So now, I am just going to write about “why” you should train period, but I’m coming from a different, more specific angle. Baby boomers, or men as young as over 30, this is crucial information that can increase your health as well as save you tons of cash, now and in the long term! Ladies, scroll down to the very bottom for a picture of what natural levels testosterone in the female body can do for you, and why following the same plan as your cave-dwelling other half will have you looking slimmer, sexier and healthier

DO YOU SUFFER FROM LOW TESTOSTERONE?
If you are in your teens, early 20′s, have a nice day, you are dismissed (for most of you).
If you’re on the wrong side of 40, and even somewhere near, you should read this.
Yes, women too!
If you have man boobs, lower libido, excess body fat, no muscle tone, decreased confidence, are not in the same you were in your 20′s (which is hard to maintain, I know, but you can still look amazing if you do something about it) and you let coworkers walk all over you and never stand up for yourself, you probably are experiencing “low T”. Behavior, schmehavior. If you’ve been like that your whole life, you may just have been screwed when testosterone was handed out, like I’ve been every time I try to go get the new iPhone 4S!

WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT?
Back to my 4 pillars: exercise, nutrition, environment, hormones.
They all link together. Remove one, the rest falls apart, or falls short.
Exercise: you have to pick the right intensity to boost the secretion of testosterone, by stimulating the right parts of your brain (hypothalamus, pituitary glands). A typical (and thank God the trend is changing into facts rather than fashion) weight loss of low weights and treadmill is NOT the right thing to do to raise your testosterone.
Nutrition: The right kinds of foods help boost T levels naturally. Examples are celery, bananas, avocado, raw unsalted nuts, asparagus, basil, garlic, figs, whole eggs, lean organic meats to name a few. My vegan friends can be very happy up until I mentioned eggs, and vegetarians until I mentioned meats. So, you can raise those levels too!
Environment: get some sun! 30-60 minutes a day will help your body “luteinize” which is a precursor to testosterone. Make more lutein, make more testosterone. You need at least 1000 lux a day (lux: SI of illuminance, equal to 1 lumen per square meter). An office gets you about 500 lux a day. The sun produces 50,000 to 100,000!
Hormones: well, as you can see, that’s directly related to all of the above. Skip one, you’re throwing off the entire hormonal chain. Or, supplement poorly with inadequate hormone replacement therapy and the balance is off. Good therapy, on the other hand, is great if you’ve exhausted all options, but replacement therapy is that: replacement, not supplementation. It means you can never stop once you start, or the balance is off (again) and it’s very, very expensive ($500-$1000/month, not counting the lab tests and screenings to determine what amounts you should take).

WHAT ELSE CAN I DO?
Watch “guy flicks”. Seriously. Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, John Wayne, Bruce Lee, Charles Bronson were never accused of being sissies. Didn’t you ever feel pumped up after watching any Rocky movie? You can watch your favorite football team, but if they lose, you drop your T-levels too!

Avoid Dr. Phil and Project Runway. I know you can get easily suckered in. Walk away, turn on your iPod to some metal, download something cool and kick ass and watch it on your computer.

If your shampoo has paraben, laurel sulfate, F&DC yellow, trash it now! Those are respectively xeno estrogens that you’re rubbing in, toxins that cause infertility (and may even cause women to not carry full term) and penetrators so it can get into your blood stream!

Eat like a man: a low fat high fiber diet, commonly perceived as good for weight loss, is even more effective at dropping your testosterone levels too. You need fat, natural fat (mono and omegas for instance, stay away from trannies, I mean, trans fats). Oh yeah, and lift like one too!

Stop self-defeat right now! Most of what you do is driven by fear, your reptilian brain, also called the resistance. Stop looking at what you DON’T have and look at what you’re great at. Take that, and do more of it. Why? Cause great begets great, and you are engraining that behavior, which in turn helps you rebuild some confidence, which helps you boost your feel-good hormones, which make you want to conquer the world and yaddah yaddah yaddah…

Now, ladies, I promised you a picture. Be natural, be feminine, and be not afraid. I promise, on my son’s life.

