrid proteins,” as well as the proteins in the wrong form (isomers) so they cannot be properly used by your body.

They also tend to be acid-processed and contain surfactants, artificial sweeteners, heavy metal contaminants (arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury), and a long list of chemical additives. Instead, look for a high-quality whole food whey supplement that is minimally processed, comes from organic, grass fed, non-hormone treated cows and is independently tested and verified for purity.

An excellent source of convenient, quick-to-prepare high-quality protein is whey protein. Whey protein is an excellent ‘fitness food’ because it contains not only high-quality protein, but also extremely high amounts of leucine, which is particularly important for muscle growth and repair.

One of the reasons whey protein is so effective for exercise recovery is that it assimilates very quickly — it gets into your muscles within 10 to 15 minutes of swallowing it, just when they need it most. Whey is also excellent for your immune system, as it is rich in immunoglobulins, lactoferrin and other precursors for glutathione.”

Using C8 Oil

If you are in full ketosis and use C8 oil before the workout, you should be fine for energy during your exercise. When you put yourself in ketosis, you will burn fats off your body when you run out of the ketones from the C8 oil. It also takes longer to burn off the energy from ketones.

I have used C8 oil with whey protein (kefir or yogurt) as my pre-workout, and I still do half the time. I can work out and still have plenty of energy after. C8 with a little bit of whey is the best pre-workout while cutting weight. (Half the time, I intermittent fast before my workout. I might skip eating before my workout for a week or two at a time but I never skip a meal after a workout!)

The Anabolic Window

It was believed that it was crucial to get a meal as soon as possible after a workout. Experts claimed there was an anabolic window after exercise in which the body would use protein to rebuild muscle. Experts are now saying this isn’t true. Your body will use protein as needed for building muscle for days after a workout.

Your body will be in fight or flight mode right after a workout, and you won’t be able to produce enzymes to absorb nutrients right away. You can meditate to activate the rest and digest mode for better digestion. It’s a good idea to relax and make every meal a ritual for better nutrient absorption.

The Best Post-Workout Meal

The body produces many enzymes to store energy in the muscles and build muscle shortly after a workout. Take advantage of the environment in the body and eat protein and healthy fats and carbs. Every time you eat, you activate the growth pathways of the body and post-workout is the best time to enable growth. Always!

The combination of fat, protein, and carbs activate growth the most but the combination of fat and carbs isn’t far behind. If you are looking to cut weight you never want to eat things like ice cream, french fries, or popcorn with butter. Instead, choose fat or carbs at each meal. Follow a keto-diet most of the time, and once a week before and after leg day, use carbs without fat, (if you’re cutting weight) to increase your insulin and level off hunger hormones.

What The Post Workout Meal Looks Like

A post-workout meal would look something like this: soup with homemade bone broth and organic vegetables. This meal would be very high nutrient, and the amino acids in the bone broth are perfect for improving the amino acid ratio needed for the human body. In other words, bone broth is high in the right amino acids that the body needs for growth and repair.

The number one objective with eating is to get the nutrients our bodies need. I use coconut milk as my source of energy, and spices like curry are excellent antioxidants. I would add another source of protein to this meal like grass-finished beef, or seafood. Whey in the form of Kefir or yogurt is part of every post workout meal to get all the fast acting essential amino acids.

You can add juiced vegetables to this for more essential nutrients but you’ll have to chew when you drink it because it’s the chewing that triggers the enzymes to digest the nutrients in the veggie drink.

I like to add raw egg yolks when I can as well because they are so loaded full of nutrients. Raw egg yolks are easily absorbed and used by the body and they are like a multivitamin if you look at their nutrient profile. They have every nutrient minus vitamin C and vitamin K.

If you are a high-intensity athlete like a professional hockey player, you will have a hard time replenishing carbohydrates to maintain a high level of performance day after day. Experts recommend eating about a cup full of easy-to-absorb, high-carb foods, like pasta, rice, or potatoes, every half hour after intense exercise for the next four hours.

High intensity athletes will also have a hard time rehydrating. The problem isn’t the water it will be the minerals that we lose when we sweat. Sweating is the number one way we detoxify so we want to sweat but we will also lose minerals at the same time. I use a multivitamin, trace minerals, and sea salt after high intensity exercise where I sweat a lot.

