The good morning has been popular in bodybuilding and powerlifting circles forever, as it’s a tremendous exercise for the glutes, hamstrings, and lower back, and has the potential to add pounds to your squat and deadlift max. It can teach you to hinge at the hips and fire the muscles of your posterior in unison for better running, jumping, and overall explosiveness. But if you don’t respect it, you can end up with a back injury that plagues you for life—and that’s exactly what happened to the legendary Bruce Lee when he tried the good morning.

Here’s the ultimate guide to mastering this age-old lower-body builder for maximum safety and effectiveness.

What Are Good Mornings?

First, you need to understand what a hip hinge is. As LA trainer Ben Bruno (@benbrunotraining on Instagram) likes to explain it, a hinge is basically the movement you make when you have a boner in the morning and you have to pee: keeping a long spine, you bend your hips back, lowering your torso toward the floor. (For ladies reading this who may prefer a different, but no less crude analogy, imagine mooning a crowd.) That’s a hip hinge, and it’s a basic movement pattern we should all know how to do properly. Any time you pick something up from the floor, whether it’s a baby or a barbell, you’re hinging at the hips. The hip hinge is also necessary for jumping and other explosive movements, such as a power clean, and a football player couldn’t get into a three-point stance without one.

The good morning is a hip hinge in which external load is carried across the back of the shoulders. You hold a bar on your back and bend your hips as far as you can while keeping your head, spine, and pelvis aligned. (Alternatively, a band can be used, wrapped around the back of your neck and under your feet.) Legend has it that the good morning got its name because it looks like a stretch you’d perform as soon as you get out of bed. Imagine doing it without load, while yawning, and with arms reaching overhead, and you can kind of see why the name stuck.

Apart from where you hold the weight you’re lifting, a good morning really isn’t that different from other hip hinge movements like the Romanian deadlift or hip thrust. Holding the weight so far from your center of gravity makes the exercise less stable than these other examples, so you can’t go as heavy, and you have to be even more aware of your spine position throughout the lift. But on the plus side, the good morning seems to have more carryover to the back squat because its mechanics are so similar. It’s also a good alternative to the conventional deadlift, as it’s less stressful to the body as a whole, takes grip strength out of the equation, and allows you to perform more training volume. (You might only be able to handle one or two deadlift workouts per week without running into problems with recovery, but you could do several sets of good mornings throughout the week safely.)

What Muscles Do Good Mornings Work?

The good morning activates your body’s biggest muscles. To perform the hinge, the glutes and hamstrings have to work through a long range of motion. Stabilizing that motion are the back muscles—ranging from the rhomboids, teres major and minor, and lats, down to the spinal erectors—the core, including the quadratus lumborum, the deepest abdominal muscle and essential for good posture, and your calves.

Good mornings also have a way of training you to breathe and brace your core properly, says Kelly Starrett, DPT, creator of The Ready State and author of Becoming a Supple Leopard and Waterman 2.0. This can have much farther-reaching benefits than just giving you muscles you can see in the mirror. To prevent the weight from pulling your torso to the floor, you have to create stability by activating your diaphragm and taking air deep into your abdomen. (More on this under How To Correctly Perform a Good Morning below.) “This allows you to access the pelvic floor,” says Starrett, the muscles that control the bowels and bladder. Strengthening this area helps prevent medical problems like incontinence and pelvic floor prolapse. Yes, that means good mornings can play a role in keeping your guts where they belong—inside your body.

Are Good Mornings Effective?

Just about every sport requires the ability to hip hinge, so good mornings are a useful exercise for athletes of every stripe. However, muscle-seekers and heavy lifters rely on them most.

They’re a favorite of bodybuilders who want to put more size on their glutes and hamstrings, and powerlifters who are striving to build their squat and deadlift. The good morning is particularly good for squatters, writes Bret Contreras, PhD, CSCS,*D, in his book Glute Lab, a guide to glute exercises. “The good morning helps reduce the risk of injury in a squat-gone-wrong situation, when the hips shoot up out of the bottom position, which is a common occurrence when squatting with maximal loads. Because the good morning mimics this exact movement pattern, the rationale is that the lifter strengthens the muscles used to carry out the movement, which might help prevent injuries if or when the fault occurs.”

Some Olympic weightlifters also use good mornings as an assistance lift for the clean and jerk and snatch. Barbell complexes, a form of conditioning circuit that’s grown out of weightlifting training, often feature the good morning. To do a complex, you perform several barbell exercises that feed into one another, all without putting the bar down. A complex could begin with five reps of the hang snatch, and then, since the bar finishes in an overhead position, go to an overhead squat for five reps. From there, the lifter can lower and press the weight behind the neck (five reps), and then lower it back to shoulder level, where he/she can finish the complex with five reps of good mornings. Used this way, one could argue that the good morning is an effective exercise for fat loss and cardio.

Finally, the good morning stretches the glutes and hamstrings at their end ranges of motion, making it highly valuable for improving hip flexion mobility. This is important for being able to squat, lunge, and crouch low, and access the full strength and power potential of these muscles.

“Good mornings might have started in modern weight rooms,” says Starrett, “but we see a similar pattern in practices like yoga’s sun salutation. People figured out a long time ago that you need to be able to hinge, extend the spine, and keep your hips, pelvis, and lumbar spine coordinated, organized, and stable. The good morning is a great expression of this notion.”

How To Stretch Before Doing Good Mornings

Perform the following mobility drills to prepare your body for the good morning. Do 5–10 reps for each.

Mountain Climber

Cat Cow

Mobile Table

How to Correctly Perform a Good Morning

If you’re new to the good morning, practice it with a PVC pipe, dowel, or broomstick before you use a barbell (yes, you can do this at home, if you like). The reason for this is twofold: the light weight of the stick will allow you to learn the mechanics of the movement with minimal injury risk, and its shape will provide you immediate tactile feedback on your form.

Position the stick vertically down your back (reach one arm behind your head and one behind your back to secure it), and try to maintain three points of contact with it throughout the exercise. The back of your head, your upper back, and butt should touch the stick at all times. When you can keep the stick against those three points, you know you’re keeping your head, spine, and pelvis aligned and neutral, which is critical for performing the good morning safely.

When you think you’ve got it down, move on to an empty barbell, and then load the bar gradually from there.

Step 1. Place a barbell in a power rack and grasp it with hands shoulder-width apart. Step under the bar and position it along the back of your shoulders. Draw your shoulders down and back (think: “proud chest”). Nudge the bar out of the rack, and step back, setting your feet hip-width apart. You can point your toes straight ahead, or turn them out slightly, to the 11 and 1 o’clock positions.

Step 2. Draw your ribs down, as if pulling them into your hips. Take a deep breath into your belly, trying to expand it 360 degrees. Now brace your core. You should feel very stable throughout your torso. Twist your feet into the floor so that you feel tension in your hips and the arches in your feet rise—keep this tension throughout the set. Focus your eyes on the floor a few feet in front of you.

Step 3. Soften your knees, and begin bending your hips back, lowering your torso toward the floor while keeping your head, spine, and pelvis in a straight line. Your lower back should be neutral—not excessively arched, and certainly not rounded over. Think about pulling your butt and hips straight backward. Continue hinging your hips until you feel a strong stretch in your hamstrings, or you think you can’t go any further without losing your stable spine position. Allow your knees to bend naturally.

Step 4. Squeeze your glutes as you reverse the motion and extend your hips to stand tall again.

As you get familiar with the movement, you can experiment with variations in your stance and grip. For an even greater glute and hamstring hit, you can perform good mornings with a wider stance, greater knee bend, and more toe flare. This better mimics the way most people squat, so it can have greater carryover to that exercise. You can also hold the bar higher up on your back—on your traps rather than the rear deltoids. Done with a narrower stance and less knee bend (as shown above), this version can help build your deadlift (assuming you deadlift with a conventional stance).

“If someone hasn’t done good mornings before, or we identify some technique errors, we regress back to a PVC pipe and see if they can perform 10 reps,” says Starrett. “Then we test again to make sure they’re breathing comfortably throughout the exercise. The next step is typically a regular 45-pound barbell, although some people find it easier to hold a light dumbbell behind their head as they hinge. This isn’t really about equipment or the muscles used—it’s about establishing sustainable motor patterns and testing their integrity.”

How To Fit Good Mornings Into Your Workout

As mentioned above, good mornings work well as an assistance exercise for the back squat and conventional deadlift. You can perform them after you do one of those main lifts, or on a separate day elsewhere in your training week. In Glute Lab, Contreras recommends using 2–3 sets of 8–12 reps as a starting point.

Starrett says that he personally puts light good mornings at the start of a hip hinge-focused session, progressing from there to kettlebell swings or deadlifts. “The good morning can help groove the hip hinge pattern,” he says, “and also illustrates areas that are still sore from previous sessions and might need some mobility work after you’re done.” Starrett cautions that you don’t need to go very heavy on good mornings to see results, no matter where you choose to place them. “A couple sets of 10 with a light weight will still challenge you.” And whatever weight you use, work up to it slowly.

How to Prevent Good Mornings Causing Back Injuries

While the good morning is a safe exercise when done properly, many lifters have injured their lower backs performing it—including martial arts icon Bruce Lee. While reports vary, it seems that The Dragon was working out sometime in 1969, and skipped or rushed his warmup. Lee performed a good morning with around 135 pounds (approximately his bodyweight), and injured a sacral nerve. (No, he wasn’t kicked in the back by Wong Jack Man, as the movie Dragon: The Bruce Lee story posited.) After a long layoff, he was able to train again, but supposedly battled back pain for the rest of his life.

If Lee—a man who looked like he was built from coiled steel springs—can hurt himself doing good mornings, you can too. So take every precaution.

When people hurt their backs on the good morning, deadlift, or any other hip hinge, it’s often assumed that the spine went into unwanted flexion (you rounded your lower back), but Starrett states that improperly executed extension is more often to blame. That is, coming up out of the bottom of the movement too fast, or with too much of an arch.

“Go lighter and slower than your instinct tells you,” says Starrett. “Also, make sure you’re not going down too far—imagine reaching into a crib but not picking up your baby.”

If you have a history of lower back pain, the good morning may not be for you, at least until you’re sure the injury has healed. You can work on back extensions, Romanian deadlifts, and single-leg Romanian deadlifts in the meantime, and get a very similar training effect.

Another common mistake is to let your weight shift over your toes, says Starrett, “which, if overdone, can compromise your mechanics. Instead, make sure you apply pressure evenly throughout your feet for the duration of the movement, particularly when you start to hip hinge. This seems like a small thing, but will have a big impact on your lumbo-pelvic organization, and how well you’re able to maintain force production.”

The post Good Mornings: The Exercise Your Workout Needs appeared first on Onnit Academy.

When asked how much booze is OK to drink on a diet, most nutritionists sound like Mr. Mackey, the school counselor from South Park: “Alcohol is bad, m’kay. You shouldn’t drink alcohol, m’kay.” As booze carries a host of health risks and offers few real benefits for your waistline, it’s easy to write it off as an unnecessary addition to any diet. But, as with signs that say to shower before entering a public pool, some rules are just asking to be broken, and you’re probably going to drink from time to time anyway—no matter how badly you want to lose weight and get in shape. And who are we to try and stop you?

As booze tends to contain both alcohol and sugar, the question of where it can fit on a ketogenic (or other lower-carb) diet is a big one. After all, “going keto” means cutting carbs way down. But according to Dominic D’Agostino (ketonutrition.org), an assistant professor at the University of South Florida—and one of the world’s leading researchers on ketogenic diets—“If you avoid the kinds of alcohol that have higher carbs and consume other types in low to moderate quantities, you don’t need to totally cut it out.”

We’ll raise a glass to that.

Read on, and you’ll learn exactly how you can make booze a part of your pursuit for a better, fitter body on a low-carb eating plan.

The Expert’s Guide to Alcohol on The Ketogenic Diet

As we described in our guide to going keto, the original, medically-defined ketogenic diet stipulates that you get 75% of your total calories from fat, 20% from protein, and 5% from carbs. (A person following an average 2,000-calorie diet would then limit his/her carbs to around 25 grams per day.) This configuration causes your body to switch its main fuel source from carbs to ketones—molecules that are made from your stored body fat. When this happens, you are considered to be in a state of ketosis. At the same time, when the body needs carbs for energy, it learns to make them itself in a process called gluconeogenesis.

First used in modern medicine by physicians at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in the 1920s, the ketogenic diet was applied to help patients suffering from epilepsy, seizures, and other neurological issues. Since then, research has suggested that keto eating can also help increase mental focus and promote healthy weight loss—perhaps even better than a low-fat diet can. A ketogenic diet also helps your body’s cells become more sensitive to glucose, so your pancreas won’t have to work as hard to carry carbs into them.

The classic ketogenic diet, however, can feel very restrictive and is often hard to follow, especially for athletes and other active people who may need more carbs to fuel exercise and support recovery afterward. In that case, we like what’s called a Mod Keto approach that allows you to consume more carbohydrates than in the traditional ketogenic diet. With Mod Keto, you can get 40–60% of your calories from fat, 20–40% from protein, and 20% from carbs (100 grams for the 2,000-calorie dieter). Though you may not be able to maintain a state of ketosis on this plan, the carbs are low enough to keep you mentally sharp but also generous enough to provide fuel for intense workouts.

What To Know Before Drinking Alcohol on the Keto Diet

There’s no denying it: excessive alcohol consumption can jeopardize several processes in the body, whether you’re keto or not. Your liver recognizes booze as a poison and prioritizes ridding your system of it. While it’s doing that, it stops making ketones and puts the brakes on gluconeogenesis (more on this later). To add to the problem, if you choose sugary beverages, a single serving has the potential to kick you out of ketosis, or eat up most of your carb allowance for the day. Furthermore, an alcoholic beverage can add hundreds of empty calories to your intake. Multiply the effect of one such drink by three or four or more—as in a night of binge drinking—and you’ll easily turn your finely-tuned metabolic engine into a clunky old rust bucket. (For your reference, a study from the National Institute of Health defines binge drinking as consuming five or more alcoholic drinks in a single session.)

Of course, booze is bad for the brain, too. One of the reasons heavy drinking makes you stagger like you just ate a Francis Ngannou uppercut is that alcohol disrupts the cerebellum—the brain region responsible for balance and coordination. In his book Why We Sleep, University of California, Berkeley, professor Matthew Walker explains that even moderate drinking causes memory impairment. He cites a Sleep study that found that participants who consumed alcohol on the same day they performed a learning exercise forgot about 50% of what they’d learned afterward. Even those who had two nights of high-quality sleep between the exercise and their bout of drinking forgot roughly 40% of the information. Walker hypothesizes that alcohol interferes with the process of committing items from short-term to long-term memory, which usually takes place while we’re asleep.