I like to work towards a goal, and the mere training goals of strength building or hypertrophy didn’t tickle my adrenal glands enough to generate any kind of training fire inside me. While my personal routine didn’t change in preparation of the event, I wanted to prove that I can be ready any time, any day, and that the conditioning I put myself through would be enough. So, the only variable I changed in my training was my diet, which was great because I embarked on a journey I’ve been hearing about and wanted to experience myself after rave reviews. I’m talking about Ori Hofmekler’s Warrior Diet. My personal results have been fantastic and I am glad to endorse it!

Why The Warrior Diet: Switch on Your Biological Powerhouse For High Energy, Explosive Strength, and a Leaner, Harder Body?
Well, for starters, if my own coaches and RKC comrades have been raving about it, it was endorsement enough for me to give it a shot. Designed for efficiency and maximal energy, it seemed like a no-brainer since my journey as a new father has been tough on the eating and sleeping schedule, 2 vital components of any successful fitness program. I directly asked Pavel Tsatsouline, who’s been on it for years I believe, his take on it. While it wouldn’t necessarily pack mass on me, it would give me plenty of energy and time to both work and take care of the baby when my wife needed time for herself and her work, in between my own clients.
Since any balanced diet revolves around insulin management, I was skeptical because all I was ever taught was to eat frequent meals during the day, which prevents overeating and “survival” metabolic slow-down. See, the Warrior Diet has you go through periods of controlled under-eating during the day alternating with over-eating at night.

I can almost see your furrowed brow on one side, raised brow on the other side. Some of your “hmm…” can be heard through the web too!

WHAT’S THE DEAL?
Hofmekler has you eat only live and raw foods during the day. Coffee or tea is allowed. Drink as much water as you want of course. Squeeze some fresh veggies and fruits and guzzle it down, chew on some raw almonds, cashews or pistachios. Hunger is a sign of vitality. Of course, don’t mistake that for an anorexic program! You eat enough to sustain and actually stimulate insulin release and get you going, burning fat and preserving muscle. You can even ingest a protein shake. But don’t stuff yourself like the domestic nomadic Zoo animal our society turned us into. Think predator, hungry, strong and driven to survive and thrive! When a big cat like a lion or a tiger feasts, they eat till satisfied, unsure of when their next meal comes. That’s you at dinner time. Eat till you’re more thirsty than hungry. Follow the VERY HEALTHY order of salad first, then your veggies, then your protein and if you have room, your carbs. Mix and match textures, colors, tastes (crunchy, soft, sweet, sour, savory, green, red, cold, hot…) and eat away. Then, rest up and sleep. While asleep (night time, circadian rhythm), you only use enough calories to rebuild your muscles from your hunt (I mean, training), while stocking up energy for the day ahead.

Think warrior, Roman soldier: when do you have time during battle to take a break and eat. Your adrenaline’s pumping, you’re hungry for life, food but need to stay razor sharp. How do you think you’d do if you felt like after Thanksgiving dinner while trying to slash away at your enemies? Lethargic is my guess. Save that for sleep!

Hofmekler goes into better detail in his book, and I urge you to give it a shot. I wouldn’t if I didn’t try it myself.

COMPARE TO OTHER DIETS
I have always been a fan of the TNT diet, which taught me that we only burn carbs at high physical intensity training (weights, sprints, martial arts, surfing, tennis…) and burn fat when our heart rate is slow/resting (blogging, sleeping, surfing your desk, watching TV…). The Paleo diet adheres to the same principle, though I am no fan of eating liver, kidneys or any other filtration organs and I do mind eating the better cuts of meat. I am picky, I won’t eat certain parts, like the heart or the brain. Sorry, Paleo dieters, you’re better people than I am, and I see no real reason to do this, other than maybe to generate less waste from the animal that “donated” its life.
The Zone diet doesn’t work, because not everyone’s needs are the same. Athletes vs couch potatoes, pregnant vs non-pregnant women, marathon runners vs shot putters. You can’t say we all need 30% fat, 30% protein, 40% carbs. And ultimately, the body reach homeostasis, so why not try something new, that makes sense and is on par with your goals? It even works if you’re not a lifter, and just want a new program. Read it, read Ori’s points and analysis.

