Sunday, August 14, 2011

400,000 hour body - compliments of Whole 9 (whole9life.com)

We get a lot of questions about products, services and protocols that promise miraculous results – improved body composition, fitness, energy or health – with minimal effort. This slant is not new – the lure of a shortcut (or “free lunch”, as Gym Jones calls it) has been the carrot dangling from our health-and-fitness stick since we first started paying attention to what we ate and how we moved. And wouldn’t it be great if it were true? If you could achieve all of your health and fitness goals in half the time, with half the effort? Heck, if that were possible, we would have signed on a long time ago.

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.

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