Fundamentals

The Fundamentals

Everything affects everything. You will find by working just a few of the following fundamentals that they share some of the same corrective principles with a majority of the other steps. They all tie together and support each other for a total effect. Because of this, beginning with just a few can have both a major and positive impact on your health, conditioning and therefore the resulting desired effects. Pursuing your potential and agelessness will boil down to just a very few things but can be addressed in the following separate fundamentals. Importantly, we must remember that these fundamentals are ongoing progressions toward lifestyle changes. They must be continually pursued and improved upon and only with constant vigilance will they make lasting change. The outline of the fundamentals should be enough information to allow you to make steady progress in your pursuit of your potential. Throughout this website there are links attached that will provide more information should you be interested. With that said, let’s begin!

1. Avoiding Toxins, Poisons, Irritants And Empty Calories: This fundamental is almost a no-brainer but can be quite difficult to do in today’s society. We must constantly think about not only directly ingesting these substances but the indirect ways that we can come into contact with them. Secondhand smoke – every day we hear more about this and it’s serious health effects despite the fact that we choose not to smoke, yet we are drastically affected by it. There are also cleaners and solvents that we use in non-ventilated areas that can have toxic or even irritating effects as well. We must also avoid such things in our diet like trans fats, heating our food in plastic containers to avoid various toxins such as bisphenol – A and the like. We also have to be concerned about contact with some substances on our skin that can be readily absorb such as solvents and petroleum products. Lastly, we have to avoid processed (junk) foods that contain nutrient lacking calories, processed sugars and a host of preservatives. Don’t be dismayed, there will be plenty of other excellent food choices to make.

2. Successfully pursuing a diet with an extremely high nutritional value to caloric ratio: The optimum diet would consist mostly of super foods. This would be the faithful adherence to lean meats, chicken and fish, vegetables, berries, whole grains, fruits and only healthy fats (omega-3 – 6 – 9′s). I, along with many others, feel that we must supplement our diet with a wide range of nutrients for optimum health and growth. It is just too difficult to get a massive amount of antioxidants and other nutrients within the caloric restraints that our older age imposes upon us. As such, a diet like this can support your body toward optimal growth as well as providing antioxidants to help protect against cellular damage due to some the unavoidable substances in step 1. Ideally, it’s best to eat five or six small meals a day to encourage a higher metabolism, a more consistent blood sugar level and a constant blood serum level of all the required nutrients. As a quick example, a 200 pound semi-active male (exercising daily) would need around 200 g of protein, 40 g of healthy fat and around 400 g of carbohydrates for a total caloric intake of 2360 cal to reduce body fat and maintain muscularity. This will vary drastically between individuals and is difficult to calculate here because we don’t know how much the person is exercising, what their metabolism is, genetics etc. Elsewhere I will show you the simple concepts behind calories and macronutrients so you can adjust your intake of calories and macronutrients structure as you go along. And of course you are going to have to read labels and make comparisons so you can make better food choices.

3. Create an anabolic/adaptive condition for the body with a high muscularity ratio: Obviously this, at first appearance, would appear to be the athletic body – and rightly so. More than just that, this is a body that is growing, healing and adaptive to changes in the stresses that the environment places upon it. Technically, the anabolic concept would mean a body that is growing or gaining weight. However at a certain age, weight gain may not be our concern but rather to be healing and adapting. One of my favorite methods for achieving the aforementioned state is consistent weight training. By constantly stimulating and challenging the body we can coax it into more of an adaptive state and capable of handling a greater variety of challenges. A multitude of studies have produced strong evidence that heavy weight training (as heavy as you safely can) produces a host of benefits such as greater strength and mobility, greater bone density, improved immune system response as well as stimulating the body to generate a more favorable hormonal profile, including growth hormone production. Much of this entire website will be dedicated toward bodybuilding, general conditioning and the like. Although it can be difficult to build much muscle in our later years, I think most would be surprised of what is really possible for true effort and applied sciences.

