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How Passionate Are You?

By On September 3, 2012 In Life, Movement With No Comments Permanent Link to How Passionate Are You?Permalink

I’ve got a question for you:

How passionate do you feel about movement?

Anything under 8 out of 10 and you’re going
to struggle to achieve your goals, whatever they
are.

You see, passion is like rocket fuel. It energises
and motivates you to reach higher and achieve
more, to touch the stars and become more.

Without that passion, movement just becomes
stale, stagnant, part of a routine or, in the worst
case, exercise – something you do because you’ve
been told it’s good for you and you have to.

Variety is the key to staying passionate about
movement. Routine is the enemy of variety.

With that in mind, I want to challenge you to
try something different this week. It’s a beautiful
day, the sun’s shining, so get outside and move
your body in the way nature intended.

Throw out your normal routine (you can always
go back to it next week, or tomorrow) and do
something new, fresh and invigorating.

Do anything as long as it’s different.

If you normally lift weights, then try some of
those advanced body weight exercises you’ve
always wanted to try but put off.

If you hate running, take your shoes off and
trot barefoot on grass or a soft surface.

If you focus on serious, competitive training,
get outside, in the park or the woods and just
play.

Use a kettlebell, a rock, a log, a rope, your
own body, a partner, your kids, your dog.

Just mix it up, try something new, challenge
your mind and body and, most important of all…

Have fun!

When you get back to your normal routine, you
should find that this little foray into the training
wilderness has reignited your passion for what
you’re doing.

Even better, you may find that what you’ve really
been looking for is a new way to train, one that
lines up with what Mother Nature really intended
for us Lean Green Human Beings.

Enjoy and let me know how you get on!

Olly

Breakfast Of Champions

By On August 23, 2012 In Health, Life, Movement With 2 Comments Permanent Link to Breakfast Of ChampionsPermalink


Music credit:

We humans are built to move. The best way to start the day is to do just that. Get moving.

If you wake up feeling sluggish and lethargic, instead of reaching for coffee and sugar to hotwire your tired adrenal glands, get outside, breathe the fresh air and start moving. I guarantee it will wake you up, energise you and make you feel good.

For the next week, try getting up 15-30 minutes earlier than normal and create a simple early morning movement routine for yourself. Do it first thing, before you do anything else and see what affect it has on your energy levels and mood.

A simple way to track progress (of how you feel) is what I call the “crapometer”. This is just a simple 1-10 scale, with a smiley face by the 10 and a frowney face by the 1. When you wake up, ask yourself how you feel on a 1-10 scale (1 is crap and 10 is amazing) and then write down the score in a diary or journal. Although its low-tech, this kind of simple tracking can really help you make dramatic changes in your life. You can adapt and use this for pretty much anything you want to improve.

As for the specific exercises, anything goes really, but low intensity is the order of the day, first thing in the morning. Instead of a full on, gut wrenching workout, focus on gentle, rhythmical movements, mobilisation and deep breathing. The idea is to warm up your body and bring all systems online for the day ahead. Start gently and warm and moblilise the major joints, get the cerebro-spinal fluid pumping and the digestion working.

Think about bringing energy into your body, not draining energy out. If you do it right, after 10 minutes, you should feel like you’re firing on all cylinders and ready to tackle anything life throws your way.

My typical routine

I have a couple of 10 minute routines I alternate, depending on what sort of mood I’m in. Sometimes I’ll do just some basic tai chi or qi gong, or even sun salutations (not sure which type of yoga they’re from). If I’m short of time, I’ll just do a couple of sets of 10 deep squats and hang out in the “paleo chair” for a minute or two. It doesn’t really matter as long as you move, breathe and feel like you’re boosting your energy levels. The more playful the better.

The routine I show you in the video is largely based on Paul Chek’s Zone Exercises. The idea is to not get out of breath, or raise your heart rate. If you feel you’re working too hard, stop, rest for a moment and then pick up where you left off. All movements should be rhythmical and flowing and don’t worry too much about strict form. It’s kind of like a dynamic meditation.

Here are the 5 exercises from the video to get you started but feel free to create your own routine.

1. Breathing Squats

These are just deep squats done with a slow tempo and a focus on deep breathing. They’re one of my favourite Zone exercises and the perfect start to any day. Go as low as you comfortably can, exhaling on the way down and inhaling on the way up. Take 4-6 seconds going down and 4-6 seconds coming up. This slow tempo is harder than it looks. Aim for 10-20 reps.

2. Tai Chi Rotations

This is a very popular tai chi warm up. The idea is to swing your arms, generating the movement from your core, not the arms. Keep your arms totally relaxed and loose by your sides, bend the knees a little and then rotate to one side as you straighten your legs. Imagine your arms are soft like spaghetti and let them slap against your body (gently). The leading hand (left hand if you’re rotating left) should wrap around your back and slap against your opposite kidney (right kidney), giving it a gentle massage. Breathe deeply and gradually increase the speed and range of movement as you warm up. Do 20 rotations in each direction.

