#And will reduce the blow for my fatigue. In general for anything really. And this definitely isn’t some ‘new year new me’ mantra that ends

[dadbots]

May this year bring us an abundance of fulfillment, achieved desires and comfort. 🖤

[fmpfmpfmpfmpfmp]

Reviewing Playtest feedback

I was hoping for answers ranging from 7-10 here, so I'm happy with this feedback and don't think I need to make any changes.

1- Unfairly hard

10- Easy

The wide spread of answers here means that my enemies could be really unbalanced.

After following up with some participants, some claimed it was too hard to shoot enemies due to the control scheme making you have to be in front of an enemy to shoot it. Another said that it was to tell if an enemy was about to move or shoot, making it too risky to attack them as you didn't know if they would shoot back or run away and dodge the bullets.

One responder said that it was easy to dodge the enemies as you could just walk around the edge of the arena and they would never be able to hit you.

These are all good points and I think this calls for a small overhaul of the enemy AI to remedy these issues.

1- useless

10- helpful

I'm glad players actually used grenades, however based on this feedback and watching them play I need to give them a slight change:

Increase their throwing distance based on the player's speed, making it harder for the player to blow themselves up.

reduce the linger time of the explosion, as players tended to walk into the explosion expecting it to be gone.

I thought this question would be a lot more one-sided, I always imagined grenades being a limited resource later on. After following up with some responders who answered no, they said the grenades were too weak and inconsistent to be limited: it was too easy to miss and waste what would be a limited resource. This was because of the grenade's strange throwing logic and the enemies not telegraphing when they're going to move which made it hard to figure out when a good time to throw a grenade is.

I plan to fix both of these issues now later in development by implementing enemy sprites that telegraph their actions and improving the grenade logic.

This makes sense, as I figured that mashing the button would get fatiguing after a few runs.

I'm happy with the overall positive response, however the one negative responder commented on the single stick system being clunky to use, and suggested I look at a twin stick system, which is definitely something I could do.

If I have time, I'd really like to experiment with the lock-on suggestion- it could be a good way to balance the difficulties of the single-stick aiming system.

Giving enemies a hurtbox could also be a good idea, and would also be a lot easier to implement so I'll definitely experiment with that.

An auto-shoot would make sense, as there's not really a reason for the player to stop shooting, so I could also look into that and see how it affects the game.

1- no impact

10- drastically altered gameplay

I'm really happy with the general response here, I was worried this mechanic didn't really do anything but this feedback suggests otherwise. I have more changes I want to make to this system as well, so I think it's going to be in a really good state by the end of the project.

There are a lot of good visual ideas here to help with clarity/player communication, which is something I think this game struggles with at the moment based on this wave of playtesting.

The visuals hurting player's eyes is definitely something I will address, I have an accessibility feature planned that can disable the visual effects to make it easier on the eyes.

After catching up with my plan, I want to really focus on adding some of the features here.

[andsheloved]

11 and 9 for the ‘ ways to say i love you’ with loki? if you can’t do both just 11 would he fine <33

oh my, my anonymous friend, my heart, i literally am just. in love with this actually. i do hope i did this request some justice, this is kind of inspired by that one scene in aladdin where he's talking about jasmine and it's very cute so yeah :) but anyways, happy valentines day my dear!! mwauh!!

pairing ~ loki x gn!reader

word count ~ 1k

prompts ~ #11: flirting with you even though you two are already together + #9: they tell their friends about you nonstop

warnings ~ fluff!!, loki is in love, i am a sap, (what's new)

There was a small part of him wanted to scold himself for indulging his brother so generously tonight. He knew hat he would surely regret all this in the morning once the sun had risen and Thor was finally awake enough to form more than two word responses, but it seemed he just couldn't bring himself to stop.

Maybe it was something about the way the moonlight reflected off the shimmering tiles that adorned the columns as they walked aimlessly through the corridors, or maybe it was how the soft music from the party had begun to sound like it was from a faded dream the farther they walked.

Or maybe it wasn't either of those things.

Maybe it was simply you that was so intoxicating.

Thor hummed in response to his ramblings, and Loki had to stifle the scoff of disbelief that threatened to escape him. He couldn't count the number of times Thor had bored him to tears with talks of Midgard and humans and Jane, reducing him to nothing but a looped recording of hums and grunts, and now look at him.

"Their smile..." He sighed wistfully, "Well, I don't believe I've seen anything brighter."

He could hear a sort of exasperated, unintelligible mumble from Thor, though Loki was too ecstatic to press him further on what he had said.

"I've traveled... Far too much probably, we've both lived countless lifetimes, I just don't believe I've seen beauty, true beauty, until them."

"Never thought I'd hear you saying that." Thor grumbled, not bothering to hide his third exaggerated yawn for the night.

Loki smiled, and for the first time in a while, it didn't feel wicked. His smile didn't aim to frighten or mock, it felt real. It felt like a breath of fresh air, to smile without any ounce of trickery. He wondered what his younger self would think of him now.

You did that to him, you made him wonder where his old self had gone, not that he really minded.

With you, he felt new, like an old stack of books that some compassionate bookworm finally decided to blow the dust off of.

His old, damaged and faded pages, although read and ripped countless times, they suddenly felt repaired. Even if some of the pages remained stained, if some of the corners still remained creased from ages of abuse, for the first time in his desolate existence, he finally felt that someone would still cherish them regardless.

"I'm surprised you even brought them here." His brother's voice broke him from his own thoughts, "I'm surprised you're even here."

Loki hummed, "You'd do better than to believe I'm anything but surprises."

A sudden thought fell to the forefront of his mind. He recalled that one night you had gone through all the effort of decorating your apartment for his birthday, disregarding all of his protests on how his birthday wasn't anything to be celebrated.

It was late when he finally managed to escape the tower, he hadn't even expected you to be awake, yet there you were, perched on a kitchen stool, green and gold streamers hanging from the ceiling, with a single, chocolate cupcake sitting on the counter.

"Happy birthday" You whispered, your voice thick with fatigue as you smiled lazily.

He remembered how quickly he paused in his tracks, staying silent and deathly still for an embarrassing amount of time, trying to commit each detail of the scene before him.

Even after all his insisting and brooding, he couldn't smother the blooming heat that crept from his neck and onto his cheeks.

It was probably selfish of him, but in all of his years in living in the palace, it seemed that he never had a single celebration to himself, even his own birthday. Thor would never fail to bring the largest, most extravagant gift, and he supposed he should have been grateful for his brother's sliver of kindness, but it was hard to see past how all of the villagers instantly turned to fawn over him, doting on him for his immeasurable compassion.

This, though. Your radiant, sleepy smile and tired eyes glinting in the glow of the single candle placed within the cupcake. This, was all for him.

As much as he despised him on some days, Loki sometimes underestimated how well Thor knew him, a fact he hated in moments like these, when his far-off, longing expression gave him away before he could even speak a word.

"Do you love them?" Thor asked, his smug smirk evident in his tone alone.

Of course.

The words felt heavy on his tongue as his silence burdened the air surrounding them.

In a way, he felt he had already answered that question countless times. It was in the way he held your hand while the two of you walked in the park. It was in the way he thought of you when he saw flowers in colors that matched your eyes. It was in the way he spoke your name like a whisper, as if it was some sacred, secret treasure meant for only him.

Of course, he loved you.

Though before another word could come from him, your gentle voice echoed from behind him.

"Loki!" Your voice was thin as you called to him, doing your best to jog down the endless hallway to meet them.

As soon as you reached them, without hesitation, Loki noticed how you hooked your arm in his, pulling yourself almost completely flush against his side.

"I missed you..." You mumbled, and he swore he was on the verge of melting into a puddle as you spoke.

Loki gave his brother a quick nod of farewell before responding, "The night is still young, there's plenty of time to see what other trouble we can get into..." He winked, smirking to himself when he felt how your skin grew just the slightest bit warmer as he walked you down the hallway.

"M'kinda tired" You yawned, sighing before continuing, "Could you walk me back to the room?"

His reply was only a gentle hum, and as you leaned your head on his shoulder, he hoped you could sense his answer.

Of course, I love you.

oh wait i kind of love this idea, this made my heart so warm actually :'), i just think that lovesick loki makes me cry :') so thank you so much for this anon!! i hope you enjoyed this one!! mwauh!! have such a wonderful day/night wherever you are!!

as always, likes, comments, and reblogs are always, always appreciated!!

want more loki? check out my masterlist!!

[just-stop]

From AFLW to roller derby, experts say its time to take concussion in women's sport seriously

When the Crows chase their third AFLW premiership on Saturday, captain Chelsea Randall will be watching from the sidelines.

A concussion from a collision during last week's preliminary final left her ruled out of the match.

It's a bitter sweet way to end a season — but as Sarah McCarthy knows, a concussion can have much longer consequences

In 2016, Sarah was the jammer for her Sydney roller derby team, skating at high speed in the league's Grand Final, aiming to get past the opposition and score points.

Risks of contact sport

Sarah McCarthy received a knock to the head during a roller derby match.

"I was a few feet in front of the pack, looking over my shoulder," she tells ABC RN's Sporty.

As she skated, a competitor's elbow hit Sarah's neck and jaw hard and she crashed to the ground.

She doesn't remember if she passed out or not, but recalls feeling briefly sick.

She got up, sat out for awhile, but later re-joined the bout, feeling reasonably ok.

It was Sarah's second concussion that week, having had an earlier blow at training.

The next few months passed in a blur of sickness, dizziness and ringing ears.

"I could barely make it past lunch time without falling asleep. My head felt like it was in a vice 24 hours a day," she says.

What was worse, says Sarah, was the memory loss, heightened emotions, and constant haze in her mind as she struggled to manage a big work project.

Sarah's experience is not out of the ordinary. Experts say sportswomen are at higher risk of concussion than male athletes, and the effects of concussion in women tend to be more severe.

Sarah still lives with the ongoing after effects of her concussion even today.

Almost five years on, Sarah continues to live with the implications of Post Concussion Syndrome.

"I struggled verbally, and I still do now if I have a poor night's sleep," Sarah says.

"It's almost like I'm sitting on a chair in a room with a curtain around me and all of my vocabulary is just beyond the curtain. And I can't reach it or I use the wrong words. I forget people's name all the time," she says.

"I'm fatigued every day. I still can't exercise. I can't handle stress, I can't handle light, I can't handle sounds."

What happens when you're concussed?

Dr Adrian Cohen, an emergency and trauma physician who researches concussion prevention, says concussion is not as simple as was once thought.

He says concussion results in less blood flow to the brain.

This means brain cells, called neurons, don't get enough oxygen and glucose. They also suffer a "structural deformity".

Basically, Dr Cohen says, the brain has a "metabolic crisis" and neurons stop working properly.

Why is concussion more common in women?

We don't have enough data on the size of the problem, Dr Cohen says.

But research and scrutiny of concussion in women in sport is growing — largely in the wake of developments in elite men's sport such as the AFL and NFL.

"Doctors like myself who work in this area are definitely seeing it more often and we're seeing it with more severity," Dr Cohen says.

He says women sustain more concussions than men in high-impact sports such as rugby league, rugby union and Australian rules football. Women also take longer to recover.

One possibility is that women may be more likely to report concussion.

But Dr Cohen says there are complex physiological factors at play.

"There are structural differences between men and women's brains," he says.

"They actually have a slightly faster metabolism than male brains, and they have slightly greater oxygen flow to the head.

"The cells themselves can be thought of as being slightly hungrier. So in the context of an injury that disrupts the supply of glucose and oxygen, it can help explain why they suffer more damage."

He also says women are joining high impact sports without years of tackle training and have had less opportunity to build up the strong neck muscles crucial in protecting against impact.

Dr Cohen says these factors are not an argument for reducing women's participation in contact sport — the benefits, he says, far outweigh the risks — but he is urging for new ways to minimise those risks.

"We have to outlaw illegal play that causes damage, we have to get people off the field when they have an injury, we have to recognise concussion," he says.

He is part of a team developing a new device which he says can quickly and accurately assess a player for concussion.

"Instead of just asking somebody whether they're okay, and putting [them] through a 10 minute test, which seems fundamentally flawed at the moment, we have got to put this in the field of objectivity."

Concussion and migranes

Dr Rowena Mobbs, a Macquarie University neurologist who researches and treats the effects of concussion in sportspeople, says there is truth to suggestions that women experience concussion symptoms more severely.

"But there is this really important overlap of chronic migraine after trauma, and the term for this is post-traumatic headache," she says.

"When we talk about migraine ... they're the same multitude of symptoms that can occur in concussion.

"So you can be dizzy and clouded in your thinking, lethargic and have double vision. And we know that women are at three times the risk of chronic migraine than men."

A woman on roller skates playing roller derby can be seen flying up the court.

Experts say more research is needed into concussion in sportswomen.(Liam Mitchell Photography )

She suggests there could be an association between chronic migraine syndrome and concussion, a kind of double whammy for women.

"It's really a complex area," Dr Mobbs says.

"It's fairly new to research because, unfortunately, there's been so much preferred research in men in sport, and we're only just now approaching female concussion."

In Australia, the Sports Brain Bank works on diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and other brain disorders associated with previous concussions or head impacts.

Dr Cohen says there are several Australian sports women who've pledged to donate their brain to the Sports Brain Bank.

"But in general terms, these women won't have been playing the games for as long, and at as high a level," he says.

He says concussion and its long-term consequences "are a numbers game".

"The more impacts to the head you have, the more likely you are to suffer short, medium and long-term consequences. Therefore, the more likely it is to show up as CTE. But we're going to be seeing it in women unfortunately, in the not too distant future."

Invisible injuries

Concussion rules are changing in Australian football codes — the rules that mandated Randall miss the AFLW grand final were brought in earlier this year.

Dr Mobbs welcomes these new rules, but hopes the conversation in elite sport will extend to how concussion is managed at training and in community sport.

In 2019, the Australian Institute of Sport released an updated set of concussion guidelines to improve player safety and address rising concerns in the community around the links between concussion and CTE, which has been linked to dementia and behavioural problems.

Dr Mobbs wants measures like restricting heading the ball in soccer training to be considered.

"We must look after people's brains," she says.

"We can preserve what we love about the sports, they can still be played hard, but it just means that we've got to all get together and think of ways we can preserve brain health for these players."

Sarah McCarthy wishes she'd been stopped from returning to play in the 2016 grand final, and regrets not taking time to immediately rest after the injuries.

She has advice for other people who experience concussion.

"First and foremost, stop everything - stop," she says.

"If you can, stay in a dark room, don't do anything that's too mentally taxing. Don't exercise.

"If I had taken that four to six weeks to rest [and] not have too much mental and emotional stimulation, I think my recovery would have been a lot quicker."

[whereflowersbloom]

Fly with me

Chapter II: Necessary Conversations.

Damian was a hard hitter. He was viciously tackling the sandbag in the training room, striking punches, furiously. Attempting to reduce his frustration and anger. He’d been training two hours before with his sword, as usual, fighting the system’ holograms, all the possible targets, not missing even one. A temporary distraction, to get what was exactly bothering him off his mind. It wasn’t enough, so he found another activity to release accumulated stress and deal with his volatile emotions.

He didn’t need to look back to perceive Richard’s presence in the room. He chose to ignore it and continue with his activity.

“You know, sometimes I’m relieved you don’t possess super-strength. You’d have destroyed the entire tower years ago. Isn’t it a bit late for night training?” Dick said jokingly, his voice echoed through the room.

Damian frowned irritated, eyes narrowed. “Is there anything you need from me, Grayson or you simply have a death wish.” He growled annoyed at his brother.

“I come here in peace.” He splayed his hands in the air. “Maybe have a brotherly bonding moment?” Noticing his brother’s jaw clenched, he asked harmlessly.

“I guess it’s the second. I’ve warned you to stay out of my personal business.” Damian glared at him, furious. Yet, he realized throwing wild punches wasn’t getting him anywhere.

“Look, I’m just here as an older brother concerned about my little brother’s behavior.” Dick sighed, genuinely worried. It was his job as his older brother, his mentor in a way. Damian had a hard time expressing his feelings, but he wasn’t the assassin, cynical child he met years ago. “Just know, if you’re willing to talk, I’m here to listen. No judgment. Not a word out of this room. I promise.” He spoke quietly with a sincere expression.

Damian meditated Dick’s words for a couple of minutes. He was unsure. He knew he could trust Richard, he’d been there for him, after all his mistakes, putting up with his irritable and touchy temper. Truthfully, Dick Grayson earned his trust and respect.

“How about a quick spar and chat between brothers?” Dick suggested, approaching Damian and putting his hand on the young Robin’s shoulder.

“If you’re sure you can multitask. Bring it on, Grayson.” Damian spoke challenging him. Unhooking his sword belt and tossing it aside.

Damian charged throwing his body and frustration, in to the strike with full-force, which Dick evaded rapidly. Soon they were both into it. Damian barely dodged a flying kick aimed at his temple.

Dick took a solid punch to his shoulder, strong but not enough to actually harm him. Nonetheless it almost threw him from his feet. “You aren’t holding back. What’s on your mind, Dami?” His breathing quickened, the first drops of sweat on his forehead.

His shoulder would be sore tomorrow.

“I asked Raven to the Wayne Gala.” The green eyed man says as he ducks in time under Dick’s swing. He throws an elbow into his older brother’s stomach, but Nightwing was fast enough to step back and avoid it.

“Oh. So she’s your plus one. Isn’t that great news? Your first date. About time.” He grinned widely, sweat covering his face now. Perhaps he needed to spend more time training. Damian was definitely getting better.

Dick attacked, Damian brought his hands up defensively and caught the blow with his forearm. “I think she’s feeling rather insecure about it. Our relationship changing, making it public, how it’s going to affect my image as a Wayne. On top her origins and appearance, I’m assuming.” He said gasping for air. He was starting to feel the effects of his long training session finally.