Post-Workout Supplements

The supplement industry is a hundred billion dollar industry. Unfortunately, some of these supplement companies may be more interested in money than in your health. Also, most supplements will have toxins in them. Supplements do not have to be effective and they only have to be harmless enough to a standard set by the FDA. Don’t waste your money and how much toxin is ok for you to take?

Inasmuch, most supplements are doing more harm than good. For example, if you are not deficient in vitamin D, (or anything) then don’t take it. Too much of anything is just as harmful as not enough.

Because most supplements are doing more harm than good I recommend not taking them unless you really know what you are doing. The only supplements I will talk about here are the ones that have been proven to be beneficial.

I take a high quality multivitamin twice a week from a source I trust and I take fermented cod liver oil. Fermenting it will preserve the oil and it has a probiotic. It will have vitamin K2, vitamin D, Vitamin A, and Omega 3s. The amount in each pill is unknown because it is a whole food not processed in a lab.

Glutamine has been proven to increase recovery significantly as seen in this study. Putting a scoop in a post-workout drink is a great way to ensure you get it in your diet. Creatine-monohydrate shows fabulous results for bulking up. Only use these products short term or they can be carcinogenic as well.

Using mocha green tea can be excellent for bulking up or cutting also. The epigallocatechin gallate or EGCG in green tea diverts calories away from fat cells and into muscle cells. Use green tea with your meals, especially on cheat meal day.

Commercial Pre-Workout Supplements

I do not recommend using a commercial pre-workout supplement to increase energy for your workout. During the workout, we break down the body and the rest and recovery part is where we get the gains. Recovery is the most important part and often foolishly underrated.

Pre-workouts always have caffeine or a combination of stimulants. Taking a pre-workout might give a person more energy and mental clarity for the moment, but a person will not rest and recover as well. Notably, you won’t sleep as well.

Sleep is crucial for gains, but not only that; the next day will be stressful. When a person takes pre-workout supplements, they are essentially stealing energy from tomorrow, and they will not recover as well. Keep in mind the recovery is the most critical part.

If you are about to do high-intensity exercise like playing hockey, one of your objectives is to keep your heart rate as low as possible. If you can keep your heart rate down, you will have more endurance and power. Stimulants increase your heart rate and max out your performance quickly. Never take stimulants if you have to perform for more than a short burst like a javelin, shotput, or catapult athlete.

On the flip-side, if you have an exam, a cup of coffee will increase mental clarity. Don’t overdo it or your exam jitters will break the desk.

Summary

To summarize, eat about 2-3 hours before a workout. Have carbs, protein and fat in accordance to the diet you follow; fat for a ketogenic diet or cutting weight and use carbs with fat for bulking up.

If you want a pre-workout drink, I recommend C8 oil with homemade kefir if you are cutting weight. If you are bulking up, then fast-acting carbs, C8 oil, with BCAAs and whey protein in the form of homemade kefir or yogurt is the best pre-workout.

You should be fine during the workout if you drank the C8 oil mixed with kefir or yogurt before the workout. If you want extra energy during the workout or are looking to bulk up, mix 1/4 sports drink with 3/4 water and drink that during your workout.

After the workout, do some meditation to activate the rest and digest mode. Have healthy fats, carbs, kefir, bone broth, and a good source of protein like grass-finished beef. You can add juiced vegetables and raw egg yolks for added nutrients.

Post-workout is your most important meal, and you should never cheap out on nutrients whether you are looking to bulk up or cut weight.

I wish you lots of health, love and happiness!

Travis Wade

The only holistic personal trainer in Edmonton

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What You Can Add To Your Workout To Improve It Immediately

Posted on June 13, 2016March 5, 2023 by Travis Wade

13
Jun

What You Can Add To Your Workout To Improve It Immediately

By Travis Wade

I didn’t have time to write an article this week. I know I’m a slacker. However, I want to refer you to an article on bodybuilding.com. I send this to every new client because I want them to know how to eat before during and after a workout. I wrote an article on that already, but here’s an article on what to have during your workout. I hope you enjoy it!