Your Grandma probably swore by the slumber-promoting power of her evening cocktail, and maybe you do, too. But there’s a difference between short-term sedation and restful sleep. While it might make you feel drowsy at first, when the hooch wears off, you can experience a rebound effect that actually stimulates alertness. If you’ve ever woken up at 3 a.m. after a bender, now you know why. Another contributing factor: the hot and cold feelings that alcohol can induce by disrupting the hypothalamus, the area of your brain that modulates body temperature, and other parts of the endocrine system.

In the book, The Sleep Solution, Chris Winter, who has become the de facto “sleep doctor” for NBA, NFL, and other pro teams seeking a rest-related advantage, states that the biggest nighttime issue with drinking alcohol is the disruption it causes to REM sleep. Professor D’Agostino has felt it firsthand. “If I have more than 16 ounces of wine, it not only affects my REM sleep but also the deep restorative stages,” he says, “so I feel lethargic in the morning.”

And then there’s the hangover. Alcohol has a diuretic effect, meaning that it prompts your body to excrete more water. This is why you go to the bathroom twice as often during happy hour, and why you wake up with a dry throat the morning after. Unfortunately, at the same time your body is losing water, it’s losing electrolytes too, throwing off the fluid balance inside you. This can hurt your performance the next time you hit the gym or the trail.

On the bright side, alcohol does have some benefits if you resist the temptation to go overboard with it. Numerous studies have shown that consuming small daily quantities of red wine can help with blood pressure, inflammation markers, and perceived and actual stress levels. In an article published in the Journal of Cardiovascular Disease Research, the phytochemicals in plants known as polyphenols—particularly resveratrol, and quercetin, which are present in wine—were shown to promote heart health. “The positive effects of dry red wine are pretty well established,” says D’Agostino. “Since I started drinking four to 12 ounces each evening, my overall health numbers are the best they’ve ever been. My HDL cholesterol numbers have increased by 25–30% percent.”

More into beer? Then you’ll appreciate the ability of hops to help protect brain cells from oxidative damage, as the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry reported.

How Does Alcohol Affect Your Keto Diet?

When you drink, around 20% of the alcohol (aka ethanol) enters your bloodstream, where it goes on to affect the brain and other parts of the body. The remaining 80% goes to your small intestine and then to your liver. Once in the liver, the process of metabolizing alcohol into energy begins via an enzyme called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD). As NAD is also responsible for turning glucose into fuel, the liver temporarily stops glucose metabolism to deal with the alcohol.

“The liver is always going to prioritize metabolizing ethanol,” says Ben Greenfield, author of Beyond Training and host of the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. “That will occur over and above gluconeogenesis and utilizing glucose in the bloodstream.” At the same time, as mentioned earlier, fatty acids will stop being converted into ketones. These systems won’t get back on track until the alcohol is burned for fuel.

To add further complications, your body must deal with the waste products that drinking alcohol produces. When your liver breaks down ethanol, it results in acetaldehyde. The body sees this as a toxic threat and slows down fat metabolism further so that it can deal with the load, which it converts to acetyl CoA. At the same time, a buildup of acetaldehyde levels along with the release of NAD prompts the liver to produce new fatty acids. In other words, not only does drinking hurt your ability to burn fat, it encourages you to store more of it—a double whammy.

Now consider that your body can only convert acetaldehyde into 30 ml of acetyl CoA per hour. That’s the best case scenario, with half that amount being the low end of the range. A typical pint of beer (16 ounces) will make most people produce just under 23 ml of acetyl CoA, so drinking just one has the power to prevent your body from burning fat for an hour. If you start imbibing at dinner and continue until last call, you could produce enough acetyl CoA to disrupt fat metabolism for 9 to 12 hours afterward.

Alcohol and Workout Performance and Recovery

If you follow some form of a keto diet and you work out, you’ve got even more reason to cut back on booze. New Zealand’s Massey University has done numerous studies on how alcohol affects performance and recovery. It found that drinking can inhibit the protein synthesis necessary for muscle repair and growth, as well as delay injury healing. In an article on the school’s website, study author Matthew Barnes concluded, “If you’re [in the gym] to perform, you shouldn’t be drinking alcohol.”

There’s also evidence to suggest that alcohol can diminish muscle-building pathways triggered by strength training. A study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research concluded that, “Alcohol should not be ingested after RE [resistance exercise] as this ingestion could potentially hamper the desired muscular adaptations to RE by reducing anabolic signaling, at least in men.”

What Alcohol Can I Drink on a Ketogenic Diet?

Due to all the reasons listed above, alcohol intake should be minimized on any diet, and particularly on keto. But when you do drink, you can limit the damage by giving preference to the lowest-calorie and lowest-sugar beverages available. Below are some examples.

Hard liquor
This stuff is your best booze bet. Whiskey, rum, vodka, gin, brandy, and tequila have 0 grams of carbs and 95–105 calories per shot.

Dry white wine
Dry sparkling wines contain 1.3–3 grams carbs and 96–150 calories per five-ounce glass. Other dry whites also fare well, with Brut Cava (2.5 g carbs and 128 calories) and Champagne (2.8 g carbs and 147 calories) rounding out the podium, and Pinot Blanc not far behind (2.85 g carbs and 119 calories).

Dry red wine
Pinot noir, Merlot, Cabernet, and Syrah (Shiraz) have 3.4–3.8 grams of carbs per glass and around 120 calories.

Light (low-carb) and dark beer
While beer is one of the more carb-drenched booze choices out there, the lightest of the lightweight beers aren’t overly dangerous to a keto dieter. Budweiser Select 55™ contains under 2g carbs and 55 calories per 12 oz, and Miller 64™ has 2.4g carbs and 64 calories. Stouts and porters are higher in calories than most other beer options, but they also offer more health-boosting properties, so we don’t think you should exclude them on the weight of the numbers you see on their nutrition labels alone. Guinness Draught™ has 125 calories and 9.4g of carbs (of which only 0.8 grams are sugar), but also boasts high levels of flavonoids, which can help combat inflammation, lower oxidative stress, and reduce the oxygenation of cholesterol.

What Drinks Should I Avoid on a Ketogenic Diet?

The following drinks are known for packing a sugary punch. Indulge in them and you’ll swiftly kiss your ketogenic diet goodbye.

Any alcohol served with a soda, syrup, or fruit mixer
Sodas cram up to 50 grams of carbs in every 12 ounces. Cocktails made with syrups or artificial fruit can pack 20 grams per serving.

Regular beer
Some IPAs contain over 20 grams of carbs and more than 250 calories, and fruity beers can have more than 30 grams carbs and 300-plus calories.

Liqueur
Southern Comfort™ isn’t too bad with just 4.8 grams of carbs and 98 calories per serving. But Jägermeister™ (17g carbs and 154 calories), Kahlua™ (22g carbs, 137 calories), and amaretto (26g carbs, 165 calories) belong in the Hall of Shame.

Margaritas
The amount of tequila’s not the issue. The 100–175 calories and 30 grams of keto diet-busting carbs in the mix are.

Wine coolers
These pack a hefty 15–30 grams carbs and have between 200 and 250 calories.

After-dinner wines
Moscato™, port, and sherry contain up to 18 grams carbs and 75–100 calories per 3 ounces.

How Much Can I Drink On A Keto Diet?

It’s impossible to give a one-size-fits-all answer for how much booze you can drink while still staying keto. We’re all different, and, just as with other kinds of food and drink, alcohol rarely affects two people in exactly the same way. According to D’Agostino, your metabolic state before you start drinking—whether you’re fed, fasted, or semi-fasted—can also affect the degree to which ethanol impacts you.

To be on the safe side, it seems best to limit yourself to two drinks per night at the most. This allowance assumes you’re choosing from the What Alcohol Can I Drink on a Ketogenic Diet list, as these options will make it easier to stay in ketosis, or at least low-carb enough that you’ll avoid disrupting your hormone balance while also gaining the health benefits that alcoholic beverages can provide in moderation.

Remember that moderate drinking is not only tolerable to the body but also helpful. The University of California Irvine’s Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders evaluated the lifestyle habits of people who lived to be at least 90. Researchers concluded that those who drank lived longer than those who abstained. Furthermore, drinking up to two alcoholic beverages daily has been found to promote longevity. With that said, Greenfield, warns that going keto can, over time, make you a bit of a lightweight when you drink. “If you’re on a ketogenic diet and your primary source of glucose comes from gluconeogenesis,” says Greenfield, “you might have lower tolerance to alcohol, as your body processes it right away,” he says. When your glycogen stores are depleted, as they are on keto, alcohol gets metabolized much faster and therefore goes to your head much sooner. “And as you metabolize more of the alcohol, you’re going to be dealing with more acetaldehyde,” says Greenfield, “so if you drink too much you could experience a worse hangover.” If you used to guzzle drinks with reckless abandon, your new low-carb lifestyle might cause you to get tipsy on lesser amounts. One drink alone may be plenty for you, so don’t rely on your pre-keto limit as a guide.

If you want to get really scientific about your boozing, D’Agostino suggests buying an Abbot Precision Xtra™ monitor on Amazon.com or at a drugstore to measure your ketone and glucose levels before you start drinking and 30 minutes after you stop. “Then see how different kinds of alcohol and quantities affect you,” he says. “I found that 12 ounces of dry wine is the most I should have, and I often only have six ounces.”

It’s not just a question of what kind of booze you choose, how much you drink, or how high the alcohol by volume percentage is. Your rate of consumption is also important. Try to avoid downing your first drink in one go. As mentioned earlier, your body can take more than an hour to process the byproducts created by the liver when metabolizing even a small amount of alcohol, so if you can, sip slowly to give yourself a fighting chance of keeping up with the intake.

“The toxicity of alcohol is related to how fast you administer it,” D’Agostino says. “Once you start to feel buzzed, you’re beginning to experience the negative effects. That’s why I stick to a small amount spread out over several hours. Last night, I had a small glass of Merlot while I was preparing dinner and then a second one a couple of hours later. That had no affect on my glucose levels and a minimal impact on my ketones.”

A further consideration is exactly when you should drink. If you’re going to have a glass or two, it’s best to do it a few hours before bed—say, with dinner. The closer your alcohol consumption is to bedtime, the more it’s likely to mess with your sleep and overnight metabolism.

Are There Any Tricks That Would Allow Me To Drink More?

As alcohol is a diuretic, you’ve probably heard the recommendation to pound water before, during, and after drinking to offset the potential dehydration. Like alcohol consumption itself, drinking water is fine if done in moderation. Drinking too much fluid, however, will start flushing electrolytes (magnesium, potassium, and particularly sodium) out of your system, and that can make a hangover even worse. Stick to an eight to 12-ounce glass of water per serving of alcohol and include a pinch of sea salt. The salt contains trace minerals that aid in fluid retention.

Eating food will slow down the absorption of the alcohol, so try to combine your drinking with a main meal. Blood alcohol content can rocket up to three times higher if you don’t have any food in your system. Whereas if you eat just before or while drinking, peak alcohol concentration can be reduced by between 9 and 23%. Be sure you’re eating the right foods too. While a night of drinking can be part of a cheat meal that finds you eating carb foods as well, it’s smarter to stick to keto-friendly fare like meat and vegetables. D’Agostino says fat, protein, and fiber slow the absorption of alcohol and reduce the load it puts on your digestive system. A big meal may also help you feel more satiated, causing you to drink less.

There are exceptions, however. “Personally, I’ve found that a small glass of wine that’s been fermented for a longer period of time to lower the sugar content allows me to operate well on a low-carb diet,” says Greenfield. “I do this particularly when my liver’s glycogen stores are low, which would be when I’m in a fasted state or post-workout. So I break the rules and drink on an empty stomach. I usually have a small glass of wine from Dry Farm Wines or FitVine Wines at 7:30 or 8 p.m. after I’ve exercised and before I eat dinner.” If he’s drinking liquor, Greenfield uses club soda as a low-carb mixer.

Even if you do overdo it at the bar, don’t panic. There’s a simple prescription for getting back on track. “Just drink a couple of glasses of water and go for a brisk walk,” says D’Agostino. “This way you’ll combat the dehydration and increase your circulation and metabolism, which will enable you to clear out the alcohol and get back into ketosis.”

The post The Expert’s Guide to Alcohol on The Ketogenic Diet appeared first on Onnit Academy.

Apart from beating boredom, bag training offers some functional, athletic advantages that more mainstream modes of cardio don’t. “On a treadmill, bike, or rowing machine, there’s a consistent cadence, and your breathing is rhythmic,” says Onnit Pro Team manager Andrew Craig, who’s also a veteran of the UFC’s middleweight division. “But when you train with a heavy bag, your inhalations and exhalations are rapid and varied.” This makes them similar to how you would breathe in a fight, and most other stop-and-go, anaerobic activities. Assuming your striking technique is good, you’ll generate power that starts from your feet, and is then released with the twist of your torso. “The rotation required to throw a punch or kick works just about every muscle in your body. You move through multiple planes of motion in ways you wouldn’t with any other training tool.”

In this article, you’ll learn all about how to train with a punching bag, including the best bag to get and the right gear to go with it, and you’ll discover two punching bag programs that you can use for full-body workouts that get you lean and conditioned. It’s the baddest cardio on the planet!

What’s the Difference Between a Heavy Bag and a Punching Bag?

First, let’s clear up a small but significant matter of terminology. Many people refer to heavy and punching bags interchangeably, as if they’re one and the same. However, a heavy bag is just one type of punching bag.

“A regular heavy bag is usually four or five feet long, and is mainly used for punching,” says Craig. They often weigh between 30 and 200 pounds, and typically hang from the ceiling or another structure overhead. The heavy bag doesn’t move much when you strike it (hint: because it’s heavy). The classic heavy bag is a cylinder shape, but there are offshoot bags with different designs that offer distinct training advantages. “There’s a banana bag, which is longer—up to six feet—and often thinner,” says Craig. “Because of its shape, it’s easier to strike this one with your knees or elbows.”

There are also bags with contours that simulate an opponent’s body, making it easier to throw specific kinds of punches like uppercuts and body shots. However, unless you have a martial arts or boxing background, or you’re ready to invest in some expert coaching to learn good striking technique, Craig suggests restricting your workouts to throwing punches. “These other kinds of strikes are highly skilled movements, and you might hurt yourself if you don’t perform them properly.”

The term punching bag can encompass a variety of tools. The most prominent is probably the free-standing bag, which is basically a heavy bag that’s mounted to a base. They’re usually weighted down with sand or water, and can be rolled anywhere you want to place them, which makes them convenient to move and easy to set up in a home gym (especially if you can’t mount a heavy bag on your ceiling or wall). Free-standing bags usually spring back into place after you hit them, making them a good option to practice kicks on. Nevertheless, Craig isn’t a fan of bags mounted to a base because they can alter the footwork fundamentals needed to get in position to strike the target. These bags can slide and wobble on the floor when you hit them, changing your distance from and orientation to the bag throughout the workout. The dynamics of how they recoil can cause problems, particularly for a novice.