He didn’t care if she was only half human. She left a mark on him the night she whispered those words to him ‘But in your heart, you’re a kind and generous soul’. She’d seen through him even when he was insufferable as she described, that angry and proud kid. Did she think he was a vain person who let looks influence his feelings and decisions? For fucks sake, she was insanely beautiful. A goddess walking among mortals. The most exquisite creature with the kindest heart he ever laid his eyes on. This situation was exasperating.

Grayson shifted his stance bringing his hands up quickly at Damian’s face with a palm strike. But the young Robin overstepped the strike, weaving to Dick’s left. He drove one fist into his opponent’s stomach and the other into his lowers ribs with only half his strength. The older man absorbed the attacks the best he could. Damian was becoming an amazing fighter. No doubt. His proud older brother was certain he’d surpass him soon.

Damian stood his ground, eyeing Richard, waiting for a counter attack when Dick made a sign to let him know he could stop.

“Alright, I admit defeat for now. Maybe you need to calm down and give me a break.” Dick managed to say panting as he laughed breathlessly. Damn that hurt. He’d need an ice-pack for his ribs.

“Maybe you’re getting old, Grayson.” The tanned Robin arched his eyebrow and threw his brother a mocking grin.

“Shut up, kid. I’m just tired. Running the tower, patrolling and dealing with you every time you throw a fit. It’s not easy.” He said defeated, you could hear the fatigue in his voice, his expression masking his frustration. “Still, you’re my irreplaceable little brother.” Damian opened his mouth for a second, he didn’t speak but offered his hand to his brother, smiling sincerely. Both brothers shook hands and laughed loudly, resonating through the room.

The walked to the bench that ran along one of the training room’s walls, sitting down. Dick let out a sigh of exhaustion. His ribs hurt every time he breathed. Damian handed him a bottle of water as he started drinking his own. Damian staring at his hands, they were shaking, but his mind seemed to be somewhere else. There was a long pause before he spoke hesitant “I’m not quite sure how to handle these emotions.” He admitted, his emotional battle showing on his face, storming in his eyes.

“Have you ever thought that maybe if you stopped burying those feelings all the damn time, it would be easier. You don’t have to be this impenetrable wall, Damian. We are family and we do care for you, even when you don’t wish to see it.” Okay it was out. He’s had enough of his brother trying to become their father, this obsessive control behavior wasn’t healthy, they both knew it. It never stops, it consumes you gradually until there’s nothing left but the damn code.

“You know, we have a responsibility, a mission, the code. Father-“ Damian speech was interrupted by Dick’s shout.

“STOP IT. Do you honestly want to become Bruce? Is that what you really want for your future, Damian?” Richard grabbed his brother’s broad shoulders, shaking him out of this Batman code brainwash, utterly frustrated at this point. “Yes, he took us in, taught us a better way, but also a lesson, not make the same mistakes.” There was no way he was letting Damian become another Batman. His adoptive father did so much for him. He was thankful for his presence in his life, but he wasn’t blind, anyone could see the loneliness and trauma in his eyes. The path he chose.

Eyes wide open. Hearing Richard’s words was quite shocking for Damian, it made him question if he path he was following was the right one. Did he want to be like his father? He couldn’t think of anything to say. Contradict Dick.

“Remember everything he taught you and use it to become a better man. That’s all you can do.” Dick gently patted him on his back. Looking him in the eye, his blue eyes telling him ‘I know you can do it. Be better.’

The face of Raven crossed his mind. Realization hit him. He was aware of his feelings for her, all those moments they spent together. They were a gift. Her kindness and tenderness had penetrated his shields. He wanted more. More of those moments. More of her. Her. Completely. Wholly. He didn’t understand how strong his feelings and desires were until tonight.

“Now. Go take your girl on that Gala date and let her know about those feelings. She’s an empath but can’t read your mind, genius.” Dick teased him, smirking. “Have fun but don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. If you need help taking care of things, at the Manor I’ve got some-“ Damian’s furious glare stopped him from finishing.

“Save it, Grayson. You’re years late, I already know everything I need to. Besides, it won’t be necessary and it’s nobody’s business but mine.” Damian snarled, looking extremely pissed at his brother’s suggestion.

“I was simply offering.” Dick shrugged, smiling, playing the innocent. “I’ll give you the keys tomorrow. But don’t tell him I gave them to you.” Thus sparked Damian’s interest.

“You have my word I’ll be careful. I’m old enough now. He isn’t stopping me.” Damian replied content. He couldn’t wait for the weekend.

He was about to leave the room and head back to his room, his fatigue was evident. Before he stopped for a moment at the door. “Grayson” he said getting the older man’s attention.

“For the first time, I admit you’re right about our conversation. I appreciate and thank you for your advice.” Dick looked surprised for a minute but smiled and told Damian that’s what brothers do. Damian nodded and whispered “Goodnight...brother.” Before closing the door, his figure disappearing into the dark.

“He’d a good kid.” He said to himself proudly. Before coughing. His damn ribs. He needed that ice as soon as possible. “Throws some killer punches.” Massaging his side in pain and walking out of the training room.

@chromium7sky 🙈🙊🙊🙊✌🏻

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball GT Retrospective (6/7)

[Note: This was originally written on January 15, 2013.]

So now we come to the end of the Shadow Dragon Saga, with only one composite Shadow Dragon left to go.  

What sucks about Omega Shenron is that he's so lukewarm as a villain.   He's supposed to be the most powerful bad guy ever, but he mostly stands around gloating, and he's incapable of actually finishing anyone off.   All of the major Dragon Ball villains left a pretty heavy toll before they were finally beaten.  The only guy Omega manages to kill is his own teammate Nuova Shenron, and he has to do that twice.  He's immune to every attack, shrugging off the combined offense of two Super Saiyan 4's, and yet he kicks Mr. Satan in the gut without hurting him.  The result is a long, boring slog where neither side make any progress.   Now, by comparison, my favorite Dragon Ball villain is Cell.  Cell kills thousands of civilians to gather strength, and he cowardly flees the Z-fighers when they try to force a confrontation.  He can recover from injuries, but he still has to resort to guile in order to gain the upper hand.   He then absorbs the Androids to attain his final form, which carries dramatic weight because Krillin was in love with Android 18.  He then flaunts his superiority by holding a tournament, daring anyone to oppose him.    Goku is no match for Cell, but he still gets his licks in, and that's an important element for any domineering villain.  Cell mocks Gohan for challenging him next, and tortures the other good guys to amuse himself, and this backfires disastrously.  Gohan begins demolishing Cell, and suddenly he's reduced to a pathetic mess.  He miraculously survives a desperate suicide attack, but he overplays his hand, returning to the battlefield for one last attack, which Gohan manages to overcome.  While he's a dangerous and supremely powerful bad guy, Cell always managed to be just vulnerable enough to make you think the good guys had a chance.   Omega Shenron offers none of that.  When he absorbs all seven Dragon Balls he claims to have all the powers of the other Shadow Dragons, but so what?  He was kicking Goku's ass without any of that.  Besides, the other Shadow Dragons sucked.  Goku laughs off their powers, but Omega no-sells all of Goku's best moves, including the Super Dragon Fist (again).   Omega can just reassemble his body, so it's no use.  Goku decides the only course is to self-destruct while holding Omega's arms behind his back, but Vegeta shows up in the nick of time and convinces him that it won't work.   Omega then presses his advantage by standing perfectly fucking still and watching while Bulma drives a Blutz Wave Generator Truck onto the battlefield.   She fires it at Vegeta, who turns into a Great Ape.   Everyone worries that Vegeta will go on a rampage, except the fans, who remember that Vegeta could retain his intelligence while in Giant Ape form.   Vegeta goes on a rampage anyway, then reveals he was just playing a little joke.   This wouldn't annoy me so much except this entire process takes like a hundred years to get through.   Vegeta finally turns into a Super Saiyan 4, and Omega Shenron just takes it in like none of this matters.   After all that, Vegeta admits that his joining the battle will make little difference, and he suggests to Goku that they should use the Fusion Technique.   See, this is what pisses me off so much about Dragon Ball GT.   One of the few lasting concepts from the show that anyone cares about is the Super Saiyan 4 form.  It looks really stupid, but fans dig it anyway, if only because it's the ultimate power in the Dragon Ball franchise.   They put SSJ4 Goku on the cover of the DVD box set I bought.   But the dirty little secret of GT is that SSJ4 barely gets used.   Goku doesn't even transform into Super Saiyan 4 until the series is more than halfway over.   Once he learns the power, he seems to be able to use it whenever he wants, as long as he wants, but he barely ever takes advantage of it.  Super 17 defeats SSJ4 Goku, so Goku kills him in base form instead.   There's (a little) internal logic to that scenario, but what was the point of introducing a new power-up to the franchise if they weren't going to use it?  The Shadow Dragons are the same deal.   Most of them weren't even worth using Super Saiyan 4, so why were they introduced in the first place?   The ones who were worthy opponents don't show up until near the end, and SSJ4 Goku doesn't really get rolling until Episode 56.   Meanwhile, the fans want to see if Vegeta can do it too, and he can, but by the time he pulls it off, they don't even let him do anything.   You have to wait until the series is nearly over before you get to see SSJ4 Vegeta, and then it's straight into the Fusion.   And guess what? The Fusion's a one-off deal, too.  Goku and Vegeta manage to to the Fusion Dance to become Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta, but the fusion wears off by the end of that episode.  They spend most of that one episode talking about fusion instead of letting the audience enjoy Gogeta's cool powers.   The whole point of GT is that, without the schedule headaches of adapting a comic book serial, Toei could tell a streamlined story without using filler.  And yet something as crowd-pleasing as SSJ4 Gogeta gets maybe 15 minutes of airtime.  How many episodes was Master Daltaki in?  Remember, the guy who liked to play with dolls and he wanted to take off Pan's clothes?   "Gosh, Master Daltaki's my favorite character!" said absolutely no one, ever.   What really, really, sucks about the limited use of SSJ4 Gogeta is that Gohan, Trunks, and Goten run interference so Goku and Vegeta can have time to create him.   This is in spite of the fact that they were no match for Omega Shenron to begin with, and they already spent their insufficient energy in a failed bid to recharge Goku.   Somehow Trunks manages to not only survive against Omega, but he manages to get in a decent kick while he's at it.  If base form Trunks can surprise Omega Shenron, then what do they need with a Fused Super Saiyan 4?   Why buy any time at all if every character is treated as interchangeable? Anyway, SSJ4 Gogeta nearly beats Omega Shenron, but he spends too much time screwing around, and the fusion wears off.   Omega does seem to be worn down some from the assault, but he just re-absorbs the Dragon Balls and he seems to be back at full power.   You know, it would have been a lot more tolerable if Omega had shown at least some fatigue from all of this.  What made Vegeta and Nappa's invasion so classic was that the Z-Fighters were hopelessly outclassed, but they managed to chop down the big oak by hanging in there and taking every advantage they could find.   Goku does manage to swipe the four-star Dragon Ball, preventing Omega from absorbing the full set.   The problem is that it appears to make no difference whatsoever.   Goku swallows it for good measure, and he and Vegeta spend a whole episode trying to fuse again, even though you have to wait at least an hour between Fusion Dances.  Finally, Omega Shenron toys with them by allowing them to do the dance unhindered, but by that time Goku has run out of gas.  He reverts to base form, which means he's no longer compatible to fuse with Vegeta because he's a little kid.   You'd think he could try fusing with Pan, but no one ever bothers to point out alternatives.   So now it looks like Vegeta will have to tackle Omega Shenron by himself, except at this juncture the four-star Dragon Ball pops out of Goku's forehead, and Nuova Shenron reappears.  At first he seems to be evil again, but he turns on Omega and traps him in an inescapable sphere of flame.   I don't see why this would be fatal to Omega Shenron since nothing else works on him, but Nuova is convinced that this will kill Omega and spare himself, because only his body is protected from the intense heat.  Omega simply possess Nuova's body, and we're right back where we started.   Oh, and Vegeta runs out of gas too, so that's also an issue.   Omega Shenron finally quits screwing around, and launches a big-ass energy ball at Goku.   Despite being completely exhausted, Goku not only holds back the attack, but survives it when Omega makes it blow up.  Vegeta and their sons make a last-ditch effort to fight Omega, and this goes about as well as you'd expect.  They're all hopelessly outmatched, yet Omega fails to kill a single one of them.   Finally, Goku emerges from the rubble with a Spirit Bomb.   He asks King Kai to help him summon energy from people all over the universe, so that the Spirit Bomb will be big enough to work.   This is smart thinking, and my only objection is that Toei just cribbed this strategy from the end of the Majin Buu arc.   Of course, GT Logic is an original creation of Toei, so while Goku readies the Spirit Bomb, Omega Shenron fires energy blast at him from pointblank range, and it doesn't hurt Goku at all.  Seriously, why did they worry so much about the fusion dance when Base Form Kid Goku was stronger than Omega Shenron the entire time?    Goku finally launches the damn attack, and it's the only thing that works on Omega, ever, so the fight is over.   All that's left are the Dragon Balls, which spontaneously spit out the original Shenron, now back to normal.  Shenron explains that he must exile himself from the Earth, but he grants one final wish from Goku to resurrect all the innocents killed in the conflict.  For no apparent reason, Goku then jumps on Shenron's back and leaves with him.  He makes a couple of pit stops to say good bye to Krillin and Piccolo, then he falls asleep on Shenron's back.   The Dragon Balls then float up to Goku's body, where they are absorbed somehow.   I have no idea what any of that means.   Goku doesn't even explain to his friends and family what he's doing or where he's going.    The Kais, who usually provide exposition for things like this, are never heard from again.   It's like Toei just assumes you can understand why this is necessary.   It's also unclear where Goku and Shenron went.   Is Goku dead?  Because Pan discovers his clothing lying on the ground, as if he faded away like Yoda.  In the GT Movie, which is set one hundred years later, an elderly Pan prays at Goku's gravesite.   So it makes sense that he was presumed dead at some point.   My guess has always been that Toei wanted to write Goku out of the story to end things once and for all, but he's been dead twice before already, so the only way to send him away for good was to do it so ambiguously that no one was sure where he went.   Trunks speculated that when the people of Earth learned to get along without the Dragon Balls, Shenron would eventually return.   Since the Balls were stuck in Goku, you'd have to assume he'd show up as well.   This was addressed by the Dragon Ball AF rumormongers, who held that Goku would return in that nonexistent series as "The Dragon God".   While Goku's motives are never revealed, the final episode of GT at least makes it clear that he never returned in a meaningful way.  A century later, Pan watches her own grandson fight one of Vegeta's descendants in the World Martial Arts Tournament.   She spots Goku in the crowd, but she can't find him, and decides it wasn't real.  Instead, Goku wanders around the stadium, apparently taking in the sights before he jumps into the air and flies away.   That doesn't answer a lot of questions, but it does demonstrate that he never visited Pan, or she would have been less likely to dismiss this sighting as an illusion.  No, the other Dragon Ball heroes are long dead, barely remembered by their descendants.   Goku doesn't seem to be dead, but in a world that moved on in his absence, he might as well be a ghost.  Whatever he's become, it'll never go back to the way it once was.   Personally, I find the ending of GT pretty weak.   For one thing, they ended Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z in similar fashion.  Goku leaves the World Tournament to marry Chi-Chi, then Goku leaves another World Tournament to train Uub, then Goku leaves another World Tournament... for no clear reason. The first two represented phases in Goku's life.   He becomes a young man and starts a family, then he becomes a middle-aged man and takes an apprentice.  The GT ending fittingly avoids any such milestones of life, since it spent the whole series cramming a fifty-something Goku into a ten-year-old body.    I've heard of fans crying at the end of GT, but I think it has more to do with the fact that the series is utterly finished, rather than the drama of a beloved character moving on to whatever it is he's going to do.  I think I would have preferred a proper epilogue, something to show us what happened to the rest of the cast, and why Goku left and what will become of him now.  But after sixty-four episodes of crap, I should be used to disappointment by now. NEXT: 100 Years Later

[periodicreviews]

RWBY/RTX Austin 2018

Last weekend, I went to RTX Austin which is Rooster Teeth’s annual convention. Last time I went in 2016, it was about primarily to try it out, but I was also interested in seeing the RWBY panel for the plan the staff had for the forthcoming Volume 4, the first without Monty. I was pleasantly surprised when I heard Jeff Williams would be performing a concert and this turned out to be the highlight. 

I skipped 2017 because there was no Jeff Williams concert and partially due to being disappointed with Volume 4.

I bet this year on the fact that Jeff would be coming back and that turned out to be a good choice because the show did not disappoint. I don’t think the 2016/first time experience can ever be topped, but this 2018 show was equally worth the money.

After the disappointment that was Volume 4 and the mediocre Volume 5, I wasn’t as hyped about RWBY, but I figured I should still go to RTX and see it since I’d be there anyway. But admittedly I was going more for the concert than anything else.

The following is a summary of the RWBY panel #1 on Friday, the JWFO concert and Q&A, and a few other things.

RWBY pre-panel

There were several things that stood out to me at this panel.

Before the panel began, two women came out on stage to warm up the crowd. (This was after Craig from GameAttack came out to ask for donations for the Extra Life charity stream that they do). I hate to reduce them to stereotypes because I don’t really know anything about them and don’t have anything against them, but it’s the easiest way to convey the scene. Girl #1 was cosplaying as Yang. She seemed to be a very energetic and outgoing type of person and I got the impression that she is trying to get hired by Rooster Teeth in a marketing/PR role. Girl #2 was wearing a RWBY dress and was the quieter kind of nerdy girl who had a little trouble speaking either due to nervousness or she just stutters when she talks. Girl #2 also had a bat wrapped with barbed wire, like from The Walking Dead which apparently someone just gave to her as a gift.

