Complete as many rounds as possible 20 minutes of:
95 pound Thruster, 5 reps
95 pound Hang Powercleans, 7 reps
95 pound Sumo Deadlift High-pull, 10 reps
Post rounds completed to comments.
Supplements.
Supplements have always been a hot topic, and with more “scientific” studies being done each year, it’s been easy to market just about anything as the cure to just about anything. Let’s get some basics out of the way, and then we can have a discussion in Comments.
Supplements should pick up the slack, nothing more. We know what our ancestors ate, with little room for debate. Meats and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch. Sound familiar? It should. It’s on the back of our business cards, the back of some of our shirts, and we talk about it plenty: The Paleo Diet. For the most part, going Paleo tends to fix so many “everyday” or “chronic” problems, very few people come back with complaints if they have been eating enough.
That being said, the devil is in the details. Meats? What kind of meats?! Great question, with plenty of depth for a completely separate blog post. What you need to be looking at is not what kind of meats you should get rid of, but what kind of meats you’re not getting. Most of us don’t eat Wild Salmon, for example, on a regular basis.
Enter Fish Oil.
Our ancestors got their share of fish, and with it they got their share of EPA/DHA, their “Essential Fatty Acids,” their Omega-3s, their Omega-6s - it was all well balanced. Fast forward to today, and the ratios are off - way off. This shouldn’t be a surprise, as nobody can reasonably argue any nutritional value to Ritz Air Crisps, bread, or grain-fed beef, yet these are common parts of our society’s “normal” diet. Fish Oil supplementation can do a lot to balance you out again, providing your body with the EPA/DHA that your ancestors got (who were in much better shape than you, by the way!), along with regulating a ton of inflammation and damage going on in your body.
What about other supplements? Flax? Creatine? Steroids?
The first thing you need to do is take a step back and ask what you’re trying to fix by taking these. Was flax seed commonly consumed by your evolutionary blueprints? If you’re taking it for the supposed Omega-3 benefits, you’re missing out. It doesn’t contain EPA/DHA, which is what we really want from the Omega-3s. Your body will try and convert what you’re getting into EPA/DHA, but do a very inefficient job at it. To top things off, Flax has a fun tendency to provide some additional inflammation for your body to play with, so if creaky joints, swelling, or tendinitis is your thing, load it up!
As for creatine and steroids? You won’t find us promoting it. Your body naturally produces creatine and testosterone. If you’re lacking in either, your body might very well benefit from small doses. But there are better, safer, more efficient ways of jump-starting these processes. Try deadlifting heavy, for one.
There are hundreds of supplements out there; if you’re not sure why you need them, you probably shouldn’t be touching them until you find out. And when you do, make sure it makes sense.
Post thoughts to comments.
July 2nd, 2009 at 10:40 am
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