We’ve been working on this post for a while, but Life got in the way. (Alternate story: Dallas is better at starting projects than finishing them.)  Nonetheless, we’d like to talk about recovery. No, not economic recovery—though that would be lovely—but physiological recovery from the stressors placed upon us by our modern physical world.

Rest vs. Recovery

These two words, “rest” and “recovery,” have distinctly different meanings when applied to health, fitness or athletic contexts. Recovery can encompass many different behaviors and strategies, but it is fundamentally different than just resting.

Rest is simply the absence of effort or movement—the absence of exertion. Think taking a day off from exercise or sport, napping, chilling on the couch, rotting your brain with Jersey Shore or Lost reruns, and going to bed nice and early so you get adequate sleep. All of that is fine and good, but resting is only one small part of true recovery.

Recovery is the restorative process by which you regain a state of “normalcy”; healthy and in balance. (If your “normal” is not “healthy,” perhaps you should spend some time considering that.) Recovery is far more than just taking a day off from training. Genuine recovery includes adequate rest, but also must include the engaged, deliberate execution of a cogent plan to offset the (physical and psychological) cost of your training.

In his 2010 All Banged Up post, Dallas wrote:

“I see more sub-acute and chronic injuries resulting from inadequate recovery from exercise (especially with high-intensity programs), than resulting from an acute or traumatic incident. The primary fault lies with inadequate or improper recovery from exercise, not the type or intensity of exercise. (To put it another way, it’s not that you’re hurting yourself doing pull-ups – more often than not, it’s because you’re not properly recovering from those pull-ups.) I believe that a high-intensity exercise program is both effective and sustainable life-long only when combined with good nutrition and recovery practices.”

Merely taking a day or two off from exercise when you’re feeling overtrained (or All Banged Up) is, to put it bluntly, the slacker’s version of “recovery.” One of the many things that has been underscored during our training with Rob MacDonald of Gym Jones is that recovery requires just as much (or more!) discipline as training itself. Which means if you’re training hard, a case could be made that you should spend more time focused on recovery than you do on training itself.

Don’t have that much time in your busy, stressful life? It might mean a little less training and a little more time spent on recovery.

Still don’t think that’s really necessary? Maybe you just don’t realize how stressful your life really is.

Stress is Stress

Let’s review the biological concept of hormesis as it relates to recovery. Hormesis is an adaptive process that occurs as the result of a specific “dose” of a stimulus. In simple terms, you could summarize it as “the dose makes the poison” meets “what doesn’t kill you might make you stronger.” Hormesis describes the dose-specific response to a stimulus; whether something’s net effect is beneficial, harmful, or neutral depends on the “dose.”

Another way to put it is, “some is good, but more is not better.” Hormesis is at the core of our favorite refrain, “context matters,” and is reflected in our Whole9 Health Equation as the balance of Stress vs. Recovery. Why all the focus on stress?

During his recent Paleo(fx) presentation, Dr. Daniel Kalish said, “Psychological stress and physical stress are virtually indistinguishable in the body.” We wanted to give him a standing ovation for that. What does that mean, in terms of hormesis and our Health Equation? If you’ve got a ton of psychological stress, that costs you something. It costs you recovery capacity. It cuts into your reserves. In fact, being chronically psychologically stressed is probably more damaging than overtraining or under-sleeping, though those are obviously poor behaviors, too.

Think about your own life. Ask yourself if your “dose” of a stressor is appropriate for your context. There are lots of examples of stressors: intermittent fasting, high-intensity exercise, under-eating, cold showers or acute exposure to cold, caffeine intake, eating extremely hot peppers… the list is long.

A “stressor” isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but the application of that stressor in that dose in a context already saturated with a high stress load may be detrimental to your health.* If you’re a parent with an infant (and thus some degree of sleep deprivation/disturbance), a busy job, and some financial stress, do you think the net effect of getting out of bed at 5:00 AM five days a week to do high-intensity exercise is positive? Likely not. (If we just described your life, please… just stay in bed.)

*This is one of the reasons why we rarely recommend intermittent fasting to our consulting clients. Unsurprisingly, most of them are on the “too much” side of the stress scale, rating their daily stress at an average of 8 out of 10. These folks don’t have any “reserve” left to offset an additional stressor, which means adding IF on to their current health equation would do them more harm than good. IF may be a perfectly appropriate tool for other folks with different contexts, but it’s not for everyone.

Minimum Effective Dose

Exercise is an excellent example of hormesis in action. An appropriate “dose” of physical stress provokes a positive adaptation in your body (you get fitter), but dosing progressively larger and larger amounts of exercise can be seriously detrimental to your health.  Make no mistake – excessive training (or, perhaps stated more accurately, under-recovering) can and commonly does have serious health consequences. And what look like “reasonable” training for one person might be way more stress than a different person has the capacity to adapt to.

Clif Harski, among other Smart People we know, talks about the “minimum effective dose,” that sweet spot on the hormesis graph. This is where healthy adaptation is occurring, but you’re on the safer side of the stress curve, not revving at the redline day in and day out. In the case of exercise, doing none is pretty unhealthy, but doing too much is unhealthy too.

The real key is to find that sweet spot, where you’ll have optimal adaptation to the stressor without reaching the point of diminishing returns–or worse, when the exercise “takes” more from your health than it gives back. Like with other stressors, exercise is dose-dependent, and the appropriate dose for you depends almost entirely on you, your context, and your goals.

Are you Under-Recovered? Here are a few things to look for:

1. You used to be excited about going to the gym – not so much anymore.
2. Your performance (or lack thereof) is seriously stressing you out , and a poor workout ruins your day.
3. You’ve got chronic muscle soreness after every workout, and/or that lingering “shoulder thing” that just won’t seem to heal.
4. Your sleep pattern has become irregular.
5. Even though you’re in bed for enough hours, you never feel well-rested in the morning.
6. You need a Monster drink or three espressos to get fired up for your training sessions.
7. You crave carbohydrates (sugar!) more than you used to.
8. You’re getting sick a lot, or just can’t seem to kick that cold you picked up.
9. You’re training hard and “eating right” but that little belly just isn’t going away.
10. You’re actually gaining fat, instead of losing it.

Any of this resonate with you?

So how does all this connect back to actual recovery? In order to progress forward with health, there must be a relative balance between Stress (such as exercise) and Recovery. Otherwise, you’re writing checks your body can’t cash, eventually ending up beat down and “overdrawn.”