Speed bags are the small, ceiling-mounted, teardrop-shaped ones you’ve seen in videos of old-time boxers training (and all the Rocky movies where Stallone makes them rattle so fast you wonder if they sped up the tape in the editing process). Speed bags are great for improving reaction time, boosting hand-eye coordination, and, as the name suggests, developing punching speed, but they aren’t meant to be hit hard, and you don’t use the same striking technique you do for power punches. As they’re really a specialized tool for dedicated boxers, Craig says not to bother with a speed bag until you’ve gotten a heavy bag and mastered the boxing basics.

What Heavy Bag is Right For Me?

Back in the day, any boxing gym worth its salt would only have leather heavy bags. Though there are a bevy of man-made materials available now that all promise greater durability, Craig thinks good ol’ animal hide is still the way to go for longevity, quality, and feel. Generally, you’ll want a heavy bag that’s equal to about half your bodyweight. So, if a brand has three different weights available—say 75, 100, and 125 pounds—most adults should go with the middle option. As long as the bag doesn’t swing or shake dramatically with every blow you land, it’s offering enough resistance to provide a good workout. Heavy bags range in price depending on the size and material (leather, while more durable, is costlier than vinyl), but you can expect to spend more than $100.

Most bags come pre-filled, but you can save considerable money by buying an empty one and stuffing it yourself. Take a pair of scissors to some of your old T-shirts and shove those rags into the bag. However, bags can also be filled with sand, water, textiles, and air.

Not sure how to mount your bag? Check out this video from Fight Alex if you’re planning to anchor the bag to your ceiling, and this one if you’re going to affix your bag to a wall bracket instead.

What Do I Need To Work Out On A Punching Bag?

Hitting a bag with bare fists or workout gloves is about as dangerous as walking up to Mike Tyson and telling him he talks funny. If you’re going to train like a boxer, you need to go all in, and that means investing in gloves. Again, Craig recommends leather. Store sold out? Then synthetic leather is a good backup option. Get a 12 or 14-ounce pair, which are usually sold separately from a bag. Punching bags are often bundled with 16-ounce gloves, but Craig says those are more suited for sparring in the ring, and the weight of them will make your forearms and hands fatigue quicker when you try to pound the bag with them.

Gloves don’t just fit over your naked hands. Your fists have to be wrapped first to help stabilize them and prevent injury. Craig recommends cloth hand wraps that are at least 180 inches long each (they come in packs of two). Two other styles—quick wraps and elastic wraps—are also popular, but many people don’t like how the elastic feels on their hands. The old-school cloth wraps also absorb more moisture, keeping your hands dryer and reducing the risk of painful chafing. The one exception is if you’re always pushed for time, and scheduling your workouts is a challenge. In this case, quick or elastic wraps can help you start your heavy bag session without having to individually bundle up each paw like an Egyptian mummy.

Need specific brand recommendations? Of course, there’s Everlast, probably the biggest name in boxing equipment. But Craig also likes the Muay Thai kickboxing favorite Fairtex to supply a bag, gloves, and wraps, with INFIGHTSTYLE and Action Pro Gear also high on the list. Failing that, go with a classic boxing brand like TITLE or Ringside. If you can’t find the gear you need because every vendor is sold out, look on Craigslist, eBay, or, as sad as this is to say, a local gym that is going out of business. Check for wear and tear before you buy, and don’t feel bad about offering much less than what the seller is asking. Shrewd shoppers can pay as much as 50% less, and even get the stuff delivered free. People who sell fitness equipment see it as clutter (and often heavy, dirty, cumbersome clutter at that), and they’re usually desperate to get rid of it. Just tell them you can pay in cash, and you’ll take the gear right away. Ultimately, you’re doing them a favor, and they know it.

How To Stretch Before Hitting The Bag

Use the following warmup routine from Andrew Craig to prepare your body for a punching bag workout.

1 Reverse Lunge To Sumo Squat

Reps: 5 (each side)

Step 1. Step back with your right leg and lower your body into a lunge until your back knee is slightly above the floor and your front thigh is parallel to the floor.

Step 2. Pivot on your right foot as you turn your knee out and stay low, so that you end up in a sumo squat, facing 90 degrees to the right of where you started. Reverse the motion to return both feet to standing and facing front. Repeat on the opposite side.

2 Quick Feet Drill

Reps: 20

Step 1. Stand just behind a line on the floor with your feet shoulder-width apart and a bend in your knees.

Step 2. Step your right foot just over the line, and then the left foot. Step the right foot back behind the line, followed by the left. Each step over the line and back is one rep. Move your feet fast, minimizing contact time with the floor.

3 Scorpion Pushup

Reps: 4

Step 1. Get into pushup position with your hands shoulder-width apart. Tuck your pelvis slightly so that it’s perpendicular to the floor, and brace your core and glutes.

Step 2. Lower your body until your chest is about an inch above the floor. As you go down, raise your left leg off the floor and reach it up and behind you, and twist it toward the floor on the opposite side. Continue until you can tap the floor with the bottom of your foot.

Step 3. Press your body back up, uncoiling it and returning the leg to the floor. Repeat the pushup, lifting the right leg. Each pushup is one rep.

4 Wall Suplex

Reps: 2

Step 1. Stand in front of a wall, facing away from it, with feet slightly wider than shoulder width. Squat down halfway, and then extend your back, reaching overhead until you can touch the wall behind you with both hands.

Step 2. Drive your hands into the wall so it can support your weight, and brace your core. Walk your hands down the wall toward the floor as far as you can—if your lower back gets uncomfortable, stop.

Step 3. Walk your hands back up the wall and return to standing. That’s one rep.

5 V Up

Reps: 10

Step 1. Lie on your back on the floor and extend your arms overhead and behind you.

Step 2. Draw your arms forward in front of you while you perform a situp and simultaneously raise your legs. Your body should form a V shape at the top.

6 Quick Feet Drill

Reps: 20

Repeat the quick feet drill from above.

7 Scorpion Pushup

Reps: 4

Repeat the scorpion pushup.

8 Wall Suplex

Reps: 2

Repeat the wall suplex.

9 V Up

Reps: 10

Repeat the V up.

10 Switches

Reps: 20

Step 1. Stand with your right leg in front of a line and your left behind it.

Step 2. Quickly switch your feet back and forth. Each switch is one rep.

11 Scorpion Pushup

Reps: 4

Repeat the scorpion pushup.

12 Wall Suplex

Reps: 2

Repeat the wall suplex.

13 V Up

Reps: 10

Repeat the V up.

14 Jump Rope

Reps: Jump for 60 seconds

Step 1. Hold the rope with hands at hip level and stand tall.

Step 2. Jump over the rope with both feet, landing on the balls of your feet. You can land with both feet at once, or one at a time. Mix up your jumping styles as you become more comfortable.

The Beginner’s Punching Bag Workout 

If you’re brand new to bag training, try this routine from Craig. It uses only punches, so the risk of injury is low, even if your technique isn’t solid.

If you’re unclear how each punching technique should be performed, here’s a quick guide to some boxing basics.

Stance. Stand with your feet about shoulder-width apart and legs staggered. If you’re right-handed, your left leg will be in front, and you’ll jab with your left hand while your right is reserved for power shots. If you’re a southpaw, stand with your right foot in front. You should feel balanced in your stance, and your hands should be held at the sides of your chin. Your chin is tucked, and your elbows are near your sides. At the end of every punch, return your hand to your chin immediately.

Jab. This is your main weapon—a quick, short punch done with the lead hand. Throw your front hand straight out, turning your knuckles toward the ceiling as your arm locks out. Your knuckles should point up just as the punch snaps to completion. Typically, the jab is done while taking a small step forward.

Cross. A power punch thrown with the rear hand. Drive through your rear foot, pivoting on the ball of the foot to turn your hips as you throw it. Again, turn your knuckles as the arm extends.

Hook. This is a swinging punch that can be done with either hand. Bend your elbow 90 degrees, and bring your arm up until it’s parallel to the floor. Twist your body, pivoting your foot to deliver the punch. The palm can face down, or toward you.

Uppercut. Once you’ve set up an opponent with jabs and crosses, you can often finish him/her with an uppercut to the chin or body. The movement is almost the same as the hook, but the punch comes on an upward trajectory. Shift your weight to the side that will throw the punch, and then throw it upward with your palm facing you and elbow pointing down.

On every punch you throw, let the first two knuckles of your hand (the index and middle finger knuckles) deliver the blow. Landing with the smaller knuckles will injure your hands. Try to stay relaxed as you’re moving with your hands up, and exhale forcefully as you throw each punch. Move your head from side to side when you throw punches.

Directions: Perform 6 rounds as directed. All rounds are 3 minutes, followed by 1 minute of rest (so set a timer!). Before you begin, wrap your hands, and use them for the first round of shadow boxing. Then put your boxing gloves on and use them for the rest of the workout.

Round 1: Shadow Boxing

With your hand wraps on, move around while you throw punches. Try to stay light on your feet and cut angles so your body is never square to your target. (You don’t need the bag yet; just box against an imaginary opponent.) Throw jabs, crosses, hooks, and uppercuts, and focus on your breathing while you warm up slowly.

Round 2: Build Drill on Bag

With your boxing gloves on, cycle through these four combinations on your heavy bag.

• Jab
• Jab, cross
• Jab, cross, hook
• Jab, cross, hook, cross

Jab, cross, hook

Jab, cross, hook, cross

– Take a second between each combo to address your stance and defense (hands up!). Don’t stay in one spot in front of the bag the whole round—move at angles, imagining the bag is an opponent you want to cut off from the rest of the ring.

– After the combinations, hit 20 quick, straight punches for speed, alternating hands, while standing right in front of the bag.

Straight Punches

– Now perform a burpee—squat down, shoot your legs back so you land in a pushup position, and then reverse the motion to stand back up.

– Repeat the combinations, straight punches, and burpee for the whole round. When there are 10 seconds left on the clock, fire off straight punches nonstop, alternating hands.

– When the round ends, do 5 burpees.

Round 3: Jab, Cross Combos

Cycle through the following combinations.

• Jab, cross
• Jab, jab, cross
• Jab, jab, jab, cross

– The cross always comes hard, but the jabs can have different cadences behind them. In the example below, a short dash indicates a quicker combination, while a longer dash represents a slower combination with a longer pause between strikes. Experiment with all of them, and make up your own.

• Jab-cross vs. jab—cross
• Jab-jab-cross vs. jab—jab-cross
• Jab-jab-jab-cross vs. jab-jab—jab-cross

– When there are 10 seconds left in the round, throw straight punches nonstop, alternating hands.

– When the round ends, do 5 burpees.

Round 4: Same-Side Hands

Alternate the following two combinations. You’ll do combo 1 with your rear hand and combo 2 with your lead hand.

Combo 1

• Rear uppercut
• Cross
• Hook

Combo 2

• Jab
• Lead hook
• Cross (this is the exception; use your rear hand to cross)

– When there are 10 seconds left in the round, throw straight punches nonstop, alternating hands.

– When the round ends, do 5 burpees.

Round 5: Slow to Fast, Fast to Slow

Throw 5 slow/soft punches on the bag with both hands and, immediately after the fifth punch, rip off 3 hard and fast punches.

– Without resetting, repeat the 5 slow punches and 3 fast punches. Continue for the duration of the round.

– When there are 10 seconds left, throw straight punches nonstop, alternating hands.

– When the round ends, do 5 burpees.

Round 6: 7-Second Drill

Stand close to the bag so you don’t have to step in for all your punches. For the first 7 seconds of the round, hit the bag as hard and fast as you can. Rest 7 seconds, and then repeat the drill till the end of the round.

– Keep your hands up even while you’re resting. Maintain a bend in your knees, and keep moving your head side to side.

– When there are 30 seconds left in the round, throw straight punches nonstop, alternating hands.

– When the round ends, do 5 burpees.

The Ultimate Heavy Bag Workout 

This workout from Craig is for experienced strikers, and utilizes all weapons, meaning the hands, feet, elbows, and knees. Do not attempt it unless you’ve already had some instruction in kickboxing or Muay Thai.

Directions: Perform five rounds as directed. All rounds are 3 minutes, followed by 1 minute of rest.

Remember to practice defense and footwork. Don’t stand still between combinations. Keep your hands up, and use slips, rolls, and pulls (head movement) to evade counterattacks. Think about stepping out of range after every combo you throw. This will ensure you have to also step into your punches when initiating each combo.

Round 1: All Weapons

Work the following combinations for 30 seconds each.

• All punching combos
• All elbows
• Skipping knees
• Right kick
• Left kick
• Push kick

Elbows

Skipping Knee

Push Kick

– At the end of the round, throw a jab, cross, hook, cross with maximum power.

Round 2: Hook and Kick

Perform a lead hook, followed by a rear kick. Now throw a cross and then a switch kick. Let the switch kick land you in the opposite of the stance you started in.

Switch Kick

– Repeat the drill back and forth in both stances for the duration of the round.

– Vary your power output, and change the level of your kicks.

– At the end of the round, throw a jab, cross, hook, and cross with maximum power.

Round 3: Body Work

Cycle through the following combinations.

Combo 1

• Jab to the head
• Cross to the body
• Hook to the head

Combo 2

• Jab head
• Cross head
• Hook head
• Hook body

Combo 3

• Jab head
• Cross head
• Hook body
• Hook head

Combo 4

• Jab head
• Jab body
• Cross head

– At the end of the round, throw a jab, cross, hook, and cross with maximum power.

Round 4: Slip/Roll Drill

• Jab, cross
• Slip
• Cross, hook
• Slip
• Hook, cross
• Roll

– Repeat the combo, but replace the slips with rolls.

– At the end of the round, throw a jab, cross, hook, and cross with maximum power.

Round 5: 4 Series

• Jab, rear kick
• Jab, cross, switch kick
• Jab, cross, hook, rear kick
• Jab, cross, hook, cross, switch kick

– At the end of the round, throw a jab, cross, hook, and cross with maximum speed and power.

Circuit Training with Heavy Bags 

A circuit is a series of exercises done back to back with little or no rest in between. Circuits get your heart rate up and keep it elevated, which improves conditioning, and they can burn a lot of calories in a short time. Perform the following circuit on the bag with your boxing gloves on.

Directions: Perform the first exercise for 30 seconds straight, and then rest 10 seconds. Then go on to the next exercise and do the same. Repeat until you’ve completed every exercise in the circuit, and then repeat the circuit for 5 total rounds.

1 Straight Punches

Hit the bag with a right-left-left-right combination with full power.

