Detox diets, cleanses, and therapies are all the trend today. But the message isn’t new.
People have used different detoxification practices to purge the body of foreign invaders for centuries. However, the prevalence of the current detox trend reflects, in part, the ever-increasing amounts of toxins in our modern world. And we know for sure that a cumulative toxic burden, if not addressed, can lead to serious health issues.
Do you start each new year vowing to lose weight or improve your training performance? If so, are you among the 80 per cent of the population whose New Year’s resolutions failed by February?
Myths are abundant in the fitness industry, word of mouth in gyms and on social media leads to a lot of nonsense being spread around. This, unfortunately, leads to many people believing things which are not true, and often the misinformation leads to no improvement in someone’s health and fitness or even worse can lead to injury.
Training is what the body needs to adapt and develop. Consider that without sunlight plants struggle to grow, similarly, without training our bodies will not develop and grow much.
Your body needs training as a stimulus to take it outside of its normal comfort zone, which ultimately means the body has to make changes to develop. You may only be able to do a bodyweight squat at the start of your training, but after the body is exposed to training consistently and repeatedly it will get stronger and you might be squatting with a barbell on your back after several weeks.
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Supplementation is the use of specific vitamins, minerals and ingredients to achieve a targeted outcome in your health and fitness. Our current environment and lifestyles mean it is hard to get everything we need from food alone, which would be ideal, and thus the targeted use of supplements can be of benefit to your health. There are some supplements that are useful for everyone to take, and this article will elaborate upon supplement basics.
Recovery is essential all the things that you do outside of training, it includes sleep and stress management which are vital to good health, but recovery also extends to enjoying your hobbies and making time for yourself. So getting 8 hours of sleep with good quality deep sleep is integral to recovery, as is going on a long walk which you enjoy, reading a book or spending time seeing your friends and family.
Nutrition is the catalyst to excellent health, strength and body composition. Nutrition is crucial for physical goals (i.e. fat loss) and more health and lifestyle-oriented goals (for example, better focus, energy, detoxification, and blood sugar control).
What we do in training needs to be matched by how we eat and recover, and the saying “we are what we eat” still holds.
The body is very highly connected and there is a link between the organs of the gut and the brain which is termed the ‘Gut-Brain Axis’. The link between the two works both ways, the gut and the things we digest can affect our brain function and similarly stresses to the nervous system can affect our gut. Research in this area originated in around 2004, and since has gained a lot of momentum in the scientific community (1), and can impact your health in numerous ways.
Ever feel fuzzy, have trouble concentrating or remembering things? How about problems sleeping or losing weight? You may have toxin overload.
Have you heard of zeitgebers before? If not, you should learn about it because it’s intrinsically linked to your health, performance, and recovery.