In case you’ve not experienced this eye-opening phenomenon firsthand, take our professional word for it: it takes a lot longer to recover from an overdrawn state than it took to get you there in the first place. Like paying off debt, it’s a prolonged and generally miserable process. We’re not trying to scare you – we’re simply sharing what we know in the hopes that it will save you some heartache. Take it or leave it.

Recovery 101

You don’t get fitter when you are training. Whether you CrossFit, or Zumba, or swing kettlebells, or run marathons… you get fitter when you are recovering from that training.

Being committed to recovery means that sometimes you don’t train hard, even if you really want to, and even if everyone else is doing it.

A commitment to recovery may mean that you take ice baths sometimes.

It means that when all you want is pizza and a beer, you choose a nutritious meal instead.

It means that you put away the computer/TV/smartphone/video game and go the heck to sleep.

It means that you spend some intimate time with your foam roller, lacrosse ball, stick, ice pack, or other self-care tool/torture device.

It means that you watch and learn from Kelly Starrett getting his supple leopard on.

It may mean that you seek out a reputable practitioner of your preferred therapeutic approach: massage, Rolfing, acupuncture, chiropractic care, naturopathic or functional medicine.

It might mean that you use your noggin’ and take a pass on a race or competition that really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of Your Life and Health.

It might even mean that you revisit your trip down Whole30 Lane.

“Aerobic” is not a dirty word.

If you’re passing on lower intensity, longer duration activity and exclusively working at a high-intensity, we think that’s a short-sighted perspective. For our clients, we recommend regularly spending at least a half-hour doing easy activity as part of your recovery practices. Riding the Airdyne, walking, swimming, or biking for 30-90 (long, slow, boring) minutes expedites recovery from hard training, improves metabolic efficiency (especially in folks on a low-ish carb, high-ish fat diet), and improves cardiovascular health.

Don’t confuse durations over a half hour with “chronic cardio” – the long duration, moderate-to-high intensity stuff that really nails you. To be clear, no one was ever harmed by a two hour hike or an easy spin on the bike with their kids. Keeping the intensity low is the key to recovery activities, and including some long, easy stuff in your routine improves health and recovery from hard training—which ultimately will improve performance in your higher-intensity sport or exercise program.

Regardless of how you choose to step your recovery up (perhaps, in part, by stepping your training down), it’s time. Summer’s activities are just around the corner, and if you play a sport, participate in outdoor pursuits, or simply like comparing your physical capacity to others (or yourself!), now is the time to invest in yourself. Now. Not tomorrow, or next week, or after a few more workouts. Now.

You owe it to your Future You not just to rest, but to recover.

In February 2011, Dallas wrote an article for Performance Menu, the “journal of nutrition and athletic excellence” published each month by Greg Everett of Catalyst Athletics.  The article focused on the impact of sleep (or lack thereof) on your health and athletic performance.

Today, thanks to the generosity of Catalyst Athletics, today we are offering Dallas’ article for free – available to those without a subscription to PMenu. (Although if you don’t yet have a subscription, we can’t help but wonder why. Your health, performance and taste buds would all benefit from PMenu’s high caliber monthly offerings, and who doesn’t like the instant gratification of an on-line publication? The best part? You can subscribe for the whole year for only $30. Seriously – go do it.  We’ll wait.)

Here’s a preview from Dallas’ article.

Sleep: An Undervalued Ergogenic Aid

We all know we need sleep, and most of us would admit that we probably need more. Unfortunately, that knowledge often isn’t enough to compel us to take action to improve our sleep habits (or lack thereof). In many Western societies, the hard-charging, go-getting executive takes pride in sleeping less than his or her competitors, purportedly “getting more done” in any given day. (From a raw productivity perspective, that may be true, though research suggests that being chronically sleep deprived significantly impedes psychomotor function, memory retrieval, and… work productivity. So spending more hours getting stuff done – at the expense of sleep – makes you get less done in any given hour. Ah, the irony.)

In the realm of athletics, sleep seems to be the red-headed stepchild: clumsily acknowledged, generally overlooked, yet permanently part of the family. To the detriment of our health and performance, we often don’t give sleep proper priority. I think it’s high time that we help sleep come in from the cold.

Download the full PDF

You can download the full Performance Menu PDF here.

And as you couldn’t comment or post questions on the original article in PMenu, we’ll host them here – so feel free to post your thoughts below.

Enjoy – and tuck yourself in a little early tonight, okay?

CON·TEXT
noun /ˈkänˌtekst/
The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.

My Context Is Not Your Context

Definition aside, in simple terms, “context” means the general story of your life, past and present – everything that makes up your big-picture health and fitness.  A good place to start evaluating your own context is our 9 Factors – but most folks are already savvy to the fact that things like sleep, training and stress all play a major role in their individual health status.

What is often overlooked is that there are additional variables like age, health history, and genetics that also contribute to your individual context.  But unlike diet, sleep and training, many of those “invisible” factors are completely outside of your control.  And while it may be all too easy to ignore those factors or pretend they don’t impact your health, you’ll do so to your own detriment.

Age

You’re only as old as you feel, right?  In a way, that’s absolutely true.  But when it comes to things like recovery from exercise, metabolism and sleep, age plays an important role.  You may be in the best shape of your life, but some studies say that the older you get, the more likely you are to experience problems related to recovering from exercise.  While that conclusion is highly individual (and not necessarily an inevitability of aging), experts agree that at the very least, you should change the intensity, volume and frequency of training as you age.

In addition, you may be back to your high school weight, but your body isn’t as good at working through some metabolic processes as it used to be.  And you may have blackout curtains and turn in at 9 AM, but the older we get, the less likely we are to sleep as well as we used to.  Whether we like it or not, our age (and the aging process) is a factor to our big-picture health and fitness.

Health History

We’ve heard hundreds of transformation stories from Whole30 participants, some of whom admitted to having poor health habits in earlier years.  Now, as they string together a year or two of health eating, exercise, sleep and stress management, they picture those years behind them.  Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy.

A history that includes metabolic derangement and weight gain (especially the yo-yo variety), presents major challenges to your return to a healthy weight and metabolism.  In fact, your health history dictates to a large degree how hard you’ll have to work to achieve your new health and fitness goals – and you may find some of those goals (particularly regarding weight loss) are simply unattainable, given what your body has been through in the past.  While it’s unfortunate that you’d have to pay for past sins today, when you’re working so hard to do everything right, your health history is an unavoidable part of your current context.