2 Kick Combinations

Alternate legs for the following kick combinations.

• 1 right kick
• 1 left kick
• 2 right kicks
• 2 left kicks
• 3 right kicks
• 3 left kicks

3 Alternating Jumping Lunge

Get into a lunge position and then explode upward, switching your legs in mid air and landing with the opposite leg in front. Immediately jump again and switch back. If you can jump high enough so that you have time to fire a knee strike at the top of the movement, do so.

4 Hooks On the Bag

Square yourself up to the bag and throw hooks in a right-left, left-right combination. Use full power—rip them!

5 Kick Combinations

Repeat the kick drills from #2.

6 Pushup with Shoulder Tap

Perform pushups, tapping your shoulder with the hand opposite to it at the top of each rep. So, do a pushup, and at the top, touch your left hand to your right shoulder. On the next rep, touch your right hand to your left shoulder.

Want more workout ideas? Skip the Instagram poseurs and check out “Bazooka” Joe Valtellini, Tony Jeffries, or Damien Trainor—all well-credentialed striking coaches.

What Should I Do for A Cooldown?

For your cooldown, end each bag training session with three minutes of slow and smooth shadow boxing. Keep moving your feet, and consciously slow down your breathing.

The post Heavy and Punching Bag Workouts: The Expert’s Guide appeared first on Onnit Academy.

What’s the best thing to do when you’re feeling overwhelmed, angry, or depressed? While booze, drugs, or finding the source of your frustration and breaking its nose might be the first thoughts that spring to mind, you’re more likely to get relief by taking a walk outside accompanied by a few deep breaths.

Forest Bathing: Bust Stress and Boost Your Health by Reconnecting With Nature

Communing with nature is the oldest form of stress management known to humankind, and yet only recently has science begun to really study it. Forest bathing, a Japanese term for bonding with the outdoors for health-boosting purposes, is now being seen as a legitimate form of therapy for tightly-wound people cracking under the pressures of living in the modern world. Even if the nearest jungle to you is a concrete one, there are ways to reap the benefits of being in nature that can add years to your life—or maybe even save it outright.

What Is Forest Bathing?

The expression “forest bathing” comes from a Japanese term coined as recently as the 1980s. “Shinrin-yoku” translates to “forest therapy,” or, “the medicine of being in the forest.”

Of course, appreciating the tranquility of woodsy surroundings dates back much farther than Pac-Man and Flock of Seagulls hairstyles. For as long as people have been living in the cramped conditions of cities, they’ve been looking for reasons to escape them. Nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche often strolled in nature for more than four hours a day, and he credited the habit with allowing him to conceive his world-changing theories. Nature-loving has been a common trait among other big thinkers too, including psychoanalyst Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, and Aristotle, who taught his students while walking through the wooded hills of ancient Greece.

But it wasn’t until the 80s that famed biologist/naturalist E.O. Wilson started writing about “biophilia”—the concept that humans evolved from nature and so have a deep longing to maintain connection to it. The clamor of urban life, Wilson hypothesized, was getting in the way of us satisfying this primal instinct, and many city dwellers rarely, if ever, spend any substantial length of time in natural settings.

Half a world away from Wilson’s office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Japanese researchers were coming to similar conclusions, leading to the government making shinrin-yoku part of its national healthcare plan. While two-thirds of the country is covered in trees, the explosive growth of major cities like Tokyo and Kyoto, and widespread rural-to-urban migration, meant that many Japanese people were losing their connection to the agrarian settings their families had thrived in for centuries.

In his aptly titled book, Forest Bathing, Qing Li, a medical doctor at Tokyo’s Nippon Medical School and chairman of the Japanese Society for Forest Medicine, reveals that the Japanese capital is now the world’s most crowded city, with 13.5 million people and 6,158 people per square kilometer (for some perspective, London has 1,500 people per square km, New York 1,800, and Paris 2,844). Not surprisingly, such population density makes it hard for residents to find peace and quiet. The subways are so jam-packed during rush hour that white-gloved oshiya (professional “pushers”) have to shove commuters into over-crowded carriages. And yet, Li writes that he is able to seek solace in the midst of the mayhem by retreating to tree-lined parks to take a daily walk. “This is not exercise, or hiking, or jogging,” he explains. “It is simply being in nature—connecting with it through our sense of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch.”

Benefits of Forest Bathing

Philosophically, all people can agree that being active in nature is good for us, but this isn’t merely an assumption anymore. There’s an emerging and growing body of evidence to support the notion, and Dr. Li and his fellow researchers at Nippon Medical School are leading the charge on forest bathing research.

Helps Fight Cancer

NK cells are like the Navy SEALs of the immune system. (NK stands for natural killer.) They play an important role in defending the body against bacteria, viruses, and tumors. NK cells are called into action any time the body senses out of control cell division or virus mutation.

Li published a review on the subject of forest bathing and its immune-boosting properties in 2010. In the experiments, adult Japanese men and women took trips into a forest for three days and two nights. Afterward, activity in the NK cells was found to be up by 50%, and the number of NK cells also grew by 53.2%. The stress reduction that comes from being outside may be one reason why, but trees themselves may be another. Phytoncides are antimicrobial compounds emitted by plants that help them fight off insects and germs. “Phytoncides released from trees, such as α-pinene, and limonene, have a big effect,” says Li. The NK-cell impact of the three-day excursions was shown to last for 30 days afterward.

Calms Your Nerves

To say that “everyone” is stressed out these days is no understatement. According to a 2018 report from the American Psychological Association, 91% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 21 say they’ve experienced some health problem due to stress in the past month—compared to 74% of adults overall. (Consider that most of these young adults, nicknamed Generation Z, don’t even have full-time jobs or families of their own yet—it’s only going to get harder!)

Needless to say, chronic stress is harmful. Prolonged exposure to stressors keeps us stuck in fight-or-flight—that alert but anxious state of mind that indicates the sympathetic nervous system is in control. “Forest bathing can increase the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system,” says Li, the rest-and-digest counterpart to fight-or-flight, “and reduce the activity of sympathetic response. It can restore autonomic nervous system balance and deliver relaxation effects by reducing levels of stress hormones such as adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol.”

Li isn’t the only one to come to this conclusion. Another team of Japanese scientists published a study in Public Health that found forest bathing significantly reduced feelings of depression and hostility. The more down or angry people were, the greater the benefits of going into the woods. Then there’s a gigantic 2018 meta-analysis published in Environmental Research. It evaluated 143 studies tracking an incredible 290 million people from 20 different countries. The results not only corroborated what Dr. Li says about forest bathing and stress, but also demonstrated that it reduces blood pressure, lowers the risk of heart disease, and is correlated with more than 100 positive health outcomes.

What If I Don’t Have A Forest?

Most of the research on forest bathing had subjects camp out in the wilderness for a few days, but, unless you happen to live at the foot of a nature trail, this may not be a likely option for you. Fortunately, studies have also shown that shorter exposures to the great outdoors can yield significant benefits. A 2015 study from the University of Melbourne found that subjects who only looked out a window at a natural scene for a mere 40 seconds increased their focus and alertness.

And thanks to modern science, there are ways to take the woods with you wherever you go. One of Li’s studies looked at how tree-derived essential oils impact NK cells. Although it was an in-vitro experiment (done in a petri dish rather than a live human), the NK cells still increased in number and activity level when incubated with the oils. And just as with longer forest bathing exposures, the oils elevated the amount of disease-fighting proteins perforin, granzyme A, and granulysin in the cells. How? Most likely the powerful phytoncides contained in tree bark and its extracts that the oils were made from.

While nobody is suggesting you inject oils into your veins, you might do well to put a few drops of cedar, cypress, pine, or any other tree-based essential oil in water, or a carrier oil, and fire up a diffuser for a few minutes in the evening, or just take a few deep sniffs from an essential oil bottle. This might be particularly beneficial when your immune system is taxed by travel, or you feel like you’re coming down with a cold. As most oil bottles are only one ounce in volume, they’ll fit nicely in your suitcase. In his book, Dr. Li suggests inhaling tree-derived oils through a salt pipe inhaler, or putting three drops in a bowl of boiling water, covering your head with a towel, and breathing deeply through your nose. “Steam inhalation of essential oils is a very direct method of aromatherapy,” Li writes, “and gets the phytoncides deep into your body.”

Chances are, even if you live in a big city, you have more options for enjoying the outdoors than you realize, as well as people to enjoy it with. You can make new connections through a group like Walk2Connect, an online community of avid walkers that coordinates people all over Colorado (your town probably has something similar; Google it). If you’re in the Big Apple, look into the New York Ramblers, while San Francisco has the Forest Bathing Club.

How To Become A Forest Bather

Most aspects of improving health, such as eating better and adopting an exercise program, are never quite as simple as they seem. You have to figure out what the best foods are for your body, learn exercise technique, schedule meals and workouts, and so on. Forest bathing, however, really is as simple as it seems: all you need to do is go outside to somewhere peaceful and pay attention to your surroundings.

That last point, however, is crucial. According to Dr. Li, if you let technology interrupt your experience, you won’t get the most out of it. Leave your cell phone at home, or at least switch the bloody thing off for once and stash it in a pocket or deep in a backpack. “Looking at your phone will diminish the benefits of forest bathing,” Li says. “Whereas if you don’t bring your technology, you will soon forget about screens.” Afraid that you’ll get lost in the woods, and that no phone will mean you can’t call for help? Plot your route in advance and tell friends where you’re planning to go. If on the off chance you do wind up in the middle of nowhere and can’t find your way back, the rest of the world will know where to come looking for you.

Apart from your phone, eliminate anything else that you’d find distracting or that would prevent you from fully engaging in your surroundings. This includes any fitness trackers you might use. Forest bathing isn’t about accruing more steps, staying in a certain heart rate zone, or trying to make a workout of the experience in any way, shape, or form. It’s about simply being, and it should feel relaxing.

If you have trouble tuning into nature, start thinking about what you’re seeing, hearing, and feeling around you—the rustling leaves in the trees above, the crunch of snow beneath your feet, the burbling of a nearby stream.

11 Rules For Better Forest Bathing

To make the most of your forest bathing experience, follow these 10 guidelines from Dr. Li.

1. Make a plan of where you’ll walk and how far based on your own physical abilities. Avoid taking on anything that will tire you out. Remember, this is not a workout.

2. If you have an entire day to do it, stay in the forest for about four hours and walk about five kilometers (or a little more than three miles). If you have just a half-day, stay in the forest for around two hours and walk approximately 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles). Whatever length walk you do, take it slowly. (By “forest,” we mean that any rustic area will do, whether it’s a park in the center of a crowded city, or your carefully manicured backyard, if that’s all you have access to.)

3. Take a rest whenever you’re tired.

4. Drink water or tea whenever you feel thirsty.

5. If you find a comfortable spot, sit there for a bit and enjoy the scenery. You can even read if you like (paper books don’t count as a distraction; e-readers do).

6. If possible, bathe in a hot spring after the forest trip. These monkeys seemed to enjoy it. Seriously!

7. If you’re going to take a long trip to a remote area, let people know where you’re going in advance, and when they can expect you back.

8. If you’re going to camp overnight, go with friends and bring the necessary camping and wilderness survival equipment. Don’t take on potentially dangerous adventures on a whim.

9. If you want to boost your immunity (natural killer cell activity), a three-day/two-night trip is recommended.

10. If you just want to relax and relieve stress, a day trip to a forested park near your home is enough.

11. Forest bathing is a preventive measure, so don’t expect it to cure you of any conditions you already have. If you have allergies to plants you might find in a woodsy area, take every precaution, and speak with your doctor before making any prolonged trips.

5 Ways To Appreciate Nature

Li says that if you’re not used to spending focused time in nature without technology on hand, it can be difficult initially to truly embrace it. He offers this checklist of ways to tune all five of your senses into what you’re experiencing.

1. Sense of sight. Actively look for the greens, yellows, oranges, and reds in plant and tree leaves.

2. Sense of smell. When you come upon a fragrant flower, take a moment to smell it and think about how it makes you feel.

3. Sense of hearing. Listen to the forest sounds and bird songs. Most birds chirp between 2,500 and 3,500 hertz, which is smack dab in the middle range of human hearing. This is why it can seem like music to us.

4. Sense of touch. Touch the trees and walk barefoot for some stretches (when safe, obviously). Research from 2015 indicates that “grounding”—direct skin contact with the surface of the earth—can help balance the body’s inflammatory responses and reduce pain.

5. Sense of taste. If you come across fruits, nuts, or seeds that are safe, indulge in them (but it’s best to rinse them first).

For more tips on stress management and improving mindfulness, see Onnit founder Aubrey Marcus’ book, Own The Day, Own Your Life.  

The post Forest Bathing: Bust Stress and Boost Your Health by Reconnecting With Nature appeared first on Onnit Academy.

Before we go any further: if you’re here because of a typo in your Google search, and you really wanted to read about a fizzy soft drink, click the back button and try again.

However, if in fact you want to read about the digestive enzyme pepsin, you’re in the right place. And while it’s perhaps not quite as exciting as Pepsi, pepsin is pretty important—especially if you eat a lot of protein in hopes of building muscle and/or losing fat.

What Is Pepsin?

Pepsin is an enzyme in the stomach that helps break down the protein in your food for digestion. Specifically, it acts on the proteins in meat, eggs, dairy products, nuts, and seeds. It is the first enzyme to attack protein in a group of enzymes known as proteases (you’ll often see this term on digestion supplement labels). Pepsin was the first enzyme to be discovered, and was named by the German physiologist Theodor Schwann—the man who recognized the cell as the most basic unit of animal structure.

Here’s how pepsin works…

Glands in your stomach lining make a protein called pepsinogen. If there is a sufficiently acidic environment (between 1.5 and 3 on the pH scale), the vagus nerve, along with hormone secretions, stimulate the release of pepsinogen into the stomach. Pepsinogen then mixes with hydrochloric acid (stomach acid) and converts to pepsin. Pepsin breaks down the proteins in whatever foods are in your stomach into smaller units called peptides, which are then absorbed by the small intestine. In the intestine, other proteases continue to break the peptides down further into amino acids that your body can use to build new proteins for itself, or to burn for fuel.

Sometimes pepsin can flow backward from the stomach to the esophagus, resulting in acid reflux conditions. For this reason, traces of pepsin in the esophagus can help doctors diagnose reflux events. Drug companies sell products that are intended to inhibit gastric secretion to provide relief; one such product, Pepcid AC®, derives its name from pepsin.

Pepsin can be taken as a supplement to help with digestion. Commercial pepsin is derived from the stomachs of pigs. Due to its acidic nature, pepsin is also used to remove hair and other tissues from animal hides before they are tanned, as well as shells and scales from seafood.

What are the Benefits of Pepsin?

