Vitality For Freedom
Less Vitality = Less Potential
This guide is an introduction to ancient and modern methods for improving health and performance.
Dive deeper into these topics in the RealMVMT 1 and Vault Courses.
Do your best with the following. Health is not everything, we are here to live in this time. Making health a fetish that restricts freedom and causes great worry may also not be ideal for health. Interact with people, and love the time we live in while taking care of ourselves.
Steroids and hormone replacement therapies decrease the need to pay attention to these factors in the short term. Beware of taking advice from those using HRT / Steroids who aren't taking care of their health.
Checklist
Sleep well (dark, deep, enough)
Cultivate anabolic (Yin) hormones.
Eat what works.
1. Sleep
Clean the brain and store useful information.
Light dark cycles are very important. Sleep in complete darkness or only moonlight (no artificial lights from inside or outside your room).
Avoid screens / artificial light before bed to improve sleep, ideally from sundown, at least 1-hour.
Sleep more during winter. "Lights Out" is a great book on sleep and nature's cycles of hormones and fertility.
ACTION > Value sleep.
The best athletes, musicians, etc. are often very good at sleeping.
2. Stress Vs Sex Hormones
Adrenal health will have a huge impact on performance and quality of life.
Sex hormones are building hormones for tissue growth and repair.
The amount and quality of new tissues will be heavily influenced by the stress in the system when tissues are being laid down.
Stress and sex hormones come from the same pathway meaning pregnenolone can either become testosterone or cortisol depending on demand.
The ability to relax and create calm in the body is key for performance.
Heart math work has been proven effective in increasing DHEA
3. Food
Increasing insulin at other times should only be a priority if mass is the primary focus.
Raising insulin around training 2-4 times a week isn't a bad idea if we want to hold muscle mass and recover well.
Whenever we eat the body makes an attempt to sterilize and use the food we have consumed. Eating often makes this challenge constant for the body. Stimulating insulin constantly has a huge negative impact on long-term health and performance.
Decreasing cortisol production post-workout is a good idea.
This is part of the reason why people self-medicate for stress with sugar.
Insulin has an inverse relationship with cortisol.
Protein is primary.
Leucine is the primary driver of new protein synthesis. Muscle meat is rich in leucine and signals for the cells to take up a spectrum of amino acids from the blood.
Glycine from connective tissues is key for brain function, anabolism, and connective tissue quality. Glycine is commonly low and isn't found in lean muscle meats. The best sources are broth, collagen, and gelatine. These substances are also rich in proline that helps for connective tissue quality.
Get enough of it to have high-quality tissues.
Fat is good.
Eat fats from well-raised animals for neural, hormonal, and immunological health.
Sacred Foods.
Fish eggs.
Broth.
Wild Ruminant Animals > Nose to tail
Raw wild fish.
Oysters.
Egg yolks from free, organic birds.
Raw dairy for some.
4. Fasting
WARNING > Fasting Is A Stressor, Like Cold, Strength Training Etc. just adding more and more stressors is a DISASTER waiting to happen.
Autophagy
Recycle damaged proteins and remove junk from the cells. This is a constant process in the body that is up-regulated by the body during famine and fasting.
Mitochondrial Biogenesis
Make new mitochondria as a result of challenging your body to produce energy from internal reserves.
Lower Insulin
Lower baseline insulin is a good thing.
Healthy cells and cell membranes respond effectively to chemical signals decreasing the work required by the organs to create more signaling molecules to influence unresponsive cells.
Ketones
BHB has emerged as a powerful protective molecule for the body. Many of the therapeutic outcomes of ketogenic diets for neurological and inflammatory conditions are being replicated with BHB supplementation. Fasting increases the use of fat as a fuel and increases ketone production. There is no accessible measure for how many ketones the body is producing and using, we can only measure circulating levels which could be considered the ketone surplus in the same way we can look at blood sugar or blood amino acid concentrations.
How To Do It...
8-hour eating window.
What is it?
Basically, this is either skipping breakfast or having an early dinner.
It's very easy to do and helps to break habits around snacking.
This is a sustainable long-term approach that could be applied by almost everyone with positive outcomes for health and hormones.
Even with hard training, this approach can work. Coffee / Tea can help get through the fasting period and may assist with mobilizing fatty acids. If fat loss is the goal or you have autoimmune challenges don't use fat during the fast. If performance is the focus and you're lean then bulletproof drinks etc can be used.
When to use it?
3-7 days a week ongoing.
When not to use it?
Generally, you only want to train fasted if you have a very strong constitution, if the primary goal is fat loss or if your training is mostly neural stimulus with little inflammation or protein synthesis being stimulated. Generally when you're training protein synthesis begins WHILE you're training so what you have eaten before and during training will have an impact.
OMAD - One Meal A Day / 4-hour window.
If MAXIMAL size without concern for body fat is the goal then this method probably isn't for you.
