Updates and a Great Reminder

Things have been heating up here with New Dawn Fitness and that is a good and bad thing.  We have always said we wanted to grow slow and made a decision when Dawn decided to not go back to teaching that we would take the four to five years before William starts school and treat them like college.  Learn all that we can and make a big launch once he starts kindergarten.  That is still the plan, but we are being driven by a demand to speed up that time line and are making some changes to meet the need.  A few things we have in the works:

• Our old website is gone and now links directly to our blog, I am using all of my tech know how to get a revamped blog/website up and running by the end of the summer.
• We are going to organize all of our past posts into categories for easier referencing during challenges
• We will be rolling out new 30 day challenges both nutritional and physical in the coming weeks and are working on a guide to help people new to the idea of clean eating.
• We have been working more with on-line training, where we start with a series of one-on-one sessions and transition to sending workouts through e-mail with videos and  explanations of each exercise.
• Dawn is now teaching two classes in the neighborhood community center and we are hoping to add more this fall.
• I have picked up two clients, as well as an opportunity to work with all of the teams at my school, performing the Functional Movement Screen on them and prescribing corrective exercises when needed.  I will also be working with each team teaching proper movement throughout the year.
• We are getting t-shirts soon!
• Finally we are going on vacation next week and are looking forward to the much needed break

We leave you with a blog post that gets to the heart of what it is that we do.  I have said before that we are less personal trainers and more like life coaches, because exercise is just a small part of being healthy and getting your mind right is the first step in seeing any lasting change in your health.  We often see people who's focus is solely on making aesthetic changes to their body(upper arms, thighs, belly, etc.) fail to achieve any lasting changes.  This post really struck a cord with us and said, much better than we have in the past, what can happen when your mind is not right. It was on The Everyday Paleo blog, but was written by Jason Seib who has his own blog called Primitive Stimulus and it is well worth your time to read he has some great posts.

Have a great week and we will be back soon with info on the latest challenge.

Whats The Deal With Cholesterol?

This is a true story that I am sure plays out several times a day in several doctors offices throughout the world.  A guy in his late thirties goes into the doctor for a regular check up and gets his blood panel.  The doctor looks at the results, sees a total cholesterol somewhere over 200mg/dL and the conversation goes like this.(again this actually happened to a friend)

Doctor: Your cholesterol is a little high, I am going to put you on Lipitor to get it down. 

Friend: I'm not a big fan of being on medication doc, is there anything else I can do?

Doctor:  You can cut back on the high fat foods, but I still want you to take the Lipitor, so we can get the number down.

Friend:  But doc I really don't want to take medication and would rather try to fix it on my own.

Doctor:  With a confused look on his face says, I am on Lipitor. What's the alternative, death?

This is one striking example, but Dawn and I have had several friends and family members go through a version of this same conversation with their doctors and most of them left with a prescription for a Statin.  My friend in the above example held strong, knowing that he just had a baby and sold a business and his lifestyle was not as healthy as it could be at that particular time.  He made a few adjustments and amazingly without medication was able to lower his cholesterol.  It is not our place to say whether one should  take a Statin or not, that is a personal decision that individuals need to make, but we hope that by providing information, people will feel empowered to take more control of their health.

This post is not so much about cholesterol as a number or the need to reach an ideal cholesterol level.  It is more about what cholesterol is and how it has come to be synonymous with DEATH.

What is Cholesterol?
Cholesterol is a soft, fat-like substance. It is a building block of body cells and hormones, it makes up 50 percent of your nervous system, and is necessary for metabolism. Cholesterol is essential for all human life.  So how did it come to equal heart disease and death?

Guilty by association or chicken and the egg

Cholesterol is produced in response to issues in the body.  It is a repair substance that works it's way to places of need such as the walls of damaged or inflammed arteries(heart disease) and does it's best to repair this damage.  Because it is around these dammaged arteries, it becomes associated with the damage and as such a cause for heart disease.  As pointed out by Lierre Keith in The Vegetarian Myth, "It's like blamming the fire department for the fire."

The medical field has been working on the notion that if we just lower everyone's cholesterol we can cure heart disease, but like many of the other medical approaches that take an acute approach to chronic problems that Diane Sanfilipo talked about in her seminar, it just does not work.  It's like putting perfume on body odor, you smell a little better but you didn't fix the problem.

The perfume in this case has become a multi-billion dollar industry known as Statins.  Statins work to immediately lower your cholesterol number by blocking an enzyme in the liver that is responsible for making cholesterol.  If you can't make cholesterol your numbers improve and your cured, right?  Except we tend to dismiss the issues that led to the rise in cholesterol in the first place.  Remember, cholesterol is an essential substance that forms in response to some sort of trigger.  We feel strongly that lifestyle and nutrition play a critical role in preventing or reversing the effects of these triggers, if given the chance.  When was the last time your doctor even asked you about your nutrition or your lifestyle?  With statins there are considerable side effects, whereas with a change in lifestyle and nutritional habits there are numerous benefits.  See the difference?

Chris Kresser writes a blog called The Healthy Skeptic and we really enjoy his work.  He wrote one of the best posts on the whole issue of cholesterol I have read here.

We are not anti-doctor, or even anti-medicine.  We just feel that the first line of defense and the first area that needs to be addressed when things start to go awry are your nutrition and lifestyle practices.  Instead we have created a health care system based on instant gratification, where doctors do not have time to hear about your lifestyle or advise on nutrition.  We demand and are provided a pill to fix whatever ails us, but at what cost?

The Complex

We hope you are enjoying the summer season, but with it comes the hustle and bustle of things and finding time to squeeze in a workout can be a challenge.  Luckily we have the answer for you, it is called a complex.  A complex is a series of movements done together for a predetermined number of reps and rounds.  You can choose any movements but we wanted to share a complex that we use frequently. 

The two videos below are of one round of the same complex.  One using a barbell and the other with dumbells. The sequence goes like this:
5 Deadlifts
5 Power Cleans
5 Front Squats
5 Push Press
5 Lunges
5 Rollouts/walkouts

You move from one exercise to the next without stopping until you have finished all six movements.  You then rest a minute between rounds.  We like to perform anywhere between three to five rounds of this sequence.  It is a great way to hit several of the major muscle groups in one quick time efficient workout.