Pepsin does to protein in your food what a six year-old child does to a LEGO building—it dismantles it into smaller pieces. Those pieces can then be absorbed easily by the small intestine.

Pepsin is also responsible for killing bacteria in the stomach and separating vitamin B12 from protein so that the vitamin can be properly utilized. In 2015, Chinese researchers proposed that pepsin may help us digest nucleic acids—components of DNA and RNA that are essential to virtually every aspect of health, from the immune system to muscle growth. This finding suggests that pepsin’s role in nutrient breakdown is greater than previously thought.

Why Take a Pepsin Supplement?

Digestive enzymes can become diluted for a number of reasons, and, as a study in Oncotarget noted, they tend to diminish further as we get older. If the pH of your gut rises, your stomach won’t be able to release sufficient pepsin. Without the enzyme that breaks it down, the body can’t process protein optimally. Therefore, taking a supplement that contains pepsin may be helpful.

Pepsin can be taken alone, paired with an HCl supplement (betaine hydrochloride), or as part of a digestive enzyme blend. Some protein powders are also blended with pepsin and other enzymes to aid the protein’s absorption.

Pepsin For Bodybuilding

If you’re eating extra protein in an effort to put on muscle mass, or to retain muscle while you diet off fat, pepsin can help ensure that the protein you consume gets utilized properly. “While there is no clinical evidence linking pepsin supplementation to muscle building, clients with [digestive problems] often report good results when they start taking a digestive enzyme,” says Marc Bubbs, ND, CISSN, performance nutritionist for the Canadian men’s basketball team and author of the book Peak. “It may lead to restoration of appetite and consumption of the required amount of protein and calories to achieve hypertrophy.”

Another way to boost protein assimilation is to watch what you’re eating. Research published in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition notes that, “Legumes, cereals, potatoes and tomatoes contain inhibitors that reduce protein digestibility by blocking trypsin, pepsin and other gut proteases.” So, if you want to ensure that one component of your meal isn’t sabotaging another, you may need to limit your consumption of these foods when eating protein sources like meat, dairy, and fish. (Thorough cooking can also reduce the inhibitors in foods like beans and potatoes.)

While pepsin doesn’t exist in food, you may be able to boost your body’s own production of it by eating more protein- and fat-rich foods. Research in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests that high-fat/keto diets may produce greater amounts of pepsin.

The post What to Know About Pepsin: Benefits & Uses appeared first on Onnit Academy.

If you want to build a successful career, get through school, or run a business, you probably won’t be able to limit mentally-draining tasks or escape making tough decisions, but you can take steps to keep your mind as focused and sharp as possible in spite of the challenges it faces.

How Can I Improve My Mental Acuity?

According to Dr. Jim Afremow, a mindset coach to Olympians, co-creator of the Champion’s Mind app, and former sports psychologist for pro sports teams such as the San Francisco Giants, the route to better focus, concentration, and understanding is recognizing the interplay between what’s going on around you and what’s happening inside your brain.

“Your mental state is dependent on both internal and external factors,” Afremow says. Here’s an example: “In the 90s, it was so hard to get a reservation at a famous restaurant in New York that [the restaurant] started getting a lot of complaints. So they had psychologists come in to find ways to get people in and out faster. They found that the two biggest difference makers were installing brighter lights and playing faster music, which shows how our external environment subconsciously shapes our mental state.”

The trouble is, says Afremow, “when we allow outside factors like 24/7 email, fast-paced work environments, and constant stimuli to speed us up too much, our performance suffers. That’s when we have to work on our inner [mental] game to slow things back down. Conversely, when we’re feeling sluggish, we need a toolkit of techniques that can energize us so we can perform well even when conditions aren’t ideal.”

Certain foods and supplements, along with daily practices such as meditation, “brain breaks,” and better sleep habits can all alter your mental state significantly, allowing you to speed up or slow down as needed to find the level of mental sharpness you require to be more focused and productive.

Can Natural Ingredients Really Affect My Mental Sharpness?

Everyone knows that caffeine/coffee can help with alertness and focus, but there’s another natural compound that, when combined with caffeine, may be even more effective for supporting a sharper mental state.

L-theanine is an amino acid found in green and black tea, and a trial published in Pharmacology, Biochemistry, and Behavior concluded that it helps lower the body’s stress response to stressful cognitive tasks. In other words, it may be able to help chill you out when you’re working on something frustrating. This calming effect could help to balance caffeine’s stimulant properties.

A study in Biological Psychology looked at the effects of caffeine and L-theanine in isolation and in combination, discovering that the two compounds together boosted cognitive speed, memory, and alertness better than when either nutrient was taken alone. Another study in Nutritional Neuroscience noted that while caffeine by itself boosts alertness, when teamed with L-theanine, it helped promote speed and accuracy on attention-switching tasks and reduced susceptibility to distraction.

Finally, British researchers found that L-theanine may help attenuate the spikes in blood pressure that are associated with caffeine use. This doesn’t necessarily mean it can counter the jittery and restless feelings that often accompany caffeine, but L-theanine seems to help you harness caffeine’s stimulatory effects, leaving you feeling alert but not overly revved up.

L-theanine is available as a supplement, but if you want to keep it simple and stick to coffee, at least get the dosing right, which can minimize the risk of caffeine’s side effects. “The sweet spot for caffeine appears to be between two and three milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight a day,” says Dr. Marc Bubbs, ND, CISSN, performance nutritionist for the Canadian men’s basketball team and author of the book Peak. So, if you weigh 180 pounds, you should aim for 160–245mg of caffeine—about one-and-a-half to three cups of coffee. “This is a level that provides most of the benefits while limiting the drawbacks of excessive caffeine intake,” says Bubbs, “like restlessness, anxiety, and inability to focus.”

Another natural ingredient worth experimenting with is Huperzia serrata (club moss). It’s been shown to help people with cognitive deficits, potentially by way of regulating oxidative stress and supporting nerve growth factors and receptors. It also acts to help promote acetylcholine concentrations, allowing for neuron communication. Lastly, lemon balm shows promise as a brain booster. British researchers writing in Neuropsychopharmacology noted its ability to promote both calmness and memory.

Tips for Achieving Mental Clarity

Here are four simple ways to boost your mental state fast.

1. Follow a Low-Carb Diet

Lowering your carb intake has been shown many times over to help people lose weight and reclaim their health, but one of the first noticeable benefits is improved thinking and concentration. This is because low-carb eating helps you avoid blood sugar spikes that rob your energy and fog your brain. Taken a step further, a low-carb diet becomes a ketogenic diet, where the lack of carbohydrate intake causes your body to run on ketones (compounds made from fat) for fuel.

A team of psychiatrists and neuroscientists from the University of Cincinnati divided adults with mild cognitive impairment into two groups. The one that followed a low-carb diet for six weeks showed improvements in verbal memory performance.

As Shelly Fan reported in Scientific American, a ketogenic diet may benefit the brain by inhibiting stress on neurons, increasing the number of mitochondria (energy-producing structures in brain cells), and regulating neurotransmitters to ensure a balance between excitation and inhibition.

“One of the biggest ‘rocks’ for achieving and sustaining a high level of mental acuity is optimal blood glucose control,” Bubbs says. “With half the US population struggling with pre-diabetes or diabetes, it’s perhaps not surprising that mental performance seems to be on the decline. Chronically high blood glucose levels wreak havoc on the brain, entangling neurons and increasing your risk of dementia and depression. Reducing carbohydrate intake can be an effective strategy for improving glucose control, especially in those with pre-diabetes or diabetes, as a reduction in carbs significantly reduces your post-prandial glucose response. So, if you find yourself falling asleep at your desk after lunch, reducing your carb intake can be a great tool for supercharging your brain game.”

For specific guidelines on following a low-carb or ketogenic diet, see our free e-book HERE.

2. Get More High-Quality Sleep

At the risk of sounding too harsh, lack of sleep is making you stupid. One of the nation’s leading sleep researchers, William Killgore from Harvard Medical School, wrote in Progress in Brain Research that sleep deprivation not only slows response speed and compromises alertness, attention, and vigilance, but also affects “more creative, divergent and innovative aspects of cognition.” Said another way, if you don’t sleep well, your brain just won’t work right. And no matter how many extra shots you get your favorite barista to put in your morning joe, they can’t overcome the detrimental impact of a bad night’s sleep.

“Even a single night of bad sleep reduces your inhibitory control, making you more likely to react emotionally to conflicts and engage in risk-taking behavior,” Bubbs says. “In fact, even after you catch up on your sleep, there’s a major lag time before your full cognitive performance is restored. If you’re serious about your mental performance, prioritize increasing total sleep time and quality above all else.”

So how can you start sleeping better? Get all the electronics out of your bedroom, keep it dark with blackout shades and cool with air conditioning, a fan, or a chiliPAD, and trade your tablet or eReader for a good ol’ fashioned paper book to help you wind down before bed. You might also want to consider taking a supplement that contains magnesium, which may help you avoid delayed sleep onset and early wakefulness, as well as improve sleep efficiency, according to a trial in the Journal of Research in Medical Sciences. Get more sleep tips HERE.

3. Take Brain Breaks

If you remember the restaurant example from above, playing up-tempo music and sitting in bright lighting helps you move faster. As we showed in our report on forest bathing, taking a leisurely stroll outside can help you relax significantly. In both cases, the environment you surround yourself with creates changes in your brain.

“If you’re in a mental slump—which hits a lot of people mid-afternoon—then step away from your desk and take a quick walk outside,” says Afremow. “Or, if you’ve got a meeting coming up, just take a stroll around the building and have a chat with a colleague. The change of scene will give you a mental lift. Don’t think of it as time wasted, but rather an investment that will provide greater clarity and focus. The more consistent you are with any mindset practice, the bigger the benefits you’ll experience.”

Findings published in Mental Health and Physical Activity noted that just 12 minutes of activity helped promote mental performance in 10 year-old kids.

4. Schedule Meditation

While walking in nature can be a form of meditation, the value of sitting quietly with your eyes closed can’t be overstated. A 2018 study that spanned seven years concluded that meditation practice can help promote improvements in attention span, as well as prevent age-related mental decline.

“If you only have a few minutes,” says Afremow, “then fire up a guided meditation on an app like Champion’s Mind, or do a little single-point meditating by focusing on your breath. Picture yourself inhaling relaxation and exhaling stress. You could also do color breathing, in which you picture yourself inhaling a calming blue and exhaling a warning color like red.” For a step-by-step guide to how to meditate effectively, go HERE.

A group of researchers led by Mark Krasnow, a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University, found that calm breathing impacts a group of nerves that are directly tied into the arousal centers in the brain. The more control you have over your breath, the more you have over your mind. One journal found that yoga breathing techniques improved performance on mental testing.

Can Blue Light Help Me Focus?

Blue light is a color in the light spectrum that travels at short wavelengths. It’s produced by the sun, but also artificial lights, and scientists believe that exposure to it can help us focus and learn. A study published in the Journal of Neural Transmission concluded that, “a significant increase in alertness and speed of information processing could be achieved by blue light.” Furthermore, a team from the University of Arizona College of Medicine’s psychiatry department determined that subjects who were exposed to blue light for 30 minutes after a learning exercise improved memory retention compared to the placebo group.

According to Bubbs, one of the best ways to get exposure to blue light is to simply go outdoors. “Getting outside is hugely important for cognition and mental health, particularly during fall and winter months. If you’re bold enough to tackle the elements with a morning walk to work or to your favorite coffee shop, your brain will be exposed to over 100,000 LUX of light intensity, even on cloudy days, which will kickstart circadian rhythms and cognition.” A brightly-lit office, by comparison, puts out only a paltry 20,000 LUX. “Get outside to burn off the brain fog and clear your mind before work, or add outdoor morning workouts to further increase the benefits.”

However, there can always be too much of a good thing. Certain biohackers will warn you that blue light can mess with your sleep, as it suppresses the release of melatonin. It can delay the onset and reduce the quality and duration of sleep. For these reasons, it’s a good idea to wear glasses that block blue light when you’re watching TV or using electronics at night. Also, cut off your exposure to as much artificial light as you can at least two hours before going to bed (dim the overhead lights, turn off the TV, etc.). But don’t think you have to live in a cave just to be able to sleep at night.

For more tips on using blue light to your advantage—and avoiding it when it’s disadvantageous—pick up Onnit founder Aubrey Marcus’ book, Own The Day. 

The post The Best Ways to Support Mental Acuity and Sharpness appeared first on Onnit Academy.

It happens every year. A lean guy or slim girl graduates high school, goes off to college, and comes home on Thanksgiving break looking like Eric Cartman on Weight Gain 4000: “I’m such a beefcake, I can’t even fit through the door.”

South Park jokes aside, bloating up your first year away at school is a legit concern. A study published in Preventive Medicine reveal that 70–77% of college freshmen do gain weight, and largely during their first semester. Hence the fable of the “Freshman 15”—the idea that you’re apt to gain 15 pounds your first year at college.

Fortunately, research shows you probably won’t gain quite that much, but the study did find that the average gain was nearly eight pounds for both men and women. That’s almost one pound per month for the entire school year, and more than enough to have your friends squinting to recognize you when you come home next summer.

If you’re a new freshman who wants to avoid becoming a statistic, this guide to eating, exercising, and surviving dorm life will help you stay lean through your first year of college.

How Should I Eat To Avoid The Freshman 15?

For the past 18 years, you’ve likely been living with your parents. Unless you’re a budding Gordon Ramsay or Ina Garten, the perks probably included your mom or dad’s cooking. You also had some physical activity built into your schedule, whether it was PE class, playing a school sport, or pick-up games with your friends.

That’s all changed now. You’re responsible for getting your own meals, and if you’re not playing college sports (and odds are that you aren’t: only seven percent of high school athletes go on to play anything in college), you’re susceptible to eating badly and getting lazy. This sets you up to eat more calories than you burn, and that means weight gain.

– Create Awareness

“When people are in high school, food intake probably isn’t even on their radar because it doesn’t have to be,” said Brian St. Pierre, R.D., C.S.C.S., Director of Performance Nutrition at Precision Nutrition. “But when they get to college, a decrease in nutritional quality, increase in quantity, and reduction in exercise can start to take its toll quickly. The best way to avoid this is to start being more aware of your meals and snacks, becoming more mindful of your portion sizes, and committing to making positive changes.”

Check this out: A study published in the International Journal of Obesity divided 75 overweight or obese participants into three groups. The first group focused on forming new eating habits, the second on breaking old eating habits, and the third was a control group that wasn’t asked to change anything. Both of the groups that made changes lost a lot more weight than the control group, and they kept losing weight after the study ended, dropping another 10–12 pounds in the 12 months afterward. However, 65% of the participants in each of the groups met the study goal of shedding at least five percent of their initial bodyweight. In other words, even the control group—comprising people who weren’t asked to change a thing—saw improvements.

