Absolute Self Defense and Fitness

Posts Tagged ‘Functional Fitness’

My son Jacob demonstrating how to “walk the clock”…

Transition drill 1

harker heights bjj

hhbjj.com

I want to welcome new fighters to our Self Defense and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu team:

The Limon Family!

Taken From The Associated Press

Fish oil pills may be able to spare some young people with signs of mental illness from a progression into fully developed schizophrenia, according to a preliminary study of 81 patients in Austria.

The study adds to evidence suggesting that severe mental illness may be prevented with intervention. The researchers are starting a larger study in eight cities, hoping to replicate the findings, which appear in the February issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, released Monday.

A severe mental illness, schizophrenia affects adolescents and young adults. Some 2.4 million Americans have the disorder, which is treated with antipsychotic medication.

“Schizophrenia is among the most mysterious and costliest diseases in terms of human suffering, so anything that gives some hope to avoid this is great,” said lead author Dr. G. Paul Amminger, formerly in Vienna and now at the Orygen Youth Health Research Center at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Researchers have wondered if the disease could be stopped before it overpowers a person’s grip on reality. Studies have tried antipsychotics in select young people, but side effects pose ethical questions, and results have been mixed.

Researchers in the new study identified 81 people, ages 13 to 25, with warning signs of psychosis, including sleeping much more or less than usual, growing suspicious of others, believing someone is putting thoughts in their head or believing they have magical powers. Forty-one were randomly assigned to take four fish oil pills a day for three months. The other patients took dummy pills.

After a year of monitoring, 2 of the 41 patients in the fish oil group, or about 5%, had become psychotic, or completely out of touch with reality. In the placebo group, 11 of 40 became psychotic, about 28%.

No one knows what causes schizophrenia but one hypothesis is that people with the disease don’t process fatty acids correctly, leading to damaged brain cells. Omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil could help brain cells repair and stabilize, the researchers speculate.

Dr. Janet Wozniak of Harvard Medical School said the findings might reasonably cause psychiatrists to recommend fish oil to some patients because there are known benefits and little risk.

Copyright 2010 Associated Press

Banana Dessert

This is super easy, tasty and a great way to satisfy a sweet tooth. When done right, it can burn fat.

It can be made raw vegan, paleo or lightly warmed under on low flame. It can be served by itself or be added to your own homemade sorbet or ice cream (raw dairy or raw vegan). Believe it or not, its great with an omelette or grass fed sausage for breakfast.

Ingredients:

1 large banana

1 tbs coconut oil

½ orange, juiced

1 tsp honey

Prep:

Cut banana length wise and then in half

Place in heated fry pan with coconut oil and fry each side 3-4 minutes or golden brown

Place orange juice & honey in separate pan, simmer for 2-3 minutes, leave to cool slightly

To serve, place bananas in a bowl and drizzle the orange syrup over the top.

Serve as is, or on top of ice cream or coconut milk.

Optional – Garnish with cinnamon, vanilla powder, goji berries, shredded coconut or cacao nibs!

Cumin Fish with Salsa

Ingredients
Fish
2 fish fillets, large
1 garlic clove, finely grated
1tbs ground cumin
1/3 cup olive oil
1/3 cup lemon juice

Salsa
1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved
1 red capsicum, diced
1 bunch parsley, roughly chopped
1 avocado, diced
1tbs olive oil
2tbs apple cider vinegar

Instructions
Combine garlic, cumin, olive oil and lemon juice. Place fish in a bowl and rub on cumin
mixture. Cover and place in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
Pre‐heat a grill to medium heat.
Place fish on grill and cook for 3‐4 minutes each side, or until cooked through.
To make the salsa, place all salsa ingredients into a mixing bowl and combine well.

It’s SNOWING!!! Since I have the morning off, I was going through all the blogs that I follow on Fitness, Self Defense and such and found a great article on back pain and spinal alignment. Something I harp on during every workout.

So, here is the first paragraph, but you’ll have to read the full article here. Posture – Why Your Back Hurts.

From Craig Weller at Elevating Fitness.com

We’re all born with near-perfect postural alignment. Watch a toddler walk, stand, reach overhead and squat and you’ll see tremendous mobility and safe strong joints.

It’s pretty much downhill from there.

North American culture has us spending an inordinate amount of time in the sitting position. A great deal of time and effort goes into preventing us from expending, well, time and effort when it comes to moving around in our daily lives. Items on shelves are always within arms reach, if we have to move very far we hop on an escalator, an elevator or get in our cars; and a job that involves spending much time on one’s feet or lifting something heavier than twenty pounds is considered “strenuous.”