Genetics

While many folks place too much emphasis on genetics (“I’m bound to be diabetic – it’s in my genes”), you’d be mistaken not to take that into account at all.  While epigenetics (the pattern of gene expression as influenced by environmental factors like diet, stress and prenatal nutrition) has far more impact on how you look, feel and live, you can’t discount that your genes, race and ethnicity play a role in your health status.  If diabetes, addiction, breast cancer or other conditions “run in the family”, consider your margin of error that much skinnier.  It would be smart to pay attention to your genetic predispositions, and factor them in as part of your context.

It’s Not a Life Sentence

Of course, just because we age, have a history of yo-yo dieting or come from a family of diabetics doesn’t mean we are permanently bound by these factors.  (Heck, just look at Art Devany – he’s healthier and more vibrant than most people half his age.) How you approach your current diet, exercise regimen, sleep schedule and stress management have an enormous impact.  The take-away is this:  by factoring in your individual context – both those factors you control and those you don’t – you’ll be better equipped to make an effective plan to help you achieve your goals.

As we move forward into focusing more on the big picture of health, fitness and quality of life, you’ll continue to hear the refrain “context matters.”  We’re not trying to brainwash you, we promise – but we hope this discussion (and the broader health-centered discussions to come) will prompt you to thoughtfully evaluate your own context, and better help you set reasonable expectations for yourself, and continue to move you forward in your pursuit of optimal health.

Since founding the Whole9 in 2009, we’ve used “our 9” to address the multi-faceted nature of a healthy lifestyle with our consulting clients.  But after developing a great working relationship with Robb Wolf and attending several extraordinary nutrition seminars (including Robb’s), we decided to concentrate our public health focus on nutrition.  Since then, we’ve written extensively about nutrition’s role in a healthy lifestyle over the past several years, and conducted more than 70 Foundations of Nutrition workshops, spreading our version of the Good Food Word.

We “zoomed in” on nutrition to meet a need in the community for practical application strategies of various dietary concepts – and we were not alone.  Over the last few years as the Paleo/ancestral health movement has grown, we’ve seen hundreds of new Paleo blogs, recipe sites and communities created for the exclusive purpose of focusing on nutrition.  But now, we see a new need within our community – and it’s time for us to take a step back and remind our readers that health is a multifaceted concept.  Nutrition is, of course, a  foundational piece of any good health and fitness program – but it most certainly is not the only piece.

Frank Forencich made an astute observation about this same phenomenon in The State of the Meme, saying, “The problem with this (nutrition-focused) variation (of Paleo) is that it’s a fragment of a much larger story. And because it’s a fragment, it tends to get pigeon-holed with every other diet meme out there. This brings Paleo down to the level of pop health, where it loses its meaning and its power.”  He goes on to add that “Paleo” is so much more than either ancestral nutrition or ancestral movement patterns – and we dig his perspective.

Context Matters

So now, for us, it’s time to zoom back out. Of course, we’re not abandoning nutrition as the foundational factor of a healthy life. But our readers need to hear more about The Big Picture. We interact with thousands of people a month via email, workshops, Facebook, and Twitter, and what we’ve realized is that many folks have drilled so far down into nutrition that they can no longer see the big picture at all. 

People ask us about the lectins in tree nuts, the fructose content of half a pear, or whether it’s okay to eat the deer they shot if the deer may have been feeding on GMO corn. (True story.)  And in many of these instances, what we want to say is,  “It really doesn’t matter, since you’re only sleeping 5 hours a night and I can smell the cortisol on you from across the street.” So we encourage you to pull back a bit, do a little introspection, and try to see beyond any one factor (specifically, nutrition) to view the reality of your big-picture health and fitness situation.  After all, self-analysis is nearly as critical to genuine progress as dissent (but that’s a topic for another day).

Analyze This

We’re calling this graphical representation of an individual’s overall health “The Whole9 Health Equation” (at least until we have a stroke of genius and come up with something clever-er). Yes, it is simplified – Dallas doesn’t like complex math equations. Yes, there are important factors (such as age and quality social interaction) that are not factored in here. No, we cannot quantify this for you personally, as (again), context matters. Nonetheless, let’s tackle this thing.

We think of each individual’s health status like a “bank account”, to and from which you make deposits and withdrawals.  Like a bank account, your Health Balance is a product of Credits minus Debits. If you make more frequent (or larger) deposits than withdrawals, you accumulate “Health Wealth”.  And, hopefully not to take this analogy too far, that Wealth pays dividends down the road.  Conversely, if you overextend your resources (withdrawing more than you’re depositing), you’ll find yourself in the red – “Health Debt”.  Think about overdrafting your bank account – you can continue spending for a while, but at some point, you simply can’t spend any more, because there’s nothing left in the bank. (Needless to say, that scenario stinks.)   Are you with us so far?  Good.  Now here’s where we start talking about specific factors.

Recovery = Nutrition + Sleep + Specific Recovery Practices

Your diet, sleep and general recovery habits are all a part of “General Recovery” (health deposits or credits).

Nutrition is the biggest potential credit. That’s why we call it “foundational”. Eating adequate calories from nutrient-dense, anti-inflammatory foods on a daily basis will deposit huge credits into your health balance.  But your Nutrition factor can also be a negative integer, a debit. In other words, eating unhealthy foodstuffs can actually cost you – big. (Think obesity and chronic disease.)

Sleep matters. We make ours a priority – above exercise, reading, socialization, or even housekeeping. Dallas has written about this in Performance Menu, and we continue to emphasize this issue in our workshops and with consulting clients.  Nine hours of sleep per night equals big deposits.  Chronically under-slept?  Equally large withdrawals.  Sometimes, prioritizing sleep requires some radical revisions to one’s life. Pay now, or pay later.

Specific Recovery Practices include ice baths, contrast showers, specific mobility work (including foam rolling, lacrosse ball work or self-myofascial release), stretching, yoga, massage and other manual therapies, meditation, recovery (i.e. easy) training sessions, acupuncture, sex, napping, etc.  Your commitment to Specific Recovery Practices, to a large degree, dictates how quickly and thoroughly you recover from training, and ultimately can determine whether your training is productive or simply destructive.