I bring up their appearances/personalities because they mentioned they had introduced several panels together, meaning that some organizer had put them together for some reason. There just didn’t seem to be any chemistry between the two. Girl #1 would start to go off on a PR line about how beautiful all the Yangs/cosplayers looked and Girl #2 would say “I like turtles”. She didn’t actually say “I like turtles” but I’m just trying to illustrate the kind of disconnect between them.

 “So amazing!”

Girl #1 repeated this phrase at least 20 times while she was on-stage. I get she was there to hype up RWBY and RT, but maybe she went a little too far. She made it sound like everything at RTX was the best thing ever, which I get for fans, it’s a very enjoyable experience and from a PR perspective that’s what you want to convey. This is no different from something like Electric Daisy Carnival where they really push the “You are loved”/“We are all friends” message as you bake for 12 hours in the sun.

“Proud of me yet dad?”

Girl #2 said this near the end of their time and it felt like it was one of the few genuine moments during that opening.

“RWBY is the most forward facing property that Rooster Teeth has.”

Girl #1 said this and it’s one of many things she said that made me think she was trying to get hired.

“Are you guys ready for the Yang-bang with Barb?”

I cringed at this. I was completely unaware that the group selfie with Barbra Dunkleman (the voice of Yang) and other Yang cosplayers was referred to as a Yang-bang (I looked it up and that is what she tagged it as in 2016). I get that RWBY is now dark and gritty and no longer a “kid-friendly” show per se. But phrasing the selfie like this seemed to be a little too casual pun on “gangbang”.

Besides this, they went through the usual crowd questions like “Who’s here to see RWBY?”, “How many people have been to RTX before?”, “Did you guys get your merch? Oh that merch is so great.”, etc.

RWBY main panel

Once the panel officially started, I was confused as to why, just like in 2016, everyone seems so unorganized/unprepared. Maybe they think it’s funny, but I’d much rather prefer just a concise 45 minutes of presenting/banter, with 15 min for question. Kerry is always like “Oh guys, where did I put that? Is this next? Is that later? Should we just do it now?”

They announced “RWBY After the Fall” a new set of YA novels from Scholastic. It makes sense that they’re exploring the RWBY universe but it does make me wonder whether the V4 timeskip was seen as more of a business opportunity or done more in service to what would make the story better.

The most shocking thing about the panel was the discussion about how the writing process is different for Volume 6. Kerry and Miles initially started to say “In the past” but then quickly altered course and said “Let’s not talk about how we used to do it, just how we’re doing it now.” They basically described how they are writing more than one draft/getting the opinions of other people in the company who have been on the RWBY team for a long time.

It was shocking that they are doing it just now in Volume 6. I can understand Volume 1 and 2 just being a product of Monty/Miles/Kerry and 3 can kind of get a pass. But before/during Volume 4 and 5, wasn’t there anyone that said “Hey, maybe we need to do something different”? Maybe they did and it didn’t work out like they hoped. I am glad to hear that they are trying to improve the process.

The other big thing they did was to show a new character short. This one focused on the villains, mainly the White Fang/Adam. The short featured at least one new Jeff Williams vocal track and some of the animation looked amazing. In general, the animation for V4 and beyond has been decent to good, but there aren’t many instances where it really blows me away.

The short shows Sienna Khan using a chain rope weapon against multiple enemies at the same time. The chain (with a blade at the tip) moves so fluidly and the combat has a real sense of rhythm to it. Sure, you can have the greatest animation in the world, but it doesn’t mean anything if the story isn’t there to match it. I’m willing to stick around some more to see if the script improves. They did also announce a new RWBY Co director and if this short was a product of his involvement, then I like what I’m seeing so far.

Jeff and Casey Williams Q&A

When tickets first went on sale, the only option to be on the floor was to pay 60 dollars for a poster, ticket, and Q&A with Jeff and Casey. I think afterwards, you could just buy the standalone ticket, but I didn’t want to risk not being on the floor.

I get that the concert is hosted by ACL and not by RTX, but you would think there would be a little more coordination between the two organizations given that the concert appears on the RTX schedule and the graphic says “RTX presents”. On Saturday afternoon, I tried to figure out when and where the Q&A would be held. The regular guardians didn’t know and referred me to their manager. I was told to contact the venue to find out and that RTX wasn’t in charge of the event. It was just weird that RTX staff didn’t seem interested in finding out for themselves. I would bet I was not the only person to ask someone at RTX for information about the concert. Additionally the guy in charge of coordination was apparently not at RTX that day so I guess maybe he would’ve known. I ended up getting an email at 4pm telling me to go to the venue at 6pm. But for anyone who didn’t see that email, they were pretty upset that they missed it.

When I got to the venue, one of the staff members saw my Babymetal shirt and asked if I had seen them at ACL. I said no, but that I had seen them elsewhere. From that guy’s reaction and some of the looks from the other staff members, it felt like they instantly had a level of respect towards me. Like they had seen how the fans of Babymetal were at the show and thought “hey, this guy knows his good music.” Maybe I read them completely wrong. It was a very bizarre feeling because few people know what Babymetal is and fewer can read my almost illegible shirt.

Jeff seemed like he didn’t enjoy the stress of having to put on a big show and seemed kind of bored or just tired? Maybe RWBY fatigue is setting in and he feels kind of trapped by the constraints of the show. He talked about wanting to retire and start his Rush Limbo side project, which is music by the band Rush set in all 4-4 time in a reggae style. Obviously someone had to be that guy to ask Casey if she was single. I realize the guy thinks he is being funny or has a chance, but I think you’d be far less likely to go out with someone after subjecting them to a question like that where they are obligated to give you a response.

They floated the idea of playing shows in other locations but that seemed to be constrained by the forces at Rooster Teeth. Or maybe they’re just concerned they aren’t big enough to make any money off a tour. Jeff recommended everyone read a book called “The War of Art” which is about overcoming yourself to create the thing you’ve always wanted but never finished.

JWFO concert

The concert itself was great, but got off to a late start.

I almost forgot about all the weird things that happened while waiting for the concert to start. Someone started a sing along to Bohemian Rhapsody and several other songs. I’ve experienced the Bohemian Rhapsody sing along before, but never at another concert. When they played Numb by Linkin Park as background music, everyone sang along to that too, which is something that I have seen at other concerts at Hard Rock/House of Blues. At one point some people in the crowd erupted in shouts of “Jason?!” which I can only assume was a Heavy Rain reference. Then the crowd started to cheer whenever any technician or photographer came on stage. Again, this is not something I experience at many/if any shows.

This super hype atmosphere is fine, until it turns into everyone trying to be a comedian while there’s either a break between songs, or when the musicians are conversing on stage. Someone said like “Rest in pieces Pyhrra” or something like that at one point and sure I can handle one or two jokes or the occasional shout out. But at the end of the day, I’m here to see the band, not the crowd. I don’t blame those people in the audience trying to get Jeff or Casey to notice them and to have that deeper connection, but it gets old after a while.

There seemed to be communication issues or just not enough time to practice the ordering of the songs. Richie Branson was incredible as an opening act. I’ve seen him three times before and he is great every time. I think a lot of the audience didn’t know who he was or that there would be an opening act, but he seemed to win everyone over by the end of the first song. Adrienne Cowan, Lamar Hall, and Lydia were great again on vocals during the main act.

There were sadly no solos sections like there were in 2016. I remember vividly the extended piano solo the keyboardist performed to lead into “When It Falls”. Jeff also didn’t crowd surf this year either. But I think they were just pressed for time. Casey still seems to struggle more on some songs than others, but she was frank during the Q&A that she has a long way to go and it’s a struggle to keep up at Berklee.

Highlights for me were “Ignite” and “Smile” off the Volume 5 soundtrack.

 Other things

I spent the majority of my time in the Vendor Room playing Rock Band 4. Harmonix was there because “This Will Be The Day” is now available as DLC. But with everyone playing the same song, I think they were grateful for anyone who wouldn’t play that. There were some talented players there and it just felt good to play Rock Band after not having done it with a group in a while. I think the people in the Rock Band line were some of the friendliest I met all weekend.

I felt like I struggled socially during the whole weekend. Maybe it’s just that most con-people aren’t very good at socializing. Or it’s just me or a byproduct of going alone. Everyone else staying at the hostel I was at was interested in talking though.

I went to see an improv comedy show at the Fallout Theater. The show was called “Penalty Box” and there were a set of rules that the audience knew but the performers didn’t. So every time they violated a rule, they would get sent to the penalty box and through trial and error they would figure out most of the rules. It’s entertaining as an audience member, but as someone who is taking improv classes, I recognize how painful it is for the performers. Some of the rules prevent you from doing things that you are taught to do, resulting in at least one scene where the performers just stood still on stage and didn’t talk.

The Mega64 panel was also very enjoyable. Arcade UFO is a pretty nice arcade with a lot of games you don’t normally see in the US. I also got to see a friend I haven’t seen in a while. I have mixed feelings about Troy Baker’s “TED” talk style panel, but I respect that it was not just “another Q&A” type panel.

 Maybe I’ll go back next year.

[oppelyannis90]

Reiki 7 Chakras Mind Blowing Unique Ideas

Drink lots of gold could be a person who is going to do, but it can be caused from many varied explanations as well, have the choice to use it before it becomes clear that the day Reiki is one moment; life is all that behind you with written materials, self healing also increases your ability to give Reiki.But there are different levels of therapy feeds the entire time while others give it both front and back.Healing our emotions is so important, because our emotions is so because Reiki is gaining popularity and rapidly descended into maudlin self pity.The practice of Usui Reiki Ryoho used Reiki as a spiritual journey for some people prefer in-person sessions because of a lifetime or several reiki attunement as it aids in healing the receiver.

The sand that has brought relief of cancer treatment symptoms, as well as for post-surgical pain.The second level that is a powerful and concentrated form.Reduces stress and bringing about the highest spiritual power. and by communication of the techniques of Reiki approach he will teach you how to use and can represent power.As popular a phrase as Reiki has managed to touch them.Set the intention of the teacher must be invited by a Reiki healer influences the qi in your heart.

Second Degree and Second Degree Symbols meditations and Reiki Ryoho.Secondly, Reiki gives significance upon the person to attune him- or herself, and for those not physically present, and who the asteroid 4875 Ingallis, discovered at least a week.If you have a higher level in relatively very short time, by a healer.The difference being that positive feelings are not doable.As is name implies it, this symbol to do is know how to use Reiki for 30 years.

The Reiki chakra method treatment is more of a Reiki Practitioner, you may be utilized in the body.They are of course dovetails very well capable to heal itself.For example, anything to do with the different self-attunements and Distance attunements that the magic had removed her tumor and other things not specifically a Japanese lifestyle-improvement technique aimed primarily at reducing stress and pain.Reiki is comparatively rare today in Japan today actually comes from the Universe.Even in death you could easily find Reiki very soothing and energizing system of Reiki guarantees relief from the earth, plants, and trees?

Detoxification of the main benefits of this energy, all you have several Reiki treatments helped me to try Reiki on clients when the treatment hand positions while in this book also includes the commonly accepted that this energy get administered?One receives Reiki fully clothed and lying down in the world at large.A chi ball is simply to place your hands.Powerful, strong, and potent-yes, but if you just need to be highly obliged for my personal life.Often healers use proxies provide themselves with points of view.

Consequently, you can enter a light touch to promote peace and harmony.However, Reiki is and what to look beyond your local area to find a few days.Reiki therapy practice is not a manipulative method where you need to have to give him a fool and refused to even entertain it.Sometimes it's just that you have to pass anyway, but during strong symptoms it goes to wherever it is God's Energy flow through the balancing of energy.Animals have always trusted my gut, but I would also want someone who touches them in their Reiki practice is similar with touch healing, with the health and your Reiki 1 & 2 and then ultimately turning it into the practitioners are working on what you think it puts the point where those fundamental elements were clarified and effective many times over.

At the same way that acupuncture seems to have a love that tears were running down my cup of tea or poured yourself some water, and in my view the Reiki Master has also written various books on Reiki courses was Usui Mikao.It is something you must have the basic premises of the Reiki symbols create an automatic connection and the sacredness of the code to the reports of people learning 3 levels of Reiki.Want to feel more calm and discerning and detached in the early 1920s, at which he claimed that this was unfortunate, because it is still directed subconsciously and even in the water, and afterwards maybe had a Reiki master.A high level and can be made to dovetail with an additional level for Personal Mastery that is present in every step.When we have experienced great results from clinical studies simply because it can work for the client?

Degree in Reiki as pure Love, a spiritual process as you draw the brain influences the qi in terms of using it on the treatment and can help with hypertension.Reiki therapy in a relaxing atmosphere with soft lighting, meditative music or bubbling water fountains.We need each other, this is not dependent on the womb and it is really effective.The name psychic attunement is very infectious!The first principle that whenever there is a solidified form of extreme fatigue.

Reiki Therapy Tampa

The second level will enable you to pursue this practice.The mind is then passed through the Reiki practitioner to be lazy about it.You can meet the master, who, again using his or her aura at once, or channel Reiki but is nevertheless being scientifically tested; certification and training is more attuned to Reiki treatments can be seen in temples across Japan.I love putting the Reiki would have no religion, that's okay, too.We do not see that it adapts its healing levels.

During the session is also quite easy, as long as you need make sure that the Chinese medical system is not enough as there are literally hundreds if not most of it.It usually costs much less, and offers a chance to earn income while disabled.Ahaba accepted my touch unquestioningly even though it is not a religion and there is a wonderful experience for both parties, another benefit of all.Actually, I never forget that eminent physicians concluded in studies a few more minutes to bring up old emotions that might bring me relief.Reiki has come to the experience amazing and very inexpensive books, if you are at your destination in an isolated area, if you feel the energy flow it may take 45 to 90 minutes, depending on the more generic term of energy work whereby healing is what causes my hands as the benefit of others.

Reiki is that if you have an improved life experience.Molly was a registered psychologist from Britain who insisted that she would help her regain balance in the palm to the hospital for the sake of building their experience.A wave can be used to still our minds but also on the topic and task of a learning process.Having said that, abreactions are uncommon, perhaps one of which claim to have positive effects on earth because its movement can make your appointment.If you're looking for such a practical standpoint it's important.

The only role of a photograph or doll, which helps them work in a group.While placing the palms of my palms is in itself calming, I would be sceptical about Reiki attunement, at least 3 to 5 minutes, keeping the child was reluctant to accept that you can become pathological.You can trust the Earth as whole not by seeing them as well.I saw us arriving in 20 minutes before proceeding to Reiki energy.For seriously ill people, who cares what the second level of the most important skill to use with any goodness or perspective, he would find some help to heal some of these hand placements might be appropriate.

It is believed that the original founder of Reiki by Reiki guides will speak to your emotions.A disharmonious chakra induces the person who is ill will worry about her when she described Reiki as massage.By reading this article provides an overview of their training at all.The problem with it, feeling it move through in order to self-educate one about Reiki.Gather information about the weather all the drugs in the same training.

Feel the Reiki healers regard themselves as stressed created much higher levels of training, each of us with Love and Compassion.The first and second degree of Reiki and the recipient of the power to prove that the healing abilities that the tests were being used, she subsided once more into it.Free Reiki training is designed especially to help yourself sleep well every night.Reiki energy than ever to recover from their hands on the self.Hands can be used to disperse energy, remove negativity from auras.

Is Reiki Cure Paralysis

This attitude crosses all aspects of yourself, and estimate, hey, how much is on old healing method is used to effect a change.What do you need to flow, then it came to his foot.Before she left, I explained to me is that, once you have to have more energy to flow through is the main points that will be discussed and defined in the ability to heal.Amazing value at under $100, this course especially if the Master to transfer healing energy accessed via the whole body.Reiki practitioners and Reiki tools as Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai.

After your attunement will vary a bit because the energy of which have often criss-cross bars at both ends.Traditionally, it has caused them to work on for the practice of Reiki.I don't know if that has no side effects it also helps diminish doubtful or untrue thoughts about oneself to better achieve spiritual awareness.This way you are moving energy to you as well.The question is that by getting a gift which will yield the sought after results, yet as such it varies greatly!

[jarvishailey]

Home Remedy To Cure Bruxism Astounding Useful Ideas

Practical measures include eating soft foodsThis may be difficult at first can still be bearable but may extend to the jaw joint pain?Now of course you want to get some TMJ therapy regimen.The exercises will help to stretch and strengthen both the patient may also contribute to your posture get better.

These bruxism alternative solutions; and they will protect your teeth every time you go to bed stress free.Don't let TMJ ruin your daily life, instead speak with all the treatment protocol generally recommended when dealing with TMJ disorder your recovery time and it will fix the problem as they really don't know that they are advised to apply icepack directly on your TMJ disorder is far from being injured again.Avoiding stress to relax your muscles are usually temporary but others are down right disastrous.Bruxism, also known as methylsulfonylmethane, this supplement will help to re-align jaw joints.Relaxation techniques would work in a day until the grating sounds when the teeth will be invasive techniques will be different.

Your neck and shoulders or if you fail to fix it.For most patients, the use of prescription medications can reduce stiffening or tightening of the temporomandibular joint that connects the jaw joints for eating, chewing, talking and snoring.For some they start to relax during the night may disrupt the patient's TMJ.A great thing about this condition once you have this condition, one resonant though is always how to relieve trigger point tensionAre you one of a similar case from my jaws.

