Another look at the work we do at Gravity Janes begins with the realization that exercise – for almost anyone who lives in modern life – must begin with what can only be described as rehab. The definition of rehab is restoring a human to a state of baseline functionality. Everyone who lives in the modern world suffers from disabilities brought on by the artificial patterns of movement that are a feature of modern life. These patterns are highly inefficient and nonconstructive, but they are so pervasive in this highly mechanized world that our bodies have adopted them as normal.
Rehab with a higher standard
Sadly, the vast majority of the population is stuck in a state of low functionality. Stuck because they are told that they’re perfectly fine and functional. Also, if you go to a traditional health club or engage in any self-directed exercise you’ll naturally stay stuck. Your particular brand of disability will prevent you from pursuing functionality with a higher standard. Instead, you’ll naturally just engage in movements that support the patterns you have come to know or, at the very least, you won’t challenge your body in any new or constructive ways. So the downward spiral begins.
Most people that come to Gravity Janes have no idea how physically ‘dysfuntional’ modern life has allowed them to become, or how much what we do here at Gravity Janes is designed to help. Most people don’t realize this because they look around them and see that they’re pretty much the same as everyone else. Therefore, relative to societal norms, they feel “normal”. And normal is good enough for most. That’s really too bad.
Normal is no longer a good standard to judge ourselves by—at least not when it comes to health and physical conditioning. Today’s normal is a steep and slippery slope to early degeneration and a poor quality of life as we age. This also explains the number one reason people don’t come see us: they consciously or unconsciously know they are functionally disabled, and they believe that disqualifies them from the work we do. I want everyone to know that overcoming that disability is exactly why we’re here.
So another way to describe GJ is as rehab from modern life, and there is currently no other viable path out of this relatively new form of disability. For those of you still exploring options for your fitness, I hope this is a powerful motivator for some action. And whatever course you choose, remember to keep your standard for functionality high – well above societal norms, and above even the standard clinical model.
When is a load too heavy?
The short answer is: a load is only too heavy when it cannot be lifted.
Why am I asking and answering this seemingly obvious question? One reason: many people still believe that anytime a load becomes difficult to handle over time, it can be traded at any time for a lighter one. This is a practice that negates much of the value of this kind of work. If you have ever done this, or even wondered why you shouldn’t, this post is for you.
Here’s one recent example of a situation where this happened: 100 barbell push presses for time. I’ll usually post some load categories on the whiteboard and suggest that every person pick a load that is “challenging but do-able”. Everyone is then encouraged to test out the load to make sure it fits the above description. We know from this that everyone can get a minimum of 5 continuous reps with their chosen load. Even after all of this, I saw some people get 30 or 40 reps into this and suddenly start pulling off plates.
Why did they do this? When I asked, I received the usual answer that goes something like, “it’s too heavy.” Now you see why I asked the original question at the beginning of this post. Based on my definition of heavy, the fact that they could do it at all meant that it indeed was NOT “too heavy”. What they really meant to say was, “it’s too hard.” Or, “I can’t get reps as quickly as I want.” Or most honestly, “it would be too embarrassing to finish so far behind everyone else so I’m lightening the load so that I can get a better score.” Not quite as noble as, “it’s too heavy.”
I’m going to choose to believe that this person really doesn’t understand the downside of this strategy. The alternative is that he or she is simply putting pride and/or comfort above health. That’s never a good trade. Here are the facts:
You could change the load once or ten times during the course of a fixed number of reps and still get some pretty good work in. The only problem with that is that you haven’t learned anything about yourself or produced the greatest stimulus for growth. There is a wealth of information waiting for you at the end of a timed circuit in which the loads are constant. For one thing, it’s an identifiable standard that can be duplicated, thereby giving you a target for future efforts and a gauge for progress. When you modify loads mid-stream you lose all of this value.
Bottom line: when the clock is running, leave the party with the date that brought you.
Dead bodies? No. Living bodies, just temporarily disabled.
Okay, now that we’ve gotten that out in the open, I hope that you will never again wonder why you hate exercise in general, and Gravity Janes specifically. But always recognize it as a sign that it is exactly what you need. But wait, there’s more.
Even though you understand and accept what I’ve just said does not automatically mean that you really get it. You can hate it, expect it to be uncomfortable, relish in that discomfort, and still show up for all the wrong reasons. I see it everyday.