In 2006, Stephen Bird published a series of papers that paint a good picture of the hormonal changes that occur as a result of weightlifting, and how different nutritional interventions impact these changes. When taken together, these papers provide a picture of the difference between short-term—e.g. during or after a training session—and long-term changes in hormones.

There were four groups of subjects in Bird’s study, organized by what they were allowed to drink during their workouts: water, essential amino acids, carbohydrates, or essential amino acids plus carbohydrates. Over 12 weeks, all the groups lost approximately the same amount of body fat, and the group that had the most complete workout nutrition (EAA + Carbs) packed on the most muscle.

Now let’s look at the acute changes that went with these big-picture changes. Researchers measured the amino acid 3-methyl-histidine in urine as a marker for muscle breakdown. As shown in the graph below, the group which drank only water (the placebo) had an increase in muscle breakdown 48 hours after its training session. There was no change for the groups that had essential amino acids or carbohydrates. The group that had the combination workout drink actually had a decrease in its 3-methyl-histidine levels after training.

What happened with cortisol? As you can see below, cortisol levels 30 minutes following exercise were increased by more than 50 percent in the group which drank water, but unchanged in the EAA group. Cortisol was decreased in both groups which had carbohydrates as part of their workout nutrition.

Think back to when I was explaining gluconeogenesis, the process in the liver that creates glucose from non-sugar sources to provide energy to parts of the body that need it. The body doesn’t need to generate its own sugar—a metabolically intensive process—when there is extra sugar from a sports drink floating around the blood stream. Thus, there was no increase in cortisol when carbs were present.

That short-term muscle loss and cortisol spike for the water-drinking group may seem significant, but don’t forget that all the groups gained muscle over the course of the study. The group that just drank water added almost four pounds of muscle over 12 weeks!

If you want to read the full article you can click here.

The bottom line is you’ll get better results from your workout if you add a fast acting source of energy and some branch chain amino acids to your workout.

I wish you lots of health, love and happiness!

Travis Wade

The only holistic personal trainer in Edmonton

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Body Building, Fitness Nutrition, Health and Wellness, strength

What Vegans Know That You Don’t

Posted on June 6, 2016March 5, 2023 by Travis Wade

06
Jun

What Vegans Know That You Don’t

These are the secrets vegans are keeping!

By Travis Wade

Oxidative Stress

Oxidants are highly unstable compounds because they are missing an electron. They steal an electron from their neighbor, but now the neighbor needs an electron, so it steals one from its neighbor, and so on. When this happens in the body, it is called oxidative stress and it’s very damaging to our cells if it’s not stopped.

How do we get the oxidants in the first place?

Free radicals or oxidants can be caused from processes in the body like metabolism, exercise, phagocytosis, and inflammation. External causes of free radicals are toxins, radiation like the sun, and medications or drugs. I looked on the internet to see if I could find a table that shows the oxidative stress of foods, but there is no such table. One thing people should know is carbohydrate metabolism causes exponentially more oxidative stress than fat metabolism.

We need a balance between antioxidants and prooxidants. However, if you look at the list of things that cause free radicals it’s easy to see we have enough prooxidants. All the toxins we are exposed to make it vital to get as many antioxidants as we can.

Antioxidants

Antioxidants are a molecule that have an electron to give without becoming unstable itself or it can steal an electron from its neighboring antioxidant buddy.

The compounds in fruits and vegetables giving them all their colors are called polyphenols and flavonoids. They are very potent compounds and thousands of them are found in plants. They are only found in plants; nowhere else. They serve as a defense for the plant against the oxidation of the sun. The reason plants don’t get sunburned is because they have these flavonoids, and carotenoids to some degree, that protect them from the oxidization of the sun. They are very potent antioxidants.

They have the same function in us. They lower inflammation very dramatically, they quench the carcinogens directly halting cancer growth, they improve our immune system, they affect our stress response system making us more likely to be calm, and they support detoxification. They do it in a way no other compound can.

Your cruciferous vegetables are high fibre, low calorie, and high nutrient making them essential daily. Check out World’s Healthiest Foods to see the nutrient content of these superfoods! All the nutrients and antioxidants may be the reason fruits and vegetables may be the cure for cancer. Any diet that staves off cancer has to be good for you! Check out Chris’ story here.

