Optimizing Energy Balance

Note: Anyone who’s taken a Taido black belt test admin­is­tered by Taido Honin has prob­a­bly read the name “Ostwold” in con­nec­tion with Taido’s taiki the­ory. Ostwold won a Nobel Prize for explain­ing how the body takes in and expends energy, but I feel that his name is wrongly invoked in Taido to jus­tify some pseudo-scientific idea about energy trans­fer that prob­a­bly wouldn’t hold much water in a lab­o­ra­tory set­ting. This arti­cle deals with sci­en­tif­i­cally ver­i­fied appli­ca­tions of Ostwold’s work and that of many other researchers.

I should pref­ace the advice I give in this arti­cle by say­ing that I’m not a doc­tor or a pro­fes­sional trainer or any­thing like that. I don’t know your specifics, so I can’t claim that any­thing I write here will actu­ally work for you. You should prob­a­bly seek the advice of some­body with a government-sanctioned pro­fes­sional cer­ti­fi­ca­tion before you fol­low my suggestions.

Having said that, this arti­cle is about some sim­ple sug­ges­tions regard­ing ways to improve health and per­for­mance by opti­miz­ing the body’s energy bal­ance. Since I started off with that broad dis­claimer, you may be won­der­ing exactly who am I to be giv­ing health advice. I’ll tell you:

I am some­body who is almost never sick, tired, unhappy, or oth­er­wise “down.” I get up every morn­ing feel­ing great and con­tinue to feel good all day. I can do things with my body that amaze my friends. In recent months, I have devel­oped the abil­ity to con­trol my weight, body com­po­si­tion, and energy lev­els to a high degree of accu­racy by manip­u­lat­ing the fac­tors I will dis­cuss in this arti­cle. I have put this infor­ma­tion together by doing a lot of research, some of which I will share with you.

Those cre­den­tials may not seem ter­ri­bly impres­sive, but I’m not charg­ing you any­thing for these ideas which, taken together, could do some amaz­ing things for your phys­i­cal con­di­tion and over­all health. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, but I think you can ben­e­fit by using this arti­cle as a prac­ti­cal guideline.

Energy Balance

Though I won’t be address­ing it in this arti­cle specif­i­cally, men­tal health and pos­i­tive self-image are at least as impor­tant to health and per­for­mance as any­thing you can accom­plish by phys­i­cal means. I am not your coun­selor, so we will just be look­ing at the phys­i­cal side of the equa­tion in what fol­lows. If you don’t see results with these sug­ges­tions, it may be a sign that you are not men­tally pre­pared for improved health. Your phys­i­cal energy bal­ance sits along­side your men­tal energy bal­ance in the total-health equation.

The human body, though not a machine, can be mod­eled by a machine when it comes to energy bal­ance. Simply put, energy bal­ance is how our bod­ies make use of food to move and heal. There are three impor­tant fac­tors to con­sider: fuel, work, and main­te­nance. I believe that the rea­son many “diets” and exer­cise pro­grams fail is because they tend to only address one fac­tor out of the three. Occasionally, one will find a pro­gram that makes sug­ges­tions for two of these fac­tors, but that usu­ally man­i­fests as a detailed eat­ing plan accom­pa­nied by a short note that says “oh yeah — you should also be work­ing out and sleep­ing well.”

The body needs bal­ance in order to remain healthy, and this can be achieved by learn­ing how to manip­u­late the three fac­tors to suit your lifestyle and goals.

Work

Since we are all mar­tial artists involved in con­sis­tent phys­i­cal exer­cise (right?), it makes sense to begin with work. I’m not going to tell you how much you should work­out, because I believe that this is deter­mined in part by the lifestyle we each choose to lead. I’m assum­ing that peo­ple read­ing this prac­tice Taido at least a cou­ple of times a week, which is already much more exer­cise than the aver­age American gets. That puts us ahead of the curve, but I have some sug­ges­tions for get­ting the most out what time we already devote to phys­i­cal exercise.

