Today's Workout 8/15

Do the following with as little rest as possible:

100 pushups <  2 minutes, any variation
100 inverted rows
25 one leg squat to chair, each side
25 dips
50 standing curl 25 lb dumbbells
50 standing overhead tricep extensions 25 lb dumbbells
20 lateral raises 25lb dumbbells
20 handstand pushups

Picture I took at the Color Run, a charity 5k my wife and I ran in the spring.

Simple Chicken Soup

Today was a little rainy and I had some extra time so I made a chicken soup that will last us a couple days.  Cooking the whole chicken provides nutrients you wouldn't get from the meat alone, and the leftovers only get better with time.  This recipe does take a couple of hours, but only about twenty minutes of real work.  It's worth it. Easy to do, hard to mess up.

What you need:
1 whole fryer chicken, preferably organic and free range, more for the nutrients than the hippie factor.
1 large onion, peeled and sliced
2 leeks, sliced
5 medium carrots, peeled and chopped
Pinch of dry cilantro
Pinch of dry turmeric
Pinch of dry thyme
Pinch of paprika
Pinch of cayenne powder
Teaspoon minced garlic
2 bay leaves
Fresh ground pepper
Sea salt
32 oz low sodium organic chicken broth

What to do:
Place the chicken in a large pot, pour in the broth and add water till the chicken is covered.
Bring to a boil and then drop the heat and simmer for an hour.  
While the chicken is cooking, chop the vegetables.
Remove chicken and use a fork to separate the meat from the bones.
Replace the meat back into the broth along with the vegetables, herbs, and spices.
Let simmer for an hour or two.

Oven Roasted Chicken with Carmelized Shallots and Blackberry Salad

This recipe comes from  David Lebovitz.  I was looking for something quick and easy that I could do in the little time I had to work with today.  This turned out great and was really simple.  I'll make it again for sure.  I made a side of carrots and squash to roast, and put together a quick salad while everything was in the oven. Can't get much more low maintenance.

You need:
8 pieces of chicken, I used four drumsticks and four thighs, bone in
3 tablespoons of olive oil
3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon soy sauce, I used lower sodium
salt and fresh ground pepper
It called for 4 large shallots, peeled and minced, I used 3 and I think for me that was plenty
1 handful flat leaf parsley

For the salad:
One small handful of baby field green salad mix per person in a medium bowl
large handful of fresh blackberries rinsed and dried gently
top with pecans and dried cranberries
no dressing

For the side:
1 cup of baby carrots whole
2 small squash cut into 1/2 inch pieces
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt and pepper

What to do:
In a glass casserole dish, mix the olive oil, red wine vinegar, soy sauce, salt and pepper, and shallots.
place the chicken in a single layer in the dish, and use your hands to mix the chicken with the marinade until the chicken is coated.

In a separate dish, coat the carrots and squash with olive oil and salt and pepper.

Put both dishes in a a 425 degree oven.
Turn the chicken once after about twenty five minutes, when it is beginning to brown.  Let the chicken cook for another twenty five minutes or so until the skin and shallots are nice and brown.  Let the carrots and squash cook the whole time the chicken is in.  When they are ready, remove from oven and garnish chicken with parsley.  Serve with the blackberry salad. 

Chipotle Chicken with Strawberry Salad and Sweet Potato

 Marinade 1 lb chicken breasts in glass casserole dish with Lowry's Baja Chipotle 30 min marinade
( I'll let you guess how long)

While chicken is marinating:
Preheat oven to 400

Peel and cut sweet potato into rounds of similar size (you may have to cut some into halves).
Place potato into a different glass dish large enough for each piece to touch the bottom, salt and pepper lightly, add 1 tbsp olive oil and mix with hands until potatoes are coated evenly.

Make salad
     2 cups arugula and baby spinach salad mix
     Handful of strawberrys sliced small
     Add small bits of honey goat cheese to taste
     Top with small handful of crushed pralines
     No dressing
     Set in fridge


When chicken is ready, place it and the potato in the oven on the middle rack.
Bake 1 hr and serve with salad.