The lesson is twofold. Small habit changes can yield big results over time, and simply gaining awareness of your habits (such as the control group did by merely participating in a weight-loss study) can yield results by itself. None of the participants had to follow a specific diet to lose weight. They only needed to become more aware of what they were eating, which automatically led to better choices.

Before you try to make drastic changes to your diet, start paying attention to what you’re eating, how much, when you reach for food, and how often you’re hungry. If you notice that you’re gravitating to pizza and cheeseburgers in the dining hall buffet when chicken breast and cauliflower is also being served, the right decisions will begin to become obvious.

– Control Your Portions

There’s no need to geek out counting calories, weighing food, and micromanaging macronutrients to control your weight. And since most of your meals will probably be served to you, as opposed to you preparing them yourself, you really have no way of knowing for sure how they were made and how many calories are in there anyway.

Keep things simple with Precision Nutrition’s “hand” method. It lets you use the size of your hand to estimate portions of foods that are primarily composed of one macronutrient—protein, carbs, or fat. (Vegetables are included as well, but because their calorie and carb-content is usually low, they get their own category.)

Protein: One serving of meat, seafood, dairy products, or eggs is approximately the length, width, and thickness of the palm of your hand.

For men: 2 servings per meal

For women: 1 serving per meal

Vegetables: One serving of broccoli, carrots, spinach, etc.—raw or cooked—is roughly the size of your closed fist.

For men: 2 servings per meal

For women: 1 serving per meal

Carbs: One serving of fruit, starches (like potatoes or rice), whole grains, or bread is what you can fit in your cupped hand.

For men: 2 servings per meal

For women: 1 portion per meal

Fat: One serving of nuts, seeds, healthy oils (such as coconut, olive), butter, etc. is about the length and thickness of your thumb.

For men: 2 portions per meal

For women: 1 portion per meal

Now you have a customized system for gauging your food intake. Bigger people have bigger hands, and therefore get to eat more. Smaller people with smaller hands get smaller portions. Your hands are always with you, unlike a food scale, so you can keep track of everything you eat, every time. What about calorie-counting apps? If you’ll use one, go for it, but there’s no guarantee of their accuracy, and the hand method is more effective for teaching you what healthy portions of food/reasonably-sized meals look like.

Of course, the hand method gets a little complicated if you’re eating processed foods with mixed macros. For instance, your dining hall lasagna has some protein, and lots of carbs and fat. This is why it’s best to stick with whole foods—the ones that are as close to how you’d find them in nature as possible (e.g. chicken breasts or thighs, steak, a bowl of oatmeal, a scoop of almond butter). But when in doubt, serve yourself one portion of whatever you’re about to eat: one square of lasagna, one slice of pizza or cake, one small bowl of chowder, etc. That should keep your intake of processed foods in check.

The hand system is just a starting point anyway. If you find you’re gaining weight with the portions outlined above, simply skip a cupped hand of carbs at one or more meals, and make further adjustments as needed until you’re seeing the results you want.

BONUS TIP: If you start every meal already feeling somewhat full, you’re less likely to overdo it when you sit down to eat. This is why some dieticians recommend drinking a 16-ounce glass of water before breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The body can’t really tell the difference between satiety that comes from liquids or solids (at least initially), so pounding water can tell your brain that your stomach is fuller than it actually is, helping regulate how much you eat.

Water too boring for you? You may get an even greater effect from a protein shake. Protein is the most satiating macronutrient (compared to carbs and fat), and burns the most calories just to digest it, which is why nutritionists often recommend increasing protein intake for weight loss. A 2013 study in the British Journal of Nutrition found that a thick and creamy protein drink heightens your perception of its protein content, which helps promote the sensation of fullness even further.

For a guide to the benefits of whey protein, go HERE.

– Try Fasting

Pop quiz, college kid: what’s the easiest way to not get fat?

The obvious answer, of course, is simply to not eat. Research shows that intermittent fasting, in which you go certain periods of time without food, has numerous health benefits, including weight loss, improved blood pressure, and even alleviated symptoms of conditions like asthma. Fasting is not appropriate for people who are already underweight or have hormonal problems, but for a healthy college student, it may be the most convenient way to stay lean and get good grades.

When you don’t eat for a while, you trick your body into thinking it’s going to starve. Years of evolution have hard-wired your system to ramp up several processes that help the body become more efficient. Insulin levels drop and growth hormone is released, helping you burn more fat. Your cells begin repairing themselves, and your brain becomes laser-focused—a sign that your body is entering fight-or-flight mode so that you can be an alert hunter.

People who fast report being able to think more clearly and concentrate better on work and other tasks. This could be due to avoiding blood sugar crashes (which are responsible for the energy lulls you feel after big, carb-heavy meals), but it may also be connected to increased production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein that boosts the resistance of the brain’s nerve cells to dysfunction and degeneration.

To start experimenting with fasting, simply skip breakfast in the morning. If you stop eating around 9:00 p.m. the night before and make lunch your first meal of the day at 1:00 p.m, you’ve completed a 16-hour fast—one of the most popular fasting methods and one that most people find easy to stick with. You’re welcome to drink water and/or black coffee during your fast to control hunger (and to help ensure you don’t overeat when you do sit down to a meal).

You don’t have to do intermittent fasting every day. The 17-Hour Fast, by Dr. Frank Merritt, explains that once per week is enough to see some benefit, but as you get more comfortable with the process, you could fast daily and for longer periods.

Try to get your roommate or a friend to fast with you. Your adherence will be better if you have support, and the two of you can compare notes to tweak your fasting approaches and get the most out of it. For a beginner’s guide to intermittent fasting, go HERE.

[Editor’s note: All of the above strategies are low-effort ways to help keep your weight under control. If you want to know more about how to diet for maximum health, performance, or ripped abs, check out our guides to caveman nutrition and keto for starters.]

How Should I Work Out to Avoid The Freshman 15?

Many people think that the only reason to lift weights is to get big and strong, but it’s actually the best way to get leaner. Gaining muscle increases your metabolism 24/7, so you’ll burn extra calories just sitting around in your dorm room.

Not into getting “jacked?” That’s fine. Hitting the weights three days a week is more than enough for you to see dramatic results without anyone confusing you for a bodybuilder (and if you’re a lady, it won’t make you look any less feminine).

A paper published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology found that the following three training methods were equally effective for achieving muscle growth on virtually any exercise you choose to do.

• 3–5 sets of 6–15 repetitions

• 3–5 sets of 10–20 reps

• 3–5 sets of 6–12 reps

Follow one or all of the methods each time you train. Three, non-consecutive, full-body workouts per week is ideal. So you could use method 1 on Monday, 2 on Wednesday, and 3 on Friday. Use the heaviest loads that allow you to complete the number of repetitions called for with good form (any number within the given range is OK). While your training should be challenging, it must also be safe, so stop your sets one to two reps short of the maximum amount you can do with the given weight. For instance, if you’re aiming to do a set of 10–12 reps, and the 10th feels so tough that you think your form would break down if you kept going for 11 or 12, stop the set there.

Change your exercises often. You’ll get the most bang for your muscle-building buck if you focus on compound lifts—those that work multiple joints at once and activate the most muscle. Most of your exercises should come from the following list:

• Deadlift variations (including conventional deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, trap-bar deadlifts, stiff-legged deadlifts, etc.)
• Squat variations (including back squats, front squats, goblet squats, etc.)
• Bench press (barbell or dumbbell, incline or flat)
• Row (barbell, dumbbell, cable, or band)
• Chinup (or pullup, lat pulldown)
• Overhead press (seated or standing, one arm or two arms)
• Kettlebell swing
• Split squat
• Reverse lunge

A great full-body workout can consist of only three exercises: some kind of pushing movement, a pulling movement, and a lower-body exercise. For example, a dumbbell bench press (pushing), a cable row (pulling), and a kettlebell goblet squat (legs).

For a complete guide to muscle building, see this article. Of course, if your college doesn’t have a good gym, you can also see great results with bodyweight training. Onnit offers a six-week body transformation program—Onnit 6—that you can do in your dorm room with no equipment (eating plans and mindset strategies, and more, are also included). For all the details about Onnit 6, go HERE.

– Cardio

Remember when your parents wanted to lose a few pounds, and they started taking hour-long jogs through the neighborhood?

Suckers.

Research has shown that high-intensity interval training (HIIT)—where you work really hard for a short burst and then coast or rest briefly—is much more time-efficient for both cardiovascular health and fat loss. HIIT workouts usually last 20–30 minutes, and sometimes can be much shorter. One study in the European Journal of Applied Physiology had subjects alternate 10–20-second bouts of all-out cycling on a stationary bike with a few minutes rest for 10 minutes. They did only ONE MINUTE of total work, three days per week. After six weeks, their markers of aerobic capacity had significantly improved.

Meanwhile, a review of HIIT studies in the Journal of Obesity concluded that interval training can burn fat during and after exercise (as the result of an elevated metabolic rate), as well as help to suppress appetite. The authors wrote, “Given that the major reason given for not exercising is time, it is likely that the brevity of [HIIT] protocols should be appealing to most individuals interested in fat reduction.”

Use HIIT 1–3 times per week. Try the following HIIT workouts, which can be done on a treadmill, exercise bike, rower, or on a track outside. Be sure to take five minutes to warm up beforehand.

• Sprint/cycle/row etc. at the fastest pace you can maintain for 1 minute. Rest 1 minute, and repeat for 10 rounds.
  
• Sprint/cycle/row etc. for 2 minutes. Rest 2 minutes, and repeat for 6 rounds.
• Row 500 meters and then rest 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Repeat for 8 rounds.

– Just Move

Exercise is awesome, but staying lean is a lifestyle that requires habits you keep outside the gym. Make an effort to simply move more throughout your day. This can include playing pickup games with friends, joining a rec league team, or merely walking as much as possible. Get in the habit of walking to classes that you’d normally drive to. As reported in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, taking a regular stroll can offer profound benefits. Researchers found a 24% reduction in the subjects’ risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, and a 20% reduction in all-cause mortality.

Another easy way to improve your health and avoid weight gain is to stop sitting so damn much. When you’re on a bus or train, give up your seat. When you call your parents or friends, pace around your room rather than lie on your bed. Also, consider getting a standing desk. Companies like Ergodriven offer options for as little as $25.

Check out this website to calculate just how much time you spend sitting each day, and figure out how many extra calories you could burn by choosing to stand or move instead.

How Much Can I Drink and Still Avoid The Freshman 15?

If we told you not to drink at all, we’re pretty sure the sound of laptops and iPhones simultaneously clicking away from this website would be so loud they’d hear it in space. No one is naïve enough to think you won’t booze at college, but we encourage you to do it sparingly (especially since, you know, you’re under 21 and all).

The fact is, you can’t burn body fat when you have alcohol in your system. Recognizing alcohol as a poison, your body’s first priority is to metabolize it, and any other foods you take in around the time you’re drinking will get stored as fat until the alcohol is cleared.

On top of that, alcohol is inherently a gut bomb. Whisky, vodka, and other hard liquors pack 80–100 (nutrition-less) calories per serving, and wine coolers, beer, and spirits with soda mixers (e.g. rum and Coke) contain a boatload of sugar —up to 30, 35, and 50 grams, respectively.

The lower-calorie hard liquors and dry wines are your best bet. But, on the off chance they don’t serve Cabernet at your next keg party, at least try to opt for light (low-carb) beers. Stay the hell away from cocktails made with syrup or soda, IPAs, and exotic party drinks. Margaritas, pina coladas, and Long Island Ice Teas can verge on 1,000 calories.

For more details on fitting booze into a diet plan, see our guide HERE.

How Can I Sleep Better At College?

We know campus life is all about pulling all-nighters and never-ending parties, but getting adequate rest is as important to your waistline as it is to your grade-point average. A study in the Annals of Internal Medicine showed that when dieters got adequate sleep, more than half of the weight they lost was body fat. When they lost sleep, however, only one quarter of their weight loss was fat (the rest was lean body mass, including muscle). Lack of sleep also made the subjects hungrier.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that college-aged individuals get between seven and 10 hours of sleep per 24-hour period. If that seems impossible, follow the suggestions in our guide to sleeping better HERE.

For an all-in-one guide to exercise, nutrition, sleep, sex (yes, sex!), and overall better living—to get the most out of your college years and life beyond—check out Onnit founder Aubrey Marcus’ book, Own The Day, a New York Times best-seller.

The post A College Student’s Guide To Avoiding The Freshman 15 appeared first on Onnit Academy.

The clean and press was dropped from weightlifting competition because judges deemed it too difficult to assess valid technique (lifting a ton of weight causes you to bend backward, and it’s hard to tell to what degree the knees are bending, and therefore how much assistance you’re getting from them). Though it may have fallen out of fashion, the clean and press is still a worthwhile exercise, and an efficient choice for building muscle, strength, and explosiveness—even if you choose to perform it with dumbbells. In fact, the dumbbell clean and press is arguably a better choice for most people than its barbell predecessor (particularly those of us who aren’t trained Olympic lifters).

The dumbbell clean and press will allow you to access most of the same benefits gleaned from the barbell variation, but without the same steep learning curve or risk of injury. Here’s everything you need to know about the dumbbell clean and press.

What Muscles Does a Dumbbell Clean and Press Work?

The dumbbell clean and press works just about all of the major muscles along the posterior and anterior chains (i.e., the muscles that work together on the back and front of the body). In other words, it’s a total-body exercise.

Starting at the bottom of the body, the gastrocnemius and soleus muscles in the calves work in tandem with the quads, hamstrings, and glutes to drive the weights up from the floor (or hang position; see below) and extend the hips. The abdominals (including the rectus abdominis, transversus abdominis, and internal and external obliques) and spinal erectors provide stability for the spine as you extend the hips and stand up tall.

The traps, lats, and rhomboids contract powerfully to shrug and pull the weights up to shoulder level. As your elbows come under the dumbbells, the muscles of the hands and forearms work hard to maintain grip, while the biceps come under tension, too. To finish the exercise with a press, the deltoids, upper pecs, and triceps fire as the core works to maintain stability.

What are the Benefits of Doing the Dumbbell Clean and Press?

“The dumbbell clean and press develops total body-strength and power, and stability in the shoulders,” says Sean Pangelinan, owner of The Fit Lab in San Diego. Like the barbell clean and press, the dumbbell version has you taking a weight from the floor (or at least knee level) and controlling its path all the way overhead. You can’t ask for a greater range of motion through which to work your whole body, and the result is a total-body workout. Working all those muscles burns a lot of calories for one exercise, so the clean and press is a good move to use when training for fat loss. Though you won’t be able to lift as much weight with dumbbells as you do a barbell, the exercise is still intended to be done heavy, so you’ll build strength and size.