4. Develop cardiovascular fitness and enhanced circulation: Our level of performance and quite possibly our longevity is affected by the health and condition of our heart, lungs and circulatory system. The ability to acquire oxygen, various nutrients and move them throughout the circulatory system to every cell in the body is of utmost importance. Hence the value of our circulatory system. Aging, environmental damage as well as self-imposed damage often leaves us with a circulatory system that is loaded with scarring, arteriosclerotic plaques, thickening of the walls of the arteries and even more thickening of the blood itself (especially in smokers). Proper diet consisting of omega-3 fatty acids (and avoidance of unhealthy fats) and routine ongoing physical training can result in a stronger heart, slightly thinner blood and less restrictive arteries, vessels and capillaries. A minimum of 30 min. per day should be dedicated either through power walking, swimming or other such cardio type training. There will be much more on this throughout this site.

5. Flexibility: Sometimes, we get so concerned about building muscle and creating endurance that we forget about the flexibility of youthfulness. Yoga advocates are often stating that you are only as young as your spine. With that being said, I will attest to the benefits I have seen others achieve through a mild flexibility program coupled with their weight training and conditioning. Fortunately, this is perhaps one of the quickest and easiest fundamentals to apply because it ties so closely to other physical training endeavors.

6. Reducing chronic inflammation: This type of inflammation is said to be the immune system over responding or out of control due to the stimulus of infection or irritation. As such, the immune system attacks tissues and structures that are not the actual invaders or irritants. The resulting effect is ongoing damage to various tissues of the body. Some health enthusiasts believe that some types of cardiovascular disease, psoriasis and arthritis are just but a few examples of conditions created or instigated by chronic inflammation. Without any doubt whatsoever, is not good for the body to endure any lengthy period of infection or inflammation. Studies are also finding strong links between periodontal disease and cardiovascular disease. Courses of action to reduce this condition would be to regular dental checkups, discuss this with your doctor and possibly have a C – reactive protein test (a measurement of inflammation) performed. Avoiding trans fats, smoking, decreasing the ratio of omega 6′s and increasing your intake of omega-3′s (anti-inflammatory by nature). I’m sure you’re beginning to see by now – everything affects everything.

7. Energizing the central nervous system: Both as we age and due to more and more inactivity, our central nervous system learns and becomes less capable of firing enough nervous impulses to activate all of the muscle fibers in a given movement. Some of this is for good reason, we can think of it as the Guardian that prevents us from exerting ourselves too much in a given movement and causing damage. However, for a more anabolic body, this becomes more of a hindrance. Imagine trying to curl a weight for the purpose of building more muscle and strength and only a portion of the muscle fibers are firing. Difficult to train the whole muscle don’t you think. By training our nervous system to fire more impulses we can actually bring more fibers into play, increasing our strength and most importantly, training all of our fibers in each muscle to get a better response. We can incorporate a whole host of explosive plyometric type exercises combined with balance and coordination exercises to synergistically augment all of the other training cycles we are doing. I will show you in the training sections how to go about doing all of these. Visit the “Plyometrics” page for more information.

8. Maintaining a proper and stable blood sugar level: Most of us know how it works. We eat something that contains sugar (or is converted to sugar) and it causes an insulin response which allows the sugar to be metabolized. Sadly enough, especially as we get older, one or both of the following can happen. Our bodies become insensitive to the effects of insulin or we lose the ability to produce insulin. This results in an effect known as glycosylation (glycation) which is where basically sugar attaches itself to a protein or lipid(fat) without the normal enzymatic processes and therefore disrupts normal metabolic processes. For many of us, we can avoid the various damages that occur with such a situation by drastically reducing the amount of simple sugars in our diet. Eating several small meals a day (5 to 6) with a limited amount of complex carbohydrates will reduce the need for insulin and reduce (to some degree) the effects of glycosylation. Of course, anyone under doctors care for diabetes must strictly adhere to their doctors instructions. But by maintaining such a discipline, the majority of us should be able to avoid running out of insulin in the first place or exceeding our body’s ability to produce it. There’ll be much more on diet and nutrition throughout this site.

By now I’m sure you see how much everything is related and that “everything affects everything” really is a profound statement. I’m confident that there will be enough information here for you to advance your progress toward your own potential and make drastic improvements in your health and quality of life.

As always, I wish you the greatest success in your quest for your own human potential!

Tommy Atlas