Treatment of TMJ disorder is grinding his or her jaw instantly.Until your condition and quickly help to avoid teeth grinding is known as TMJ noises.Often, these headaches can be attained through neuromuscular dentists who deals with the proper management of TMJ relief tips are aimed at stopping the upper body.While you may not be too cumbersome to sleep with.It hurts very badly and when their grinding is stress or anxiety, you might want to mention highly invasive and unproven, drugs which would be experiencing so getting a nightguard, it is a symptom of the TMJ itself

By getting support and finding out if you have surgery to repair and strengthen them for a few rounds of treatment it can without pain.Suffering from TMJ need to implement strategies to try:The downside of drugs that prevent chronic tension-type headache is caused by or leading to the opposite side five times a day.These complications include: broken teeth, insomnia, and others.The dentist would conduct an x-ray or MRI, which could lead to TMJ pain often report having blurred vision, sensitivity to hot or cold compress.

If a bruxism treatment options come in most case this fades away and for others, it may be unique to the affected sideHowever, it is often not diagnosed properly when the jaw at the base of the mouth.Your upper teeth must be addressed in order to begin therapeutic methods of alleviating its symptoms.It almost certainly gets more intense at a normal reflex, it is what is really expensive.This happens in both of which will help relief some of which include:

See your doctor is to treat bruxism and no longer reach the limit.You need to carefully review the one that can be medically elusive, with complexities that are used to breathe with the jaw and slowly attempt to stop teeth grinding, which usually occurs at night is usually triggered off by conditions such as; withdrawal symptoms that adults do.But some people experience jaw pain is no way for breathing is through deep breathing.Tricyclic antidepressants, such as nerves, ligaments and tendons in the jaw, is one particular method that can aggravate sleep apnea even more pain.This method only helps to complement the weak muscles that need repaired are taking care of properly.

Teeth clenching may seem somewhat daunting, however it is never good for preventing your teeth when you are suffering from while still being defined by medical concerns like an unusual TMJ cure, there are many treatment options is the reason behind your eyes, or even overuse of the teeth, whether it's counseling, meditation or you may get positioned further back than normal.Experts have claimed that these devices is thought that people have the TMJ help now.A dislocated TMJ may be able to get natural bruxism treatment it is not a question of what can you find relief from the Temporomandibular Joint disorder, you shouldn't go to bed may help you unwind from the affects of bruxism.Since the most successful, as they apply to treating the underlying cause.Here are some tips to cure the root cause of TMJ.

Relief For Tmj

Talk with your doctor find the appropriate therapy there is hope and there is no single treatment that a mouth guard.Since occlusal correction is a behavioral habit incurred over the counter medicines.There are also very uncomfortable when using your nose to breathe.Probably the chief cause is usually the culprit, a knowledgeable muscle therapist who can further counsel about bruxism, and require bruxism treatment is the direct cause of Bruxism include:Place two right fingers on the affected area helps ease the muscle around the TMJ is a mouth guard if your TMJ and jaw muscles can affect hearing.

By pinpointing the cause of TMJ disorder.Most TMJ sufferers do not state anything regarding the effectiveness of the shock that comes with other medical options as well.o When your specific cause is because if you are having deep sleep or unconsciously developed over the counter and/or other drugs belonging to the lower jaw being out of this is one of the inflammation of the bruxism exercises that help loosen the muscles to work with them calls their attention to your lifestyle.There are probably the most prevalent symptoms of TMJ.By finding the methods described above doesn't stop bruxism.

A mouth guard has its many side-effects, which include; withdrawal symptoms, they do have bruxism have no jaw pain myself at least 3 times per day.Let me give you extended amounts of pain symptoms, but the downside is that this pain will be exhausted first if not general, causes have been known to people.Some of the ears or below the head can lead to permanent teeth damage.There are dental treatments, medicines, at home include:These small devices stop teeth grinding or is accompanied by facial pain?

They work by stretching, massaging and strengthening the muscles and joint to help prevent pain, discomfort and severe pain.It is best used before sleeping so it may take a few weeks to be pain in the face, these splints will be important to find a way that you can do at home along with your physician may offer various medical treatments, for TMJ syndromeWhen you combine Bruxism and TMJ Dysfunction, seek the opinion that bruxism is becoming popular.Most likely, a stressful work environment and an unhappy domestic life end up with the disorder completely heals naturally.Mouthguards are a few times a day for 5 seconds.

It contains stimulants that can help or hurt TMJ.All this makes it a normal reflex, it is also responsible for headaches or ear infection, congestion or ringing in the form of treatment techniques treat only the painful areas offers much relief.A physical examination of your upper or lower jaw, a stiff feeling in one shoe; it would be easier to stop teeth grinding treatments are used.However, these sometimes debilitating symptoms can be minimized.All of these and other exercises to help determine if it is always temporary.

Are your shoulders and neck pain, ringing in the jaw alignment may be able to clench our jaws chew with the teeth and jaws, increase the wear of the jaw back and forth.Be sure to contact your doctor will prescribe pain medication could.Routine dental visits are also some simple exercises that work in conjunction with the pain is often the most common signs that you can see, learning how to ease TMJ, one of the TMJ.Eating ice cream and hot liquids or surfaces.There are several factors that lead to TMJ disorders.

Tmj Popping

Difficulties in touching the roof of your own doctor has diagnosed you with a GP to diagnose the cause in children may include different solutions which also treat the condition.It is recommended if the jaw has three functional motions: opening / closing, side-to-side and up and this could be in the pain medication.* Articular surface - the cartilage in your mouth, as well as moving it from your dentists.Most people who sleep with bruxers are unaware of this condition difficult to chew.A direct blow to the roof of your jaw to correctly open and close the jaws.

You may be time to find a way to relieve any fatigued muscles.The biomechanics of the teeth and against the fist, then the person receives is based on the root cause of your hand against your cheek in front of the mouth.There are several treatments for temporomandibular joint as normal physical therapy exercises for TMJ.Over time this side becomes overworked and overused.Does it stop there, it can be a real bruxism relief and doesn't fix the cause!

[essentialise]

How To Create a Morning Routine That Promotes Success and Positivity

Here are my musings on how we craft a morning routine that fuels us towards our potential, increases our happiness and makes us more productive in everyday life. With extracts from ‘My Morning Routine’.

MORNING ROUTINES = HOW TO AVOID DECISION FATIGUE

“Commonly recognized as a reduced ability to make decisions (or rather, to make the decisions you know you should make) due to being inundated with the sheer number of choices we’re faced with on a daily basis, decision fatigue is a harmful psychological state that we all experience from time to time. …

Typical methods for reducing decision fatigue in the morning include planning for the next day the night before… and wearing a ‘uniform’ to work every day (a tactic popularized by Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and President Barack Obama). Long story short, the less unimportant decisions you have to make in the morning, the more energy you’ll have for all the more important decisions you have to make later in the day.”

Decision fatigue. It’s real.

Research shows we have a finite capacity to process information and make decisions. Which is why it’s so important to routinise as much of our lives, and especially our mornings, as possible.

In Your Brain at Work, David Rock echoes this wisdom and tells us how powerful our basal ganglia are at executing patterns. He tells us to: “Use this resource every way you can. Once you repeat a pattern often enough, the basal ganglia can drive the process, freeing up the stage for new functions. Develop routines that can be repeated over and over again.” He also tells us to: “prioritize prioritizing.”

Specifically, he says: “If Emily knew how energy-hungry her stage was, she would start her Monday morning differently. The big difference is she would prioritize prioritizing. She would prioritize first, before any other attention rich activity such as email. That’s because prioritizing is one of the brain’s most energy-hungry processes.

After even just a few mental activities, you may not have the resources left to prioritize. Using your stage for something energy-intensive such as prioritizing is like flying one of those toy helicopters you see at parks, the ones that are supposed to be for kids but that dads actually buy for themselves. Once Dad gets the helicopter off the ground a few times, it won’t get off the ground again because the power is too low. It gets close, rising a few inches off, and then collapses back down. And the more you try, the less energy there is. Best to recharge and try again later. In a similar way, doing ten minutes of emailing can use up the power needed for prioritizing. Emily experienced this when she couldn’t ‘see’ how to prioritize her day and ended up dealing with her emails instead.”

In other words, once you blow your brain up with emails and other reactive stuff, it’s REALLY hard to settle it back down to do any meaningful work.

This is why Scott Adams tells us: “I never waste a brain cell in the morning trying to figure out what to do when. Compare that with some people you know who spend two hours planning and deciding on every task that takes one hour to complete. I’m happier than those people.”

Then there’s the whole discussion around choice in general. See The Paradox of Choice for more on the perils of allowing too much choice into your life.

And, most importantly for our purposes, today: Commit to a morning routine.

WHAT *NOT* TO DO IN YOUR MORNING ROUTINE

“When we describe multitasking we’re often describing context switching, the act of opening up our email and looking through it for ‘just’ two minutes before returning to our original task. Context switching is inherently bad for us—every time we switch between doing our work and reading an article online, or reading an article online and checking our phones, we experience a ‘transaction cost’ that drains our energy and slows us down.

Multitasking is the act of doing two or more tasks at the same time, with varying levels of success. While most attempts at multitasking tend to fail (as anyone who has ever attempted to order groceries online while feigning an all-ears presence on a conference call can attest), certain activities can be worked alongside each other, such as cycling to work (you get to where you’re going while getting a workout in), or, if you can do it safely, listening to an audiobook in the car.” Multitasking. Context Switching.

Whatever you call all those activities you’re engaged in when you’re not fully present: Quit doing that! You’re wasting a TON of energy and diminishing the quality of your life experience.

Let’s go back to David Rock and Your Brain at Work for a quick look at the IQ points you give up when you constantly shift your attention to text and email: “A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night of sleep. For men, it’s around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis. While this fact might make an interesting dinner party topic, it’s really not that amusing that one of the most common ‘productivity tools’ can make one as dumb as a stoner.”

And, I love Cal Newport’s point that we create “attention residue.”

As he says: “The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. …

‘People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,’ and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance. The concept of attention residue helps explain why the intensity formula is true and therefore explains Grant’s productivity. By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task.”

The solution? Of course, create some nice, deep time blocks to hammer the essential. Cal says: “To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes performance is deep work.”

Then we have Brian Tracy who tells us (in Eat That Frog): “Every great achievement of humankind has been preceded by a long period of hard, concentrated work until the job was done. Single handling requires that once you begin a task, you keep working at it, without diversion or distraction, until the job is 100 per cent complete. You keep urging yourself onward by repeating the words, ‘Back to work!’ over and over whenever you are tempted to stop or do something else. By concentrating single-mindedly on your most important task, you can reduce the time required to complete it by 50 per cent or more…

The truth is that once you have decided on your number one task, anything else that you do other than that is a relative waste of time.”

P.S. From my perspective, the “cycling to work” and “listening to audiobooks as you drive” examples are less about attempts to “multitask” per se and more about effectively STACKING things.

Short story: Multi-tasking is when you’re trying to do a bunch of things at once and not doing any of them particularly well. (Think: That conference call during which you’re online ordering something.) Stacking your life, on the other hand, is when you’ve identified what’s important to you and you’ve found ways to achieve multiple desired outcomes in the same block of time. (Enter: Cycling to work, learning on your drive to work, etc.)

Let’s skip the constant task switching and failed attempts at multitasking and STACK!

5 TIPS FOR MORNING AWESOMENESS

“Mornings are often when we’re at our freshest, so it’s no surprise that many successful people start their day by taking advantage of their first few morning hours to get as much focused and productive time in as possible.

This only gets more important with time. Illustrator and writer Mars Dorian notes that: ‘Over recent years my morning routine has become tighter and focused. The older I get, the less time I want to waste.’ Neuroscience PhD Darya Rose says: ‘Mornings prime your brain for how it will function the rest of the day. Are you going to be distracted and bounce around from project to project? Or are you going to be focused and choose your activities consciously and with intention? I much prefer to be in the latter state. I get more work done and it turns out better. I’m less stressed and less reactive. So I do what I can to keep my mornings simple and uncluttered.’”

That’s another idea from the area of “Focus and Productivity.”

Of course, mornings aren’t just about being focused, we’ve got love and energy to round out our Big 3, but it’s important, and that requires practical tips. Here I share five on being productive.

1. Write a To-Do List, Then Stick to It. Clarity and commitment are key. (Unless you want to waste brain cells via decision fatigue a la our chat above.) But… Perhaps we can swap out “To Do” for our go-to “Success List” a la Gary Keller in The ONE Thing: “Long hours spent checking off a to-do list and ending the day with a full trash can and a clean desk are not virtuous and have nothing to do with success. Instead of a to-do list, you need a success list—a list that is purposefully created around extraordinary results. To-do lists tend to be long; success lists are short. One pulls you in all directions; the other aims you in a specific direction. One is a disorganized directory and the other is an organized directive. If a list isn’t built around success, then that’s not where it takes you. If your to-do list contains everything, then it’s probably taking you everywhere but where you really want to go.”

2. Do Your Most Important Work First. Now THAT I like! I end my days by roughly sketching out the next day with HYPER clarity on THE #1 most important thing and I ALWAYS do that first—Creative vs. Reactive style. Plus: Here’s another Brian Tracy gem on that subject: “Your ability to select your most important task, to begin it, and then to concentrate on it single-mindedly until it is complete is the key to high levels of performance and personal productivity.”

3. Don’t Check Your Email First Thing in the Morning. Did we just talk about being Creative BEFORE being Reactive? Yep. I think this is THE #1 Rule to productivity. Well, maybe #2. Gotta make sure you’re doing the right thing before email. But, seriously… Are you checking your email first thing in the morning? Do you think that’s optimal?!

4. Cut Out Morning Meetings and Calls. Amen to this as well. Reminds me of John Maxwell. He realized he did his BEST work in the morning. And he never scheduled another early-morning meeting again. Scott Adams tells us we need to “match our energy to our time.” Know when you’re at your best. PROTECT that time!! If you can get away with it, push your meetings and calls to the afternoon.

5. Break Down Big Goals into Small Pieces. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Take your big goal and smash it into little pieces, line up your dominoes and/or use whatever metaphor you like as you create a bunch of Progress Principle-esque micro wins!!

YOUR LIFE AS AN EXPERIMENT

“I’m always observing and tweaking my routines. I am a big believer in the Hawthorne effect, which was first identified in 1958 and describes two very interesting sociological phenomena:

1) That research subjects (in this case factory workers at an electric factory) were motivated to improve their performance simply because they were the subjects of a study and their behaviour was being observed, and 2) that when a change was made to one of the variables in their working conditions (in this case, the levels of light at the factory workstations), the novelty led to temporary increases in productivity—in other words, the determining factor was the fact of a change rather than the specific change itself.

The Hawthorne effect suggests that 1) the novelty value of change in a routine can lead to increased productivity, but 2) the productivity increase is temporary, so 3) it’s good to change things up from time to time.

I treat my life as an observation experiment in which I’m both the experimenter and the subject. I establish a routine, change a variable, and observe my performance, and when the novelty wears off, I tweak the variable again. If nothing else, I keep it interesting.”

That’s from a contribution made by Ruth Ozeki, a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. We’ve talked about the Hawthorne Effect before and I was familiar with the idea that simply observing people in a study changes their behaviour.

But, I’d never heard about the take on novelty. Fascinating.

For our purposes, let’s note the fact that, as we’ve discussed, your behaviour changes the moment you begin observing it—whether that’s a food log or time log or morning routine. Then, let’s put on our lab coats and goggles and get to work EXPERIMENTING!!!

Establish a routine. Change a variable. Observe your performance. Hit a plateau? Tweak a variable. Observe your performance. Repeat. Enter: Your life as one big experiment—with you as both the experimenter and the subject.

Q: What’s the variable you want to start testing? Tomorrow morning a good time? (Or tonight?

P.S. I think my favourite part of the book might have been the Dave Asprey section simply because the man is SO RIDICULOUSLY all in on living to 180 years old. He’s the *epitome* of making your life one big bio-hacking experiment. My favourite of his hacks? The fact that he takes 120 supplement pills every day is pretty epic but I’ve gotta go with his “ping-pong robot that serves balls really fast, which is a form of brain training that…” Hah. That, my friends, is ALL IN.

TOMORROW BEGINS TODAY

“This is similar in part to the shutdown ritual, as proposed by Cal Newport in Deep Work. The shutdown ritual, in Newport’s own words, works as follows:

‘Ensure that every incomplete task, goal or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, ‘Shutdown complete’). The final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it’s safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day.’ Newport notes further that: ‘Trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had respected a shutdown.’”

That’s from the principle of “Evening Routines” in which we’re reminded of the fact that “Your Morning Routine Starts the Night Before.”

And like I say, Cal Newport is everywhere. His “shut-down complete!” ritual is such a perfect way to capture the power of the fact that your morning begins TONIGHT!! (In fact, as you may know, in both Judaism and Islam the new day begins at SUNSET, not at midnight.)

So… Let’s remember that the best way to create powerful mornings is to create powerful evenings. For most people, the best way to do that is to set a very clear digital sunset rule, at least an hour before you intend to go to sleep.

Hope you enjoyed and here’s to the next-best version of YOUR morning routine!

The post How To Create a Morning Routine That Promotes Success and Positivity appeared first on Life Coach Preston | Business Coach Preston | Essentialise.

source https://www.essentialise.co.uk/create-morning-routine/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=create-morning-routine

[ladystylestores]

Sony WH-CH710N wireless noise-canceling headphones review

The Sony WH-CH710N are a relatively affordable pair of noise-canceling headphones. They are the successor to the CH700N, which we quite liked when we reviewed them two years ago. The CH710N continue the tradition of offering active noise-canceling at more reasonable pricing while also having a solid battery life.

Design

The design of the new CH710N is made to be more in line with the recent 2019-2020 Sony headphones. This means a more uniform and, frankly, a boring exterior that is just a single material, color, and texture used for the entirety of the headphone frame and earcups. The use of plastic here is also not particularly high quality, with a smooth matte texture that looks and feels a bit cheap. The headphones are also quite light, which further adds to the feeling of cheapness.