However, it’s impor­tant to real­ize that work is not lim­ited to “work­ing out.” Every phys­i­cal action or inac­tion in which the body engages has some gross effect. This includes the way we move and walk, our sleep­ing posi­tion, and every­thing else we do. We can all ben­e­fit by find­ing ways to do our work with greater effi­ciency. Efficiency in move­ment requires mobil­ity, agility, and coordination.

Two Important Attributes

The first thing I want to sug­gest is more work on bal­ance and dynamic flex­i­bil­ity. These are both hot top­ics in the fit­ness indus­try in America right now, but as opposed to many health trends, they are directly applic­a­ble to our per­for­mance in Taido.

With regards to bal­ance, I specif­i­cally rec­om­mend Scott Sonnon’s four cor­ner bal­ance drill as part of your daily rou­tine because it requires no equip­ment, has incre­men­tal lev­els of dif­fi­culty, and improves uni­lat­eral bal­ance in posi­tions which resem­ble kick­ing tech­niques. I sug­gest you add this drill to your warm-up for every prac­tice ses­sion. In addi­tion to build­ing bal­ance, stud­ies have shown that chal­leng­ing our pro­pri­o­cep­tion (the set of senses that make up our col­lec­tive bal­ance, move­ment, and posi­tion sense) tunes the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem for more effi­cient per­for­mance of dif­fi­cult phys­i­cal tasks. In other words, chal­leng­ing your bal­ance prior to a Taido work­out will likely improve your coor­di­na­tion dur­ing practice.

Dynamic flex­i­bil­ity is flex­i­bil­ity in motion. Since Taido is an art of mov­ing the body, it makes sense that dynamic stretches would be of more use to us than the sta­tic stretch­ing I see in most Japanese and American prac­tices. Examples of dynamic stretches Taidoka would find use­ful would be swing kicks and arm swings in all direc­tions. Since these stretches require fast motion, they should not be done until the body is fairly warm, but in light of numer­ous recent stud­ies show­ing that sta­tic stretch­ing prior to work­outs increases inci­dence of mus­cle pulls and strains, it appears that dynamic stretch­ing is the best bet for warm-ups. Static stretch­ing still has a place after prac­tice, but dynamic swings do much more to pre­pare the body’s tis­sues for the types of move­ment Taido demands.

The Basics

My last sug­ges­tion regard­ing work is pay atten­tion to basic attrib­utes and com­pe­ten­cies. I’ve already writ­ten a long arti­cle on improv­ing jump­ing skills. Someday, I hope to post arti­cles relat­ing to core train­ing and build­ing endurance. Until then, I sug­gest you incor­po­rate some of the prac­tices from my breath­ing arti­cle into your rou­tine. If you weight train, keep any max-strength cycles short and focus on fast, multi-joint move­ments like snatches (my per­sonal favorite, but there are a vari­ety of options) for the major­ity of the year.

Fuel

Next up is fuel. Obviously, this includes food, but let’s also not neglect the air we breathe and the water we drink. Though we don’t have as much con­trol over our sup­ply of water and air as we may like, if we keep our eyes open, we may find oppor­tu­ni­ties to improve the qual­ity of these kinds of fuel. Since this arti­cle is lim­ited to phys­i­cal fac­tors, I won’t go into thoughts and social pro­gram­ming, but be aware that they do influ­ence you profoundly.

7 Habits

I’ll start off by rec­om­mend­ing that you read Dr. John Berardi’s arti­cle on the seven habits of highly effec­tive diets. This is one of the bases of my per­sonal approach to mak­ing the right food choices for my goals. I agree with Berardi that any­one who can’t meet at least ninety per­cent com­pli­ance with the seven habits is going to have a hard time opti­miz­ing their diet to improve their health and per­for­mance. Think of these seven habits as a shodan in nutri­tion and work towards mak­ing them part of your life.

I do have one per­sonal tweak to Berardi’s plan that I would sug­gest to you — eat­ing way more veg­eta­bles than fruits. Fruit isn’t nec­es­sar­ily bad for your body, but it is very sweet, and eat­ing lots of fruits dur­ing the day can do strange things to your energy sys­tems. Controlling insulin has been shown to be very impor­tant to main­tain­ing meta­bolic bal­ance. Also, many peo­ple are highly sen­si­tive to sugar because of the emo­tional con­nec­tions they develop to sug­ary snacks as chil­dren. I wouldn’t go so far as to say one should avoid any fruit they like, but be aware of the effect it has on your energy lev­els. If you notice any weird spikes fol­lowed by slight depres­sion later in the day, you may want to look at sub­sti­tut­ing more vegetables.