WHAT IT DID FOR ME
I started 10 days before my 5K obstacle course in the Malibu mountains, the infamous Spartan Race. By body fat percentage was at 12.5% on a Saturday. On Tuesday, I had dropped 3% body fat at my annual physical exam. My lifts, my energy and my mood have been better. On the day of the race, after completing uphill runs, scaling steep 10′ walls, mud crawls, cold water swim, cargo nets and gladiators with big foam sticks at the finish line, I felt exhilarated, elated and I never got sore nor did I feel more fatigued than after a “medium” intensity workout!

To me, that was validation enough in my eating with the Warrior Diet, as well as my training with kettlebells, powerlifts and natural movement patterns, staples of my (and your) physical fitness development!
(I did run wearing my Vibram Five-Fingers and was glad I did. The grip and agility it gave me, especially after crawling through wet, muddy areas, was a nice welcome compared to wearing soggy sneakers!)

Why yes, it is bad for you if you don’t exercise, because of one word: entropy!

ENTROPY
Not doing squat (I am not referring to the exercise) is bad because as we age, we lose about a pound of muscle every couple of years past 30. If a pound of muscle burns 50 calories a day (at rest) and you lose 5lb of muscle in your 30′s, when you reach 40, you can gain up to 90lb! How does that work? If you’re not burning 50 calories a day for a year, that’s 50×365=18250 calories the pound of muscle made you not burn. A pound of fat is 3600 calories, so that’s roughly 5lb between the ages of 30 and 32. Compound that over a decade, you get pretty close to 90lb, EVEN IF YOU ARE EATING THE SAME HEALTHY FOODS YOU’VE BEEN EATING THE WHOLE TIME!!!

HOW DO I GET TONED?
Well, that’s the culmination of all things wellness related: nutrition, training, sleep patterns and hormonal balance and environmental factors (work, home, stress…). I emphasized exercise for health in the first sentence. Performance based exercise is geared at a specific goal, such as an athlete trying to lift a certain weight, run a certain distance, fight X amount of rounds… The result leads to improved muscle tone and a greater functionality in the muscles anyway, without being the main goal. Consequently, let me ask you this: why not pick a performance-driven goal so you can both look good and do stuff? You don’t have to be an athlete to train like one. Besides, training like an athlete puts you in a better frame of mind for EVERYTHING else in your life. That competitive edge, the desire to push and better yourself is something society is lacking. We make excuses, look for shortcuts and fail.

So, go ahead and DO it. Don’t try, that’s just a promise to fail!

Become Flexible, so you can have more mobility, less aches and pains and greater ability in your daily activities.
Develop your Agility and hand-eye coordination, so you’ll never be off guard, always ready and better prepared with sharper reflexes.
Lift to get Strong, because no one needs to be weak. Lift that baby while you’re carrying groceries, move that couch, push the stranger’s dead car off the main road, rescue the damsel from the fire.
More muscle, more speed, more movement leads to more Tone anyway.

Congratulations, you are now FAST!

To read pillars 1 through 3, click on the links below:
Pillar 1: Flexibility
Pillar 2: Agility
Pillar 3: Strength

Tara Wood, the exuberant founder of Wildfitness

Here’s a recent interview I conducted with her. Read the Vital Juice LA article about me and Wildfitness, as a companion guide and article, as I put their senior editor through a Wildfitness oriented routine.

Philippe Til: Ever since I discovered your company and took part in your Wildfitness Coach training in London in May 2008, I’ve been “preaching the Wildfitness gospel”. Would you mind telling us, in a nutshell, the philosophy behind it and how you came to start it all up?

Tara Wood: The Philosophy in a nutshell: What is true human fitness? Look at tribal humans in nature:
“[Their] bodies are splendid, flexible, nimble, skilful, enduring, resilient and yet they have no other tutor in gymnastics but their lives in nature”. (Georges Hebert)
Wildfitness believes that looking to nature and our evolutionary origins provides the most upstream and useful guide for how to eat, move and live to achieve our natural human physical potential. Unfortunately, many of us have been separated from nature for so long we have lost our understanding of what is ‘natural’ – we no longer know how to eat, move and live in a natural way and as a result our health is suffering.
A Wildfitness course provides the physical experience, expert coaching and time to help modern city dwellers rediscover their true natural physicality and vitality. You’ll learn to choose the right foods among the dizzying array of modern food stuffs, to move skillfully and harness natural forces to get lean, flexible and injury-free and to understand the role that your body’s natural rhythms of rest and recuperation play in achieving health & vitality for life.