The Problem Vegans Encounter

Iron, zinc, coenzyme q10, collagen, protein or certain amino acids, omega 3 fats, and Vitamin B12 are very difficult for vegans to get from their diet. These nutrients are essential. Check out the links on these nutrients to find out more about how they are beneficial. I can’t explain all that here or this article will get really long!

Juicing Recipe

Because I don’t like vegetables, I juice them daily. One of the key ingredients Chris used to cure his cancer is carrots. And by the way, he used his method because he read God’s Way to Ultimate Health by Rev. George Malkmus with Michael Dye; he is not the only one who was successful curing their cancer with raw vegetables. There has been many. One thing I may add is, some doctors will use vitamin C intravenously to help with cancer treatment.

This is what I juice daily.

Ingredients:

1 bunch of spinach
2-3 carrots
1/2-inch knob of ginger
4 celery stocks
5 leaves of cabbage

Directions: Juice ingredients together and drink.

These are a great combination of vegetables for antioxidant and nutrient benefits. Spinach is on the Dirty Dozen list on ewg.org which is a great resource for toxic rating of all kinds of products. If you can get organic, it’s preferred, but if not make sure you wash your spinach really well. Celery is also on the Dirty Dozen list so the same goes. You can usually get organic spinach, carrots, ginger, and celery at Superstore. Cabbage is on the Clean Fifteen list.

I wish you lots of health, love and happiness!

Travis Wade

The only holistic personal trainer in Edmonton

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Body Building, Fitness Nutrition, Health and Wellness, strength

Is Your Vitamin Supplement Doing More Harm Than Good?

Posted on May 24, 2016March 5, 2023 by Travis Wade

24
May

Are Your Supplements Doing More Harm Than Good?

By Travis Wade

The Truth About Your Supplements

Sayer Ji is an expert in vitamin and mineral supplements. It was his first love in the wellness industry and he is now well known in the wellness industry as the guy who puts it all together. At first I didn’t like this guy because he has no credentials, so I thought “Why is this guy speaking?” He’s now one of my favourite speakers to listen to because he knows his stuff better than anybody. He has the world’s largest evidence based natural health resource. Check him out here www.greenmedinfo.com

Multivitamins

According to Sayer Ji, Centrum and Flintstones multivitamins have known toxins in them and do more harm than good. Sodium selenite, for example, is a toxin commonly found in a multivitamin. Centrum is the number one most common brand of multivitamin recommended by doctors. Flintstones multivitamin is the leading children’s multivitamin. Bauer and Pfizer are the pharmaceutical companies making these multivitamins.

In their ad, Flintstones vitamins say that 82% of children don’t eat enough vegetables and if they are not eating enough vegetables they may not be getting the nutrients they need. So you would think that taking a cheap Walmart multivitamin is better than taking no vitamins at all.

Some of the ingredients in Flintstones vitamins are aspartame, cupric oxide which is known as a pesticide, artificial colouring agents that have been banned in the European Union because of known problems with neurotoxicity and attention deficit disorder, zinc oxide which is used in sunscreen and isn’t very bioavailable, sorbitol, hydrogenated fat, and GMO corn syrup. All of the above are found in Flintstone’s vitamins.

The Top 10 Most Common Nutrient Deficiencies

The number one nutrient deficiency over all is vitamin D which is why I wrote an article on it. You can’t get enough sun my friends. People around the equator are getting 40,000 units of vitamin D a day. Get out in the sun and take your clothes off. Wear shorts. Not only will you get Vitamin D, but you will get infrared rays which detoxify heavy metals better than anything. The difference between D2 and D3 is D2 comes from plants and D3 comes from animals. The D3 is 87% more effective and converts to its active form 500% faster. Other sources of vitamin D are fish, beef liver, and bone broth.

The second most common nutrient deficiency is omega 3’s. I was just talking to a masters student and she was reminding me that through evolution, human brains grew massively after we starting eating fish with omega 3s. Our brains are made from omega 3s. It is true brain food but it is also the third leading legal performance enhancer. We die without omega 3s. If you want more info on omega 3’s; read my article on omega 3’s here. Common sources are the SMASH diet: sardines, mackerel, anchovies, salmon, and herring. I’d like to add a few more of my favourites: cod, oysters, and bone broth.