Gaining Strength Simply

If you have never lifted weights, or if it has been a good while since you have done any strength training, Developing a good base is the place to start.  You need a solid foundation on which to build. The best way I have found to go about this is through the Stronglifts 5x5 program. This program is very simple. It is comprised of only five exercises. The squat, deadlift, barbell row, bench press and shoulder press. The plan is layed out so that you perform only three of these exercises per workout. You do three workouts a week, which should last less than an hour each. Don't let it fool you though, done right, that three hours a week will be exhausting. It is one of my favorite programs simply because it is fun, and you make serious headway in a small amount of time. The point of this program is to add weight each time you go to the gym. When I am doing this program I always see strength gains quickly, which is encouraging. There is also a free app that will track your progress for you and guide you through the program. Check out the program here . They will ask for an email, but the program is legit and I rarely get any emails from them. Download the free report, don't let the hype at the beginning scare you off, just scroll down and check out the program layout. The most important part of this thing is to not get ahead of yourself. Do each lift with strict form and start out LOW on the weight, you'll be adding it on quickly enough, trust me. If you are a beginner this program will really get you started on the right track for maximum strength gains. Intermediate and advanced lifters I think will benefit from this program as well. I use it to get motivated and get my body back into the swing of things if I've been away from the gym for a while. When I plateau I move on to a different program.

Health Benefits of Green Tea

Green Tea is one of those products that gets touted a lot as a cure all. If you walk through any Whole Foods or Fresh Market, you will see tons of products containing green tea, and literature praising the health benefits of consuming it. I wanted to do some reading and see if I could find more information than what I've been given by the people trying to sell it, and here's what I found.

Where did it come from?
There is a legend that thousands of years ago a Chinese emperor was making camp in the forest. As a pot of water boiled over the fire, a wind blew up and sent several leaves from a nearby tea plant tumbling in. The emperor was familiar with herbal medicine, so he decided to let it steep, and drank the freshly brewed tea. The emperor was happy with his discovery and eager to share it.  Soon the kingdom, followed centuries later by much of the world, was drinking tea. Throughout history tea, and in particular green tea, has been associated with a multitude of health benefits. People over time have noted its ability to prevent and cure diarrhea, which can be a serious problem in areas that lack modern medicine. It has also been thought to prevent dementia, cardiovascular disease and stroke, diabetes, cancer, and a slew of other chronic processes. These associations have been made and reinforced over the course of centuries of consumption, which leads one to believe that there must be something to it.

There are three main varieties of tea. These are green, black, and oolong. White tea exists as well but is a subclass of green tea. All come from the leaves of the same plant, with the difference being how they are processed. To produce green tea, the leaves of the plant are steamed while they are fresh so that fermentation does not occur. Oolong tea is partially fermented and black tea is fermented completely (fermentation also increases caffeine, leaving black tea with more than twice the caffeine of green tea). After steaming, the leaves are rolled and dried, rendering a product that is stable and can be packaged and shipped. Because green tea doesn't undergo the fermentation process it retains it's color and more of the chemicals that are thought to be beneficial to our health than oolong or black tea. These chemicals are called polyphenols. Much as it sounds, a polyphenol is a chemical compound comprised of many phenol groups bound together. The amount of phenol groups and their structural placement give these chemicals their varying attributes. They can come from natural sources or be made in the lab, and are water soluble for the most part, which is why we find them in teas. You may also see the polyphenols in green tea referred to as flavanols or catechins. In any case the polyphenol compound that is believed to be the main source of green tea's healthy effects is called epigallocatechin gallate, or EGCG for short. EGCG is a powerful antioxidant, and has also been shown to have antidiabetic and anticarcinogenic effects in the labratory setting.