Supplements

The other addi­tion I sug­gest to Berardi’s sug­ges­tions is to include a multi-vitamin. Berardi claims that nutri­tional sup­ple­ments are inessen­tial if one chooses the right foods. I agree that it should be this way in a per­fect world, but in the age of indus­tri­al­ized farm­ing, many foods have sig­nif­i­cantly lower amounts of nutri­ents than they used to. I per­son­ally fol­low the Life Extension Foundation’s basic rec­om­men­da­tions regard­ing vit­a­min sup­ple­ments and take well in excess of the daily allowance rec­om­mended by the government.

In addi­tion to sup­ple­men­ta­tion with a multi-vitamin, I sug­gest omega 3 fatty acids. Life Extension sells a high-tech fish oil sup­ple­ment that I rec­om­mend, but any fish oil sup­ple­ment is bet­ter than noth­ing. These fats are not only good for your heart, they help to reduce inflam­ma­tion caused by putting the body under stress. For peo­ple who work­out or par­tic­i­pate in sports, intake of high-quality fats is vastly impor­tant to the recov­ery process.

On the sub­ject of recov­ery nutri­tion, I’ll refer to another arti­cle by Berardi about post-workout nutri­tion. Essentially, Berardi sug­gests that all ath­letes should be con­sum­ing a high-carbohydrate bev­er­age dur­ing and imme­di­ately fol­low­ing train­ing. The opti­mum com­po­si­tion is actu­ally about a 4:1 ratio of carb to pro­tein. This has been shown to do won­der­ful things for build­ing mus­cle, pre­vent­ing sore­ness, staving off catab­o­lism, and pro­mot­ing recov­ery. There is a ton of infor­ma­tion regard­ing post-workout nutri­tion on T-Nation.

Macro-Nutrient Timing

T-Nation also has tons of arti­cles about nutri­ent tim­ing. Usually, when the coaches at T-Nation are mak­ing a big deal and writ­ing lots of arti­cles about some­thing, it means that they are get­ting ready to launch a new prod­uct. However, you can’t sell the times at which peo­ple eat, so there might just be some­thing really impor­tant to the con­cept on this one.

Temporal nutri­tion is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant diet advice for peo­ple wish­ing to improve their body com­po­si­tion. I am cur­rently slightly over ten per­cent body-fat, and I really don’t work­out that much. Though my cowork­ers think it’s magic, I can eat tons of food, work­out only when I feel like it, and con­tin­u­ally improve my body because I under­stand the con­cept of nutri­ent tim­ing. In a nut­shell, it goes like this:

• carbs in the morning
• fats at night
• pro­tein all day

Of course, that’s a sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, and some peo­ple require spe­cific ratios of the three macro-nutrients, but as a gen­eral guide­line, the above is pretty uni­ver­sal. The body can use carbs bet­ter in the morn­ing than it can fats. It can use fats bet­ter at night than it can carbs. You always need pro­tein to pro­mote heal­ing and recov­ery from exer­cise. And sadly for those of us who love pasta with cream sauce, the body reacts to meals that are high in both car­bo­hy­drate and fat by low­er­ing metab­o­lism and hoard­ing fat. This is why Berardi and oth­ers advo­cate stick­ing to two basic meal tem­plates: P+C and P+F.

Of course, mix­ing them up a lit­tle is not a prob­lem, but a P+C meal should be less than fif­teen per­cent fat, and a P+F meal should be less than fif­teen per­cent carb, for the most part. This may seem dif­fi­cult to do at first, but that’s because we are socially con­di­tioned to eat three big meals each day. This isn’t bio­log­i­cally sound eat­ing — it’s designed to fit around our jobs. However, if we make a small lifestyle change and begin eat­ing sev­eral snacks every day, it’s quite easy to adhere to the nutrient-timing guide­lines. I eat about eight times a day, and each meal is small enough that I can eat it in a few min­utes and get back to work.