I started Wildfitness just after leaving university. There was no question about doing anything else – it was an expression of my passion and belief that nature knows best. Learning to live naturally I have always believed is the most sophisticated health and fitness plan the world knows. I also had the good fortune of having a family house in what I think is the most beautiful place in the world (Watamu, Kenya). Wildfitness was a way of keeping the house and sharing it and its healing qualities with lots of people.

Beach Running in Watamu, Kenya.

Besides the like-minded feeling and connection I had to train with your people, my Wildfitness training also constituted something that is very important to me: continuing education. I learned Pose, natural movement patterns, the “Wild diet” and since have become kettle bell certified (RKC, through Pavel Tsatsouline) after Lee Saxby correctly introduced me to these training systems. How do you expand the breadth of training knowledge in your system? What changes/additions do you bring to keep Wildfitness “sharp”?

Keeping Wildfitness ‘sharp’ is an ongoing process, we will never know all the answers to nature’s mysteries in full, but we get closer all the time. We are in the great position to have the best minds in evolutionary fitness to draw from: Lee Saxby, Dr Nicholas Romanov, Frank Forencich, and Erwan Le Corre. We also have our Wildfitness locations as an actual arena to test out our coaching techniques on real people whose entire experience we create over several weeks. Translating theory into practical coaching is a real art – particularly when you deal with human beings! So we are constantly re-visiting the latest insights into evolutionary wisdom and constantly getting feedback from and evolving our courses. What we find, as we get more understanding and further ‘upstream’ insights into how our bodies and nature work, is that our courses actually get simpler.

What do you look for in terms of locations for your Wildfitness vacations?

Firstly it must be Wild. It must also be accessible and safe, but above all it must be a place to experience pure nature without noise and light pollution. We look for awe-inspiring natural environments where you can challenge yourself in a variety of different ways. We chose simple but comfortable and beautiful accommodation for up to 18 people. We look for places that operate while considering the environment and there needs to be a source of local organic food nearby.

What are the biggest perceptual challenges your clients face when they start training and discover a way of moving that seems to go against 3 decades of established “gym fitness”?

Some of the biggest perceptual changes that our clients go through are:

- That being fit means so much more than looking slim or muscular. We aim to inspire people towards new fitness goals – instead of focusing on what your body looks like, focus on what it can do. Aim to have a body that is useful, skilful, efficient, resilient and that can perform the wide range of different movements which it was designed to do in nature. Appreciate the beauty of graceful movement itself and you will find a beautiful body is the natural result. The other natural results are energy, health and being able to do all sorts of useful things.

- That fitness is not in reality split into the categories that gyms split it into: speed, endurance, strength, co-ordination, flexibility etc. Natural movement contains elements of all these qualities and by doing a variety of natural movements you gain the ability to be fast, to endure, to be strong, to be skillful and agile all when you need them. Indeed, to do a movement effectively you always need all the elements of fitness at the same time in varying degrees. A good example of this is that your ability to lift something heavy is about your speed, flexibility, co-ordination and speed, more than it is about your muscular strength.

- The other major perceptual change is that moving is fun! If you train in a punishing way, you actually don’t get the results. Rest is the other half of fitness, there isn’t a linear relationship between exertion and how fit you become. Sleep, fun, inspiration, and balance are vital to getting fit. We see many of our clients getting in such good shape (often having failed to before) by building in rest to the day as religiously as building in movement.

Swimming in the turquoise Kenyan sea...

What is perceived as exercise today is actually counterproductive in many ways to how we’re supposed to move, but the media continue to promote the “establishment”. At the same time, at every corner, a new fitness gimmick seems to pop (at least in the USA, I don’t know about the UK). How would you argue that Wildfitness is not an ephemeral trend?

We don't need to buy into more plastic junk!