In summary, sub-par Nutrition, Sleep, and Specific Recovery Practices have the potential to massively impact your Health.  (Duh.)  How rapidly this occurs partly depends on how fast you’re “spending” those resources with Physical Stress (PhysStress) and Psychological Stress (PsychStress).

Total Stress = Physical Stress + Psychological Stress

Physical Stress (PhysStress), for most of us, is structured exercise or participation in an actual sport. For some, working a manual labor or highly physical job (construction, firefighting, etc.) would also qualify as physical stress.  But for folks whose primary physical effort is deliberate exercise, there are several factors that determine the amount of PhyStress: intensity, frequency, and volume.  

Intensity refers to how hard the activity feels to you, and how hard your heart is working.  Frequency is how often you are experiencing this physical stress – twice a day, three times a week, etc.  Volume means the amount of work you complete in each training session – whether you lift a particular weight ten times during your session, or one hundred times.

Each of these factors work together to determine physical stress – notice they are all multiplied in the equation. That means in increase in one has the potential to dramatically affect the total of your PhysStress.  You can do short-ish high intensity stuff sometimes, or long and hard stuff occasionally, or long, low intensity activity daily – but not daily high intensity training, or large volumes of moderate intensity training, or (god forbid) both.  Unless you’re a professional athlete, of course, in which case you value performance over health. Most of us don’t fall into this category.

Psychological Stress (PsychStress) can come from a variety of sources, and can be pretty insidious. It could be job-related stress, family/marital stress, anxiety and phobias, unresolved childhood trauma, low self-esteem, guilt, etc. This stuff runs deep. But if you carry things (i.e. “baggage”), it costs – daily, monthly, and annually. The kicker here is that a complete lack of PsychStress doesn’t make a very big deposit into your Health Balance – but its mere existence can make gigantic withdrawals.  Do your best to deal with this stuff head-on, even if it sucks. Some things are actually out of your control, and that has to be okay, too.

In summary, how much of your Health Balance you can afford to “spend” (i.e. the total of your PhysStress and PsychStress) depends mostly on the size and frequency of your deposits (i.e., how much effort you’re putting into Recovery – nutrition, sleep, and specific recovery practices). 

Note:  Before you even ask, no, we cannot quantify this for you.  We can’t say an ice bath is worth 10 health dollars, and a two-a-day training session costs you 20.  You know why?  Because context matters.  Your specific lifestyle and health status play a crucial role in how much you deposit or withdraw from your Health Balance with any given factor.  For example, an evening of dietary off-roading may cost a lean, insulin-sensitive person 10 health dollars, but it may cost an overweight, autoimmune-suffering person 100.  This equation requires you to self-analyze, and determine which factors have the biggest effects on your own individual Health Balance.

Some Health Balance Examples

Some factors detract enormously from your balance. For example, the short-term sleep deprivation that normally accompanies a new baby takes a pretty serious toll on a person.  In this example, you are not able to make large deposits to your balance, even if you’ve backed off of hard training, and are still eating well.  It’s like taking a big pay cut for a few months – your spending habits have to change.  However, what you’ve done up until this point makes a big difference.  If you have a large Health Balance “savings”, you can make it through this situation relatively unscathed.  However, if you’ve been living paycheck to paycheck, barely covering your withdrawals, an unexpected life situation like a new baby will absolutely break you.  Still with us?

A nutritional strategy like intermittent fasting (our favorite example) might be just the right amount of “stress” to drive a positive adaptation in one person’s body, causing the overall effect to be positive. But in someone else, that additional stress only further taxes an already-overstressed system, and may actually detract from their Health Balance. Of course, every person’s scenario is unique, which is why no one can state definitively that IF (as an example) is universally good or bad.

Figuring out your individual context can be tricky, especially when you are both the least qualified person to accurately assess your “stuff”, given how close you are to the subject matter – but also the only person who has all the information about your own context.  But with our big-picture approach, some practice (and perhaps some guidance from a professional), you’ll be able to better evaluate your own overall health balance, and create a solid plan to keep you in the black.

Is Your Health Balance Off Balance?

All too often, we see people struggling to figure this stuff out – really struggling, working hard. They’re committed to making changes, to progressing, to improving… but they’re either overvaluing/undervaluing some factors, or completely overlooking one or more pieces of the puzzle. Admittedly, it’s not easy, but we’re hoping that this post will prompt some more honest introspection. Here are some examples of genuine-but-misguided efforts to improve health:

• Looking for a nutritional solution to a lifestyle problem, such as attempting to offset the effects of chronic stress by cutting out fruit or nuts, or trying a new PWO whey protein.

• Being frustrated with your “plateau” (performance, weight loss, whatever) and doing more of what got you this far.  “If high-intensity training helped me lose 20 pounds, then more of it will probably help me lose those last 10.”   All of those factors (Intensity, Frequency and Volume) multiply to create a potentially astronomical PhysStress product before you even realize it.

• Being so wound up about sticking to the Whole30 guidelines that you actually create more stress for yourself. Folks, the Whole30 is a self-awareness tool, not a hazing.

• Over-exercising to manage your stress.  Sometimes you need to suck it up, buttercup, because being an “exercise addict” is not a flag you should proudly fly – and will put you into Health Debt faster than you can say, “I’ll rest when I’m dead.”

• Being over-stressed and under-sleeping, but still cutting calories to try to lose that stubborn belly fat. (One word: cortisol.) Don’t underestimate the power of sleeping more and stressing less on body composition.

• Grappling with “that shoulder thing” and looking to your physical therapist/chiropractor/acupuncturist to magically fix it instead of taking a week (or two!) off from the gym to focus on nutrition, sleep and bumping up your Recovery.

Any of these sound familiar?  Don’t beat yourself up if you’ve been working hard in all the wrong areas – the thing that counts is that you’re willing to work hard.  Looking at the big picture is difficult, and takes practice – and sometimes, a template (like our equation) to help you figure it all out for yourself.

Taking Care of YOUR Health Balance

We hope our Health Equation has cued some critical and honest self-analysis, and helped you think about factors outside of nutrition as they apply to your health and fitness. Given that each person’s context is different, we’re not able to make blanket statements about how much or how little is appropriate for you, but we bet that if you stop and think about it, you will probably be able to intuit a reasonable direction to head.

In the coming months, we’ll be talking a lot more about context, non-nutrition factors, and (hopefully) a sane way to combine these things into a life that is deeply enriching. If you leave with just one concept, please remember: context matters.  Drop feedback, questions or thoughts about your own Health Balance to comments.