Some exam­ples of good P+C meals are an egg mixed in a bowl of oat­meal or a smoothie with fruit and pro­tein pow­der. High-protein foods such as tuna, chicken, or eggs can be added to just about any­thing. For P+F meals, I’ll typ­i­cally make an omelet or have some cot­tage cheese. Unfortunately, the Guinness milk­shake (about 1000 calo­ries of alco­hol, sugar, and fat) doesn’t fig­ure in very well at any time of the day.

I know some peo­ple really love eat­ing full meals, and I do too. My best sug­ges­tion is to eat this way for most of the week and then have two or three days where you go lighter on the snacks and eat a larger din­ner. This allows you to make an occa­sion out of nights out with your friends, etc. Once a week, I go shop­ping and cook some­thing cre­ative for myself and a few of my friends. It’s some­thing I enjoy, and it makes it a lot eas­ier to stick to small meals for most of the week.

Recovery

Finally, we come to recov­ery, or bod­ily main­te­nance. I’ve writ­ten a lit­tle about sup­ple­men­ta­tion for recov­ery and post-workout recov­ery nutri­tion above, but there’s a lot more to it. Actually, I would argue that recov­ery is the most over­looked com­po­nent of the energy bal­ance equa­tion. To get started, check out this T-Nation arti­cle with some gen­eral tips.

Sleep

I think the most obvi­ous aspect of recov­ery is sleep. Most peo­ple claim to under­stand the impor­tance of qual­ity sleep, yet most peo­ple don’t seem to get enough of it. Dr. Joe Mercola has some tips for improv­ing your qual­ity of sleep, and Steve Pavlina wrote a series of arti­cles about polypha­sic sleep, which some peo­ple may find inter­est­ing too. Incidentally, I’ve had a good deal of suc­cess with bipha­sic and tripha­sic sleep pat­terns in the past.

Unfortunately, I work in a sit­u­a­tion that doesn’t allow me arrange my sleep sched­ule in the man­ner I feel is opti­mal for my health. I think most peo­ple in the mod­ern world have a sim­i­lar prob­lem. As a com­pro­mise to get­ting most of my sleep at night so I can keep a large chunk of time open for my job, I’ve started tak­ing after­noon naps. I nap right after work, usu­ally about an hour after hav­ing a high-protein snack. I sleep for thirty to forty min­utes. Then, I get up and do a brief (ten-minute) work­out (“move­ment ses­sion” would be more pre­cise) to increase my cir­cu­la­tion and boost my moti­va­tion. I find that this allows me to sleep about two hours less each night with­out fatigue, and that time directly trans­lates to pro­duc­tive work on projects such as Taido/Blog.

One cool thing about tak­ing a short nap is that, by wak­ing before enter­ing deep sleep, one avoids any kind of groggy feel­ing upon wak­ing. I set a timer for about thirty-five min­utes to be sure I awake dur­ing REM sleep, which means I can remem­ber my dreams and write them down for later inspi­ra­tion. I’ve been doing this pretty con­sis­tently for a cou­ple of years now, and dur­ing sum­mers, I tend to sleep less than five hours each night — about six in the win­ter. I wake up at sun­rise each day, take a nap upon return­ing form work, and go to bed when­ever I hap­pen to get sleepy later, which is almost never before midnight.

Some peo­ple have trou­ble falling asleep, but I believe this is because they try to force them­selves to sleep when they don’t need to. Eight hours is really exces­sive for most peo­ple unless they’ve been under a lot of phys­i­cal or men­tal stress. Another rea­son peo­ple may have dif­fi­culty falling asleep is that their minds are too excited by tele­vi­sion, inter­net, or any of the other high-density infor­ma­tion streams most of us access each day. It’s impor­tant to limit our depen­dence on these things for enter­tain­ment, lest we find our­selves over-stimulated.