Are our teachings a fad? Well yes, in a way. Many of the things we do, believe in and live by are temporary. We are continuing to evolve, continuing to understand who we are, where we came from, how we should live. To say we have answered these questions, for anyone to say they have answered these questions is labeling yourself as limited and a bit silly. But I do believe that looking to nature, looking to what we know of our origins is a rich and lasting place to look for these answers. And I also believe that looking to nature and our evolutionary origins is a philosophy that gives a fruitful focus, more so than scientific enquiry that tries to make sense of our physiology and biomechanics outside of this context. Our techniques will change, but what separates us from ‘gimmicks’ is that our philosophy does not. Fundamentally our philosophy is a search for the real nature of ourselves and our world.

Thank you so much for your time! I believe you’re in Kenya right now for a Wildfitness Convention, correct? What’s the best way to get in touch with you or any member of your organization?

Yes, the whole Wildfitness team were out in Kenya at the beginning of the year discussing all things Wild. Contact us on info@wildfitness.com or our website is www.wildfitness.com .

Thanks Philippe – I hope you will come and join the tribe out here again soon! We hope to have a location nearer to the States sometime soon, until then keep spreading the Wild messages over there across the pond. Thanks!

Stretching at Sunset. Peaceful nature...

(All photos were taken from the Wildfitness web site Kenya Gallery. For more pictures and additional Wildfitness locations, please click here. You can also download a free “mini-workout” which acts as a teaser/warmup, but engages your body in one of the many ways to get fit through Wildfitness modalities by visiting Exercise TV.)

Hunter Gatherer Lifestyle
In the movie, the Na’Vi tribe has a lifestyle of total communion with their ecology. Everything is connected to their Goddess Eywa (quite literally, through some form of organic technology, as every living creature seems to have the equivalent of a USB port, be it plant or animal, even the soil), like a huge hard drive where you can download and upload memories. They attempt to not disturb any ecological balance, and any kill is justified and respected. The Na’Vi, indigenous to Pandora, are tall, lean, beautiful, agile and extremely fit. They are “Wild Fit”, as a matter of fact. They train all day long by riding their native equine and bird equivalents, climb trees, cling to vines, scale mountains and more. The forest is their playground, their gym. Quickly into the movie, you care more for the natives of Pandora, truly connected to their planet, than you do for the humans, who act as a colonizing virus (a concept explored in movies like The Matrix Trilogy) after putting their own planet, Our planet Earth, in ecological jeopardy (nice to know in many centuries, we still haven’t resolved our environmental issues).

Wild Na'Vi Fitness

Similarities to Our Ancestry
Well, not just our ancestry if you consider we still have a few tribes of true Hunter Gatherers, such as the Hadza in Tanzania. But, humans used to be hunter-gatherers before they were farmers, over 200,000 years ago. Farming (and a newly acquired sedentary lifestyle) lasted 10,000+ years until we became the modernized “zoo humans” we are today, thanks to the industrial revolution. We have the technology, which seems soulless compared to how the Na’Vi’s “theo-technology” (a term I just coined for this post, but will not claim was not used elsewhere, if someone happens to have beaten me to it), but we are disconnected, figuratively. We may connect to the World Wide Web, send tweets and social network updates via our smart phones, but we are detached from our immediate surroundings, all focused only on our tech devices. The Na’Vi remind me also of the Masai warriors my wife and I encountered when honeymooning in Tanzania. Very tall, lean, able to read the bush and track animals even in the dark, with a built-in GPS into their brain, their skin so dark it seems it had a bluish tint to it. We don’t need to travel 6 light years, though I thank Jim Cameron for the experience, the reminder, the awareness, the message.

Masai fitness

Movies: Not Just To Escape
Yes, movies allow us to escape from our worldly matters, but great ones also bring us back, especially when the message is subtly obvious (great oxymoron, but stay with me here…). Last year’s “Wall-E” showed ballooned humans, degenerating after trashing the Earth. Here, we saw us colonizing another planet to steal rather than undo what we did to ourselves. The answer in both cases was a return to our roots. It’s not just fitness. It’s a change of perception (which the movies provide), hopefully for a change in lifestyle, not just exercise and proper eating. It’s a call to Action!