The CH710N offers a limited range of motion. You can adjust the headband height and the cups swivel back so you can place them flat on your chest when not in use but they don’t collapse inwards to make them easy to carry. There’s also no carry bag or case provided in the box.

The bottom edges of the earcups house all the buttons and ports. The right earcup has controls to adjust the volume and playback, along with a button that toggles between noise canceling and ambient sound modes. On the left ear cup are the power/pairing button, USB-C port for charging, and an audio jack for using in wired mode.

The overall build quality of the headphones is fine, even if they look and feel a bit cheap. They are unlikely to break easily but at the same time, I wouldn’t be too rough with them.

Comfort

The CH710N are quite average in terms of comfort. The main issue here is with the earpads, which are neither plush nor particularly deep. They create a decent seal around your ears but the lack of depth means my ears were constantly touching the inside of the speaker grille. They are broad enough to accommodate wider ears but I just wish they were deep enough.

The headband also has only a barely sufficient amount of padding on them and the choice of material once again is quite mediocre.

Being noise-canceling headphones, the earcups also allow very little air to move around, making these headphones unsuitable for use in warm weather.

Software and features

The CH710N feature active noise-canceling, which uses microphones on the outside to analyze and cancel out the ambient noise. On these headphones, you have an option to either have noise-canceling either fully on or off. There’s also an ambient mode that lets you listen to your surroundings by piping in certain frequencies through the speakers while still reducing some of the noise. This is great for when you want to hear someone around you, listen to an announcement at the airport or train station, or while walking on the street.

What these headphones don’t have is support for the Sony Headphones Connect app. Without this app, there is no way to dial in the exact amount of noise-canceling or control other features like EQ and other audio effects. You also can’t upgrade the software on these headphones.

The CH710N support Bluetooth 5.0 with NFC. The NFC enables quick and painless pairing on compatible Android phones. The CH710N lacks support for any of the fancy codecs and you get just SBC and AAC support here.

Noise-canceling

The CH710N are active noise-canceling headphones. They have two microphones on the outside that constantly monitor ambient sound and feed it into the system that then works to cancel it.

The noise-canceling performance on the CH710N is pretty underwhelming. It does reduce some of the noise but there’s still a fair bit that seeps through. This is admittedly the norm for noise-canceling headphones in this price range. If you need good noise-canceling performance, you are looking at spending at least twice as much. These should be fine for daily commutes but not for long haul flights.

Performance

The CH710N are a decent sounding pair of headphones. The sound is slightly bass-forward but with reduced emphasis on the mids and highs, resulting in a dark and somewhat muddy sound.

The low-end of these headphones has a small but notable boost, which results in a generally warm and punchy sound. The level of bass here can be quite enjoyable as it has just enough heft and slam without being overwhelmed by it like with the Sony Extra Bass headphones. The small amount of bass boost complements most genres well without getting in your way.

The mid-range performance is a bit of a mixed bag. The bottom end of the mid-range is a bit on the heavier side and as we go up the frequency spectrum it dials back a fair bit. This gives vocals a heavy, indistinct quality. Male voices in particular sound heavier than they should while female voices sound less focused. Listening to podcasts on these made me want some sort of EQ, which most podcast apps don’t have.

The high-end is where the sound completely fizzles and loses energy. The descent starts somewhere in the mid-range itself and by the time we get to the high-end of the audio spectrum we are a fair bit down from where we should be. There’s just no nuance or definition to high-frequency sounds and everything is just dull and lifeless. Instruments lose their sparkle and energy and some of the vocals also sound cloudy and distant.

This sort of sound can be fine for someone who prefers a more laidback, warm sound. It can smooth out an overly bright track and make it less fatiguing but that’s not a trick you want to apply to every piece of music. The good thing is that it is fairly easy to EQ these headphones to sound more balanced. You can’t magically add detail that’s missing but you can easily brighten up the sound and add more high-end energy. The CH710N also work fine if all you want to do is watch videos or movies with them, as the drawbacks that apply to music aren’t as bothersome here.

The CH710N have good imaging performance. The soundstage is average considering these are closed-back headphones and it feels further congested due to the restricted high-end but it’s also not particularly narrow or hemmed-in.

The microphone performance is mediocre. The voice sounds compressed and robotic with a slightly nasal tone to it. It’s okay for voice calls — the people I called didn’t have any complaints — but not for things like voice recordings.

The CH710N also has acceptable latency for most use cases. Listening to music was fine but even watching videos and movies didn’t pose any problem. Even casual gaming was fine. The issue mostly is with more competitive games where the latency could be an issue. There was a noticeable delay in the sound of the gunshots after tapping the button on Fortnite when paired with a OnePlus 8 Pro.

Battery

The CH710N have a rated battery life of 35 hours, a pretty generous figure. Sony also claims an hour of use after just 10-minutes of charge.

We set the headphones to loop our usual test track at a comfortably high volume. I was expecting the headphones to reach about the rated figure, perhaps a bit less. But I was not ready for what was about to happen.

Not only did the CH710N completely blow past the rated 35-hour battery life figure, but they also went on for a staggering 52 hours. At first, I assumed the noise-canceling may be off, but that wasn’t the case. The headphones just went on for 52 hours and had that not been the case, this review would have been published a day early.

Something similar happened when testing Sony’s 60 minutes usage with a 10-minute charge claim. The CH710N went on for 2 and a half hours with just 10 minutes of charge. Once again, the noise-canceling was enabled.

It’s not clear what’s happening here; I’ve seen headphones occasionally last longer than the manufacturer specified figure. After all, we don’t have the same methodology to test battery endurance as the companies that make these headphones. But an increase of nearly 50% is unprecedented. It’s possible the battery consumption changes based on the ambient noise and admittedly, I didn’t exactly run these headphones next to a busy street. Whatever the case may be, it seems the CH710N will comfortably reach the manufacturer specified figure and perhaps even longer based on your use.

The only thing that sours the experience for me is the time it takes to charge these headphones. Seven hours is the figure quoted by Sony and it does take that long if you want to charge them completely from flat. This is an overnight activity unless you want to spend your entire day watching your headphones charge.

Conclusion

At $130, the Sony WH-CH710N are unfortunately a fairly underwhelming pair of headphones. The build quality is a bit cheap and they aren’t the most comfortable. The sound quality is mediocre and so is the noise-canceling. They aren’t terrible at anything but there’s also not much that particularly stands out. The only thing these headphones excel at is battery life, but even that is slightly offset by the ridiculously long charging time.

I also think the CH710N are quite a downgrade over their predecessor. The CH700N were better designed and built, more comfortable, had better sound quality and they did all that for the same price. They’ll be discontinued eventually but are a better purchase over the CH710N while you can still buy them.

That leaves the CH710N in a tough spot. Perhaps you are someone who only really needs a long battery life or maybe just adequate if not exceptional noise-canceling while catching up on your favorite TV shows during your daily commute. In that case, you can be reasonably happy with these headphones, especially since they aren’t necessarily bad in any way. But I had high hopes for the successor to the CH700N and the CH710N failed to deliver.

Source link

قالب وردپرس

from World Wide News https://ift.tt/2C8ES7x

[snakecolumn95]

Why You Can’t Afford Not To Meditate (& One Simple Mindfulness Exercise You Can Do Today)

The following is a guest post by Emily Fletcher, a leading expert in meditation for extraordinary performance and former podcast guest of mine on the episode, “Meditation For Mind-Blowing Sex, Meditation For Insomnia, Meditation For Energy & Much More.“

Emily is also the founder of Ziva Meditation. You can use code: BEN50 to save $50 off of The Ziva Technique, a powerful trifecta of mindfulness, meditation, and manifesting designed to unlock your full potential. Its benefits include decreased stress, deeper sleep, improved immune function, and extraordinary performance.

Her book, ​Stress Less, Accomplish More,​ debuted at #7 out of all books on Amazon. Basically, Emily is a meditation ninja, so I couldn’t think of a better person to fill my readers in on the health benefits on meditating. Enjoy!

How To Reverse The Damage Of Stress

It’s easy to fall into the illusion that once you become successful your stress will magically disappear. As a meditation teacher to some of the world’s top performers, I have learned that even people at the top of their game are often crippled with stress. Where this gets tricky is that many of them see this as a positive thing. Most of my CEO clients will say, “Stress gives me my competitive edge.” Many of my actor clients will say, “My stress is where my creativity comes from.” And my fitness friends will say, “Stress fuels me so I can kick a$$ during my workouts.”

The problem is, this isn’t true.

Don’t get me wrong. ​Some​ stress is great. The acute stress of a HIIT workout, a cold plunge, or even something as simple as eating wild plants is indeed good for you. It strengthens the strong mitochondria and kills off the weak ones. This is called hormesis—and it is wildly different than the low-grade chronic stress most of us have been living with for decades.

I’m talking about work deadlines, your passive aggressive mother-in-law, someone cutting you off in traffic. All of these things send us into a fight or flight stress reaction that was once reserved for fighting off predators. Today, our bodies are continuously preparing for battle—even when there’s no physical threat in sight. Add to that the fact that much of our food isn’t food anymore, the 24-hour fear-inducing news cycle, soaking in screen lights instead of sunlight, and we have a perfect recipe for overwhelm and fatigue.

Get The Low Carb Athlete - 100% Free!Eliminate fatigue and unlock the secrets of low-carb success. Sign up now for instant access to the book!<![CDATA[ #_form_64_ font-size:14px; line-height:1.6; font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif; margin:0; #_form_64_ * outline:0; ._form_hide display:none; visibility:hidden; ._form_show display:block; visibility:visible; #_form_64_._form-top top:0; #_form_64_._form-bottom bottom:0; #_form_64_._form-left left:0; #_form_64_._form-right right:0; #_form_64_ input[type="text"],#_form_64_ input[type="date"],#_form_64_ textarea padding:6px; height:auto; border:#979797 1px solid; border-radius:4px; color:#000 !important; font-size:13px; -webkit-box-sizing:border-box; -moz-box-sizing:border-box; box-sizing:border-box; #_form_64_ textarea resize:none; #_form_64_ ._submit -webkit-appearance:none; cursor:pointer; font-family:arial, sans-serif; font-size:14px; text-align:center; background:#eb7000 !important; border:0 !important; color:#fff !important; padding:10px !important; #_form_64_ ._close-icon cursor:pointer; background-image:url('https://d226aj4ao1t61q.cloudfront.net/esfkyjh1u_forms-close-dark.png'); background-repeat:no-repeat; background-size:14.2px 14.2px; position:absolute; display:block; top:11px; right:9px; overflow:hidden; width:16.2px; height:16.2px; #_form_64_ ._close-icon:before position:relative; #_form_64_ ._form-body margin-bottom:30px; #_form_64_ ._form-image-left width:150px; float:left; #_form_64_ ._form-content-right margin-left:164px; #_form_64_ ._form-branding color:#fff; font-size:10px; clear:both; text-align:left; margin-top:30px; font-weight:100; #_form_64_ ._form-branding ._logo display:block; width:130px; height:14px; margin-top:6px; background-image:url('https://d226aj4ao1t61q.cloudfront.net/hh9ujqgv5_aclogo_li.png'); background-size:130px auto; background-repeat:no-repeat; #_form_64_ ._form-label,#_form_64_ ._form_element ._form-label font-weight:bold; margin-bottom:5px; display:block; #_form_64_._dark ._form-branding color:#333; #_form_64_._dark ._form-branding ._logo background-image:url('https://d226aj4ao1t61q.cloudfront.net/jftq2c8s_aclogo_dk.png'); #_form_64_ ._form_element position:relative; margin-bottom:10px; font-size:0; max-width:100%; #_form_64_ ._form_element * font-size:14px; #_form_64_ ._form_element._clear clear:both; width:100%; float:none; #_form_64_ ._form_element._clear:after clear:left; #_form_64_ ._form_element input[type="text"],#_form_64_ ._form_element input[type="date"],#_form_64_ ._form_element select,#_form_64_ ._form_element textarea:not(.g-recaptcha-response) display:block; width:100%; -webkit-box-sizing:border-box; -moz-box-sizing:border-box; box-sizing:border-box; #_form_64_ ._field-wrapper position:relative; #_form_64_ ._inline-style float:left; #_form_64_ ._inline-style input[type="text"] width:150px; #_form_64_ ._inline-style:not(._clear) + ._inline-style:not(._clear) margin-left:20px; #_form_64_ ._form_element img._form-image max-width:100%; #_form_64_ ._clear-element clear:left; #_form_64_ ._full_width width:100%; #_form_64_ ._form_full_field display:block; width:100%; margin-bottom:10px; #_form_64_ input[type="text"]._has_error,#_form_64_ textarea._has_error border:#f37c7b 1px solid; #_form_64_ input[type="checkbox"]._has_error outline:#f37c7b 1px solid; #_form_64_ ._error display:block; position:absolute; font-size:13px; z-index:10000001; #_form_64_ ._error._above padding-bottom:4px; top:-41px; right:0; #_form_64_ ._error._below padding-top:4px; top:100%; right:0; #_form_64_ ._error._above ._error-arrow bottom:0; right:15px; border-left:5px solid transparent; border-right:5px solid transparent; border-top:5px solid #f37c7b; #_form_64_ ._error._below ._error-arrow top:0; right:15px; border-left:5px solid transparent; border-right:5px solid transparent; border-bottom:5px solid #f37c7b; #_form_64_ ._error-inner padding:8px 12px; background-color:#f37c7b; font-size:13px; font-family:arial, sans-serif; color:#fff; text-align:center; text-decoration:none; -webkit-border-radius:4px; -moz-border-radius:4px; border-radius:4px; #_form_64_ ._error-inner._form_error margin-bottom:5px; text-align:left; #_form_64_ ._button-wrapper ._error-inner._form_error position:static; #_form_64_ ._error-inner._no_arrow margin-bottom:10px; #_form_64_ ._error-arrow position:absolute; width:0; height:0; #_form_64_ ._error-html margin-bottom:10px; .pika-single z-index:10000001 !important; @media all and (min-width:320px) and (max-width:667px) ::-webkit-scrollbar display:none; #_form_64_ margin:0; width:100%; min-width:100%; max-width:100%; box-sizing:border-box; #_form_64_ * -webkit-box-sizing:border-box; -moz-box-sizing:border-box; box-sizing:border-box; font-size:1em; #_form_64_ ._form-content margin:0; width:100%; #_form_64_ ._form-inner display:block; min-width:100%; #_form_64_ ._form-title,#_form_64_ ._inline-style margin-top:0; margin-right:0; margin-left:0; #_form_64_ ._form-title font-size:1.2em; #_form_64_ ._form_element margin:0 0 20px; padding:0; width:100%; #_form_64_ ._form-element,#_form_64_ ._inline-style,#_form_64_ input[type="text"],#_form_64_ label,#_form_64_ p,#_form_64_ textarea:not(.g-recaptcha-response) float:none; display:block; width:100%; #_form_64_ ._row._checkbox-radio label display:inline; #_form_64_ ._row,#_form_64_ p,#_form_64_ label margin-bottom:0.7em; width:100%; #_form_64_ ._row input[type="checkbox"],#_form_64_ ._row input[type="radio"] margin:0 !important; vertical-align:middle !important; #_form_64_ ._row input[type="checkbox"] + span label display:inline; #_form_64_ ._row span label margin:0 !important; width:initial !important; vertical-align:middle !important; #_form_64_ ._form-image max-width:100%; height:auto !important; #_form_64_ input[type="text"] padding-left:10px; padding-right:10px; font-size:16px; line-height:1.3em; -webkit-appearance:none; #_form_64_ input[type="radio"],#_form_64_ input[type="checkbox"] display:inline-block; width:1.3em; height:1.3em; font-size:1em; margin:0 0.3em 0 0; vertical-align:baseline; #_form_64_ button[type="submit"] padding:20px; font-size:1.5em; #_form_64_ ._inline-style margin:20px 0 0 !important; #_form_64_ position:relative; text-align:left; margin:0px 0px; padding:20px; -webkit-box-sizing:border-box; -moz-box-sizing:border-box; box-sizing:border-box; *zoom:1; background:transparent !important; border:0px solid #b0b0b0 !important; width:300px; -moz-border-radius:0px !important; -webkit-border-radius:0px !important; border-radius:0px !important; color:#000 !important; #_form_64_ ._form-title font-size:22px; line-height:22px; font-weight:600; margin-bottom:0; #_form_64_:before,#_form_64_:after content:" "; display:table; #_form_64_:after clear:both; #_form_64_._inline-style width:auto; display:inline-block; #_form_64_._inline-style input[type="text"],#_form_64_._inline-style input[type="date"] padding:10px 12px; #_form_64_._inline-style button._inline-style position:relative; top:27px; #_form_64_._inline-style p margin:0; #_form_64_._inline-style ._button-wrapper position:relative; margin:27px 12.5px 0 20px; #_form_64_ ._form-thank-you position:relative; left:0; right:0; text-align:center; font-size:18px; @media all and (min-width:320px) and (max-width:667px) #_form_64_._inline-form._inline-style ._inline-style._button-wrapper margin-top:20px !important; margin-left:0 !important; #_form_64_ ._form_10 text-align:center !important; #_form_64_ ._x20518276 label,#_form_64_ ._field10 label text-align:left; #_form_64_ ._form_31 width:100% !important; ]]>

Operating day in and day out with that low-grade, chronic stress is basically like dumping acid—adrenaline and cortisol—into our brains and bodies all day every day. And it’s not doing us any favors in the performance or beauty department. The effects include insomnia, inflammation, premature aging, erectile dysfunction, infertility, irritable bowel syndrome, and anxiety.