Meditation

One strat­egy for reduc­ing men­tal stress and turn­ing our minds down a cou­ple of notches is med­i­ta­tion. Meditation does not make you go blind or turn you into a vegan. I can’t teach you how to med­i­tate, but if you want to learn med­i­ta­tion on the cheap, my rec­om­men­da­tion is the “chaotic med­i­ta­tion” as described here. This tech­nique is excel­lent because it mobi­lizes the ten­sion in the body in order to release emo­tional stress. I feel this is eas­ier and more effec­tive than seated med­i­ta­tion for most people.

Baths

If med­i­ta­tion seems a lit­tle woo-woo for you, try this: take a bath about thirty min­utes before bed every night. It’s the cul­tural norm here in Japan, and it really helps relax the body. In addi­tion, for some peo­ple, it can be the only chance they have all day to be totally alone for fif­teen min­utes. Making a habit of a nightly bath can be a great help in allow­ing your mind and body to recover from the day. Especially on days that you exer­cise, a hot bath can help stim­u­late mus­cle repair and reduce delayed-onset soreness.

Massage

Massages and other types of body­work are also great for phys­i­cal recov­ery. I get a mas­sage every week, and it helps my body estab­lish a stress-floor for relax­ation on the other six days. An expe­ri­enced mas­sage ther­a­pist or body­worker can also help to alert you to chronic stress adap­ta­tions and work on releas­ing stored ten­sion. Anyone involved in stren­u­ous sport activ­ity should con­sider mas­sage a nec­es­sary com­pen­sa­tion for their high-stress phys­i­cal work.

Compensation Recovery

Compensation isn’t just for sports though. As I wrote above, every­thing we do with our bod­ies is work — even just sit­ting still. As a result, we need to com­pen­sate for the habits of motions and immo­bil­ity we ingrain each day. If you sit in a chair at work for hours at a time, don’t go home and sit on the sofa right away. Take a walk and move around a bit. Since most of us have less-than-ideal pos­ture for most of the day, it’s good to take up activ­i­ties such as yoga which empha­size proper align­ment of the spine. If join­ing a yoga class is too much of a time com­mit­ment, as least take a few min­utes each day stand up and stretch your back and limbs. You’ll find your­self more com­fort­able and pro­duc­tive for it.

My favorite method of active recov­ery and move­ment com­pen­sa­tion is Warrior Wellness, avail­able from RMAX. I’m writ­ing a sep­a­rate review for this prod­uct because I like it so much. In fact, I do this rou­tine every­day, and the car­ry­over into my Taido prac­tice and over­all ease of move­ment has been really fantastic.

General Recommendations

So that cov­ers fuel, work, and main­te­nance in terms of energy bal­ance. I believe that any­one who fol­lows even just a few of these sug­ges­tions will find them­selves feel­ing health­ier and more ener­getic within a week’s time. The more of these habits you can adopt, the bet­ter con­trol you’ll be able to exer­cise over your body’s appear­ance and performance.

If you try out any of the above advice, you may want to give some seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion to a few more suggestions.

• drink only clean water.
• avoid arti­fi­cial sweeteners.
• avoid using a microwave to cook your foods.
• seek out high-quality whole foods and ethically-produced meats.

doing these things requires time and money in excess of what most peo­ple are pre­pared to spend, but the health ben­e­fits of incor­po­rat­ing some of them when pos­si­ble is worth the effort. I sug­gest you read Dr. Mercola’s advice on healthy eat­ing and check his health blog reg­u­larly. Making a com­mit­ment to your health is a dif­fi­cult thing to do in mod­ern soci­ety, but those of us who aren’t sat­is­fied with the notion of a 75-year life-span see it as necessity.

Even it you don’t want to go health-crazy, under­stand­ing and apply­ing the idea of energy bal­ance will at least help you to look good naked. These are prin­ci­ples which I’ve been using for a a while now, and I’m super-hot, so I can vouch for their effec­tive­ness. If noth­ing else, adopt at least five of Berardi’s seven habits and see if you don’t notice enough improve­ment to give them all a try. If you like what hap­pens to your body at that point, come back to this arti­cle for more ideas on opti­miz­ing your energy bal­ance for increased health and performance.