The most common bad reason for showing up at Gravity Janes is to counter-act the effects of a lousy lifestyle outside of the gym. The simple version of this is: yeah, I eat crap and I’m stressed out and I don’t sleep well and I’ve got the body to show for all of that, but I’ll just go into the gym more often and fix it. Bad idea. Even if that were a notion that actually worked (it doesn’t), it would still be a bad idea because 90% of your life is still unhealthy. If any version of that has ever crossed your mind, and if just returning to normal is ever your goal for the work you do at GJ, I don’t expect you to be around very long. You will get discouraged, you will eventually come to the conclusion that your ill health is an acceptable condition, and you will leave.
The second most common bad reason for showing up at Gravity Janes is the desire to show off to other people in the gym that are in worse condition than you. We give you a lot of opportunity for bragging rights in this gym by virtue of how we measure your performance. But that opportunity can be used for good or evil. Check yourself. Once again, that motivation won’t last. And it will result in a variety of distortions of the work for the sake of never having to reveal your weaknesses. If you can’t feel good about coming in near the bottom of the pack on a WOD merely because the quality of your work was high and it was the best performance you’ve even had on that specific work, you’re in it for the wrong reasons.
The people who stay are here for a very different reason: the goal of creating the highest quality-of-life for yourself. Quality-of-life is a funny thing, and if you don’t have a clear picture of what it is you’re probably not motivated by it.
Let me try to sum up the greatest prize of all for the work you do here. It is the ability to think clearly and creatively, and to use those thoughts to motivate a physical response resulting in outcomes that are ultimately satisfying to you and/or the people you care about. That may sound like a bit of a mouthful, but if you break it down into smaller concepts you begin to see the tremendous value of that notion. Just about all that is valuable in life is contained there. And just about all that is valuable in life can be improved upon by the work you do at Gravity Janes. Now that’s motivation. Every other reason pales by comparison.
Ultimately, I will know what your motivation is, even if I don’t today. I will know who truly values what we do. Those are the people who will still be showing up for their GJ workouts a year from now. Hope to see you there.
Accidental Health Seminar, Feb. 2011
In short, Accidental Eating allows us to silence the marketing hype and the advice of so-called ‘nutrition experts’ about what we should and should not be eating, and adopt some very simple rules that will set us on a guaranteed path to measurable, quantifiable health. What comprises a truly healthy diet – in the measurable sense – should not be left to anyone’s mere opinion, but rather to empirical fact. The science exists to support this, but the average person will never be able to discern it from the thousands of other scientific assertions made in an attempt to sell you something. So let’s just set science aside for the moment – we are not scientists, after all – and practice what the rest of us really already know to be true.
The fact is that humans have always been hunters and gatherers. Our diet was dictated to us by nature. We ate what was available, when it was available, and what was available for the least energy expended to acquire it. Our choices were few. We didn’t always like that arrangement, but it turned out to be the healthiest plan the species has ever known. It sustained us well for centuries before the first middleman separated us from the source of our nutrition.
The key aspect of this arrangement was that food was strictly about nutrition, never entertainment. Say what you will about the life of a human 1,000 years ago, but this we know for sure: There was no obesity, and there was no degeneration brought on by poor nutrition. That is when the sources were the most important thing. Did early man ever need to understand the chemical make up of the various macro-nutrients, and what our blood type is, and if it’s Tuesday then I can’t have X? No, they didn’t.
Remember, you don’t need science to prove that there is gravity; we all know it to be true and we act accordingly. These 7 Rules of Accidental Eating are no more than an acknowledgment of what we know to be true about nutrition, and how to act accordingly. Here now are the 7 Rules of Accidental Eating, with brief explanations below each:
Rule #1. Know where your food came from -
We could make nutrition very simple: for starters, eliminate grocery stores and restaurants. What these have in common is that they sell us food that we know the least about. If we simply returned to foraging, we would automatically know more about the food we eat, where it came from, and how it was prepared.
Now think about what you ate today and how little you know about where it came from. So many hands on your food along the way between the real source and your body, all making a profit, and most perfectly happy to cheapen the nutrition value of the food to do it. This is about accountability. The more you know, the more nutritionally correct your food will be.
Rule #2: Eat only what could have been available to you 5K years ago -
Eating well is simply eating as humans have historically eaten until very recent times. Very close to nature. Some of the cues are: organic, local, seasonal.