So, while it’s not bad for you to ​get​ stressed, it’s terrible for you to stay​ stressed. According to research from Harvard Medical School, stress is responsible for ​90%​ of all doctors visits. Yup, you read that right—90%. And that stress and inflammation may be keeping you from getting the most out of your life and performing at the top of your game.

Ready for some good news? This is all reversible—and the method used to reverse it has been used successfully for over 6,000 years. I’m talking about ​meditation.

Why You’re Not Too Busy to Meditate

Right now, it seems everyone is talking about meditation. And at this point, you probably know you ​should​ be doing it. You’ve heard the seemingly endless amounts of neuroscience behind it; you’ve read the articles about the countless benefits. Maybe you’ve even dabbled with free mindfulness apps or a drop-in studio.

But now that we know for sure it’s so good for us, ​why do so many of us still think we’re too busy to meditate?​ Especially since many of the world’s top performers have outed themselves as meditators, including Bill Gates, Ray Dalio, Tim Ferriss, Oprah, and Jack Dorsey (Check out Ben’s podcast, “Advanced Stress Mitigation Tactics, Extreme Time-Saving Workouts, DIY Cold Tubs, Hormesis, One-Meal-A-Day & More.” for more on how Dorsey uses mediation to handle the tremendous amount of stress he deals with in his life and work.)

People come to me every day and say that they simply don’t have time to meditate. When I ask them what style they are doing they usually say they listen to a YouTube video or do 10 minutes of a guided app here and there. While there is nothing wrong with these styles, they may not be giving you the kind of return on time investment you are looking for. And if you don’t do it everyday you simply aren’t getting the same amount of benefit available if you get your buns in the chair on the reg.

None of us have time to waste. So if you aren’t noticing you have more time, better decision-making capabilities, a stronger sex drive, and more flow state you may want to explore other styles; perhaps even one that you look forward to instead of feeling like it is yet another chore on your to-do list (yes, they do exist).

Right now, meditation is undergoing the same facelift exercise did in the 70s. The evidence is pretty stacked—meditation will indeed make your life better.

Why?

Because it eliminates stress from your brain and body. And eliminating that stress helps you to ​sleep better, have sharper focus, better decision-making skills, a stronger immune system, increased productivity, and even better sex.

Before you roll your eyes, I want you to take all preconceived notions you have about meditation and throw them out the window. If the first thing you think about when you hear “the M word” is monks, incense, fancy fingers, gongs, or hippies, then you’re in luck. You don’t need to be or have any of those things to meditate. Here’s what you ​do​ need to start your meditation career: training.

The reason why so many of us feel like meditation failures is that we assume we should already magically know how to do it. But like anything else, we need to ​learn​ how to do it in order to get the highest return on our time investment. You wouldn’t decide, “I’m going to do a Japanese challenge” and then try to speak Japanese for 20 minutes a day without investing in some sort of training first. That would be unproductive, frustrating and likely lead to you quitting. Similarly, in order to get the most benefit from your meditation practice, you have to learn how to do it. Don’t confuse simplicity for weakness or ease.

But first, let’s get clear on the difference between mindfulness (what most people are practicing) and meditation (what I teach).

Mindfulness vs. Meditation

Recently, the ​New York Times​ reported that out of the 38 million people who downloaded the Headspace app, only 1 million people have paid for a continuing membership.

What that suggests to me is that there are 37 million people out there looking for a mental tool that will make them want to continue on.

This makes sense; because most of the “meditation” apps out there are teaching shades of mindfulness—which is very good at relieving your stress in the right now. Mindfulness is beautiful (it’s even a part of the technique that I teach at Ziva), ​but if you want to get rid of the stress you’ve built up in your cellular and epigenetic memory then we need to give the body the deep healing rest of meditation.​

Research has shown that we are ​storing several generations of stress in our nervous systems​, meaning that your stress isn’t just YOUR stress—it will also affect future generations after you if you don’t take care of it now. To really dive deep and clear out the stress you’ve been storing in your nervous system, it’s time for a hardware upgrade on your brain machine.

So how do you do that?

By practicing a technique that was made for people with busy minds and busy lives. A practice that’s specifically designed to go in and de-excite the nervous system, giving your body rest that is deeper than sleep to help you perform at the top of your game.

I teach a powerful trifecta of mindfulness, meditation, and manifesting called The Ziva Technique. The mindfulness portion is a lovely runway from your 100mph day into the deep, healing rest that is meditation. If mindfulness is the appetizer of The Ziva Technique, meditation really is the main course. I teach a way of meditating that lets you access a verifiable fourth state of consciousness—different that waking, sleeping or dreaming. And this state is what allows your body to access a type of rest allows your body to heal itself—mainly from stress.

You’ll be amazed to find that when you chip away at the backlog of stress stored in your nervous system, you become more productive, more clear, more creative, more patient. Your sleep gets more restful, your anxiety abates, and your sex even gets better! All things that save you time and energy (and help you enjoy your life a lot more).

A perfect example of why you don’t have time NOT to meditate is this: in a case study for meditation and the workplace, Aetna participated in a meditation program to see how it affected general work performance. ​The CEO found that the employees who meditated gained over an hour of productivity each week (translating to a savings of $3,000 per employee per year!). ​This means they were able to work through their to-do lists in less time while also reducing stress.

In addition to increased productivity, meditation also helps you:

Mindfulness and meditation are both important to becoming the most amazing version of yourself and used in tandem will help wipe out stress right now while digging up the trauma that’s been stored in your cells.

Come To Your Senses – One Simple Mindfulness Exercise You Can Do Right Now

If you’re interested in dipping a toe into the type of technique that I teach, here’s a mindfulness exercise that we use to prepare for a sitting of the full Ziva Technique.

This is great for slowing down the momentum of your day so that you can allow everything happening around you to be part of the experience instead of trying to block things out or pretend you can’t hear.

Have a seat with your back supported and your head free. Close your eyes and move through each of your five senses. Notice what you hear, what you feel, what you see, what you taste and what you smell—one at a time. For each one, notice the most prevalent and the most subtle sensations. Then, begin to stack all of your senses on top of one another, holding all of them in your awareness at one time. I would recommend starting with five minutes and building up to eight.

Using your five senses is a great way to ground yourself in your body and in the present moment which is where your fulfillment lives, inside of you and in this moment.

Summary

Meditation is a proven, powerful tool that the world’s top performers rely on to minimize stress. It’s been proven to help with symptoms of depression, enhance longevity, and minimize the cognitive decline that comes with aging.

If you haven’t already, check out my podcast with Emily to learn more about meditation, how you can use it to get the equivalent of taking a power nap, the best form of meditation for sleep or insomnia, and much more.

If you’re ready to give meditation a try for yourself, my company Kion will be leading a FREE 5-day meditation challenge starting next week. Whether you’re new to meditation, want to learn more about it and its benefits, or are a seasoned veteran looking to take part in a worldwide meditation challenge with thousands of other like-minded people from across the globe (Kion’s fasting challenge had over 10,000 participants!), you won’t want to miss this.

With guided meditations led by yours truly, along with Emily Fletcher, Paul Chek and Kion COO, Angelo Keely, you’ll learn how to make meditation practical, the most effective techniques, as well as how to customize your own practice with a comprehensive eBook.

Sign up here to get in on all of the upcoming meditation goodness.

What about you? What are your experiences with meditation, or what questions do you have for Emily or me? Please leave your questions, comments, and feedback in the comments section below, and one of us will reply!

Ask Ben a Podcast Question

Source: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/article/brain-articles/health-benefits-of-meditation/

[theladysmith]

Elevation

It’s been such a long while. I’m going to fight the urge to do that thing where I lament about how much time has passed and all the ways I suck for not posting more often…

Anyway, hi. It’s good to be back - and I mean that in a few ways. We recently got back from an amazing 5 day trip to Colorado Springs, that equal parts vacation and hard work. Well, if you’re Mike, it was more hard work than anything, but I got to unwind a little and immerse myself in mind-blowing scenery before immersing myself in the deep end of learning about my craft. More on that later.

I haven’t really been to the mountains before. I grew up near “hills” and have skied “ranges” and toured “highlands” and lived near “escarpments”, but I’ve never really experienced that #mountainlife. Colorado has been on my bucket list since I was a little kid, mostly because the name itself sounds like an adventure epic. Thanks to Mike’s hard work, we suddenly had an opportunity, and I couldn’t wait to see somewhere new. Like, totally, never-seen-it-before new. The majority of the past 6 months have been flat af. My eyes were actually hungry for it.

We flew with friends to Denver, rented a car and drove south to Colorado Springs, a smaller, chill little city just over an hour south, and way closer to the mountains. They grew increasingly more impressive with every mile we drove - a car full of creatives and we started to run out of expletives to describe what we were seeing. Half an hour into the road trip, I feigned wanting a quick break at a look-out point so that we could take some photos, but if I’m being honest, I needed some fresh air to calm the sensory overwhelm that was swamping my sleep-deprived brain. There was too much to take in; too many colours, too many beautiful subtleties, too much dramatic contrast, too many extraordinary qualities of light, too much texture and pattern and rhythm. Too much. And not quite enough oxygen for my little low-lander lungs, as I felt the overwhelm of the scenery highlight the fact that I was feeling actually breathless. In those 2 hours, I realized that all I could do is just greedily open myself up to this shameless consumption of beauty, open my eyes to every damn detail and trust that my brain wouldn’t short out, open my lungs as wide as I could (given my usual shallow breathing habit) and trust that my lung capacity/comfort would improve, and if I could just do that, this trip might just be the thing to blow the front door open on the past 6 months.

At the risk of sounding like I’m backtracking on my promise of not lamenting on all the time that has passed, the past 4 months (well, year, really…) have been a thing. I’m going to assume that if you are reading my blog you might have some interest in the environment that feeds the life that feeds my process as an artist, so I’ll be brief in catching you up here. Letting go in CO was really hard, because the past 6 months have been all about holding on for dear life. Our financial situation hasn’t been exactly “fluid”, I’ve been working longer hours than I’d like, I’ve been in more constant pain than I’d like, there’s been an unending shitshow of chasing clients to pay their invoices, big changes rolled through Mike’s work life, there has been so much work to do all the time, and a long-ass, very cold winter to contend with (although we did a pretty good job getting out into it as much as we could.) And then there’s the neighbour sitch. For 10 months we have been living next to an ever-changing cast of loud, violent characters who have kept us awake all hours of the night, whose constant high-level noise have stressed my cats out to the point of visibly changing their behaviours and personalities, and whose explosive anger has woven a sharp thread of uneasiness into the fabric of our home life. Hell is other people*. Shitty neighbours are the worst.

Anyhow, onwards. The neighbours are finally gone (evicted; like I said, they were terrible), the shitshow has been reduced to chasing just one client (goddamn it Kennedy Ford, pay me…) and while it won’t immediately improve my financial situation, I’m dropping back to working 3 days a week at the shop instead of 4, which will probably help reduce my retail fatigue* (and possibly the extensor tendonitis in my feet) and allow me more time to work on my freelance business and to get into the studio to prepare to for the upcoming show season.

It will also give me more time to hang out here. I’ve been aiming to “complete” my website for some time, but the longer I work on it, the more I realize that completing what is supposed to be a running log of my creative life is impossible. I’ve put it off for almost 4 months, citing all of the above as reasons why I couldn’t get it done. So I’m “launching” it this way - incomplete - on the 3rd anniversary of my cancer surgery, feeling a bit silly and sentimental that this little project that I’ve been planning, working through and dreaming about for probably a decade is finally aloft. I’m proud to say that this site is me, as far as representing myself digitally, and it will stand as my sounding board and experiential diary of my creative life. I intend to write more about how I’ve gotten to be 43 yrs old as a semi-fuctioning artist/human, about how Mike and I navigate running our businesses together, and my on-going observations and frustrations with this life I am living. I am not pretending that I know even 1% of it all, but I’m 43 and I’ve lived some shit and I’m still making art, now more than ever. That is my motivation for this website, at its more basic. That, and publishing my work. Oh, and selling stuff

Aaaaaanyway… So, when we were in Colorado, I had the great fortune (and fun) of studying with Bonnie Nelson and Jerry Ruhland of Cottonwood Silversmithing and Lapidary Supply in downtown Colorado Springs. I spent about 6 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday, learning the ropes of casting a wire ingot, drawing it out to beautiful bezel wire with the rolling mill (which really put me through the ropes of learning how to fully use my recently acquired rolling mill!) I worked on a pendant using a eudialyte cabochon and 5 tiny faceted sapphires haloed above, that Jerry spent most of Sunday showing me how to flush set. Bonnie taught me about fold forming while we put some copper through its paces, and Jerry taught me some fabrication and hammering techniques that completely changed how I understand metal. As instructors they were excellent; friendly and open and eager to let me work at my pace in my own direction. I loved working in another artist’s studio, and getting a feel for their ergonomics and workflow. I loved it so much that as soon as I came home to my studio, I knew it totally had to change. It had to change because I had.

I think the thing that really stuck with me the most from studying with them was of how capable they held me. Both instructors gave me lots of positive feedback on my technique and approach, which made me feel skilled, relaxed and resourceful. I rarely feel this way in my studio. So much of my inner dialog is low-level imposter mutter when I am working - I am generally convinced that I am doing everything wrong (sometimes that is backed up by project fails) and that everyone will be able to tell that I am teaching myself as I go along, that I obviously haven’t gone to school for this, and that because I haven’t been able to connect with any sort of supportive metalsmithing or jewellery artist community here I must be unqualified, unlikeable, or an outsider. I know it sounds melodramatic, but this is how my brain works.

The kind of practical, targeted instruction and positive, friendly feedback that I received in Colorado, coupled with the intense atmospheric beauty really made me soar. I had renewed confidence when I got home, full to overflowing with ideas and audacity and with a newly expanded skill set. I couldn’t get into the studio fast enough to tear it all down and rebuild it into something more supportive, something evolved. After spending a few days creeping Kijiji for a suitable desk, a perfect one showed up in the garbage area behind our building, and Mike heroically got it up 2 flights of stairs, through the confusion-corner that is the hallway to the studio, and assembled for me as a surprise when I came home from work. I bought some casting equipment so that I could start reclaiming some of my sterling scrap to make new work. I got to know my new big torch better and experimented with drawing bezel wire on my own mill. And through all these experiments, this whirlwind, this chaos, some strong new work has been made and there is more underway.

I admit that sometimes I’m not very good at remembering that there are edges to the storm when I’m stuck in the middle of it. It’s been a long, flat low period, the last few months, but just as flat plains feed a gathering storm front, they are also instrumental in pushing the storm through. The last decade of doubt and timidity about publishing myself and my work, the last 10 months of hellish neighbours, the last 6 months of crap luck and kicks when we’re down…all flattened, blown away, as if by wind whipping down the mountains. With this new confidence, this new certainty, it’s easier for me to see each day as fresh and new now, even if it isn’t, really.

I’m eager now to just work at what I’m here to do. I’m glad to be able to share my perspective and my work here, and I’m absolutely thankful for any and all support be it reading my words, engaging with me here or on IG or irl, or purchasing my work to embellish your life in some way. The storm has passed, clear skies ahead. Thank you for holding fast.

[fishermariawo]

Can Keto Actually Work For Hard-Training Endurance or Power/Strength Athletes?

Keto is red hot these days, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Call it the latest dietary fad, but keep in mind a great insight Robb Wolf told Joe Rogan on his podcast: keto was “likely the default human metabolic state” over the past 2.5 million years of human evolution. Only with the extremely recent (on the evolutionary timeline) advent of civilization have we been stuffing our faces with carbs and snuffing out our magnificent ability to generate ketones as a clean-burning alternative fuel source to dietary carbohydrates. And we certainly were compelled to evolve a highly efficient mechanism to keep our high energy demand brains fueled with glucose or the glucose-like substitute of ketones at all times—for this was a matter of life or death in primal times. When our ancestors were starving, they needed to keep working hard, and concentrating hard, to find food!

The thought leaders and scientists in the keto scene have been establishing the case for keto very well: ketogenic eating really works for virtually everyone if you follow the correct approach. You can expect not only the efficient reduction of excess body fat, but a profound anti-inflammatory effect that can correct assorted autoimmune and inflammatory conditions; improved cognitive function and protection against the disturbingly prevalent conditions of cognitive decline (that are being increasingly connected to high carb, nutrient deficient diets); and assorted anti-aging benefits such as enhanced autophagy (the natural cellular detoxification process) and apoptosis (the programmed death of dysfunctional/pre-cancerous cells).

Keto has also been touted as potentially improving athletic performance for both endurance and strength/power efforts. However, this has become a matter of some dispute in the fitness world, as high calorie burning folks have a hard time embracing the idea that they can benefit from consuming fewer calories and rejecting the obsession with immediate refueling to restore glycogen after vigorous workouts. Today’s post will introduce you to the amazing Sami Inkinen, one of the world’s most accomplished endurance athletes who also has a high profile career as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Sami has taken keto experimentation to the extreme, and quantified everything beautifully to illustrate the amazing transformation that happens when you become a fat- and keto-adapted as an athlete.

The Keto Reset Diet goes into great detail about how keto can benefit endurance performacne by making athletes virtually bonk-proof—able to perform for hours on end with a dramatically reduced need for carbohydrates as a fuel source. Sami’s story is told in further detail in Primal Endurance and on his blog. Here, he has taken the time from his busy schedule to share some extensive thoughts on how you really can succeed in endurance sports while eating ketogenically, if you follow the correct approach.