If you're wanting to train twice a day then it's probably not for you.
If you've got a weak constitution and immune system you'll want to train after eating.
When not to use it?
One - three times a week
Amazing for fat loss and a simple way to reset without interfering with your training too much. Long fasts are a stress.
When to use it?
This is a more extreme approach. It requires more discipline and helps to push the body further into using ketones and fat as fuels as well as upregulated autophagy.
Using some coffee, ketones, tea, bulletproof drinks, and broth can also support this process. Less than 250 cals during the fast is a decent number to stay under. Technically this is not a "fast" but effectively you're going to be getting 90% of the result. If a few cals make the process bearable and repeatable let's nail it!
What is it?
If MAXIMAL size without concern for body fat is the goal then this method probably isn't for you.
If you're wanting to train twice a day then it's probably not for you.
If you've got a weak constitution and immune system you'll want to train after eating.
When not to use it?
Extended Fasts.
What is it?
24-96hr fasts or even longer have been used to drop huge amounts of body fat and reset baseline insulin and hunger.
When to use it?
Once a month/quarter. When you're happy to unload training volume (not when you're recovering from super high volume.
When you need a mental challenge and reset. There is great personal pride and power in a fast.
When not to use it?
If MAXIMAL size without concern for body fat is the goal then this method probably isn't for you.
If you're wanting to train twice a day then it's probably not for you.
If you've got a weak constitution and immune system you'll want to train after eating.
The Opposite Of Fasting
Eat every 2-3 hours.
The more you're like a herbivore the fatter you will be.
The way to fatten a pig/dog / cat is to give it a lot of carbs. Same for humans.
6. Sun / Light
Nothing grows without the right amount of light.
Look at the sun around sunrise daily.
Be in it and expose as much of your body as possible to it first thing in the morning.
The early light is different and as humans, we're designed to calibrate our hormones off it.
The same goes for evening light.
The same goes for some daylight.
In the same way that plants and reptiles power up with light, so do humans.
If you're looking to heal and recover faster look to the light.
Old school bodybuilders understood this well.
Don't get burnt. Get sun.
UNNATURAL LIGHT
It's a new thing. Electricity basically happened yesterday in terms of evolutionary adaptation. If you get occasional. Like all of this, the closer to optimal you go while having fun with the process the healthier you will be!
It's as bad as junk food with the impact it's having on humanity.
Shift work is massively carcinogenic, it moves you closer to death.
7. Touch & Connection
Babies who aren't touched don't grow the same.
We're the same throughout life.
We need human connection and physical touch.
Have great people in your life.
Lounge around on each other. Make babies/practice etc.
It changes your hormones - oxytocin, your Heart Rate Variability / Coherence, and Ultimately your life.
8. State
This may be the most "woo woo" and the hardest to buy into. It may be the most important.
Emotions carry energy that changes DNA expression.
This makes sense. The body wants to adapt and be ready for what's next 90+% of what you do and think today is what you did yesterday.
Good or bad.
Same goes for STATE.
To be in love.
To be connected.
To be abundant.
To be invincible.
What other state could we choose?
To be resentful, self-loathing, fearful, limited...
If you tune in to yourself you know that you can feel a shift as you engage with these words.
Engage with what you love. Become unlimited.
9. Minerals
Water Beings
Some say we're evolved from sea mammals. Whichever way we have mineral-dense internal environments.
Sodium
Increase in salt decreases CVD risk.
Some people are salt sensitive.
Initially
2g / L water (around 1g / kg body weight)
Decreased carbs makes
Potassium
Helps to bring more volume into the cells post-workout.
There is a balance between potassium and sodium.
Calcium
Eating some dissolved bones or dairy are good sources.
Magnesium
A key mineral to relax the body. It has a huge impact on cellular energy and function.
Trace Minerals
If you're getting enough meat, eggs, and broth and not too much-processed food this shouldn't be a huge issue. If soils are deficient then foods from them will also be less rich in certain minerals.
Fulvic minerals are one option to make sure you're getting a little of everything.
10. Heat & Flow
It should be hard.
You will feel shit when you stand around doing nothing or lay around all day.
Crap is pooling.
The lymphatic system depends on movement.
It carries the immune system and removes damaged cells.
Manual Therapy
Active Recovery Technique.
Mobility work
Sauna
Infra-red or traditional. When you get hot you create heat stress and massive circulation. You also activate detoxification through sweating.
There is a strong positive health outcome for Sauna usage.
Concentric Training
Sleds / Bike / Stair Sprints
Low-intensity training >
Low-Intensity Movement
Keep it moving!
Walking > Hiking > Juggling > Hacky Sack
Movement machines > Eric Sopoto post-surgery
Conclusion
You might have heard of all these.
The question is which can you do better.
That's the game with RealMVMT.
To lead by example through application.
Make small adjustments and monitor progress.
As we respect ourselves and increase our vitality and performance we do the same for those around us by osmosis.
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