Importance of the Foot

When constructing a house, the foundation is one of the most important aspects. Without a base that is structurally sound, the rest of the house will be thrown off-balance, ending badly for all those involved. The same is true for a tree; if the roots are all jacked-up and have nothing to latch onto, it won’t be able to support itself once it gets to be a certain size.

For some reason, this stuff makes perfect sense to us, but we often neglect our feet when we think of our overall fitness. The foot is what plants us firmly on the ground and gives us structural integrity. If the musculature and bone placement is imbalanced, it does not bode well for everything up north.

Most of us are on our feet. A lot. Everyday. And if you’re not, you may have other problems that you need to attend to (get active!) first. Since they are constantly being used, all the tissue gets very tight and often inflamed. If you’ve been a newsletter subscriber for a while now (email me at Aspire.Perspire.Inspire@gmail.com if you’re not), or if you’ve read through the posts on my blog, you know what myofascial release is, and how it can alleviate this problem.

For those of you who haven’t been so lucky yet (shame on you), I’ll give a quick run down of what myofascial release entails. Your muscular system is covered by layers of a thin film-like tissue called fascia (pronounced fashuh) which will eventually tighten up if it is used too often without proper relief. To loosen up the fascial tissue, you apply pressure on a certain area, which will signal the muscle to provide “slack” to that area.

In order to do this, I will often use a foam roller, a raquet ball, or a tennis ball to get the job done, depending on how much pressure is needed and where it’s located. For the feet, I started out with a raquet ball, because it provided less resistance and, therefore, less pain (which will be CONSIDERABLE when you first start). These days, I use a tennis ball because it provides an amount of pressure that my foot can take.

Start by putting your foot on top of the ball and pressing down to a level that’s a bit painful, but not excrutiating. Then, roll your foot across the ball, keeping the same amount of pressure on it throughout. Cover the whole area of your foot. After your done, it should feel much looser.

While you probably won’t notice some drastic difference in your posture or anything, trust that it’s quite important to pay attention to your feet. With the type of shoes that we’re cramming them in these days, they take tons of abuse all day.

Just like you wouldn’t neglect the foundation of a house, or the roots of a tree, don’t neglect your own base of support!

Rep Ranges

When anybody goes to the gym, they go to either lose fat, add muscle, gain strength, or any combination of the three. Unfortunately, many people don’t know how the body responds differently when stimulated by varying rep ranges. The vast majority of men read in a fitness magazine many years ago that the best way to make their muscles grow was to do 3 sets with 6-12 repetitions in each set. The ladies were told that “in order to tone your body, do 3 sets with 15 reps.” While both of these parameters are certainly worth doing, it is beneficial for both genders to cycle through the other ranges.

*Warning: it’s about to get very science-y up in here*

In order to know why we should use varying rep ranges, it’s important to understand what’s happening on a physiological level in your body.

Let’s start at the top, with the range of performing 15 or more repetitions in each set. This is used to improve muscular endurance, and is generally marketed toward the female population as a way to gain leaner muscle and avoid gaining muscle that will make them “bulky.” Please disregard that statement as pure ridiculousness.

Endurance work has its place in the gym, but it really shouldn’t be placed as a paramount, especially for women who are afraid of looking like bodybuilders. Ladies, one of the most important ingredients in building big muscles is testosterone. That’s why all the female bodybuilders who look like they could deadlift a small car are on steroids. Without the testosterone injections, their body wouldn’t be able to grow to that size. So please, DO NOT be afraid of lifting some heavy weights!

Moving on to the next rep range: 6 to 12 repetitions. This is regarded as the “body building” range, due to it’s ability to grow larger muscles. Without going into too much detail about the construction of your muscles, there is basically a network of tubes that disperse nutrition throughout the mucle. This network is called the sarcoplasmic reticulum. When lifting weights that allow you to lift it between 6 and 12 times, this causes sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, which means that the nutrition network grows and becomes saturated with fluid. This, in turn, adds volume to the muscle.

Now, when a muscle grows, it gets stronger. I think we can all agree that this is fairly common sense. However, it’s not the most effective method for growing stronger. What really generates strength is the actual muscle fibers and the neurological pathways that connect them to your nervous system.

This brings us to the final rep range: 3 to 6. When lifting weights this heavy, it breaks down your muscle fibers and, during the recovery process, builds them back up along with new ones. This is called myofibrillar hypertrophy, and it increases the “density” of your muscle. This method will cause the muscles to grow larger, but not to the degree that sarcoplasmic hypertrophy does. By increasing the number of fibers in the muscle that are available for recruitment during a lift, it boosts the power of the muscle.

Another way that this rep range increases strength is by optimizing the efficiency of neurological pathways between the muscle and the nervous system. The stronger the signal is between these two elements, the stronger you will be. Just like anything else, practice makes perfect (I know, I know, PERFECT practice makes perfect, but you get my point). The more you stimulate this connection, the better it will become.

To conclude, people come to the gym with different goals, and hopefully I’ve supplied you with enough information to ensure that you will approach your next workout with the correct rep ranges for your objective. Good luck, and make sure to cycle through all of them every now and then!

The Best “Diet” For You (It’s Really Not That Complicated)

Walk into Barnes & Noble, look for the Diet and Health aisle, and it quickly becomes apparent that nobody has any idea of what “the best” way to eat really is. There’s the Atkins Diet Book, the Paleo Diet Book, the Mediterranean Diet Book, and any other type of diet book you can imagine, all claiming to be #1 for everybody.

Dirty little secret of the nutrition industry: there’s no such thing as a “silver bullet” diet that works for everyone. We’re all biologically different, so even though a certain diet helped your friend drop 20 pounds last year, it doesn’t guarantee its success with you.

In addition to following the recent fad diets, many people obsess over counting calories and planning what time of day they should eat. They cite things like keeping their body from going catabolic, making sure their metabolism stays high, or ensuring a caloric defecit for weight loss. While all of these things are legitimate reasons for eating the way they do, there’s one glaring problem with all of them.

It’s usually not maintainable.

People don’t enjoy inconveniencing themselves, so they may have high motivation to follow a diet for a little bit, but many will give up after some time. While I don’t think your diet is something that should be taken lightly, it shouldn’t be something that causes you stress. If restricting calories makes you hungry all the time, that’s not good. If trying to eat every two hours on the dot is making you miss out on socializing, that’s not good. There’s no need to be miserable.

Here’s the thing. Scientists can tell us that “the optimal ratio is 40-65% protein, 20-35% carbs, and 10-20% fat for each meal” until they’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t change the practicality of it. Most of us are busy people. We don’t have time to measure everything out and make sure that we’re taking in the correct portion size. Is it possible? Of course. Is 95% of the population going to do it? Probably not.

We’ve complicated nutrition too much over recent years, and now people are suffering from information overload. Most of the nutrition principles can be boiled down to a few simple rules that will keep you healthy.

Eat when you’re hungry, not when your watch tells you to.

Stay away from processed crap as much as possible. Food can either be the slowest medicine in the world, or the slowest poison. Processed food is the poison.

Eat a variety of whole, natural foods.

Vegetables, vegetables, vegetables (your momma knew what she was talking about).

There are obviously better, more complex ways to get the best possible intake of foods. But if it’s too difficult to maintain, it’s not doing you a whole lot of good. Follow the rules above, and you’ll turn out fine. I guarantee it.