Being fat- and keto-adapted is an obvious benefit for endurance, since endurance performance is predicated on being burning more fat and sparing glycogen. The benefits of keto for strength/power athletes is less logical, because high intensity, high glycolytic (high glucose burning) workouts would seem to beget carbohydrate consumption in order to recover and replenish glycogen-depleted muscles. However, keto pioneers in the power scene have discovered amazing results, which are being increasingly validated by science at places like the Applied Science and Performance Institute in Tampa, FL, with Ryan Lowery and Dr. Jacob Wilson. Luis Villasenor, the legendary “DarthLuiggi” in the keto scene, has followed a ketogenic diet as a competitive powerlifter and bodybuilder for some 16 years! Through his KetoGains.com program, he and his team have coached thousands of high intensity athletes to improved performance and improved body composition. Luis is a living, breathing example that you do not have to destroy your health with massive overconsumption of carbs and protein to maintain a bodybuilder physique.

We’ll hear more from Luis and others about how to utilize keto for high intensity performance in the future. Briefly, fasting and ketogenic eating have been shown to have a remarkable protein-sparing effect. It makes evolutionary sense that your body would initiate assorted mechanisms to preserve lean muscle mass when you are starving. Unfortunately, in the carbohydrate dependency paradigm, your body routinely converts lean muscle tissue into glucose via gluconeogenesis to meet your energy needs, especially for the brain (only two percent of body weight, but consuming 20-25 percent of total calories!)— a ravenous consumer of glucose. For carb dependent athletes who don’t remain constantly glycogen stocked, bad things happen with fatigue, delayed recovery, and loss of lean mass. This is why bodybuilders have been urged to eat their six small meals throughout the day and obsessively overconsume protein and carbs to spur growth. Luis and others have shattered this paradigm by getting big, strong, and lean in full keto mode.

Back to endurance, where for decades the conventional thinking was to carb load with your evening pasta feeds and morning cereal troughs, train super hard so you can go harder and longer without falling apart, and possibly train the body to store more glycogen (yes, it’s possible to a minor extent, but soon you will learn how irrelevant this is), and to stuff sugary drinks, gels, and cubes down your throat, hopefully without gagging. Finally, it was believed essential to stuff your face with more carbs immediately after workouts in the so-called “window of opportunity,” when your muscles can restock glycogen optimally.

We are in the age of a transformation in the endurance scene to the extent that I might boldly proclaim that the endurance champions of the future will possibly be full keto or at least cyclic keto to gain a performance and recovery boost. To date, our endurance champions have fueled their efforts with sugar and beige glop—my pet nickname for grains. Who can forget when Olympic swimming legend Michael Phelps’s diet was presented with great fanfare a decade ago as totalling 12,000 calories a day, featuring heaps of refined carbohydrates. Phelps later admitted to exaggeration, and readers at this site can appreciate the irony of his correction that he really only ate 8,000-10,000 calories…featuring heaps of refined carbohydrates. I still get giggles for a quip I wrote over 30 years ago in my first endurance training book relating to the prevailing ethos of the endurance community: “if the furnace is hot enough, anything will burn.” I related my impressive pre-race meal before my fastest marathon performance: a couple beers, a bag of frozen peas, and a half-gallon of rocky road ice cream—pretty much all that was available at my bachelor pad that night!

As our sophistication in training methods and health and nutrition science grows, we can all appreciate the destruction caused by eating garbage while pursuing ambitious fitness goals, especially when training patterns become chronic. The awakening is upon us, but unfortunately it seems like many athletes are stuck in the old paradigm. Sugary drinks, bars, and gels are still flying off the shelves, and the community as a whole is freely dispensing hall passes to each other and themselves to indulge in nutrient-deficient foods on account of their impressive workouts.

Sami and his mind blowing performances and self-experimentation results serve as a true inspiration for endurance enthusiasts to try something new with an informed and disciplined approach, and reap phenomenal benefits. Not just performance benefits (how about Sami moving his theoretical “time to bonk” value from 5.6 hours while carb dependent to 87 hours when fat adapted?!). Enjoy the following commentary from Sami, encouraging athletes to consider a ketogenic approach.

Traditional advice for endurance athletes is to “carb-load” and to consume enough carbohydrates before, during, and after a race for fuel through the entire event and for recovery. But what if I told you that you could run or ride your bike for longer without hitting the dreaded wall? What if I told you that you could even recover faster and improve your metabolic health? All of this is possible, but only if you throw out the advice we’ve all been given about carbohydrates and exercise.

There’s a different path when it comes to fueling our bodies—a ketogenic diet. Restricting carbohydrates and relying on most of your calories as fat induces a state of nutritional ketosis, meaning that your body will use fat—both dietary and body fat—as its primary source of fuel. Even the most lean athlete has tens of thousands of fat calories on hand, so it makes sense to use them! The key is knowing how.

Here are 3 of what I believe to be the most compelling reasons for an endurance athlete to make the switch from a high-carb to a high-fat nutrition plan:

1. You can become virtually bonk-proof

As athletes, we want to be our best and be able to compete at our best. We prepare for months or even years with training plans for both our performance and our nutrition in hopes that we leave our best out on the course. Despite our strongest efforts, many of us know it’s possible to get to a point during exercise when we ‘hit the wall,’ regardless of how well-trained and prepared we are going into an event.

‘Bonking’ or ‘hitting the wall’ typically occurs after about 2 ½ hours into continuous, hard exercise, which corresponds to when glycogen (glucose stores) is really low. When exactly this happens depends on how long and how hard you’re pushing, but when your body can no longer meet the energy demands, it is essentially an energy crisis for the brain. You’re fatigued, not able to think clearly, and if you’ve ever experienced this during an event, you know that it’s simply miserable.

Ever since I experienced my first bonk on my bike, I’ve tried to figure out how to make myself bonk-proof, and eventually realized that I couldn’t do this by simply adding more and more carbs to my nutrition plan. When we eat and train with carbs, our bodies rely on them, but we have a limited ability to store them with a capacity of only 500-600 grams of glycogen (glucose stores), or about 2,000 calories. I’d have to eat gels and bars every 30 minutes to extend the point at which I’d run out of energy, but the ability to eat and absorb that energy while exercising is limited. Alternatively, we have the ability to store nearly unlimited amounts of fat. Even a very lean and small (~120lbs) athlete with low 7% body fat still carries about 30,000 calories of fat. Imagine being able to use that during a race!

So I learned how to rely on fat instead and my brain can rely on ketones (that are produced from fat by the liver) for a nearly unlimited supply of fuel. I’ve essentially made myself bonk-proof, and with fat as my primary source of fuel, I don’t need to eat anything at two hours anymore. It’s literally a game-changer! But becoming a fat-adapted athlete takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Just like training for an Ironman doesn’t happen in a week or two, neither does training your body to more efficiently burn fat. Once you become adapted to nutritional ketosis, or keto-adapted, there are several benefits. You rely less on the limited amount of carbs your body has and can more easily and quickly rely on your body’s fat for fuel. You increase the rate at which you utilize fat and you no longer ‘hit the wall’ at 2 ½ hours into an endurance event, even if you don’t have food available. In fact, the recent FASTER study demonstrated that fat-adapted athletes oxidize (i.e. burn) fat at a rate more than twice that of high carb athletes, which means the body has a better ability to access its fat and oxidize it for fuel.

2. You can recover faster

Being a successful high-performing endurance athlete isn’t just about the moments when you are working out or competing. It is also about how quickly you recover so that you can resume your usual workout regimen. Most athletes are familiar with the inflammation, soreness and swelling that comes after any hard workout or race. While some inflammation is necessary to increase muscle strength and is part of recovery from exercise, too much inflammation can interfere with the body’s repair process. It’s a balancing act. Many athletes will try just about anything to reduce post-workout inflammation, from ice baths to taking anti-inflammatory medications to chugging beet juice.

The less pain and soreness you have post-workout, the sooner you can go hard in your workouts again, and the better you might perform in the next race. After fully adapting to nutritional ketosis, I felt (subjectively speaking) a lot less sore and got rid of frequent nagging things like inflamed achilles tendons following the same workouts—racing my wife up Mt. Tamalpais [A 2,500-foot peak in Marin County, CA—just North of San Francisco], while just as strenuous as the times I had done it as a high-carb athlete, didn’t leave me with the same muscle soreness in the days after. It turns out that ketones don’t just function as important energetic molecules, but they have positive effects on cellular processes as well. Studies show that a well-formulated ketogenic diet reduces inflammation levels. Furthermore, I can get right back on the bike the very next day, meaning that I can train more frequently and don’t need as many recovery days.

3.  Your health may not be what it appears

The appearance of physical health and “fitness” can hide serious medical issues. Even if you are fit, strong, and lean, you may not be metabolically healthy.

I had no idea that this was true for me until around 2011-2012. I became a triathlon world champion in my age group and found out that I was prediabetic and metabolically unhealthy—my glucose values were consistently way above healthy ranges. Despite my years of high-level endurance sports, strict performance diets that perfectly aligned with the dietary guidelines, and very low body fat, I was on my way to developing type 2 diabetes. I was shocked to find out that following the low fat and ‘quality’ high carb dietary recommendations had led me to the brink of diabetes, but I was also determined to dig myself out of this hole. Type 2 diabetes and prediabetes are typically treated with medications (and, for some people, eventually surgery), but I wanted to try fixing my metabolic health myself. If following the dietary guidelines had led me to prediabetes, I thought there might be a way to reverse prediabetes—perhaps even by following the opposite approach.

My deep dive into published research led me to realize that the high carb diet recommended for athletes instigated my prediabetes by constantly spiking my blood sugar, and that my intense, regular, high-volume exercise had not been enough to keep my blood sugars in control. It turns out you can’t exercise enough to outrun bad nutrition advice. After finding peer-reviewed clinical research demonstrating that a high-fat, moderate protein, and low-carb ketogenic diet could help me reverse my prediabetes, I completely changed my nutrition plan and started tracking my blood sugar and ketone levels. I was amazed at how useful the regular biomarker information was to tweaking my diet around my body’s individual response.  Everyone truly responds differently to the same foods based on genetic differences, and you never know for certain until you test regularly. By switching to a well-formulated ketogenic diet and a data-driven approach, I successfully reversed my prediabetes and improved my metabolic health across the board.

The bottom line is that sustained nutritional ketosis has allowed me to:

Increase my endurance capacity by providing me access to a larger fuel tank

Reduce post-workout inflammation and thus recovery time, increasing valuable training time

Reverse my prediabetes and improve my metabolic health

You can learn more about nutritional ketosis here in an FAQ by Dr. Stephen Phinney.

In Sami’s journey to becoming bonk proof, he painstakingly tracked his progress in repeated laboratory tests where he measured fuel substrate utilization while riding a stationary bike at a comfortable pace. The results as explained in this graph series (below) are astounding. Ditto for the details of the highly regarded FASTER Study, which compared the fat oxidation rates among elite ultramarathon runners who were on a low-carb, fat adapted diet to elite counterparts consuming a traditional high carbohydrate diet. Dr. Peter Attia, one of the most brilliant minds in the keto scene who now focuses on longevity medicine at his private practice in San Diego and New York City, has also chronicled his amazing transition from sugar burner to fat adapted cyclist at EatingAcademy.com. Attia went from burning 95 percent carbohydrate calories at anaerobic threshold to burning 25 percent carbs and 75 percent fat at the same threshold heart rate after a devoted period of dietary transformation. What’s more, Attia achieved an increase in wattage output at anaerobic threshold when fat adapted—in other words, he went faster on fat! This data shatters the notion that keto is only for long, slow endurance performance.

Take a look at Sami’s graphs from repeated performance tests in the Stanford laboratory, as he progressed from pre-diabetic sugar burning machine to a fat burning beast:

Graph 1 (above): Results of Sami Inkinen’s initial performance test from 2009. At 300 watts, he is burning almost all carbohydrates—destined to bonk after a couple hours, maybe three if he can slam down some gels en route.

Graph 2 (above): Sami’s second performance test at Stanford, coming off three months of devoted carb restriction and fat emphasis in the diet. Here, at 300 watts, Sami has doubled his fat oxidation to over 400 calories per hour, going from burning almost all carbs to about half carbs, half fat.

[watsonrodriquezie]

Can Keto Actually Work For Hard-Training Endurance or Power/Strength Athletes?

Keto is red hot these days, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Call it the latest dietary fad, but keep in mind a great insight Robb Wolf told Joe Rogan on his podcast: keto was “likely the default human metabolic state” over the past 2.5 million years of human evolution. Only with the extremely recent (on the evolutionary timeline) advent of civilization have we been stuffing our faces with carbs and snuffing out our magnificent ability to generate ketones as a clean-burning alternative fuel source to dietary carbohydrates. And we certainly were compelled to evolve a highly efficient mechanism to keep our high energy demand brains fueled with glucose or the glucose-like substitute of ketones at all times—for this was a matter of life or death in primal times. When our ancestors were starving, they needed to keep working hard, and concentrating hard, to find food!

The thought leaders and scientists in the keto scene have been establishing the case for keto very well: ketogenic eating really works for virtually everyone if you follow the correct approach. You can expect not only the efficient reduction of excess body fat, but a profound anti-inflammatory effect that can correct assorted autoimmune and inflammatory conditions; improved cognitive function and protection against the disturbingly prevalent conditions of cognitive decline (that are being increasingly connected to high carb, nutrient deficient diets); and assorted anti-aging benefits such as enhanced autophagy (the natural cellular detoxification process) and apoptosis (the programmed death of dysfunctional/pre-cancerous cells).

Keto has also been touted as potentially improving athletic performance for both endurance and strength/power efforts. However, this has become a matter of some dispute in the fitness world, as high calorie burning folks have a hard time embracing the idea that they can benefit from consuming fewer calories and rejecting the obsession with immediate refueling to restore glycogen after vigorous workouts. Today’s post will introduce you to the amazing Sami Inkinen, one of the world’s most accomplished endurance athletes who also has a high profile career as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Sami has taken keto experimentation to the extreme, and quantified everything beautifully to illustrate the amazing transformation that happens when you become a fat- and keto-adapted as an athlete.

The Keto Reset Diet goes into great detail about how keto can benefit endurance performacne by making athletes virtually bonk-proof—able to perform for hours on end with a dramatically reduced need for carbohydrates as a fuel source. Sami’s story is told in further detail in Primal Endurance and on his blog. Here, he has taken the time from his busy schedule to share some extensive thoughts on how you really can succeed in endurance sports while eating ketogenically, if you follow the correct approach.

Being fat- and keto-adapted is an obvious benefit for endurance, since endurance performance is predicated on being burning more fat and sparing glycogen. The benefits of keto for strength/power athletes is less logical, because high intensity, high glycolytic (high glucose burning) workouts would seem to beget carbohydrate consumption in order to recover and replenish glycogen-depleted muscles. However, keto pioneers in the power scene have discovered amazing results, which are being increasingly validated by science at places like the Applied Science and Performance Institute in Tampa, FL, with Ryan Lowery and Dr. Jacob Wilson. Luis Villasenor, the legendary “DarthLuiggi” in the keto scene, has followed a ketogenic diet as a competitive powerlifter and bodybuilder for some 16 years! Through his KetoGains.com program, he and his team have coached thousands of high intensity athletes to improved performance and improved body composition. Luis is a living, breathing example that you do not have to destroy your health with massive overconsumption of carbs and protein to maintain a bodybuilder physique.

We’ll hear more from Luis and others about how to utilize keto for high intensity performance in the future. Briefly, fasting and ketogenic eating have been shown to have a remarkable protein-sparing effect. It makes evolutionary sense that your body would initiate assorted mechanisms to preserve lean muscle mass when you are starving. Unfortunately, in the carbohydrate dependency paradigm, your body routinely converts lean muscle tissue into glucose via gluconeogenesis to meet your energy needs, especially for the brain (only two percent of body weight, but consuming 20-25 percent of total calories!)— a ravenous consumer of glucose. For carb dependent athletes who don’t remain constantly glycogen stocked, bad things happen with fatigue, delayed recovery, and loss of lean mass. This is why bodybuilders have been urged to eat their six small meals throughout the day and obsessively overconsume protein and carbs to spur growth. Luis and others have shattered this paradigm by getting big, strong, and lean in full keto mode.

Back to endurance, where for decades the conventional thinking was to carb load with your evening pasta feeds and morning cereal troughs, train super hard so you can go harder and longer without falling apart, and possibly train the body to store more glycogen (yes, it’s possible to a minor extent, but soon you will learn how irrelevant this is), and to stuff sugary drinks, gels, and cubes down your throat, hopefully without gagging. Finally, it was believed essential to stuff your face with more carbs immediately after workouts in the so-called “window of opportunity,” when your muscles can restock glycogen optimally.

We are in the age of a transformation in the endurance scene to the extent that I might boldly proclaim that the endurance champions of the future will possibly be full keto or at least cyclic keto to gain a performance and recovery boost. To date, our endurance champions have fueled their efforts with sugar and beige glop—my pet nickname for grains. Who can forget when Olympic swimming legend Michael Phelps’s diet was presented with great fanfare a decade ago as totalling 12,000 calories a day, featuring heaps of refined carbohydrates. Phelps later admitted to exaggeration, and readers at this site can appreciate the irony of his correction that he really only ate 8,000-10,000 calories…featuring heaps of refined carbohydrates. I still get giggles for a quip I wrote over 30 years ago in my first endurance training book relating to the prevailing ethos of the endurance community: “if the furnace is hot enough, anything will burn.” I related my impressive pre-race meal before my fastest marathon performance: a couple beers, a bag of frozen peas, and a half-gallon of rocky road ice cream—pretty much all that was available at my bachelor pad that night!

As our sophistication in training methods and health and nutrition science grows, we can all appreciate the destruction caused by eating garbage while pursuing ambitious fitness goals, especially when training patterns become chronic. The awakening is upon us, but unfortunately it seems like many athletes are stuck in the old paradigm. Sugary drinks, bars, and gels are still flying off the shelves, and the community as a whole is freely dispensing hall passes to each other and themselves to indulge in nutrient-deficient foods on account of their impressive workouts.