There Is No Free Lunch

Trouble is, things don’t work like that.  If there were a valid shortcut to optimal, well-rounded, big-picture health and fitness – don’t you think we would have heard about it by now?  We sure haven’t stumbled across it.  (And we live this diet and fitness stuff.)  The truth is, there is no such thing as a free lunch.  There is efficiency.  There is intelligence in programming.  There is concentration of focus, absolute dedication, fierce determination… but everything that’s worth doing requires – demands – that you work your tail off to get there.

The Secret

You want to maximize health and achieve optimal fitness?  We’ll tell you exactly how to do it. 

Eat foods that makes you healthier, every meal, every day. Eat foods that makes you less healthy infrequently, if at all. Eat just enough to support activity levels and goals.

Exercise. Work hard. Harder than you are now. But more importantly, work smart. Too much volume, intensity and frequency is just as bad as too little.

Recover. Devote as much effort to recovery practices as you do to training. This is not optional. Most fall miserably short in this category.

Sleep 8-9 hours a night, in a cool, dark room. Make time for this. You can get away with less, but only if it’s summertime.

Manage your stress. Deal with it in a healthy fashion. Stress will undermine all of the above.

Do this, day in and day out, for years and years and years, as consistently as you can.

We Don’t Do Shortcuts

If you do these things, as often as you can, as consistently as you can, for as long as you can, you will be healthy.  You will be fit.  And your body composition will reflect that.  Trouble is, that’s not anywhere near as much fun as the promise of a shortcut.  And it’s nowhere near instant gratification. 

But anything worth doing is worth doing right.  And when it comes to your health, “right” is the only way you should consider.  So we won’t offer you fads, false promises, or miracles.  We’ll just tell you what you need to do to earn your 400,000 hour body, not just today, not temporarily, but forever. 

We’ll be expanding on these concepts – how to “put it all together “- in future posts.  Because while this stuff is all pretty simple, it certainly isn’t easy.  Stay tuned.

This is the first post in our Kill Your TV series, designed to help you navigate your television-less existence for the next 30 days. (You didn’t think we’d spring it on you and then leave you hanging, did you?) Today’s post is all about helping you through the first week without your beloved plug-in drug – and filling those hours with something meaningful.

While it may seem obvious to those of you who have been without cable for a few years now, we’re here to present the rest of you Kill Your TV participants with 174,203 (almost) things you can do with your life instead of watching TV. (We’re also giving you links to products we like in our newly opened Amazon store, to help get you started.) Take back those hours this month and do something productive, fun, enriching or restorative. Like what? Glad you asked.

Improve Your Training Performance

• Stretch
• Perform self-myofascial release
• Go for a recovery walk/bike/swim/paddle/row
• Read training-related books or articles
• Do some skill work
• Practice yoga
• Update your training logs
• Get a massage
• Take an ice bath
• Connect with your trainer or fellow gym-goers
• Lay out your short-term and long-term training goals
• Get acupuncture

Improve Your Sleep

• Go to bed earlier
• Read a book
• Take a hot bath
• Have sex
• Develop a pre-bed routine
• Prepare clothes/food/work for the morning
• Buy and install black-out curtains
• Read Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar and Survival
• Read Dallas’ sleep article in Performance Menu

Improve Your Nutrition

• Prep and cook food for the week
• Try a new recipe
• Visit a local farm or market
• Clean out your pantry
• Take a cooking class
• Prepare a new vegetable
• Read a cookbook
• Make a weekly meal plan
• Find a new nutrition book
• Sign up for a CSA
• Host a dinner party

Improve Your Family Time

• Call or visit a family member
• Play a board game or cards
• Read a book together
• Go outside and play
• Cook dinner together
• Help your kids with their homework
• Take a family walk after dinner
• Plan a family trip or vacation
• Have a date night with your significant other
• Work on a puzzle
• Do a craft project
• Write a letter or send a card
• Organize family photos
• Plan a party or an event

Improve Your Household

• Train your dog
• Finish that project that’s been half done for 6 months
• Clean something
• Organize something
• Start a garden
• Mow the lawn
• Plant a tree or flowers
• Have a yard sale
• Start a compost pile
• Wash your car
• Send stuff to Goodwill
• Get your oil changed
• Do laundry
• Go through stacks of papers and mail

Improve Your Fun and Play

• Pick up a new sport
• Go rock climbing
• Learn to swim
• Go for a bike ride
• Have a picnic
• Play with a slackline
• Play boccee
• Play ball with your kids
• Climb a tree
• Have a block party
• Throw a frisbee
• Go for a hike
• Nap in the grass
• Go to a local baseball game
• Shoot some baskets

Improve YOU

• Take an adult education class
• Get a pedicure
• Plan your dream house
• Go to church
• Volunteer
• Learn to knit
• Write something
• Take an art class
• Browse your local bookstore
• Get involved with your neighborhood
• Get involved in local politics
• Finish your will
• Join a book club
• Meet with a financial advisor
• Organize your business receipts
• Take yourself out for dinner
• Go to the dentist
• Test drive a car you can’t afford

What Will YOU Do?

Okay, so we don’t quite have 174,203 things… but this is a darn good start. And we bet you can come up with even more ideas to fill those TV-watching hours. So what will you do instead of watching television during the month of May? Submit your best ideas to comments.

For other articles in our Kill Your TV series, click here.

Just over four months ago, I gave up caffeine for good.  It wasn’t the first time I’d done without – periodically through the last two years, usually when our coffee habits had quietly and sneakily grown past the point of healthy, we’d do a week or two of no caffeine, and then reset our consumption to a more reasonable level.  I’d get to the 14 day mark, figure I was as good as cleansed and then happily make my first cup of coffee, promising myself that I’d go back to consuming “in moderation”.  In under a month, however, my consumption was usually right back to where I left off. I’d make every excuse in the book for my 3-4 cups a day – I needed a boost while traveling, a small coffee mid-workshop made the day a little easier, coffee pre-workout was an ergogenic aid. I knew I was kidding myself – and my adrenals knew it too. (News flash: the folks who counsel you on nutrition and health are human, too.)

The last time we gave up coffee for a few weeks was in August 2010, as we were moving from New England to Salt Lake City.  I went my usual two weeks without, but when I went back to my beloved Misha’s Route 66, something was different. 

