The Battle Of The Bubble: O.K., Tea, You Win

Tea: Soothing anodyne to life's cares and worries, or diabolical tool for Chinese culture's world domination?

After reading recommendations from every side for years, I finally gave drinking tea a serious try and made a habit of drinking tea on a regular basis (courtesy of a hot pot, a neat infuser cup fron Shang Tea, and a variety of tea  - oolong - that I like much more than pure green tea). And I have to admit: drinking tea has improved my day to day living quite a bit.

Yes, this unique device was the key to reversing a 30 year addiction.

My chronic anxiety levels are down, so I need to do far less yoga and chi kung to maintain my cool. And the limited amount I do seems far more effective.

Drinking hot tea after meals seems to moderate or prevent blood sugar crashes and mid afternoon dullness in a way Diet Coke and Diet Rockstar never could. (Note that I still have a couple of fountain Diet Cokes for "fun" because I like the taste and the burn, but I drink maybe 40% as much as I used to and I hardly touch the Diet Rockstar.)

I say this with chagrin - it's obvious that my DC habit affected me far more profoundly than I ever suspected over the years, and a lot of the nervous tension issues I thought were related to thyroid and a somewhat dysfunctional childhood were actually the result of (or at least aggravated by) consumption of (and craving for) the one beverage I thought I could always count on to make me feel better.

Don't get me wrong - I was an anxious introvert in high school, when a soda was something I drank 1 can of at work during my lunch break. But at some point - probably when I worked 84 hours a week on a graveyard shift for a summer job in college - TAB and then Diet Coke went from being something that helped to something I needed to function, and then became something that caused lots of issues that made my subsequent life more difficult than it needed to be. If I'd been drinking tea back then, maybe it could have helped with the basic issues in the first place, because it turns out that tea DOES calm me down.

Everyone else (who remarked that I seemed to drink a LOT of DC and wondered if that could be part of my problem) was right, and I was wrong. Yes, me, Mister "Wholistic Health The Mind And Body Should Work Together" Guy. Mister "I Have To Learn All These Intricate And Sophisticated Movement Systems To Feel Better" Guy.

Is my face red.

My critics may now commence jeering at me for overlooking the blindingly obvious.

IronGarm . View topic - Get ups - or Turkish Get-ups ?

http://irongarmx.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=220437

"tough old man wrote:
I've done them both light and heavy. Light helped rehab a shoulder and
heavy were just to see how it would go. They are a full body warm up
exercise, along with kettlebell arm bars. They are not the magic RKC
exercise they make it out to be.
For grappling I would use sandbags 2/3 to 3/4 bodyweight. Henkins had an
article on it a while back if you search his site.

This. Some things are strength/mobility/conditioning measurers and some
are improvers. After my full mobility warmup i do an arm bar into a
getup. The arm bar is a shoulder opener and alignment improver. The TGU
is a mobility measurer. If the TGU is bad or hard i need more warmup.
Going too heavy in the TGU outside of a party trick is a risky way to
lose teeth or tear a rotator cuff."

Emily Bites (via Lifehacker): Mini Taco Bowls

http://www.emilybites.com/2011/02/mini-taco-bowls.html

These Mini Taco Bowls were as tasty as they were adorable, and two of them was a perfect sized dinner serving for me. I initially intended to make these with ground beef, but when I ran to the grocery store yesterday they were completely out of 95% lean ground beef (can you believe it?) so I bought ground turkey instead. These were good with the turkey but seeing as they work out to be the same number of points per 2-taco serving, next time I'll make it with ground beef, because I prefer beef tacos. You can add any of your favorite taco toppings to these (light sour cream, guacamole, black olives, salsa etc). I wanted to keep them basic so you could easily customize them based on your preferences. I actually put a little fat free black bean dip on mine and they were amazing. The recipe could also easily be doubled to serve six. These are fun to serve and eat, so get creative and make them your own!
Source: Emily Bites Original
Ingredients:
6 - 6" Tortillas (I used Mission Extra Thin Yellow Corn Tortillas)
Cooking Spray
½ lb Extra Lean Ground Turkey (I used Jennie-O) OR 95% Lean Ground Beef
½ packet of Taco Seasoning (I used Old El Paso)
1/3 c water
3 T Reduced Fat Shredded Mexican Cheese (I used Weight Watchers brand)
6 t Taco Sauce (I used Ortega)
Shredded Lettuce
6 Grape Tomatoes, quartered