At the end of one of last weeks Boot Camp classes, I was talking to a couple of our athletes about needing certain amounts of fat in their diet. I did some research and found several articles. This is a good one to start with…

Borrowed From: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/09/06/saturated-fat/

Written By: T. Farris, author of the Four Hour Work Week.

I’ve invited Dr. Michael Eades and Dr. Mary Dan Eades, two of my favorite bariatric (obesity treatment) doctors in the US and the first to introduce insulin resistance to the mainstream, to explain the facts and benefits of increased saturated fat intake…

The sub-headings are mine, and a few edits have been made for space and context. Please see Dr. Michael Eades’ references and responses to questions in the comments.

Mid-Section Fat Loss: Problem Solved?

A couple of generations ago two physicians—one on the East Coast, one on the West—while working long hours with many patients, serendipitously stumbled onto a method to rapidly decrease fat around the mid-section. We’re sure that other doctors figured out the same thing, but these two were locally famous and published their methods. Interestingly, neither was looking to help patients lose weight.

Blake Donaldson, M.D., who practiced in Manhattan, was looking for a treatment for allergies; Walter Voegtlin, M.D., a Seattle gastroenterologist, was trying to figure out a better method for treating his patients with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Dr. Donaldson got his inspiration from a meeting he had with the aforementioned Vilhalmur Stefansson; Dr. Voegtlin came up with the same idea based on his knowledge of comparative anatomy. Though they came at two different questions from very different angles, they arrived at the same dietary answer. Both solved the problems they were seeking to solve and, coincidentally, noticed that their overweight patients lost a tremendous amount of fat from their abdominal areas while undergoing the treatment. As happened later with us and with Dr. Atkins, word of their success in combating obesity spread rapidly, and before long both physicians were deluged with overweight patients seeking treatment, completely changing the character of their medical practices. In retirement, both wrote books about their methods. Donaldson’s was published in 1961; Voegtlin’s in 1972. And as far as we can tell, although their years of practice overlapped, they never knew one another.

What was their secret? What did these two men independently discover? What kind of nutritional regimen did they use to bring about such great results in their patients?

Both had their patients follow an all-meat diet.

An all-meat diet?

Yes, an all-meat diet. Remember that when these physicians were in practice, there hadn’t been all the negative publicity about saturated fat and red meat that there has been in recent years. At that time, most people considered meat as simply another food, just like potatoes, bread, or anything else. No one worried about eating it. The (misguided) hypothesis that fat in the diet causes heart disease hadn’t reared its ugly head, so telling people at that time to go on an all-meat diet didn’t provoke the same sort of knee-jerk emotions that it does—at least in some quarters—now.

The patients who followed these all-meat diets rapidly lost weight from their midsections and improved their blood sugar and blood pressure problems if they had them. Calculations of cholesterol in all its various permutations was still decades away, but both doctors even used the all-meat diet for their patients with heart disease without problem. The all-meat diet proved to be a safe, filling, rapid way to help patients lose abdominal fat while improving their health. And remember, one of these diets was developed to treat GI problems, the other to treat allergies. The rapid weight loss that followed was a surprising, but welcome side effect.

7 Reasons to Eat More Saturated Fat

In the not-so-distant past, the medical establishment considered all fats equally loathsome: all fats were created equal and they’re all bad for you. Things have changed in that quarter, if only slightly. You have no doubt heard the drumbeat of current medical thinking on fats: some fats are now good for you—olive oil and canola oil*—but others are bad for you—trans fats and all saturated fats. That’s an improvement from the old cry, but far from the truth.

It seems that no matter how the story spins from the denizens of the anti-fat camp, one piece of their advice remains staunchly constant: “You should sharply limit your intake of saturated fats.” The next admonition will invariably be, “which have been proven to raise cholesterol and cause heart disease.” Their over-arching belief is that saturated fat is bad, bad, bad.

You see with just a glance at [our suggested meal plans] that we’ve included fatty cuts of meat, chicken with the skin, bacon, eggs, butter, coconut oil, organic lard, and heavy cream in the plan. Aren’t we worried that these foods will increase your risk of heart disease and raise your cholesterol? In a word, nope. In fact, we encourage you to make these important fats a regular part of your healthy diet. Why? Because humans need them and here are just a few reasons why.

1) Improved cardiovascular risk factors

Though you may not have heard of it on the front pages of your local newspaper, online news source, or local television or radio news program, saturated fat plays a couple of key roles in cardiovascular health. The addition of saturated fat to the diet reduces the levels of a substance called lipoprotein (a)—pronounced “lipoprotein little a” and abbreviated Lp(a)—that correlates strongly with risk for heart disease. Currently there are no medications to lower this substance and the only dietary means of lowering Lp(a) is eating saturated fat. Bet you didn’t hear that on the nightly news. Moreover, eating saturated (and other) fats also raises the level of HDL, the so-called good cholesterol. Lastly, research has shown that when women diet, those eating the greatest percentage of the total fat in their diets as saturated fat lose the most weight.