3. Piston Breathing

This is fun and will probably make you laugh the first couple of times you try it. You’ll also want to make sure you have a tissue to hand if, like most people, you haven’t cut out the foods you’re sensitive to and have excess mucous. Standing with good but relaxed posture, take a deep belly breath (from the diaphragm) and then forcefully exhale in short sharp pulses through your nose until you’ve fully exhaled all of the air in your lungs. Push the air out from the diaphragm, like a piston. Aim for 10 pulses to every 1 inhale. Do 10 reps (10 inhales, 100 pulses out).

4. Shoulder Shrugs

These are pretty straight forward. Standing with good but relaxed posture and slightly bent knees, do slow, exaggerated shoulder shrugs, working through a full range of motion. Feel any tight spots and try and breathe through them. Inhale as you shrug upwards, straightening your knees and exhale as you shrug downwards, bending your knees. Work at a natural breathing pace or around 5 sec inhaling and 5 sec exhaling. Do 10 reps.

5. Neck Rotations

Standing with good, relaxed posture, gently drop your head forwards, chin down to your chest. Move your head out to the side and back in a wide circle, inhaling as you move through the back half of the circle and exhaling as you move through the front half of the circle. Move at a steady breathing pace and take it easy, don’t force anything. Don’t grind your vertebrae as you move through the centre of the back of the circle and be careful. Breathe deeply through any tight spots until they release. Do 5 circles in each direction (5 clockwise then 5 anti-clockwise). If you feel any pain or dizziness, stop!

6. Cross Crawl

Standing with your feet about hip width apart and your arms raised above your head, with your thumbs sticking out as if you’re thumbing a lift, take a deep belly breath. As you exhale, bring your right elbow down to meet your left knee and your left knee up to meet your right elbow. They should meet around waist height. Allow the elbow and knee to both cross over the centre line of the body. Inhale as you return to the start position and then repeat with the opposite arm, opposite leg. Do 10-20 reps each side and work at a steady breathing pace. Keep your head and neck in line with your spine and don’t jut your chin forwards. You may find it difficult to balance at first, but it will soon become easy after a few practice sessions.

It doesn’t just have to be first thing in the morning. You can do a gentle “wake up” routine like this any time you’re feeling low on energy and lethargic. If you work in an office or are seated for long periods during the day, then try and do something like this to move your body and get the oxygenated blood flowing as often as you can.

Try the above routine every morning for the next week and let me know how it makes you feel by leaving me a comment below. Before you know it it will become an invaluable part of your morning routine.

When you’ve done your 10 minutes of movement first thing and given your body the kind of wake up it needs, then you can think about coffee, if you still need it. Just make sure its organic!

What Is A Lean Green Human Being? Start Here

By On April 23, 2012 In Health, Life With No Comments Permanent Link to What Is A Lean Green Human Being? Start HerePermalink


You are.

At least, in your natural state – the way nature designed you to be – you’re a Lean Green Human Being.

Over the last 4+ million years, Mother Nature’s been tweaking the design, refining, making improvements and adaptations. Some form of hominid has been on this earth though, for at least this long and you’re the result of their trials and tribulations.

But, before we go any further, let’s move away from any “Paleo-Romanticism”. Your ancestors were not faced with an easily available, abundant food supply that would just leap on to the end of their spear, with little effort. They weren’t all built like Greek Gods and Goddesses and there were a lot of bigger, hairier, tougher creatures out there with sharper teeth that wanted to eat them. Life wasn’t a picnic for these guys. It was tough and everyday they would face the harsh struggle for survival.

Which is exactly why you’re here, walking and talking and thinking in the way you do. The selective pressures of nature drove evolution in a certain direction and the evolutionary compass-needle points directly at you. And you, my friend, are truly amazing!

Ok, so you may not feel amazing right now but take a moment to think about it. You’re the culmination of over 4 million years of evolutionary trial and error. That’s a long time to experiment, make mistakes and then iron out the kinks. Also, Nature’s clever, in a way that humans will never be. It stands to reason that, after all this time, she’s going to come up with something pretty special.

Your default state is to be fit, healthy and happy.

You can move beautifully and freely in three dimensions, squatting, lunging, bending, pushing, pulling, twisting, walking and running [1]. You can crawl, climb, jump, swim, wriggle, roll, attack, defend (all of which are made up of a combination of the first 6 movements incidentally) and perform exquisitely intricate movements like threading a needle, typing on a keyboard or brain surgery.

You can talk by the age of two, building up to a vocabulary of 20,000 words by the time you’re just 5 years old, just as easily in two completely different languages, if necessary.