While you sacrifice some loading using dumbbells, they offer a few big advantages over a barbell. For one thing, they make the exercise unilateral. You have to control two weights separately, but coordinate their movement together. That increases the challenge to your core and many stabilizer muscles, including the ones in the shoulders that you need to press safely in any exercise. The dumbbells also offer a slightly greater range of motion than you’d get with a barbell clean and press, and greater range means more muscle activation.

“The dumbbell clean and press is a great introduction to the Olympic lifts,” says Pangelinan, “and is more forgiving for most people who don’t have experience in this area. You get most of the benefits of cleaning and pressing with a barbell, minus the stress on the wrists and other joints. The clean and press is one of the most efficient movements you can do, as it’s a compound lift that engages multiple joints and major muscle groups.”

How To Stretch Before A Dumbbell Clean and Press

Use these two mobility drills, provided by Onnit Durability Coach Natalie Higby (@nat.trill.fit on Instagram), to increase range of motion and stability in your shoulders and upper back before you perform the clean and press.

How To Do A Dumbbell Clean

It’s easier to learn the dumbbell clean and press when you break it down and master its component parts individually. This means starting with the dumbbell clean. A proper clean is not a sloppy curl done with momentum. When done correctly, it’s a full-body movement that builds power. Here’s how to do the clean portion of the clean and press.

Step 1. Place two dumbbells on the floor. You may position them so that the handles are horizontal, right in front of your feet. However, if it feels like they’re too far away to reach, you can place them vertically at the outsides of your feet—or angled slightly inward. If the floor still seems too far away, and you know you won’t be able to pick up the dumbbells without rounding your lower back (don’t worry, this is common), simply start with the dumbbells hanging at your sides.

Step 2. Stand with your feet straight and hip-width apart. Hinge at your hips, bending them back and allowing your knees to bend until you can reach the dumbbells on the floor. You should end up in the same starting position as a deadlift. Grip the dumbbells with your arms straight. Your head, spine, and pelvis should all be aligned.

If you’re starting from a standing position, bend your hips back and allow your knees to bend as needed until the dumbbells hang just outsides your knees. This is called the hang position of a clean, and you can begin the exercise from here.

In either case, draw your shoulders back and downward (think “proud chest”), so that someone standing in front of you could read the front of your T-shirt.

Step 3. Push your feet hard into the floor and squeeze your abs and glutes. Extend your hips and knees to get the dumbbells moving upward.

Step 4. As the weights pass knee level, shrug your shoulders hard, squeeze your glutes again, and allow the momentum to carry the dumbbells up in front of you.

Step 5. Thrust your elbows forward so that they come under the dumbbells and you “catch” the weights at shoulder level, bending your knees to drop into a quarter squat to absorb the force. Your thumbs should be facing backward and your closed palms facing each other.

How To Do A Dumbbell Clean and Press

To perform the full clean and press, clean the weights up to shoulder level as described above. From there:

Step 1. Ensure that your tailbone is tucked under slightly so that your pelvis is parallel to the floor. Brace your core, pulling your ribs down.

Step 2. Press the weights straight overhead to lockout while keeping your ribs down. Reverse the motion to bring the weights back to shoulder level, and then bend your hips back to lower them to the floor (or your knees) again.

How Many Reps Should I Do?

If your goal is power and strength, Pangelinan suggests doing the clean and press for sets of 3 to 6 reps. Three work sets (the challenging ones you do after your warmup sets) is enough. “This is the ideal amount of volume to get the full neuromuscular benefits of the exercise,” says Pangelinan, “without your form being compromised by fatigue.”

However, if you’re aiming to build your endurance and get more volume for the sake of muscle size gains, you could do 3 sets of 10 to 20 reps with a lighter weight. “Just make sure you stop if you begin to slow down or your technique deteriorates,” says Pangelinan. If you’re brand new to clean and presses, train with lower reps first to master the movement, and work on endurance after you’ve gotten the technique down.

Like the other Olympic lift variations, the dumbbell clean and press is a versatile movement that can be done in combination with other movements or with slight variations of technique. You can use the clean portion to get the weights into position for front squats or front-loaded lunges. Called the front rack position (weights held at shoulder level), you can also go into different pressing movements or overhead carries from there. If you want to train heavier or target even more power development, you can perform the press portion with leg drive, making it a push press exercise (shown in the video above). In other words, clean the weights up to your shoulders, and then quickly dip and extend your knees to help power the dumbbells overhead. Pressing the dumbbells strictly is better for shoulder strength and muscle gain, but getting assistance from your legs tweaks the exercise into more of a full-body power move.

At The Fit Lab, Pangelinan’s clients often combine the dumbbell clean and press into a circuit with reverse lunges and Romanian deadlifts. “I’ll also add in single-arm rows to improve scapular control, pushups as an antagonist to the vertical pull component of the clean and press, and single arm floor presses,” he says. Now you have a full-body circuit workout that’s great for fat loss.

Alternatives to the Dumbbell Clean and Press

If you’re not ready for the full dumbbell clean and press, you can regress the movement to something more manageable. If you want to make it even more challenging, there are progressions you can employ as well. See below for some alternatives you can use to customize your training.

Regression

If you’re not able to perform a dumbbell clean and press explosively, or you struggle with one or more stages of the exercise, no need to worry. Pangelinan recommends backing up and working on some foundational moves. “When someone’s struggling with the clean and press, we’ll work on the dumbbell deadlift, upright row, and press, separately, to groove the patterns of each phase of the movement,” he says. “I’ll also have them do quarter-jump squats [lowering your body just one-quarter of the way down], to work on the explosive component, and an overhead waiter carry to improve the integrity of their overhead position.” For the waiter carry, simply press dumbbells or kettlebells overhead and walk for distance or time. Keep your ribs down, core tight, and pelvis level with the floor.

Progression

Once you’ve got the two-handed dumbbell clean and press down, you could start doing single-arm clean and presses (shown in the video above), which add an even greater challenge to your stability and can help you correct any strength discrepancies between sides. “The kettlebell clean and press is another great alternative for someone who’s competent in the dumbbell variation,” says Pangelinan. Kettlebells require even more core stability and grip strength to control, so they’ll develop both areas.

Of course, you can also experiment with the barbell clean and press. “Start with a power clean from above the knees,” advises Pangelinan, “which gives you most of the advantages of the full clean, but with a shorter amount of bar movement, so it’s easier to control.” When that feels comfortable, you can start cleaning from below the knees, and eventually progress to full cleans from the floor.

If you want a more joint-friendly alternative to a classic barbell clean and press, try using a landmine unit (see above). The bar loads into a rotating sleeve that allows it to act as a long lever and move on an arc. The path of motion will be more controlled than doing a pure free-weight movement, but you’ll still have to stabilize it, and you won’t have to deadlift and catch the bar the same way as you do during a normal clean and press, which will take a lot of pressure off your lower back, wrists, and elbows. Still another option is using a Pentagon bar (see below). This barbell alternative offers swiveling handles, so you can get the feel of cleaning a barbell without the wrist and elbow stress, or having to time your clean perfectly to avoid a sloppy catch.

The post Dumbbell Clean and Press: The Exercise Your Body Needs appeared first on Onnit Academy.

What is a Plank Jack?

The plank jack is a combination of two very common exercises: the plank and (big surprise) the jumping jack. You get on all fours in a plank position, and then hop your feet outward and inward while trying to keep your spine and pelvis aligned. The plank jack first started to hit the pages of fitness magazines in 2014, when it was offered up as a more advanced alternative to the standard plank—a longtime staple of core workouts because of the total-body stability it demands.

Celebrity trainers like Tracy Anderson, Anna Kaiser, and Erin Oprea started including plank jacks in their programming for ab/core workouts, and that catapulted the humble plank jack into the fitness mainstream. Whether you train at a big box gym, a boutique studio, or work out at home with a fitness plan you found online, you’re likely to come across the plank jack.

What are the Benefits of Doing Plank Jacks?

Plank jacks are similar to the mountain climber exercise, in that you try to stabilize the hips and spine while moving the lower limbs. Because pretty much the whole body is active, there’s a great demand placed on your heart, so plank jacks build cardio capacity while also developing strength and stability. “Plank jacks get your heart rate up quickly, and are lower-impact than exercises like high-knees or burpees,” says Carmen Morgan, a Houston-based trainer (@mytrainercarmen on Instagram). “So they’re suitable for a wide range of clients. The hopping component of the exercise allows you to feel your core engage more than when doing a regular plank, and most people seem to enjoy the plank jack more, too.”

What Muscles Do Plank Jacks Use?

Plank jacks require some muscles to maintain the isometric hold of the plank while asking others to generate motion in the hips and legs. First, they call the internal and external obliques, rectus abdominis, transversus abdominis, and other core muscles into action to keep your body straight. On the other side of the body, plank jacks activate the muscles of the posterior chain to help you remain stable. These include the hamstrings, glutes, spinal erectors, rhomboids, rear delts, and lats. Since you’re elevated off the floor, plank jacks activate the forearms, biceps, triceps, front deltoids, and pecs to help you retain a stable plank position.

Then there’s the dynamic portion of the exercise. Your abductors pull your legs away from you when you hop, and the adductors draw them back toward your midline as you return to the starting position. Meanwhile, the calves (gastrocnemius and soleus) and quads also contribute to the explosive hop.

Wow… that’s quite the list, isn’t it? If you thought the plank jack was a basic bodyweight movement, you can see that there’s a lot more to it. It may be used to target the core, primarily, but it’s really a total-body exercise.

How To Do a Plank Jack

Step 1. Kneel down on the floor and place your hands on the floor. Bend your elbows so that your forearms rest on the floor. Your elbows should be directly beneath your shoulders.

Step 2. Extend your legs behind you and tuck your tailbone slightly so that your pelvis is perpendicular to the floor. Squeeze your glutes and brace your core. Your body should be in a straight line, your back flat. Focus your eyes on the floor.

Step 3. Keeping your body in a straight line, slightly bend at the knees and hop both feet out to the sides as if doing a jumping jack.

Step 4. Land on your toes, allowing your knees to bend slightly again, and then hop your legs back to the starting position.

The movement should look like a jumping jack performed from a plank position. Make sure you keep your belly button pulled in (core engaged) so you don’t let your hips drop. “That will prevent you from feeling all the bouncing in your lower back,” says Morgan.

Also, be careful not to move your feet out too wide with each hop. Morgan adds that, “Some people go a lot wider than is needed, which means they move slower and do fewer reps than they’re capable of.” Instead, hop your feet out just three or four inches from the starting position.

How Many Reps Should I Do?

Morgan advises performing reps for 20 seconds at a time, because “most people get gassed pretty quickly doing plank jacks.” The longer your set goes, the more likely you’ll fatigue and break form, and sloppy plank jacks where your hips bounce up and down aren’t good for anything.

When programming for HIIT workouts or bootcamps, Morgan usually includes three to four sets of plank jacks, and only prescribes them once her clients have thoroughly warmed up. “If you’re pushed for time and want to do a quick workout at home,” says Morgan, “you could do three sets of plank jacks by themselves to get your heart rate up and challenge your core strength.”

If you want to do plank jacks as part of a fat-loss circuit, Morgan typically sandwiches the exercise between renegade rows and floor presses. “It’s a quick and easy transition into and out of plank jacks when you combine them with other floor-based exercises,” she says. You can also use plank jacks as a finisher. Morgan often pairs them with regular planks. Try ending your workout with a superset in which you do 10 seconds of plank jacks followed immediately by 20 seconds of a plank hold. Rest 30–60 seconds, and repeat for three rounds.

Alternatives to the Plank Jack

Like all good exercises, the plank jack can be modified based on your experience level. The following are options you can use to regress or progress the plank jack as needed.

Regression

Can’t do a full plank jack? Don’t despair. Just work on mastering the regular stationary plank, which will help you improve head-to-toe stability before adding in the dynamic movement component. Perform three sets, holding the position as long as you can. When you can hold one set of the plank for two minutes, you should have ample stability to move on to a tougher plank variation.

When you’re ready to add a little motion to your plank, start with the plank jack toe tap (see the video below). While in the plank position, slowly move your right leg out to the side by a couple of inches and, as the name suggests, tap your toes lightly on the floor. Pull your leg back to the starting position and then repeat on the other side. Continue for 20 seconds, rest for a minute, and then do another set. Do this twice a week until it feels comfortable, and then try the full plank jack.

Progression

As you become more confident in and competent with the plank jack, you can increase your speed, the length of your sets, or do it in conjunction with other exercises, such as pullups, pushups, or jumping rope, as well as the movements Morgan suggested earlier.

If you want another exercise that combines a similar level of stability and motion, you can perform mountain climbers, particularly the hip-opening version, to improve your mobility.

The post Plank Jacks: How To Do Them & Why Your Workout Needs Them appeared first on Onnit Academy.

The Keto Diet Guide to Restaurants, Fast Food, and Takeout

Luckily, eating out isn’t as daunting for the dieter as it used to be. Even the strict keto/low-carb eater—who strives to avoid carbs most of the time—can find good, tasty options on the menu when indulging in almost any kind of ethnic cuisine, as well as at franchise restaurants and fast food hubs. Believe it or not, this includes Chinese and Mexican food, and chains like Buffalo Wild Wings™, McDonald’s™, and Taco Bell™.

You don’t need an iron will to see results from your diet. Just use this article as a field manual for what you should order, or ask to be modified, at several different eateries you used to think were only acceptable on cheat days.

The Challenges of Eating Out On A Keto Diet

One of the great benefits of a keto or low-carb diet is that it’s pretty simple to follow (check out our free ebook on the diet HERE if you’re not sure exactly what it entails). Stick mainly to meats and green vegetables, and you’ll be able to control your carb intake without obsessing over portion sizes.

But when you head out to a restaurant, or grab fast food, all bets are off. You really have no way of knowing for sure what they’re serving you, even when you make the safest order you can. Though some cities require restaurants to list nutrition information on every menu item, this is almost always limited to calories alone and/or the macronutrients—you don’t get to see the ingredients. And even if such data is available, you can’t trust even a big name, standardized chain to publish completely accurate information. The Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics reported that, on average, restaurants underestimate the calorie totals they list by 18%.

Mom-and-pop restaurants might offer better quality food in terms of ingredients, but any numbers they offer are even less reliable, as the chefs get creative and use a dash of this and a sprinkle of that to slightly vary their recipes every time. So if you can’t rely on restaurants’ self-disclosure to plan your meal, what can you turn to?