There have been thousands of studies done on green tea over the past decade, and so there is a lot of literature to filter through. Green tea poses some difficulty to researchers because it contains such a large variety of chemical compounds, and not every cup of tea is the same. There are differences in the chemical makeup of tea that vary with geographic growing location, processing methods, and brewing methods. This makes it difficult to deliver consistent amounts of green tea polyphenols to test subjects during an experiment. Some researchers have chosen to go with extracts in order to avoid this problem. A factor to consider when using extracts is that the compounds in tea act synergistically, so that studying the effects of only a select group of its constituent compounds in extract form may not be able to tell us all we need to know about how these chemicals work in concert. Also a large part of the research that has shown green tea to be beneficial has been done using animal models or retrospective reviews. Studies done retrospectively, while useful, can be hard to control for confounding factors. And though the results that have been found using animals and in vitro methods have yielded very promising results, it has yet to be seen how those results will translate to human subjects. What we can say is that green tea in normal doses, such as those you would get from drinking a few cups of tea a day, probably won't hurt and probably is beneficial. In very high doses green tea compounds can become cytotoxic, especially to the liver. High doses have also been shown to do some oxidative damage to the pancreas, which is counterintuitive since we usually think of tea as having antioxidant properties. Other negative side effects of green tea usually come from caffeine, disruption of iron absorption, or aluminum. Caffeine can cause anxiety, increased heart rate, insomnia, and increased urine output. Decreased iron absorption is mainly problematic in people with blood disorders or heart problems. Aluminum has been thought to contribute to problems with the nervous system such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Though there are some potential negative side effects of drinking tea, they are normally seen at doses well above what you would find with normal use. Thousands of years of ingestion by large populations of people who are long lived have provided enough proof for me that tea is a good thing.
All in all I think the scientific proof is still somewhat lacking on how exactly green tea is beneficial, but I'm sure in time it will catch up. In the mean time do we really need complete scientific justification to drink something that tastes great and has been associated with long life for centuries? Nah... I think the secret, as in so many areas, is in balance. That, and enjoying the process. Taking a few minutes out of the day to boil up some water and steep a cup of tea, along with the calming smells and warmth it provides can be an instantly soothing experience.  No wonder so many cultures have developed social rituals that center around taking time out and drinking tea every day.  

A couple quick tips:

Adding lemon to tea can increase the amount of available aluminum, so skip it if possible.

Bottled green tea typically contains almost none of the beneficial polyphenols found in the freshly brewed product. Also it often has a lot of sugar. Brew your own.

The compounds in green tea that make it healthy are the same ones that provide a somewhat bitter taste, so don't be scared to take it a little strong.

To get the most out of a cup of green tea it has to be consumed fairly quickly after being brewed. A Keurig machine is great because you can brew quickly and easily several times a day.

Try to stick with fresh brewed tea instead of extracts, which aren't strictly regulated and can increase the potential of negative side effects.


Sources:  Anticancer, a book by Dr. David Servan-Schreiber
               The Primal Blueprint, a book by Mark Sisson
               

                   Beneficial Effects of Green Tea:  A Literature Review, Journal of Chinese Medicine
                Cancer and Metastasis: prevention and treatment by green tea
                Cancer Prevention by Tea: animal studies, molecular mechanisms and human relevance

Easy Taco Salad

I have become addicted to this one, its so quick and easy and tastes great. Mostly healthy too, has a little salt, but you can always go skimpy if you want.
Here's what you need:
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 lb lean ground turkey
1/2 an onion, chopped
1 avocado, sliced
1 handfull of cherry tomatoes, halved
2 or 3 heads romaine lettuce, sliced
1 packet low sodium taco seasoning

What to do:
Add olive oil to skillet and heat to medium high
Add onion and heat till they are just starting to get some color on them, four or five minutes
Add turkey and cook until done
While turkey is cooking,clean and chop the tomatoes, avocado, and lettuce
When turkey is done, add taco seasoning and water and bring to a boil
Once boiling, turn heat to low and give sauce a few minutes to thicken
Toss lettuce with tomatoes, top with turkey, garnish with avocado and maybe a little hot taco sauce