Sometimes, awareness sucks

As many of you have experienced with our Whole30 program, the more “cycles” you complete of (a) going without a particular food, and (b) reintroducing it, the more acutely aware you are of the effect that food is having on you.  It was the same with my periodic coffee cleanses.  Each time I went back to drinking coffee, I noticed just a little bit more how it was negatively affecting my mood, my sleep, my energy levels – even on just one or two cups a day.  In August, however, the caffeine straight-up kicked me in the crotch with its nasty effects.  These are the things I noticed after only two weeks away, and returning back to just two small cups of coffee a day:

• Caffeine gives me crazypants.  Literally.  I get anxious.  It makes me irritable.  I pick fights, I snap at people, my fuse is abnormally short.  In general, I’m an unpleasant person to be around sometime around cup one-and-a-half.  Sorry, Dallas.

• I become maniacal about my work.  I would mindlessly, slowly sip my two cups while typing up blog posts or responding to emails and find myself in this unhealthy place where I’d refuse to break for the gym, to answer a personal phone call or even to pee (for real) because I was firmly entrenched in “work mode”.

• I didn’t eat a full meal until noon.  Ever.  Caffeine is a powerful appetite suppressant, and despite our rule to eat before our first cup of coffee, I just wasn’t hungry.  Though I’d force myself to eat something, two hard-boiled eggs was hardly enough to see me through until lunch.

Stating the obvious

Dallas was the first to say the idea out loud – carefully, mind you.  “Maybe you should, um, I don’t know, it’s just an idea, but maybe you should just… give up coffee?”  I’d been thinking the very same thing for quite some time, to be honest – at that point, it was easy to see the caffeine wasn’t doing me any favors.  I just wasn’t sure I was ready to pull the trigger.  It’s a daunting proposition, to give up coffee forever.  But on October 24^th, surrounded by witnesses, I swore off caffeine… again.

This time, however, was different.  While I still went through the same withdrawal symptoms –headaches, lethargy, crankiness – the mental cravings disappeared virtually immediately. The difference this time was that  I was giving it up for good.  There was no 30 day period, no end point in sight, no “I’ll give myself a longer break and see how it goes.”  I decided right then and there that, given the way caffeine affected me, there was no reason for me to keep it in my life.  And the finality of that made everything so much easier.  (I’ve never been good at moderation, anyway.)

Emerging from my caffeine coma

It took a full month before things (sleep, energy, my over-worked adrenals) started to come back around – that quick fix I was hoping for was nowhere to be found, in fact.  Things actually got worse before they got better, which I wasn’t expecting.  And even four months later, I’m still noticing slow and gradual improvements in areas I never expected.  Sure, I was aware of the mood swings, the irritability, the lack of appetite.  What I hadn’t noticed was how caffeine was affecting other areas of my life – until, of course, I gave it up.  (And Whole30 principles come around again, right?)  These are the things I’ve noticed in the last four months of “caffeine-free”:

• After a full month, I was sleeping so much better.  This was a tough battle – the first month, my system was all kinds of confused, and my sleep patterns were all over the charts.  I had trouble falling asleep at first, and then I’d fall asleep okay but wake up at 1 AM, 2 AM, 3 AM as my hormonal balance continued to shift.  After a solid month without caffeine, I started to fall asleep easy, sleep straight through the night and wake up refreshed without an alarm.  (I thought I was doing this already.  Comparatively, my sleep quality sucked compared to where it is now.)

• After two months, I started to wake up hungry.  Not ravenous, but genuinely, normally, happily hungry.  Good lord,  I haven’t woken up hungry since 1994.  This is an amazing phenomenon in which my body is actually sending me valid signals (hunger) when it’s actually supposed to (after fasting overnight).  Amazing… but only after only eight full weeks of being caffeine-free.  (Interestingly, feeding yourself a healthy meal within an hour of waking is very helpful in recovering from adrenal fatigue – certainly, waking up hungry makes that a whole lot easier.)

• After three months, my emotional volatility in a certain one week period each month has greatly dissipated.  This is the most surprising change – I had no idea my caffeine consumption was connected to such a serious case of “hormone poisoning” during that week.  Makes sense in hindsight, but I’m grateful that I no longer ride the hormonal roller coaster every 28 days.  (I’m not the only one happy about that.)

• After four months, I noticed my general awareness of stress – and its negative effects – has dramatically improved.  For those who know me well, I’ve always thrived on being in a constant state of stress.  Work, training, day-to-day activities were all conducted at a maniacal pace, not because they had to be.  I just thought I liked it that way.  Now, after several months of sleeping well, eating more, and generally allowing my adrenals to recover, I can feel that stress-state creeping on… and I no longer like it.  Now, it just feels, well… stressed.  (Because in most day-to-day life situations – say it with me – “Stress is bad, m’kay?”)  While I’m not great at nipping it the bud every time it pops up, and it’s usually work stuff that sets me off the fastest, I’m much better at recognizing it early and taking measures to ensure my periods of stress are less frequent, and shorter in duration.  Progress.  And you’re welcome, adrenals.

The road to recovery

I’m hopeful that things will continue to progress and improvements will continue to appear over the next few months – I fully expect it will take at least a year to reap the full physical and mental benefits of a caffeine-free lifestyle.  I’ve decided not to mess around with a good thing, and will avoid all caffeinated products for the time being.  Turns out I don’t miss black coffee enough to justify a decaf, and I’ve been told by a few smart people that even decaffeinated beverages are too much for the extra-sensitive. 

Now, if you think this entire post is just propaganda on the evils of coffee, think again (and re-read our Coffee Manifesto).  We’re not trying to tell you what to do – coffee isn’t all good, nor is it all evil.  But if you’ve noticed, as I did, that your caffeine consumption takes more than it gives, maybe it’s time to take a good, hard look at your habit, too. The rewards may surprise you.

We’ll feature a teaser excerpt here, but for those of you who want the full scoop (including tips and tricks for maximizing the performance benefits of sleep), you’ll have to purchase the February 2011 issue of Performance Menu for $5.  Better yet, subscribe for the whole year for only $30.  That way you’ll never miss a single article from contributors like Greg Everett, Dan John, Scott Hagnas and… us.  Trust us, your health, performance and taste buds would all benefit from PMenu’s high caliber monthly offerings, and who doesn’t like the instant gratification of an on-line publication?

