Deloading On Liver

For the last couple of weeks I have been feeling as if I got run over by a bus. Every muscle, tendon, and ligament is sore. Foam rolling and stretching helps, but not that much. I've been pushing on with the lifting and bouldering while a niggling little voice has been saying “you really should deload.” After this mornings weight training session, I knew I could ignore that irritating little whiner no more. I do need a deload week. Sooner rather than later. I doubt I'll be able to manage doing no training for a week, but I will cut out the weight training for 5 to 7 days and I'll try and reduce the bouldering intensity. Cutting out bouldering altogether for a week is just not an option -it's too much fun. Walking, biking and kayaking remain fair game. I gotta do something to stay sane.

 Snowy River Sunset

The gym is pretty busy these days with all the New Year's exercisers. At first I was feeling reasonably heartened because I saw some new folks actually lifting free weights, but, more and more, I've been seeing really unhappy looking folks grinding away on the “cardio” machines. I'd be pretty miserable too if I thought the road to health and fitness was reached by endless miles on a treadmill. 

 Bridal Veil Falls, Blue Mountains

There's a lot of new trainers and clients too. One young man with his older and fairly heavy lady client happens to overlap with the days/times I spend in the gym. He looks like an earnest young fellow, no doubt doing his best to get this lady into some semblance of reasonable physical condition - to his credit his client is not grinding away with a death rictus on the treadmill – but (isn't there always a but), after watching a series of work-outs that feature exclusively muscle isolation exercises, I started to think that getting in shape for this woman will likely take longer than she has left to live. I have been tempted, who wouldn't be, to go over and say, “right, enough with the one leg at a time squat on the silly machine, stand up and squat, onto a chair if you have to, but really squat.” I actually feel quite sad watching this scenario play out each day. The road to health and fitness for this particular lady is clearly so long and not getting any shorter with work-outs that are not time efficient. I think, if it were me, I'd be tempted to just go back home and sit on the couch again. 

 Bouldering

My latest pet peeve is the whole “super-food” bat-crap. Inevitably these “super-foods” are some kind of exotic extract, algae, ancient Aztec grass seed, ground up tuber from a remote Hindu Kush valley, or goanna turd extract chewed up and regurgitated by a full-blood indigenous Australian. According to the pundits, these “super-foods” can cure cancer, prevent heart disease, balance estrogen, testosterone, oxytocin, prolactin, DHEA, and a hundred other hormones you've never heard of (all at once!), reduce inflammation, normalize blood sugar, blah, blah, blah and put not just a man but a whole city on the moon. Seriously, who really believes this shit? Strangely, animal organ meats are actually the most nutrient dense foods (if you use standard measures of nutrient density) available to us, yet you never see anyone calling liver a super-food.