Rule #3: Eat regularly –
Notice that I didn’t specify the schedule. I just said eat regularly. In other words, if you choose to eat 5 times a day, do that every day and at the same time. Ditto if you choose to eat only eat one meal a day. The body is adaptive.
Rule #4: Track your broad-based functional capacity -
Show up here. It’s what we do at Gravity Janes everyday.
Rule #5: Never hungry, never full -
Need I say more.
Rule #6: Eat any given food in proportion to its availability in the wild -
This may be open to some interpretation and conjecture, but use your brain. Here’s an example of a reasoned perspective: muffins at Starbucks were never available in the wild. Therefore, eat them never.
Rule #7: Modify any of the above rules only when your personal experience suggests a long-term and sustainable improvement in Rule #4 -
This will be a rare occurrence.
All of us make an astounding number of choices everyday that affect our health – for better or for worse. But most of us don’t see that distinction in these decisions. We assume that we are entitled to the path of least resistance, and that it is the job of the medical community to prop us up when the inevitable results of that attitude show up and degrade our quality of life. Using the medical community to prop up bodies ravaged by toxic lifestyles and to enable our environmental addictions is a mis-use of the concept of medicine. It is something for which medicine was never designed, and it will result in an over-use of a system in ways that will cause prices to rise and infrastructure to be taxed beyond its limits. Seems pretty clear that this is exactly what is happening.
Today, the vast majority of the ailments that medicine treats are ailments that were unheard of or extremely rare 500 years ago. Let’s take a very simple example: heartburn. Have you noticed how many heartburn medications there are on the market today? Certainly the people who are making and selling all of these products will never tell you that this is most often a diet-induced ailment that is instantly curable with an appropriate diet? And yet we continue to speak of heartburn publicly as if it were an inevitable medical condition with no apparent cause. To point out the simple truth would jeopardize millions if not billions in sales annually. There are voices out there that are willing to speak the truth about this and many other common ills of modern society, but they don’t have multi-million dollar advertising budgets and bought-and-paid-for “scientific” studies to mold the common consensus.
What’s this got to do with the medical community and how we use it? Many of these heartburn medications require a doctor’s prescription, which means we’re making doctor appointments, having lab tests, requiring those doctors to make a diagnosis and prescribe treatment, and billing insurance companies for all of it. All for a problem that different choices in diet would eliminate. And this is just one of literally hundreds of similar conditions that are equally preventable with healthy rather than toxic lifestyle choices. You can begin to see what the aggregate impact on the medical community might look like. It might look a lot like what is in fact happening.
Here’s the bottom line: live your life according to accidental principles, and reduce your medical footprint. Think about the things you see a doctor for. Doctors should only be seen for legitimate accidents or congenital defects for which there is no environmental remedy. When all of us wake up to this simple truth we can begin to lessen the burden on our over-taxed medical system and free-up those resources for those that really need it.
"Hmmm... no food in here."
Job Description: You will be the recipient of a powerful new drug called food. Your job is to simply log your nutritional intake 3 times per week for 2 weeks, truthfully answer a couple of lifestyle questions, and allow it all to be critiqued on line. You, of course, will remain completely anonymous.
Job Requirements: Only that you be one of the many people I’ve spoken with recently who has answered my question, “How are you eating?” with the words, “pretty good.” Often the word “pretty” is drawn out as to indicate a degree of uncertainty about the next word, but the point is that you believe you know what a great diet is and that you’re practicing it with some diligence. Not necessary that your knowledge about diet has come from GJ, only that you believe it is a healthy one.
How to apply: Send me an email or see me personally for further details. I need several rats for this project.
As most of you know, that thing that you’re working for called fitness is never achieved by physical challenge alone. I know a lot of you will benefit from a real-world example of lifestyle choices and how they affect us.
News Item: “Rats that consumed cheesecake, icing and other products found at a Florida supermarket not only made the rats fat but triggered behaviors that included a refusal to eat more-nutritious fare, and a refusal to lay off the fattening stuff even when a mild electric shock was administered, Paul Kenny, one of the authors, told the The Palm Beach Post.
The Post said on Monday that the conclusions could bolster what was an increasingly popular theory that junk food has addictive characteristics that contribute to the surge in obesity in the United States.” Hmmmm…. ya think?