In fact, because we’re so sure you’ll LOVE PMenu’s format and content, and because we know you’re dying to read Dallas’ take on sleep and performance, we’re giving away 25 copies of his article, “Sleep – An Undervalued Ergogenic Aid,” to our readers.  You’ve gotta earn it, though!  The first 25 folks to post a fun and creative nutrition-related photo to our Facebook page will win a free copy of the article. Photos reflecting nutrition or food-related social commentary, humor and irony would make the cut, but photos of your lunch – delicious as it might be – aren’t quite creative enough.  So get to snapping, and we’ll pick the winners over on Facebook.

Thanks to Greg Everett and the Performance Menu team for putting out such a great publication each month – and thanks to our community for your continued readership and support.  (But don’t you dare stay up late reading Dallas’ article.  That’s just too much irony.)

Sleep – An Undervalued Ergogenic Aid

By Dallas Hartwig, MS, PT

We all know we need to sleep, and most of us would admit that we probably need more.  Unfortunately, that knowledge often isn’t enough to compel us to take action to improve our sleep patterns (or lack of such).  In the realm of athletics, sleep seems to be the red-headed step-child, clumsily acknowledged, generally overlooked, yet permanently part of the family.  With our consulting practice, and in the considerable time I’ve spent in various gyms over the years, I’ve noticed that performance-oriented athletes (and even aesthetic-driven gym rats) are very committed to their training.  I have not, however, observed the same degree of commitment to sleep.  And yet adequate quantity and quality of sleep confers not only significant health benefits, but also directly impacts your performance through a few different mechanisms. […]

Once again, today’s post is coming from readers’ emails and comments. In my recent Derailed post, I wrote the following:

In it for the long haul? Here’s where you have to triage – and listen to me carefully. Eating well and sleeping enough come first. Just focus on that, and if that’s all you can do, that’s okay. Eat only Good Food, sleep as much as you can, and supplement for cortisol management. Those are your top priorities, and if you can keep those up, you’ll maintain an awful lot of your general “health”.

I received more than a few emails following that statement, asking about cortisol management, and steps you can take to help you manage your cortisol levels. Now, I’m not an expert on adrenal fatigue by any means, but I’m pretty good with Google, so I’ve pulled some basics together for y’all. I also checked in with Dallas and Mathieu Lalonde to see what their giant science-y brains could add. One word of caution – I’ve given you some supplement links as reference, but common sense should tell you to do your own research before you start taking anything new, right?

Let’s hit the basic background principles first. The adrenal glands produce many of the body’s hormones, including epinephrine (adrenaline) and cortisol. The function is to help us under stress – the release of certain hormones puts us into “fight or flight” mode, to help us deal with crisis situations. Trouble is, when you are under constant stress, the glands are working overtime, pumping out these hormones. The excess cortisol wreaks havoc on your metabolism, and seriously circumvents the processing of fat, protein and carbohydrates and fat loss efforts.

You can help to manage cortisol levels with the following supplements and common sense tips.

Supplements:

BCAA (branch chain amino acids). A general recommendation is to take 5g of mixed BCAAs per dose, 3-4 times a day, especially post work-out, and on an empty stomach.

Dallas adds that L-glutamine has been found to have immune-stimulating properties, and can help with muscle recovery when training hard. Supplement with 10 grams, twice daily on an empty stomach, with one of those servings taken right before bed. Powdered forms are inexpensive and easily mixed into a few ounces of water.

Phosphatidyl serine. Studies have shown that 800mg/day can significantly suppress cortisol, but this can get expensive.

ZMA supplements (zinc-magnesium-aspertate) or any other supplement that has zinc, magnesium and/or calcium, along with vitamin C supplements or Emergen-C Lite. Those should help with immune function and DNA repair during stressful times.

Avoid all NSAIDs (like Advil). Dallas explains that these anti-inflammatories not only negatively affect cortisol, but they decrease protein synthesis rates. This means that your body’s acute response to the stress of high-intensity exercise is diminished, which potentially could slow recovery/adaptation. Stick to fish oils for their anti-inflammatory properties.

Training:

Perform your workouts but reduce the intensity. Exercise does reduce stress. However, excessively long bouts of training or too many intense workouts deliver too much stress to an already-stressed body, and will increase levels of cortisol.

M@ adds that intense met-cons should be no greater than 30 minutes, and ideally much less than that. Monostructural cardio at high intensity (running, rowing, cycling, swimming) should be less than 45 minutes. Weightlifting workouts should also be less than 45 minutes in total.

Sleep:

Get plenty of sleep, but it does not have to be all in one chunk. Don’t freak out if you sleep for a little while, wake up, then go back to sleep (as you’ve been doing), or get up and take a nap later in the day. Research has shown that it is not the total amount of sleep hours that matters, but the number of sleep cycles achieved while sleeping.

Here’s something from the Center for Applied Cognitive Studies: “Studies show that the length of sleep is not what causes us to be refreshed upon waking. The key factor is the number of complete sleep cycles we enjoy.” It turns out that short afternoon naps (75-90 minutes) are very productive sleep-cycle wise. So go ahead and get your sleep in whenever you can – it doesn’t have to be a whole 8 to 9 hour block.

Nutrition:

With respect to your overall diet, we’ve more than got that covered, don’t we? However, be sure to abstain from caffeine and other stimulants. M@ also adds that you may want to abstain from alcohol and fructose as well.

A small (no more than 2 blocks of whatever macronutrient combination suits your goals) PWO meal will help lower cortisol levels after exercise.

So now you’ve got a few options for helping you manage your cortisol levels, including some that come from a bottle. One obvious word of caution – this does NOT mean you can supplement your way out of stress and its negative effects on your health and fitness. Employing good life stress-management skills are going to do more for your efforts to manage cortisol than any combination of supplements. A little extra help never hurts, however, so add the above to see you through the stressful times.

I am 100% ready to return to my regularly scheduled blog-writing here at UGD, but first, a little insight as to why my personal posts have been few and far between lately. See, up until recently, my life has been pretty steady. My days looked a lot the same – I do enjoy a bit of the Groundhog Day, so I tend to find a routine and stick with it. Wake, gym, my 9-5 job, coaching or writing for the blog or 603 site, early to bed, get up again the next morning and do it all over again. I liked my routine, and it afforded me the ability to eat well, sleep as much as I needed to and train five days a week, without fail.