Directions:
1. Preheat the oven to 375.
2. Sprinkle each tortilla lightly with water and stack them on a plate. Cover the top with another plate turned upside down and microwave the tortillas for 1 minute or until warm. Turn two 12 cup muffin pans upside down. Mist each side of a tortilla lightly with cooking spray and center it in the space between 4 muffin cups, creating a bowl. Repeat with the 5 remaining tortillas, forming 3 bowls on each tin (as pictured above). Bake in the oven for 8-10 minutes.
3. While the tortilla bowls are baking, spray a large skillet with cooking spray and add the ground turkey or beef and brown. Add 1/3 c water and taco seasoning, bring to a boil and then reduce heat to simmer 3-4 minutes.
4. Let the tortilla bowls cool for a few minutes after removing them from the oven. In each bowl, layer ¼ c meat, 1 T cheese, 1 t taco sauce, 4 quarters of grape tomato and some shredded lettuce (in any order you choose).
Yields 3 (2 taco) servings. Weight Watchers Points Plus: 5 per serving.
The points per 2 taco serving remain the same whether using the extra lean ground turkey or the 95% lean ground beef.

The Perfect Recipe: Salmon in Foil Packets with Sesame Soy Sauce

Note; The quinoa was prepared separately and then added to the packet after opening to help sop up some of the sauce.

Alton Brown's Good Eats episode "The Pouch Principle" was one of the most interesting and exciting ideas I'd even seen or heard of up to that point, and I still just love the idea. I love the adaptibility of it, I love the convenience of it, I love everything about it....and yet, I hardly ever actually do it. One of the drawbacks is that since the stuff in the packet is essentially steamed, you can lose a lot of the browning and crispness that is the best part of eating. ("Glorious One Pot Meals" "infusion" principle has the same problem, but since you can brown the meat in the pot on the stove top before you add everything else and put it in the oven, it is less problematic - almost every GOPM recipe I've tried has improved immensely just by pre-searing, and there's still no extra messy cleanup.)

Still, there are some excellent applications of pouch cooking out there, and Pam Anderson is one of the best food writers around, so I had confidence in this one.

Fresh salmon fillets and about 2 lbs pounds of combined asparagus and mushrooms, tossed with a soy sauce/sugar/sesame oil/rice wine vinegar and minced garlic mixture, wrapped in individual foil packets and baked on a baking pan in a 500 F oven for a mere 15 minutes produced a wonderful main course.

Next time, I'll try it with chicken tenders and a Tarragon/mustard/cream sauce and see how it turns out.

Training: I Think I've Got It Dialed

After a bit of trial and error, I've decided that using bands alone for general upper body resistance training and balancing (see the post below where I "fixed" a 20+ year neck pain issue with 2 sets of 10 reps of 6 band exercises in less than 2 months) provides superior orthopedic and "resilience" results compared to the Yi Jin Jing regime (supplemented with band work) I was following, at least for the time invested.

So I've dropped the Yi Jin Jing for now. I'm convinced that if the ancient Shaolin monks had access to bands and the anatomical and functional exercise knowledge available today, they'd be doing something like what I do instead, at least for tissue health and muscular development.

That's not to say that I don't think chi kung has its place in a well balanced life. I'll find some way to keep working it in.

===============================================================

So what's next? I think I've got it dialed. I think I've found a way to combine the "Moving Forward Method" philosophy from the book "Joe X: Rethinking Physical Fitness For Adults" with the progressions from "Convict Conditioning" - and I'll do it using the rep schemes from "7 Weeks To 100 Pushups".

Viz: Any one over 30 simply will not be able to keep up with the 3 day a week rep scheme from "7 Weeks". Adding reps every session for 21 sessions in 7 weeks is simply a fantasy.