A client came to me asking my opinion of a certain supplement and in the process recounted a conversation she had with the clerk at a local supplement store. He was trying to sell her on the virtues of this supplement by convincing her that it would overcome any number of complaints she had about her health. He made these claims knowing nothing about her lifestyle choices regarding diet and exercise; crucial bits of information necessary before making most any supplementation advice.
Think for a moment about any supplements, pharmaceuticals, or special nutritional shakes that you consume regularly. What is the goal? The sales job on most of these products have led you to believe that they will somehow enhance your life without ever mentioning that your life became un-enhanced by virtue of a flawed diet and/or other lifestyle transgressions.
Is your health better than average and you’re just looking for a boost in vitality or or an edge in performance? Or is your health poor and you’re after a healing solution. In either case, there was a time in your life when you needed none of those add-ons to be at your best. What changed? All of those “solutions in a pill” are merely a substitute for finding the real source of the problem. And very often the cause is very simply a flawed diet.
A flawed diet is the source of a surprising number of modern ailments. But there’s no money in telling you to eat better. So the makers of these pills and shakes sell you something that you hope will simply cover up or otherwise provide the antidote for the ongoing damage being done by malnutrition.
Everything from arthritis to Alzheimers has a dietary cause or catalyst. Susceptability may be in the genes, but even those who are the most susceptable can strengthen their systems and avoid these ailments with excellent food and lifestyle choices. We have a very short supplementation list for every active person. It will appear soon on the Documents page of Gravity U. Take no other pill or concoction for your health until your diet and lifestyle are both perfect. By then you’ll realize that you never needed them.
I want to know your thoughts. That’s why I have a Comments option below. Let me hear from you.
Gravity Janes welcomes Weight Watchers to the world of healthy nutrition. Better late than never. After duping clients for 13 years with flawed diet recommendations, Weight Watchers has finally admitted that their calorie-based “points system” missed the point of nutrition. Sadly, they’re still pushing the notion that weight loss is the holy grail of nutrition. We’re happy that fewer people who are enticed by million dollar advertising campaigns will be mis-lead into thinking that they can “count” their way out of a nutritionally disastrous diet. We’d be even happier if those same people would just come to Gravity Janes for some serious and healthful nutrition counseling, and let us tell you the other facts that we’ve been telling our clients for the last 13 years, and Weight Watchers won’t be saying for another 13 years.
Read the full story here.
Robb Wolf’s book, “The Paleo Solution” is our reference standard for the Paleo Model. Order this book online here.
Picture designed to make you read my post
Health is fitness, and fitness is health. The 2 are interchangeable and inextricable from each other. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll use the word fitness here, but let it be known that we could have used either.
Many claims of promoting fitness will fail on one simple principle: fitness is not whatever you want it to be or think it should be. It is a very real and specific thing. Therefore it should have a very real and specific definition, and the path to achieving it should be equally as real and specific. That makes a joke out of common health club practices of offering classes in whatever people will pay for or, worse still, letting them go about their own unguided and uneducated business. You simply cannot engage in either of these practices and legitimately call the outcome fitness. It renders the very word meaningless. And so it seems to be.
Fitness defined:
“The degree to which a human – in a natural state and environment – is capable of consistently producing power across the broadest possible range of bio-mechanically sound and randomly encountered physical challenges.”
This is the standard by which health and general quality of life can be measured. For the first time in the history of the species we have a standard of measure for the quality known as life.
Paleo Model Lecture
In a recent lecture at Gravity Janes (www.gravityjanes.com) on The Paleo Model for nutrition, I had only 90 minutes and therefore had to be very judicious about my choice of information. It had occurred to me that presenting a new diet plan to the average person will simply add to their confusion about conflicting advice and would be a plan that would end up on the scrap heap of diets, never to be acted upon.
Rather, I needed to teach those in attendance how to judge the value of any future or past advice – including mine. Here is the test I gave them to gauge the credibility of any food recommendation:
- does it have a clear and stated test for efficacy in terms of measurable functional capacity (weight loss is an artificial measure indicative of nothing)
- does it assume that you are active (if it doesn’t say so, the answer is no)
- can the value of the diet be stated without the use of the word calorie (counting calories is not the path to health)
Any “no” answers means the advice has little or no credibility in regards to your health.
I invite all of my readers to likewise use this test to evaluate the mountains of diet advice floating around the planet. Without it, you will become mired in a morass of information that will quickly become incomprehensible.