One increasingly popular option is apps that claim to “count” the calories, and, in some cases, the macros, in certain menu options. New York Magazine writer Jake Swearingen compared the leading apps out there and determined that FatSecret was the most helpful one available, given its broad database of foods and ease of use. It features a list of drop-down menu options of meals you can select to get calorie and macronutrient content. Another app, Lose It, tries to remove the legwork by presenting such info after you shoot and upload a picture of what you’re eating. While it sounds great, Swearingen writes that “it worked fine if I snapped a pic of, say, a can of ginger ale, but not so great if I snapped a pic of a chicken-salad sandwich.” The fact remains that most nutrition apps are still in their infancy and developers simply don’t have enough data yet to create a service you can rely on.

Even if you could trust the numbers in food apps, there are less obvious dangers to your keto diet and your health lurking under every lettuce wrap—things that an app or menu won’t reveal. “Forty percent of calories in an average restaurant meal come from highly processed vegetable oils,” says Brad Kearns, co-author (with Mark Sisson) of The Keto Reset Diet. “This isn’t just an issue in cheap, greasy takeout, but also in that salmon that you assume is healthy and pay $30 for.”

The trouble with such fats is that the high temperature and pressure at which they’re processed distorts their structure at a molecular level. (This is in contrast to cold-filtered, first press olive or avocado oil, which rank as healthy fats.) Such refinement means your body will treat these fats as a foreign and potentially hazardous substance, leading to inflammation and arterial dysfunction for up to 24 hours after consumption. And the trouble doesn’t end there.

According to Kearns, “Industrial vegetable oils also disrupt fat-burning because of their distorted structure. This means that even when you choose meat and veggies or a salad—which seem to be solid, keto-friendly options—the oil they’re cooked in or that’s drizzled on top can actually short-circuit ketosis.” The solution? Kearns suggests asking for your meal to be cooked in butter. The fat in butter is saturated, and therefore safe and stable at high cooking temperatures. It can’t be changed chemically, so it won’t get corrupted like polyunsaturated vegetable oils will.

If you get a stuffy waiter or counter clerk who won’t indulge you, tell him/her that you’re allergic to oil and can’t eat food that’s cooked in it. Chances are, they have butter (or lard) in the kitchen, and can make the swap.

What to Avoid Eating at Restaurants on the Keto Diet

While we don’t want to encourage dogmatism or severe restriction on any diet, there are certain categories of food that you should steer clear of most of the time if you want to keep keto. Some of the no-no’s include:

Bread and other baked goods

When you’re keto, they’re not so “good.” They pack a big calorie punch and will send your blood sugar soaring. This category includes wraps, tortillas, and any other kind of starchy vessel that may be used to hold the main ingredient of the meal.

Fruit/fruit juice

A handful of berries in your salad is fine, because the carb count will still be low. But watch out for fruits that come from a can with syrup, such as mandarin oranges and pineapple (fast food places love to throw these into salads). A cup of orange juice is essentially sugar water; order a black coffee or plain water instead.

Soda

Give the bubbly sugar water the heave-ho—there’s no room for it whatsoever on keto (or really any other diet, for that matter). Even the smallest serving size you’ll find at an eatery (12 ounces) will contain between 30 and 40 grams of carbs per serving—90–100% of which are pure sugar. This includes those trendy “all natural” brands, and restaurants that pride themselves on serving their own homemade concoctions.

High-protein platters

Everybody has a friend who delights in deepening his voice to a James Earl Jones-level tone when he orders the meat sampler at a restaurant. While meats are a keto staple, and you feel like a big man ordering them, large servings will result in a protein overload, and too much protein on keto leads to gluconeogenesis—the body making carbs out of protein. This process will raise insulin levels and take you out of ketosis.

How much meat can you get away with? The classic ketogenic diet limits protein to 20% of your day’s calories. So if you’re eating roughly 2,000 calories a day, you should have 100 grams of protein (400 calories). (Note that if you’re doing Mod Keto, a higher-protein and carbs variation of the diet that we like better for athletes and active people, you can get away with 20–40% of your calories from protein).

Consider that four ounces of most cuts of most animals (about the size of your palm) will give you 20–30 grams protein, so a meat platter in addition to a main course of fish or steak—plus your other meals throughout the day—could be pushing it. The moral of the story: don’t be afraid to eat meat, but don’t be a mountain lion, either. Thinking you can pound protein just because it’s carb-free is misleading.

Nuts

Another way that you can unexpectedly switch off ketosis is by combining multiple sources of protein. The nuts in that stir fry give it some much-needed crunch, but they have protein—and small amounts of carbs—and both can add up to take you out of ketosis. The same goes when you eat a ton of cheese or other dairy, although nuts are easier to over-consume without thinking about it.

Alcohol

Even if you choose a meal that’s largely carb-free, a bottle of wine or a pitcher of beer (or even one cocktail or margarita) can kick you out of ketosis faster than Patrick Swayze ejected those redneck troublemakers in Road House. If you do drink while dining out, you don’t have to abstain completely, but stick to a single glass of dry red or white wine, one dark beer, or a shot of whisky, gin, or vodka (see our guide to drinking alcohol on keto for more info).

Desserts

You’re kidding, right? The only exception would be if you’re at some hipster joint that serves Paleo and/or keto options like chocolate mousse made from avocado and cocoa. In which case, you may be able to indulge, guilt-free, but ask about the sugar and oil content first.

What Can I Eat At A Mexican Restaurant?

Fajitas are your best bet, as the standard ingredients (meat, vegetables) are always keto. Just skip the tortillas that come with them. For that reason, burritos, enchiladas, and corn chips are out of the question as well. If you don’t mind eating salsa, guacamole, and cheese dip without chips, they’re all acceptable sides you’re free to go to town on.

What Can I Eat At A Japanese Restaurant?

One of the best things about a Japanese steak house is that the hibachi chef often cooks in butter, so you’ll avoid those nasty industrial oils we mentioned earlier (also, who doesn’t want a front-row seat to a fast-chopping, fire-spouting food prep act that looks like it belongs in a Cirque du Soleil show?). Feel free to have the shrimp, steak, or chicken, along with some fire-grilled veggies, but avoid rice.

Due to the rice bed it’s served on, sushi isn’t keto, but sashimi (just raw fish) is. No dumplings, tempura, or sweet sauces for you, but miso soup, edamame, and seaweed dishes are fine.

What Can I Eat At A Chinese Restaurant?

Sadly, the sweet and sour chicken is off the menu for keto folk. The same goes for egg rolls, wontons, and any other entrée drowned in a sauce that’s overly sweet. Yes, the fried rice tastes great, but it’s not going to cut it if you’re determined to stay keto (ditto all the other rice choices, even unadorned versions like brown). Your servers should be able to substitute steamed vegetables for any rice side.

Relax, you still have plenty of delicious options, including stir fried beef and vegetables, Moo Goo Gai Pan, Szechuan prawns, and egg drop soup—although you should ask if they can leave out any cornstarch they might use in cooking. Somewhat surprisingly, black bean sauce doesn’t contain that many beans and is fairly low carb. Lettuce wraps and chicken skewers should be fine as well. Ask your waiter to leave out the noodles.

If you’re really craving Asian flavor but want to know exactly what’s going into your meal, try Mongolian barbecue. You can specify every ingredient in your bowl, and they have multiple meat and veggie options that come free of sugar and starches.

What Can I Eat At An Indian Restaurant?

There’s nothing like naan bread fresh out of the oven… but you won’t be having that. However, that clay cooker can offer up something else for you that’s almost as delicious: tandoori chicken. You should be good with most kebabs and chicken and goat options, from mild (korma) to medium (tikka masala) to hot (vindaloo). Meat in cream sauce dishes are purely keto.

Avoid curries with potatoes, and carb-laden side dishes like papadums, pakoras, and samosas. Order creamy saag (toasted cheese and spinach) instead. To add flavor to any meal, ask for ghee (clarified butter), which is pure fat. Raita, a dip made from yogurt, is a tasty option too.

What Can I Eat At An Italian Restaurant?

Pasta and pizza! Just kidding. Maybe…

Some Italian restaurants are now offering spaghetti squash as an alternative to grain-based noodles, and cauliflower crusts for their pizzas. If you find yourself at one that does, load them up with meat and veggie toppings.

No keto-friendly alternatives on the menu? Start with an antipasto platter—an assortment of meats, cheeses, and vegetables (although be aware of how your protein is adding up, as we warned you earlier). A thin soup such as minestrone also makes a good appetizer, if you can get them to go easy on the pasta or rice that’s usually included. Another one: carpaccio (thinly sliced beef or fish served with vegetables). For a main dish, order meatballs, steak with a side salad, shrimp, steamed clams or mussels, and cioppino (a fish stew). Say yes to olive oil, and no to sugary dressings like, fittingly, Italian. Tell them to hold the croutons and breads. Chicken and veal parmesan have plenty of fat, but the breading is too carby to be keto.

What’s the Best Keto-Friendly Fast Food?

You can get a great keto meal at just about any drive-through window, as long as you’re prepared to tell your servers how you want it. At burger and chicken joints, simply ask them to hold the bun/bread, or remember to take it off yourself. Some restaurants, such as In-N-Out Burger™, won’t require you to modify the existing menu. Just order the burger “protein style”. For that reason, if we had to choose one, the Protein Style hamburger at In-N-Out™ is our pick for the single best keto hamburger out there. You won’t have to explain yourself to the staff, the burger tastes great, and only packs 240 calories and 11 grams carbs for its 17 grams of fat and 13 grams protein, but the In-N-Out™ franchise is limited to just a few states in the southwest (California, mainly).

A close second, and a more widely available option, would be, believe it or not, McDonald’s™. If you order a bunless burger there, you’ll get 100 calories, six grams of fat, and eight grams protein for only three carbs.

With any burger order, watch out for special sauces—see if you can get them on the side or not at all. Apart from that, the only thing decidedly un-keto about standard orders at burger/sandwich shops is the dough they serve the meat on. The same rules apply to egg-based breakfasts. Lose the bun and the hashbrowns, and maybe double down on the eggs and cheese. If an avocado bowl is an option (such as at El Pollo Loco™), go for it.

For lighter fare, almost every convenience stop offers some kind of salad. Just be sure to pick out the croutons and be conservative with the dressing.

What Can I Eat At Buffalo Wild Wings™?

Chicken wings are generally very keto, given the protein and fat content, but it’s the sauces and glazes that can really get you here. However, a conservative order of regular wings with the dry lemon pepper or desert heat rubs contain just one gram of carbs per serving.

The worst offenders on the menu are the honey barbecue wings (36 grams of carbs), bourbon honey mustard (35g), and mango habanero (32g).

What Can I Eat At Chipotle™?

With 50 grams of carbs, the giant tortilla is a ketosis buster all by itself. Add rice and beans and you’re looking at a whopping 112 grams. Want a large side of chips? Now you’re up to 239 grams. The good people at Chipotle™ must have realized that their establishment was a carb-killer, because they recently rolled out a new menu of significantly lower-carb alternatives.

The aptly named Keto Salad Bowl has just 15 grams of carbs, with 42 grams of fat and 32 grams protein. The Whole30 Salad Bowl comes in at 19 grams carbs, 34 grams fat, and 27 grams protein. Then there’s the Paleo Salad Bowl, with its 21 carbs, 29 fats, and 28 proteins. Though Chipotle™ is also touting its new Double Protein Salad Bowl, steer clear if you want to stay in ketosis, as it packs in 71 grams of carbs.

What Can I Eat at Olive Garden™?

With 25 grams of carbs each, the breadsticks are not something you want to nosh on mindlessly (or at all). And while the asiago alfredo is money, it’s also a carb-fest (92 grams). Furthermore, don’t even look at the lobster mac and cheese. It packs nearly 100 grams carbs, enough to take you as far away from ketosis as the Arizona Cardinals are from a Superbowl.

So is there anything that grows in this garden you CAN eat? Absolutely. The chicken piccata comes in at just 12 grams of carbs, and while the lasagna classico has 39 grams, it tempers this with an equal amount of fat and 40 grams of protein, so Mod Keto eaters may indulge.

What Can I Eat at Taco Bell™?

Taco Bell servers will gladly prepare most of their burritos as tortilla-free bowls, and the champ might well be the Beefy 5-Layer Burrito—sans the two-tortilla shell. It’s a filling, classic-style burrito with meat, cheese, and some beans. The tortilla-less version of the Naked Egg Taco Bundle is another solid option, as is the Grande Scrambler. The main thing to avoid here is anything with rice or flour-based wraps.

The worst choices? The XXL Grilled Stuft Burrito (97 grams carbs), the Quesarito (68 grams), and, on the breakfast menu, all three varieties of the Breakfast Crunchwrap (51 grams).

What Can I Eat at McDonald’s™?

As mentioned above, just order the patty without the bun. They should be able to accommodate you at any burger spot, be it McDonald’s™, Burger King™, Wendy’s™, Five Guys™, etc. Ketchup, barbecue sauce, and other “special” dressings are still a concern, so have them taken off if you can, but the dough is the main culprit to eliminate in order to keep keto. Very few of these places will offer grass-fed beef, which isn’t ideal, but a little conventional beef eaten sporadically, despite all its hormones and antibiotics, won’t kill you.

French fries? Forget about it. Even the small size at Ronald McDonald’s™ house contains 29 grams of carbs, while the Supersize will completely detonate your keto diet with a whopping 77 grams. The Bacon Ranch Grilled Chicken Sandwich is a worthy opponent though: 320 calories, 14 grams fat, eight grams carbs, and a massive 42 grams protein—which is more even than their burgers, making it a good selection for higher-protein eating Mod Keto adherents.

When In Doubt, Fast

In conclusion, yes, Virginia, there are ways to stay keto when you can’t prepare your own food. You just need to be more intentional with your choices, and not concede to impatient waiters/waitresses who want to stick to what they know. If all else fails and you can’t get keto accommodations, you do have one other option to exercise: fasting.

Often times, not eating at all is a better decision than eating badly. You may need some time to adjust to it, but fasting will ultimately help you feel more alert, and that’s just what you need when you’re traveling or having a hectic day (situations that would tempt you to eat bad food from a drive-through window). One study showed that fasting helps boost the brain’s resistance to damage and degeneration, and it’s been linked to improvements in blood pressure, various health conditions, and, of course, weight loss.

And fasting doesn’t mean you can’t consume anything at all. You might be surprised how satiating water or black coffee can be—use them to tide yourself over until you can get healthy food in front of you again.

“One of the benefits of being on the keto diet is metabolic flexibility and increased resilience,” says Brad Kearns. “If you’re keto, you should be able to go for several hours without eating. So sometimes I’ll just have a handful of macadamia nuts in the morning and an omelet in the evening. I know that might sound odd to have breakfast at night, but if you’re keto, then you’re already bucking a societal convention.”

If you find yourself in a strange town, surrounded by fast food that you can’t improve with a few tweaks, treat it as an opportunity rather than a nuisance. “Try fasting and exploring a new city,” says Kearns. “Instead of spending half your trip inside, sitting down at restaurants.”

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