This summer, my Fitness Train derailed when Life Stuff hurled itself across my tracks. I found myself skipping meals, missing workouts, sleeping nowhere near enough. Once I realized my tracks weren’t going to clear anytime soon, I did the best I could to run my own Health and Fitness trauma center. I triaged Life factors carefully, knowing most would survive, but accepting there would be some casualties along the way. Sleep and food came first. If I didn’t eat enough, I at least ate well. If I didn’t sleep enough, I at least took naps. Training only happened when I was well fed and well rested. Those days were sparse, but if I didn’t train at all, I at least kept moving.

As of today, my casualties are high. I haven’t trained consistently since July. I’ve lost a ridiculous amount of hard-earned strength, a ton of met-con capacity and, based on yesterday’s snatch grip deadlifts, most of my kinesthetic awareness for movements that I used to be able to perform in my sleep. My deadlift is down by almost 30#, my front squat is back where it was at the beginning of the year and I’ve lost a couple of dead hang pull-ups.

It was a Fitness train derailment of the most spectacular fashion, and there’s not a damn thing I could have done about it.

If you’re like me, health and fitness is one of the most important efforts in your life. You’ll do anything for the sake of your diet, exercise and sleep – working out while on vacation, bringing your own food to business meetings, cutting out of social occasions early because you’re training the next morning. But no matter how bad you want it, no matter how hard you try… sometimes Life Stuff hurls itself across your tracks. You get sick, your kid gets sick, work blows up, school blows up, families have crises and friends need help. It happens, and the only thing you can do is ride it out as best as you can, generating as few casualties as possible.

So how do you manage around a Fitness Train derailment, and how do you get moving again when your tracks are finally clear? Here’s my best advice, based on my own recent experience. First, when Life Stuff comes up, do your best to maintain your normal routine for as long as you can. You can juggle a lot for short periods of time, so if you can already see light at the end of the tunnel, suck it up, abandon extraneous activities and just stick to the basics. Deal with Life, eat well, sleep well and train. Narrow your scope for a few days to preserve what’s important until the crisis passes.

In it for the long haul? Here’s where you have to triage – and listen to me carefully. Eating well and sleeping enough come first. Just focus on that, and if that’s all you can do, that’s okay. Eat only Good Food, sleep as much as you can, and supplement for cortisol management. Those are your top priorities, and if you can keep those up, you’ll maintain an awful lot of your general “health”.

If you’re eating and sleeping well, get to the gym when you can. Here, you’ve got two options. If you’re feeling good and up for training with some intensity, then get to it… but make those workouts count. Screw the Filthy Fifty – your only priority is maintaining strength. Met-con capacity is cheap and dirty – it goes fast and comes back faster, so save your “cardio” for better days. Instead, deadlift. Press. Squat. Do some clean and jerks. Hit the big stuff hard and heavy. But what if you’re not feeling up for deadlifts? Mat Lalonde reminded me of a very important point a few weeks ago. Exercise, even at a slow and easy pace, is extremely effective in helping to manage stress and cortisol. So if you’re not able to train with your normal intensity, just do something. Walk your dog, swing a kettlebell or play with your kids. If nothing else, keep moving, because in terms of triage it’s better than nothing.

Once you put the Life Stuff behind you, now it’s time to get back into your routine. I am just this week ready and able to start fresh – and I’ll be the first to tell you it’s not easy. I did the best I could with what I was working with, but I hate that I had to let so much go in the process. I feel weak, uncoordinated, more tired than I should. And I’m so far off my routine that I’m having a hard time climbing back on board. So here’s what I’m doing to get back on the train to Dieselville.

First, I spent my first ten minutes in the gym yesterday doing nothing but complaining. “My deadlift feels awful. I’ve pulled way more than that with better form. I can’t remember how to snatch at all. My pull-ups are way too hard. Everything is sore, and I’m breathing too hard, and this totally sucks.” As unproductive as that might sound, I needed to get that out. I mean, come on… it DOES suck. Being as fit as you were and then having to start even a little bit over SHOULD make you want to pitch a tantrum of exit-gate-at-Disney-at-6PM proportions. So it’s okay to complain. Take a few minutes and let it all out, because once you’re done – you’re DONE. Not one more word out of you on the subject of “used to” or “should be” or any other brand of self-pity, anger or bitterness. You simply leave all that behind and GET GOING.

Find your routine again. Make fitness your top priority for a few weeks. Get to the gym at all costs, eat good food no matter what it takes, kill your TV to get that nine hours of sleep. Get yourself back to that place where this is just what you do, where it doesn’t feel forced (even if you have to force it at first).

In terms of training bang for your buck, get your muscles back. I can’t afford to care about my met-con just yet – what I need right now is STRENGTH. Dallas is starting me back on Day One of the 603 PTP program, deadlifting and pressing four days a week for the next eight weeks. Follow along if you like – there are hybrid met-cons, skill days and the occasional track day to break up the programming, but if you’re just starting out again and want to get stronger faster, this is the way to do it.

Don’t try to do everything all at once, either. The temptation may be to pile strength day upon skill day upon met-con upon “extra” cardio to get back in shape even faster. Uh, that won’t work. You’re probably still over-stressed, your body isn’t in peak physical condition as it is and if you push it too hard, too fast, you’ll end up over-trained, or worse, injured. Don’t be greedy – remember that it will take time to get back to previously enjoyed levels of health and fitness. Be patient, choose a program (whether it’s the 603 PTP, Catalyst Athletics workouts or the CrossFit Main Page) and just stick with it. Make each workout count, but make each rest and recovery period count just as much.

Finally, take your ego out of the picture. Yesterday, part of my complaining included the low deadlift numbers on my whiteboard. Dallas responded, “I don’t care what the number is, I just want them to be HARD. Are they hard?” Uh, yeah. They were hard. And we moved on. The lesson is, don’t spend any time thinking about where you SHOULD be, because that doesn’t make a lick of difference. This is where you ARE, so suck it up, stay in the moment, make your training sessions hard and stick with it. Rewards will come fast, and provide their own motivation to continue.

I’ll keep you posted here as to how my own training is progressing. I’m not a total lost cause – I’ve still got a bunch of dead hangs, my back squats are coming back fast and I pulled a 100# hang clean last weekend that practically flew up. But I’m checking my ego at this very public door in an effort to remind you that you are more than the sum of your one rep maxes… and that no matter how long Life Stuff gets in the way, it’s never too late to start fresh.

Are you stuck in Life Stuff right now, just coming back from a training hiatus or “fully recovered” from your last health and fitness break? Post thoughts and your best tips to comments.