Convict Conditioning (and the CC 2 Sequel) are pretty darned cool with the progressions in difficulty - 10 levels of progressive difficulty for each of the "Big 6". However the book breaks down a little in the actual suggested workout schedule and the suggested "2-3 Work Sets" twice a week. I seem to need more than that to "grease the groove."

"Joe X" and the "Moving Forward Method" is the most practical and patient idea I've ever seen, but the suggested exercises bore me to tears.

So how about this:

Break up the Big 6 (and supplementary stuff from CC 2) into 2 routines, one of which can be done at home with absolutely no equipment except the floor, and one of which can be done at the health club (the stuff requiring a bar to hang from.) Alternate every day, with 1 day off a week - at my age and my schedule, it's inevitable that I will simply not have time to do this on at least 1 weekday.

Start out low and easy - pick a rep scheme from "7 Weeks" Beginner level and do ALL the exercises for that rep scheme for the first two weeks. Do the exercises in a circuit to save time and keep a mild peripheral training effect going.

Example:

Day 1:

•  Kneeling Pushups (CC Level 3)
•  Bridging (CC Level 1),
•  Bodyweight Squats (CC Level 3),
•  Bent Leg Two Legged Calf Raises From the Floor (CC 2 level 1).

Day 2:

• Hanging Bent Leg Raises (in a machine),
• CC Level 1 Pull Ups from Smith Machine Bar,
• Hang from Bar for 15 seconds (CC2 level 1)
• Fingertip Pushups off Wall (CC2 level 1)

Repeat the circuit 5 times:
6 reps - 8 reps - 6 reps - 6 reps - 9 reps

After two weeks, pick the exercise that felt the easiest in each circuit and move up to the next rep scheme in "7 Weeks" for that exercise only while keeping the reps for the rest of the exercises the same. So BW squats will probably "feel easiest" after two weeks because 35 totals squats is ridiculously easy, even for me. So squats will go to

7 reps - 10 reps -  8 reps - 8 reps - 11 reps

and all the other exercises will stay the same. In another two weeks, if the kneeling pushups feel the easiest, I'll increase the reps on those, so two exercises will be 7-9-7-7-10 and all the others will stay the same.

When I am doing a given level of an exercise for the "gateway" number of reps in the "big" sets according to CC, I'll move up to the next level of difficulty in the exercise selection (example: go from kneeling pushups to conventional pushups) and drop the rep scheme back to 6 - 8 - 6 - 6 - 9.

I might add one or two things to the circuits early on - maybe swings, maybe some curls, etc. but I will keep the actual circuits down to 4-5 exercises per circuit. And I will try to always precede the day's circuit with band work or joint mobility sessions.

Of course I'll need to record my workouts to keep track of reps, but I think this will work.

• It will start out very easy
• It will progress on two levels (reps and difficulty/strength)
• It will allow plenty of time for tendon and ligaments to adapt (avoiding overuse syndrome)
• When the difficulty of an exercise ramps up, the reps will be cut way back
• There will be lots of variety
• The circuit format will keep any given day's routine pretty short, allowing me to add PACE sessions and joint mobility if needed
• And I can do half of it at home.

Tony Gentilcore: Teaching Neutral Spine (I and II)

http://www.tonygentilcore.com/blog/teaching-neutral-spine-part-i/

http://www.tonygentilcore.com/blog/teaching-neutral-spine-part-ii/

Part I is especially useful, with several video clips of some of his (and now mine) favorite corrective drills.

Note that not everyone agrees with this approach - a search for "teaching neutral spine" on Duckduckgo.com (my favorite open source, privacy respecting search engine) revealed several articles from physical therapists and coaches who don't like this aggressive approach as the answer to everything (see especially Dean Somerset's "The Myth Of Neutral Spine".) But it's still better to have the idea and maybe see through it than NOT to have an idea, right?

A Man And His Pan: Pork and Beans With Spanish Rice Redux

Topping with fresh lime juice and a bit of sour cream really ups the ante on this one. An excellent, easy one pot dish.