Perhaps most important of all, you have this big, incredible brain capable of something that may be unique to humans, called imagination. This creative intelligence gives you the ability to project into the future, conceive wonderful plans and concepts and then make them come true, if you so desire. Essentially, you can create your own reality.
Cyber Tracker founder, Louis Leibenberg believes that this capacity of imagination was born on the savannahs of Africa whilst early hunter-gatherers persistence hunted prey. Because they couldn’t keep the animal in sight for the duration of the hunt, they would have to track it. When the tracks became obscured or unreliable, the hunters had to put themselves in the place of the animal and project into the future, “imagining” what it’s next moves would be. According to Louis, this is the origin of deductive reasoning and the whole scientific process [2].

The beauty is that all of these amazing abilities all come as standard, built in and pre-loaded with the average human model, straight out of the box. Of course, it takes a little practise to master the controls, but the ability is there, right from the first breath. At some point between the ages of 6 – 12 months, you could do a perfect squat. You didn’t have to think about this or concentrate on your technique. You could just do it because that’s what you’re designed to do.

You really are a miracle. You’re arguably the most advanced, sophisticated being that has ever walked the surface of planet Earth.

You’re Nature’s flagship model…

… for the time being,

but, are you throwing it all away? Do you realise it in the first place? Are you wasting your evolutionary gifts and living a life below your potential? Are you in pain, unhealthy, exhausted, overweight, depressed or chronically ill? Unfortunately, nowadays, the answer is probably a yes to more than one of the above.

Instead of being the fit, healthy, functional, happy manimals that nature intended, even designed us to be, the norm has become much different.

We should be able to move easily and freely, without pain or injury, over a variety of terrains and using all of our natural movement patterns. We should be fit, strong and have great endurance. We should be healthy, lean and energetic, looking and feeling great inside and out. This is how we’re meant to be.

The modern reality is quite different and a lot more depressing.

• Obesity is running rampant and by 2025, just 13 years time, an estimated 47% of men and 36% of women in the UK will be obese – not just overweight but obese.
• Approximately 1 in 5 10 to 11 year olds are obese
• 7 out of 10 men and 8 out of 10 women fall below their ‘age appropriate activity level’
• Obesity and physical inactivity cost the UK £10.7 Billion each year
• Obesity increases the likelihood of: type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, narrowing and blockage of blood vessels, cardiovascular disesase, cancer, disability, reduced quality of life and can lead to premature death.
• Since 1996, the number of people diagnosed with diabetes has doubled. It’s estimated to double again by 2025.
• Around 3 people will be diagnosed with diabetes every 10 minutes (17 people every hour, 400 every day)
• Obesity accounts for 80-85% of the overall risk of developing type 2 diabetes
• Type 2 diabetes reduces life expectancy by up to 10 years
• Diabetes costs the NHS: £27 million a day, £1 million an hour, £17,000 a minute, £286 a second
• Type 2 Diabetes can largely be prevented by improving health, nutritional and lifestyle factors

These are just a handful of figures I’ve chosen for obesity [3] and diabetes [4], two of the biggest problems facing modern, westernized society. I haven’t even started on cancer and heart disease.

Perhaps the worst part of it all is that these ‘diseases of civilisation’: obesity, type 2 diabetes, high-cholesterol, high blood pressure, coronary heart disease and even some forms of cancer, are largely preventable. That means that you can prevent them from happening with nutrition, exercise and lifestyle modifications.

This means that these alarming epidemics are self-inflicted.That’s right, folks, we’re doing it to ourselves.

After countless millions of years of evolution (eons if you go back to the very beginning) and all of the challenges faced by our ancestors, struggling to survive against the odds and ensure the continuation of their genetic expression, modern man has decided to kill him self off, along with the planet which gave him life in the first place.

And they call us Homo Sapiens…

Time To Wake Up

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s not too late to change direction and clean up our act.

No matter who you are, how unhealthy, overweight or unfit you may be, you’re designed to be fit and healthy, energetic and happy. You have the ability to move better, lose weight, boost your energy levels and dramatically improve your health. You have the capacity to improve your life in all areas. You may have just forgotten how to do it, or resigned yourself to the fiction that good health and a beautiful, functional body is something only other people can achieve.

This is simply not true.

I firmly believe that your default state is to be fit, healthy and happy and that anyone has the ability to change the way their body looks and feels. It’s also a lot simpler that you might think, if you have the right information and resources for the job and that’s why I created Lean Green Human Being.

It’s my mission to show you how to take control of your health and fitness, once and for all. I want to show you how to build vigorous health and the body of your dreams, that looks and performs the way you’ve always wanted. I want to free you from the idea that you’re born somehow lacking, without everything you need to live life fully.

Most of all, I want to remind you who and what you are and show you what you’re capable of. I want to change the way you think about health and fitness, for good and help you discover and unleash your true potential.

References

1.Paul Chek’s Primal Patterns® as described in Movement That Matters, C.H.E.K. Institute

2.Tracking, The Origin Of Science, Louis Leibenberg, South Africa

3.Statistics On Obesity, Physical Activity and Diet: England 2012, The NHS Information Centre, Lifestyle Statistics

4.Diabetes In The UK 2012: Key Statistics On Diabetes, http://www.diabetes.org.uk, accessed 10th July 2012

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