The third most common nutrient deficiency is vitamin K2. Vitamin K2 makes sure calcium is being used where it needs to be used. I’ve seen people with kidney stones; it’s a medical emergency due to the extreme pain. Take your vitamin K2. Vitamin K2 also prevents calcium from building up in your vasculature preventing heart attacks, deep vein thrombosis, strokes, and other blood clotting disorders. It prevents cancer and builds strong bones. Menaquinone-7 (MK-7), is the kind of vitamin K2 you want to look for in supplements as this form is extracted from real food. The foods that have vitamin K2 are fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, and grass fed butter.

#4 is magnesium found in spinach, Swiss chard, beet greens, bananas, bone broth, and pumpkin seeds. I’ll get into this one in detail later.

#5 is vitamin B12 found in grass fed beef and beef liver, lamb, snapper, venison, salmon, shrimp, scallops, organic-pastured poultry, eggs, and bone broth. Vitamin B12 is involved in every process of the body and deficiencies will commonly result in lethargy, brain fog, and possibly numbness of the extremities. A lot of people will have a bacteria in their gut that steals vitamin B12 and taking an oral supplement will feed this bacteria and grow it. I take an injectable form of vitamin B12.

#6 is vitamin E found in hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts, pecans, sunflower seeds, olive oil, legumes, spinach, broccoli, and bone broth. If you take a supplement, natural vitamin E is always listed as the “d-” form (d-alpha-tocopherol, d-beta-tocopherol, etc.) synthetic vitamin E is listed as “dl-” forms. You want the natural forms to get the benefits.

#7 is vitamin A. Retinol is pre-formed vitamin A, found in animal products such as grass-fed meat and poultry, liver, fish, grass fed butter, and bone broth. This is the form of vitamin A your body can actually use. Beta-carotene is pre-vitamin A. You need to have a well-functioning digestive tract and sufficient bile produced by your gallbladder for the conversion into retinol. My favourite supplement for vitamin A is fermented cod liver oil. It also has vitamin D, a probiotic, Omega 3s, and vitamin K2.

#8 is iodine found in sea vegetables, eggs, spirulina, and bone broth if you use fish bones. Iodine is really important for your metabolism. Having iodized salt can help.

#9 is calcium found in leafy green vegetables and bone broth. If you want a pill form, calcium from eggshells is a great supplement.

#10 is iron found in grass fed meats, oysters, lentils, sesame seeds, spinach, and bone broth. A great resource I use to look at nutrient content of food is World’s Healthiest Foods. They used to have a website but it appears to be offline now.

Dr. Mercola and Bulletproof are where I get a lot of my supplements and health products. Things you should look for are, chelated minerals for good absorption. They are attached to an amino acid. Glycine is the amino acid commonly used to bind to a mineral for a healthy supplement.

Some forms will give you problems and if it does then you obviously have to try a different form. Oxides for any supplement tend to have a low bioavailability. Bioavailability is the ability of the body to absorb and use a substance. Citrates tend to cause toilet destruction. Not a great form either.

Get Your Nutrients From Food

In reality, I do my best to get all nutrients from food because it will be much more bioavailable and beneficial. Most food will have much more than the specific nutrient you are looking for and a lot of times those other nutrients will help the nutrient you are looking to absorb. When the nutrient isn’t possible to get with food is when I look for supplements.

I personally use creatine because I will not eat the amount of meat required to get what I need from meat. I use a collagen peptide supplement, glycine, melatonin, a couple different kinds of magnesium, L-glutamine, vitamin D, and a few others as I see needed.

Dr. Longo recommends a multivitamin every 3 days instead of every day. Dr. Longo did 30 years of research to come up with what he calls the longevity diet. It’s a great book that explains fasting as well.

I avoid some supplements altogether like omega 3 supplements. Omega 3s are poly-unsaturated meaning there are lots of double bonds with hydrogens “missing” all over it. Poly-unsaturated fats will get oxidized easily, meaning they go rancid very quickly. What you will likely be taking if you take an omega 3 pill is rotten fish oil. Rancid fish oil is a toxin that causes all the problems you are trying to cure by taking omega 3s in the first place. Please read my article on omega 3s.