2) Stronger bones

In middle age, as bone mass begins to decline, an important goal (particularly for women) is to build strong bones. You can’t turn on the television without being told you need calcium for your bones, but do you recall ever hearing that saturated fat is required for calcium to be effectively incorporated into bone? According to one of the foremost research experts in dietary fats and human health, Mary Enig, Ph.D., there’s a case to be made for having as much as 50 percent of the fats in your diet as saturated fats for this reason. That’s a far cry from the 7 to 10 percent suggested by mainstream institutions. If her reasoning is sound—and we believe it is— is it any wonder that the vast majority of women told to avoid saturated fat and to selectively use vegetable oils instead would begin to lose bone mass, develop osteoporosis, and get put on expensive prescription medications plus calcium to try to recover the loss in middle age?

3) Improved liver health

Adding saturated fat to the diet has been shown in medical research to encourage the liver cells to dump their fat content. Clearing fat from the liver is the critical first step to calling a halt to middle-body fat storage. Additionally, saturated fat has been shown to protect the liver from the toxic insults of alcohol and medications, including acetaminophen and other drugs commonly used for pain and arthritis, such as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or NSAIDs, and even to reverse the damage once it has occurred. Since the liver is the lynchpin of a healthy metabolism, anything that is good for the liver is good for getting rid of fat in the middle. Polyunsaturated vegetable fats do not offer this protection.

4) Healthy lungs

For proper function, the airspaces of the lungs have to be coated with a thin layer of what’s called lung surfactant. The fat content of lung surfactant is 100 percent saturated fatty acids. Replacement of these critical fats by other types of fat makes faulty surfactant and potentially causes breathing difficulties. Absence of the correct amount and composition of this material leads to collapse of the airspaces and respiratory distress. It’s what’s missing in the lungs of premature infants who develop the breathing disorder called infant respiratory distress syndrome. Some researchers feel that the wholesale substitution of partially hydrogenated (trans) fats for naturally saturated fats in commercially prepared foods may be playing a role in the rise of asthma among children. Fortunately, the heyday of trans fats is ending and their use is on the decline. Unfortunately, however, the unreasoning fear of saturated fat leads many people to replace trans fats with an overabundance of polyunsaturated vegetable oils, which may prove just as unhealthful.

5) Healthy brain

You will likely be astounded to learn that your brain is mainly made of fat and cholesterol. Though many people are now familiar with the importance of the highly unsaturated essential fatty acids found in cold-water fish (EPA and DHA) for normal brain and nerve function, the lion’s share of the fatty acids in the brain are actually saturated. A diet that skimps on healthy saturated fats robs your brain of the raw materials it needs to function optimally.

6) Proper nerve signaling

Certain saturated fats, particularly those found in butter, lard, coconut oil, and palm oil, function directly as signaling messengers that influence the metabolism, including such critical jobs as the appropriate release of insulin. And just any old fat won’t do. Without the correct signals to tell the organs and glands what to do, the job doesn’t get done or gets done improperly.

7) Strong immune system

Saturated fats found in butter and coconut oil (myristic acid and lauric acid) play key roles in immune health. Loss of sufficient saturated fatty acids in the white blood cells hampers their ability to recognize and destroy foreign invaders, such as viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Human breast milk is quite rich in myristic and lauric acid, which have potent germ-killing ability. But the importance of the fats lives on beyond infancy; we need dietary replenishment of them throughout adulthood, middle age, and into seniority to keep the immune system vigilant against the development of cancerous cells as well as infectious invaders.

—

The above post is an exclusive excerpt from Dr. Eades’ newest book, which is directed at people who want to reduce abdominal fat. Despite the title, the principles it details are ideal for anyone who wants to decrease both visceral (internal) and subcutaneous (under the skin) fat in the abdomen.

Keith Owen BJJ

I wanted to take a second of your day and tell everyone that I (we) have been accepted as students and affiliated members of Mr. Keith Owen BJJ.

Mr. Owen was gracious enough to accept me as his student even with all the military moving baggage that comes with being a Soldier who loves the ground game. Mr. Owen has a outstanding background in the martial arts with instructing BJJ as his forte. He is a accomplished BJJ instructor who comes very recommended from some of the more well known instructors and black belts in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Here is part of his bio…

Keith Owen is a 1st Degree Black Belt under Professor Pedro Sauer and is a Pedro Sauer affiliate in Boise/Meridian Idaho.  He has trained in Jiu-Jitsu for the last 17 years and has made it his life’s work to promote the technical side of gi, no-gi and MMA Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

You can check out Mr. Owen at BJJ Moves.com to see more of his work and instructional ability.