Magnesium

Magnesium is the number one leading mineral deficiency in our society. It’s not in the soil anymore and the toxins in the environment deplete our minerals. When I say environment I mean the air, water, things we eat, things we touch, and our inner environment in our bodies.

Things like heavy metals such as mercury or phthalates and other things like glyphosate bind to our minerals and deplete them even more. All kinds of things deplete our magnesium including stress. Magnesium is the first thing to be released from our cells when we are stressed. Not just mental stress but physical stress too.

Jane Goodall (famous anthropologist), has talked about the decline of nutrients in the soil and how the soil has dozens of nutrients, but we use 3 nutrients to fertilize our soil; nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. The lack of nutrient in the soil is the number one reason why magnesium is the most deficient mineral in our society.

I’m just saying you may need to take a magnesium supplement. It’s needed for over 300 processes in the body. It’s recommended by Wendy Myers, to take a variety of magnesium supplements. Meaning take magnesium that is bonded to various substances. Stay away from oxide. When bonded to oxide, magnesium has a 3-4% absorption rate. Citrates are also terrible for absorption but they are great for destroying toilets; be careful with them.

Wendy Myers recommends magnesium glycinate which raises red blood cell magnesium, magnesium malate which helps with detoxification, and magnesium threonate is the only magnesium that can cross the blood brain barrier. As we get older we become more deficient of magnesium in the brain. It helps memory and cognition and in the mitochondria it helps make energy. You need about 5x your body weight (lbs), in milligrams for dosage.

Mineral Deficiencies

Everyone Wendy Myers (detoxification expert), has tested has been mineral deficient. The good news for me is that meat is very rich in minerals. Lamb and bacon are high in selenium. Unless you’re actively doing something about it, you’ll likely be deficient in selenium. If you don’t like bacon then fish, beef, turkey, chicken, and eggs are other great sources.

Selenium also detoxes the body from mercury which we all tend to have. Selenium needs to be taken in the form of se-methylselenocysteine. Or bacon. I stay away from Brazil nuts because they can have a mold toxin that is a very powerful neurotoxin called aflatoxin.

Chromium is another very common deficiency along with sodium and potassium. Sodium isn’t the big enemy we thought it was. The ratio of sodium to potassium is much more important and according to Dr. Joseph Mercola we should be taking 5x as much potassium as sodium. Thallium is a heavy metal found in gasoline that blocks our usage of potassium which prevents us from producing hormones. We all breath in massive amounts of thallium if you live in an urban area.

Trace mineral supplements can have heavy metals bonded to them. Wendy advises against taking them unless you are working with a qualified practitioner doing a toxic metal detox. For more help with minerals and your heavy metal detoxification you can go to www.liveto110.com

I know doctors and our health care system have their place, but so does proper diet and exercise. A lot of the things I talk about are cutting edge topics in the health industry and some stuff you probably never heard of before, so I encourage you to do your own research. A couple of resources you can and should use are google scholar, National Library of Medicine, and pubmed. Pubmed is a government agency that shows you the research that has been done. You can look all this stuff up yourself and make your own decisions on what’s right.

I wish you lots of health, love and happiness!

Travis Wade

The only holistic personal trainer in Edmonton

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Strength Training Tips

Posted on January 25, 2016March 5, 2023 by Travis Wade

25
Jan

Strength Training Tips

These are the strength training secrets the strongest men in the world keep!

By TRAVIS WADE

I first got interested in strength training about fifteen years ago. The gym was still full of people who were into bodybuilding or athletes. I admired the heavy lifters in the gym because they weren’t all show. So this is the story of how I became one of the strongest guys in the gym.

When I decided to start strength training, I hired a strong personal trainer because only a strong personal trainer knows how to strengthen properly. I learned a lot of strength training tips from him and I worked hard.

At the same time, I read a book called “The Naked Warrior.” Pavel Tsatsouline explained the different aspects of strength training in that book. I also read many articles on strength training and learned a lot from my own experiences. In the years to come, I hired many personal trainers and read books on the subject. However, at the time, it took me about 4 months to become one of the strongest guys at the gym.

We did a powerlifting routine and I learned how to put a program together. After that, I hired a few other strength training coaches and they helped me with a few more powerlifting concepts. I learned a lot of tips that instantly increase strength and mastering these techniques while you strength train will improve your lifts too.