I am very excited about this new opportunity to learn more Jiu-Jitsu and to be able to learn from Mr. Owen.

Sweet Potato, Bacon and Egg Salad

Ingredients
2/3 cup diced sweet potato
2 eggs
2 rashes of bacon, diced using meat only
1tbs oil
4tbs dill, finely chopped
2tbs mayonnaise
2tbs lemon juice

Instructions

Boil eggs in water for 4-6minutes. Peel and dice eggs.

Boil sweet potato for 4-5minutes or until cooked through.

Place a frying pan on medium-high heat, add olive oil and bacon and fry until browned and slightly crunchy.

In a small bowl, combine dill, mayonnaise and lemon juice.

Place eggs, sweet potato, bacon and mayonnaise sauce into a medium size serving bowl. Combine well.

Serve.

In this segment, I will teach you how to drill the fighting frame and the combat application that I taught last post. I will also post this as a pod cast that will be up on the site later today.

There are two basic drills that you can easily use to functionalize this particular skill set. They are:

Give and Take. To describe this easier, I’ll give each partner a name. Trainer and Trainee. To start the drill, stand in front of your partner and get what we call the “fighting measure”. This means to reach out with your arms and touch their shoulder. If you can’t, you are too far away. Once you have the fighting measure, assume a fighting stance. Here we go.

1. Trainer slowly steps forward and delivers a right jab to the trainee’s head and freezes. The trainee steps towards the trainer and assumes the fighting frame posture, striking the trainer with the frame. Once contact has been made, the trainee steps back and assume a new fighting stance. Okay. Now, the trainee becomes the trainer and the trainer becomes the trainee. Get it?
2. To continue the drill, the trainer slowly steps forward and delivers a right jab to the trainee’s head and freezes. The trainee steps towards the trainer and assumes the fighting frame posture, striking the trainer with the frame. Once contact has been made, the trainee steps back and assume a new fighting stance. Now, the trainee becomes the trainer and the trainer becomes the trainee.
3. Repeat this action until both partners are comfortable with the motions. Once you are good to go, you may slowly speed up the action until you are at combat speed!

Block and Strike. This drill is an adaptation of the Filipino combat arts training methodology “Abecedario”.  It is a progressive skill development tool that is very effective and has endless possibilities. The set up is just like before. Trainer and Trainee. To start the drill, stand in front of your partner and get what we call the “fighting measure”. This means to reach out with your arms and touch their shoulder. If you can’t, you are too far away. Once you have the fighting measure, assume a fighting stance. Here we go.

1. The trainer steps forward and punches to the trainee’s head. The trainee steps forward and executes the fighting frame. Once contact has been made with the trainer, the trainee will follow up the frame with a counter strike.
2. For the purposes of this segment. I will prescribe a specific response for ease of use. The trainee unclasps his/her left hand from the right wrist and wraps it over the trainers attacking limb. With the right hand, (already on the head/neck) open your fist and grab the back of the trainer’s head. Next, the trainee will pull down sharply on the trainer’s neck while at the same time delivering a right knee spike to the trainer’s stomach. Lastly, the trainee will push the trainer backwards; step back and assume the fighting stance. Okay. Now, the trainee becomes the trainer and the trainer becomes the trainee. Get it?
3. To continue the drill, the trainer slowly steps forward and delivers a right jab to the trainee’s head and freezes. The trainer steps forward and punches to the trainee’s head. The trainee steps forward and executes the fighting frame. Once contact has been made with the trainer, the trainee will follow up the frame with a counter strike.
4. The trainee unclasps his/her left hand from the right wrist and wraps it over the trainers attacking limb. With the right hand, (already on the head/neck) open your fist and grab the back of the trainer’s head. Next, the trainee will pull down sharply on the trainer’s neck while at the same time delivering a right knee spike to the trainer’s stomach. Lastly, the trainee will push the trainer backwards; step back and assume the fighting stance.

Repeat this action until both partners are comfortable with the motions. Once you are good to go, you may slowly speed up the action until you are at combat speed!

One more thing. Ensure that both partners take all safety precautions. Wear the proper protective equipment especially eye protection. Because we all know its fun and games until you put an eye out!

These two drills should get you started on the road to functional defense. If you have comments or suggestions, please email me or comment in the form below.

Until next time, let’s get training!

Hey! I want to welcome another Boot Camp athlete to our family. Please welcome Molly White to our athletic family. When you see her next week, say Hello and introduce yourself.