I think Mr. Miyagi from “The Karate Kid” said, “All strength comes from learning to use the power from within.” Karate people are like that. Here are a few tips expanding on what I think he was trying to explain.

Pushing

One of the first exercises I ever did when I was a kid was the push-up. I didn’t have equipment in my room so I did sit-ups and push-ups. Grip the floor during a push-up. When pushing, twist the hands out. Feel it in the shoulders.

Unilateral Strength Training

I got into unilateral (one-sided) exercises for a while because they are great for the core. You always have to stabilize with your core when you do unilateral exercises. Grip your free hand during a unilateral strength training exercise. I still use unilateral exercises on a regular basis for the same reason; they are great for stability of the core and other accessory muscles that stabilize.

Your Feet During Strength Training

When I first started strength training, my first focus was the squat. I thought squats were the true test of strength and I still believe that. Squats are known as “the king of all exercises.” They seem to take the most out of me when I do them. Grip the floor with your toes to strengthen your squat. Barefoot is best for optimal force transfer and balance.

Your feet have many proprioceptors. Proprioceptors are nerves that send messages to the brain. They feel around for balance and detect where you are in space. You always see a tight rope walker barefoot because of proprioception.

What happens at the feet happens exponentially at the chest and shoulders. If you have cushiony shoes, it can influence your balance just a smidge at the feet, which will sway your whole body enough to ruin your lift. While strength training, the less you have under your feet, the better.

Strengthen Inter-Abdominal Pressure

Tense your abs to increase the power of any strength training exercise. It’s called intra-abdominal pressure, and it’s where all strength originates. The pelvic floor is where we have our kegel muscles and sphincter muscles. We have the diaphragm at the top, the transversus abdominis acting as a girdle around the whole mid section, obliques on the sides, the quadratus lumborum in the back, and rectus abdominis in the front. There are other muscles in this area that contribute, but the ones I have mentioned are the leading players.

I remember reading in “The Naked Warrior,” Pavel talked about how you contract all of these muscles to increase the pressure in the stomach area. He said, “It’s like you are blowing up a balloon, and the balloon starts in the stomach and expands out to the arms or legs, depending on the exercise you are doing.”

When I was talking to a yoga instructor who mentioned her plethora of past injuries, I asked her about injury prevention. She said the number one way to prevent most injuries is to strengthen your core muscles.

I read an article a powerlifter wrote about improving his lifts. He said it took him a bit to figure it out, but when he started increasing his core strength, his lifts got way better. Most of these core suggestions are in our personal-training textbook as well. You can imagine if your core is like a tree trunk, you will be able to lift a lot of weight.

Pavel Tsatsouline also said to tense the glutes to increase any exertion. I think this is also part of increasing intra-abdominal pressure. When you squeeze the glutes you clamp the pelvic floor. I have followed Pavel’s advice, and it works.

Lifting

Pre-tense the muscles before lifting weight. Arm wrestlers do this. For example, during a deadlift, the bar should come off the floor as slow as possible; never jerk the bar up. Increase abdominal pressure; tighten pelvic floor, abs, and diaphragm. Feel the abdominal pressure first and then feel that tension radiate outwards from the middle of your body. Squeeze your grip strength and tense all the muscles before you start your lift.

Breathing in Strength Training

Are you the strongest when you are breathing in, breathing out, or holding your breath? The order is you’ll be your strongest while holding your breath. You’ll be weakest when breathing out. It comes back to the abdominal pressure required on every lift. It’s like bracing yourself when you are about to take a punch in the stomach. When you hold your breath you will be your strongest because you can clamp down with your core muscles the hardest.

When you take a breath before your lift, never exhale or inhale all the way; approximately 50%. If you breathe in too much, you won’t be able to brace, and if you breathe in too little, you will run out of oxygen.

I know this isn’t a program or strength training guide; that’s a whole separate article with a lot to it. That’s actually a book. I will write that book after the one I am writing now. Until then, if you need a program or details on strength training, you can contact me, and I will help you out.

I wish you lots of health, love and happiness!

Travis Wade

The only holistic personal trainer in Edmonton

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