Sami and his mind blowing performances and self-experimentation results serve as a true inspiration for endurance enthusiasts to try something new with an informed and disciplined approach, and reap phenomenal benefits. Not just performance benefits (how about Sami moving his theoretical “time to bonk” value from 5.6 hours while carb dependent to 87 hours when fat adapted?!). Enjoy the following commentary from Sami, encouraging athletes to consider a ketogenic approach.

Traditional advice for endurance athletes is to “carb-load” and to consume enough carbohydrates before, during, and after a race for fuel through the entire event and for recovery. But what if I told you that you could run or ride your bike for longer without hitting the dreaded wall? What if I told you that you could even recover faster and improve your metabolic health? All of this is possible, but only if you throw out the advice we’ve all been given about carbohydrates and exercise.

There’s a different path when it comes to fueling our bodies—a ketogenic diet. Restricting carbohydrates and relying on most of your calories as fat induces a state of nutritional ketosis, meaning that your body will use fat—both dietary and body fat—as its primary source of fuel. Even the most lean athlete has tens of thousands of fat calories on hand, so it makes sense to use them! The key is knowing how.

Here are 3 of what I believe to be the most compelling reasons for an endurance athlete to make the switch from a high-carb to a high-fat nutrition plan:

1. You can become virtually bonk-proof

As athletes, we want to be our best and be able to compete at our best. We prepare for months or even years with training plans for both our performance and our nutrition in hopes that we leave our best out on the course. Despite our strongest efforts, many of us know it’s possible to get to a point during exercise when we ‘hit the wall,’ regardless of how well-trained and prepared we are going into an event.

‘Bonking’ or ‘hitting the wall’ typically occurs after about 2 ½ hours into continuous, hard exercise, which corresponds to when glycogen (glucose stores) is really low. When exactly this happens depends on how long and how hard you’re pushing, but when your body can no longer meet the energy demands, it is essentially an energy crisis for the brain. You’re fatigued, not able to think clearly, and if you’ve ever experienced this during an event, you know that it’s simply miserable.

Ever since I experienced my first bonk on my bike, I’ve tried to figure out how to make myself bonk-proof, and eventually realized that I couldn’t do this by simply adding more and more carbs to my nutrition plan. When we eat and train with carbs, our bodies rely on them, but we have a limited ability to store them with a capacity of only 500-600 grams of glycogen (glucose stores), or about 2,000 calories. I’d have to eat gels and bars every 30 minutes to extend the point at which I’d run out of energy, but the ability to eat and absorb that energy while exercising is limited. Alternatively, we have the ability to store nearly unlimited amounts of fat. Even a very lean and small (~120lbs) athlete with low 7% body fat still carries about 30,000 calories of fat. Imagine being able to use that during a race!

So I learned how to rely on fat instead and my brain can rely on ketones (that are produced from fat by the liver) for a nearly unlimited supply of fuel. I’ve essentially made myself bonk-proof, and with fat as my primary source of fuel, I don’t need to eat anything at two hours anymore. It’s literally a game-changer! But becoming a fat-adapted athlete takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Just like training for an Ironman doesn’t happen in a week or two, neither does training your body to more efficiently burn fat. Once you become adapted to nutritional ketosis, or keto-adapted, there are several benefits. You rely less on the limited amount of carbs your body has and can more easily and quickly rely on your body’s fat for fuel. You increase the rate at which you utilize fat and you no longer ‘hit the wall’ at 2 ½ hours into an endurance event, even if you don’t have food available. In fact, the recent FASTER study demonstrated that fat-adapted athletes oxidize (i.e. burn) fat at a rate more than twice that of high carb athletes, which means the body has a better ability to access its fat and oxidize it for fuel.

2. You can recover faster

Being a successful high-performing endurance athlete isn’t just about the moments when you are working out or competing. It is also about how quickly you recover so that you can resume your usual workout regimen. Most athletes are familiar with the inflammation, soreness and swelling that comes after any hard workout or race. While some inflammation is necessary to increase muscle strength and is part of recovery from exercise, too much inflammation can interfere with the body’s repair process. It’s a balancing act. Many athletes will try just about anything to reduce post-workout inflammation, from ice baths to taking anti-inflammatory medications to chugging beet juice.

The less pain and soreness you have post-workout, the sooner you can go hard in your workouts again, and the better you might perform in the next race. After fully adapting to nutritional ketosis, I felt (subjectively speaking) a lot less sore and got rid of frequent nagging things like inflamed achilles tendons following the same workouts—racing my wife up Mt. Tamalpais [A 2,500-foot peak in Marin County, CA—just North of San Francisco], while just as strenuous as the times I had done it as a high-carb athlete, didn’t leave me with the same muscle soreness in the days after. It turns out that ketones don’t just function as important energetic molecules, but they have positive effects on cellular processes as well. Studies show that a well-formulated ketogenic diet reduces inflammation levels. Furthermore, I can get right back on the bike the very next day, meaning that I can train more frequently and don’t need as many recovery days.

3.  Your health may not be what it appears

The appearance of physical health and “fitness” can hide serious medical issues. Even if you are fit, strong, and lean, you may not be metabolically healthy.

I had no idea that this was true for me until around 2011-2012. I became a triathlon world champion in my age group and found out that I was prediabetic and metabolically unhealthy—my glucose values were consistently way above healthy ranges. Despite my years of high-level endurance sports, strict performance diets that perfectly aligned with the dietary guidelines, and very low body fat, I was on my way to developing type 2 diabetes. I was shocked to find out that following the low fat and ‘quality’ high carb dietary recommendations had led me to the brink of diabetes, but I was also determined to dig myself out of this hole. Type 2 diabetes and prediabetes are typically treated with medications (and, for some people, eventually surgery), but I wanted to try fixing my metabolic health myself. If following the dietary guidelines had led me to prediabetes, I thought there might be a way to reverse prediabetes—perhaps even by following the opposite approach.

My deep dive into published research led me to realize that the high carb diet recommended for athletes instigated my prediabetes by constantly spiking my blood sugar, and that my intense, regular, high-volume exercise had not been enough to keep my blood sugars in control. It turns out you can’t exercise enough to outrun bad nutrition advice. After finding peer-reviewed clinical research demonstrating that a high-fat, moderate protein, and low-carb ketogenic diet could help me reverse my prediabetes, I completely changed my nutrition plan and started tracking my blood sugar and ketone levels. I was amazed at how useful the regular biomarker information was to tweaking my diet around my body’s individual response.  Everyone truly responds differently to the same foods based on genetic differences, and you never know for certain until you test regularly. By switching to a well-formulated ketogenic diet and a data-driven approach, I successfully reversed my prediabetes and improved my metabolic health across the board.

The bottom line is that sustained nutritional ketosis has allowed me to:

Increase my endurance capacity by providing me access to a larger fuel tank

Reduce post-workout inflammation and thus recovery time, increasing valuable training time

Reverse my prediabetes and improve my metabolic health

You can learn more about nutritional ketosis here in an FAQ by Dr. Stephen Phinney.

In Sami’s journey to becoming bonk proof, he painstakingly tracked his progress in repeated laboratory tests where he measured fuel substrate utilization while riding a stationary bike at a comfortable pace. The results as explained in this graph series (below) are astounding. Ditto for the details of the highly regarded FASTER Study, which compared the fat oxidation rates among elite ultramarathon runners who were on a low-carb, fat adapted diet to elite counterparts consuming a traditional high carbohydrate diet. Dr. Peter Attia, one of the most brilliant minds in the keto scene who now focuses on longevity medicine at his private practice in San Diego and New York City, has also chronicled his amazing transition from sugar burner to fat adapted cyclist at EatingAcademy.com. Attia went from burning 95 percent carbohydrate calories at anaerobic threshold to burning 25 percent carbs and 75 percent fat at the same threshold heart rate after a devoted period of dietary transformation. What’s more, Attia achieved an increase in wattage output at anaerobic threshold when fat adapted—in other words, he went faster on fat! This data shatters the notion that keto is only for long, slow endurance performance.

Take a look at Sami’s graphs from repeated performance tests in the Stanford laboratory, as he progressed from pre-diabetic sugar burning machine to a fat burning beast:

Graph 1 (above): Results of Sami Inkinen’s initial performance test from 2009. At 300 watts, he is burning almost all carbohydrates—destined to bonk after a couple hours, maybe three if he can slam down some gels en route.

Graph 2 (above): Sami’s second performance test at Stanford, coming off three months of devoted carb restriction and fat emphasis in the diet. Here, at 300 watts, Sami has doubled his fat oxidation to over 400 calories per hour, going from burning almost all carbs to about half carbs, half fat.

[cynthiamwashington]

Can Keto Actually Work For Hard-Training Endurance or Power/Strength Athletes?

Keto is red hot these days, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Call it the latest dietary fad, but keep in mind a great insight Robb Wolf told Joe Rogan on his podcast: keto was “likely the default human metabolic state” over the past 2.5 million years of human evolution. Only with the extremely recent (on the evolutionary timeline) advent of civilization have we been stuffing our faces with carbs and snuffing out our magnificent ability to generate ketones as a clean-burning alternative fuel source to dietary carbohydrates. And we certainly were compelled to evolve a highly efficient mechanism to keep our high energy demand brains fueled with glucose or the glucose-like substitute of ketones at all times—for this was a matter of life or death in primal times. When our ancestors were starving, they needed to keep working hard, and concentrating hard, to find food!

The thought leaders and scientists in the keto scene have been establishing the case for keto very well: ketogenic eating really works for virtually everyone if you follow the correct approach. You can expect not only the efficient reduction of excess body fat, but a profound anti-inflammatory effect that can correct assorted autoimmune and inflammatory conditions; improved cognitive function and protection against the disturbingly prevalent conditions of cognitive decline (that are being increasingly connected to high carb, nutrient deficient diets); and assorted anti-aging benefits such as enhanced autophagy (the natural cellular detoxification process) and apoptosis (the programmed death of dysfunctional/pre-cancerous cells).

Keto has also been touted as potentially improving athletic performance for both endurance and strength/power efforts. However, this has become a matter of some dispute in the fitness world, as high calorie burning folks have a hard time embracing the idea that they can benefit from consuming fewer calories and rejecting the obsession with immediate refueling to restore glycogen after vigorous workouts. Today’s post will introduce you to the amazing Sami Inkinen, one of the world’s most accomplished endurance athletes who also has a high profile career as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Sami has taken keto experimentation to the extreme, and quantified everything beautifully to illustrate the amazing transformation that happens when you become a fat- and keto-adapted as an athlete.

The Keto Reset Diet goes into great detail about how keto can benefit endurance performacne by making athletes virtually bonk-proof—able to perform for hours on end with a dramatically reduced need for carbohydrates as a fuel source. Sami’s story is told in further detail in Primal Endurance and on his blog. Here, he has taken the time from his busy schedule to share some extensive thoughts on how you really can succeed in endurance sports while eating ketogenically, if you follow the correct approach.

Being fat- and keto-adapted is an obvious benefit for endurance, since endurance performance is predicated on being burning more fat and sparing glycogen. The benefits of keto for strength/power athletes is less logical, because high intensity, high glycolytic (high glucose burning) workouts would seem to beget carbohydrate consumption in order to recover and replenish glycogen-depleted muscles. However, keto pioneers in the power scene have discovered amazing results, which are being increasingly validated by science at places like the Applied Science and Performance Institute in Tampa, FL, with Ryan Lowery and Dr. Jacob Wilson. Luis Villasenor, the legendary “DarthLuiggi” in the keto scene, has followed a ketogenic diet as a competitive powerlifter and bodybuilder for some 16 years! Through his KetoGains.com program, he and his team have coached thousands of high intensity athletes to improved performance and improved body composition. Luis is a living, breathing example that you do not have to destroy your health with massive overconsumption of carbs and protein to maintain a bodybuilder physique.

We’ll hear more from Luis and others about how to utilize keto for high intensity performance in the future. Briefly, fasting and ketogenic eating have been shown to have a remarkable protein-sparing effect. It makes evolutionary sense that your body would initiate assorted mechanisms to preserve lean muscle mass when you are starving. Unfortunately, in the carbohydrate dependency paradigm, your body routinely converts lean muscle tissue into glucose via gluconeogenesis to meet your energy needs, especially for the brain (only two percent of body weight, but consuming 20-25 percent of total calories!)— a ravenous consumer of glucose. For carb dependent athletes who don’t remain constantly glycogen stocked, bad things happen with fatigue, delayed recovery, and loss of lean mass. This is why bodybuilders have been urged to eat their six small meals throughout the day and obsessively overconsume protein and carbs to spur growth. Luis and others have shattered this paradigm by getting big, strong, and lean in full keto mode.

Back to endurance, where for decades the conventional thinking was to carb load with your evening pasta feeds and morning cereal troughs, train super hard so you can go harder and longer without falling apart, and possibly train the body to store more glycogen (yes, it’s possible to a minor extent, but soon you will learn how irrelevant this is), and to stuff sugary drinks, gels, and cubes down your throat, hopefully without gagging. Finally, it was believed essential to stuff your face with more carbs immediately after workouts in the so-called “window of opportunity,” when your muscles can restock glycogen optimally.

We are in the age of a transformation in the endurance scene to the extent that I might boldly proclaim that the endurance champions of the future will possibly be full keto or at least cyclic keto to gain a performance and recovery boost. To date, our endurance champions have fueled their efforts with sugar and beige glop—my pet nickname for grains. Who can forget when Olympic swimming legend Michael Phelps’s diet was presented with great fanfare a decade ago as totalling 12,000 calories a day, featuring heaps of refined carbohydrates. Phelps later admitted to exaggeration, and readers at this site can appreciate the irony of his correction that he really only ate 8,000-10,000 calories…featuring heaps of refined carbohydrates. I still get giggles for a quip I wrote over 30 years ago in my first endurance training book relating to the prevailing ethos of the endurance community: “if the furnace is hot enough, anything will burn.” I related my impressive pre-race meal before my fastest marathon performance: a couple beers, a bag of frozen peas, and a half-gallon of rocky road ice cream—pretty much all that was available at my bachelor pad that night!

As our sophistication in training methods and health and nutrition science grows, we can all appreciate the destruction caused by eating garbage while pursuing ambitious fitness goals, especially when training patterns become chronic. The awakening is upon us, but unfortunately it seems like many athletes are stuck in the old paradigm. Sugary drinks, bars, and gels are still flying off the shelves, and the community as a whole is freely dispensing hall passes to each other and themselves to indulge in nutrient-deficient foods on account of their impressive workouts.

Sami and his mind blowing performances and self-experimentation results serve as a true inspiration for endurance enthusiasts to try something new with an informed and disciplined approach, and reap phenomenal benefits. Not just performance benefits (how about Sami moving his theoretical “time to bonk” value from 5.6 hours while carb dependent to 87 hours when fat adapted?!). Enjoy the following commentary from Sami, encouraging athletes to consider a ketogenic approach.

Traditional advice for endurance athletes is to “carb-load” and to consume enough carbohydrates before, during, and after a race for fuel through the entire event and for recovery. But what if I told you that you could run or ride your bike for longer without hitting the dreaded wall? What if I told you that you could even recover faster and improve your metabolic health? All of this is possible, but only if you throw out the advice we’ve all been given about carbohydrates and exercise.

There’s a different path when it comes to fueling our bodies—a ketogenic diet. Restricting carbohydrates and relying on most of your calories as fat induces a state of nutritional ketosis, meaning that your body will use fat—both dietary and body fat—as its primary source of fuel. Even the most lean athlete has tens of thousands of fat calories on hand, so it makes sense to use them! The key is knowing how.

Here are 3 of what I believe to be the most compelling reasons for an endurance athlete to make the switch from a high-carb to a high-fat nutrition plan:

1. You can become virtually bonk-proof

As athletes, we want to be our best and be able to compete at our best. We prepare for months or even years with training plans for both our performance and our nutrition in hopes that we leave our best out on the course. Despite our strongest efforts, many of us know it’s possible to get to a point during exercise when we ‘hit the wall,’ regardless of how well-trained and prepared we are going into an event.

‘Bonking’ or ‘hitting the wall’ typically occurs after about 2 ½ hours into continuous, hard exercise, which corresponds to when glycogen (glucose stores) is really low. When exactly this happens depends on how long and how hard you’re pushing, but when your body can no longer meet the energy demands, it is essentially an energy crisis for the brain. You’re fatigued, not able to think clearly, and if you’ve ever experienced this during an event, you know that it’s simply miserable.

Ever since I experienced my first bonk on my bike, I’ve tried to figure out how to make myself bonk-proof, and eventually realized that I couldn’t do this by simply adding more and more carbs to my nutrition plan. When we eat and train with carbs, our bodies rely on them, but we have a limited ability to store them with a capacity of only 500-600 grams of glycogen (glucose stores), or about 2,000 calories. I’d have to eat gels and bars every 30 minutes to extend the point at which I’d run out of energy, but the ability to eat and absorb that energy while exercising is limited. Alternatively, we have the ability to store nearly unlimited amounts of fat. Even a very lean and small (~120lbs) athlete with low 7% body fat still carries about 30,000 calories of fat. Imagine being able to use that during a race!

So I learned how to rely on fat instead and my brain can rely on ketones (that are produced from fat by the liver) for a nearly unlimited supply of fuel. I’ve essentially made myself bonk-proof, and with fat as my primary source of fuel, I don’t need to eat anything at two hours anymore. It’s literally a game-changer! But becoming a fat-adapted athlete takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Just like training for an Ironman doesn’t happen in a week or two, neither does training your body to more efficiently burn fat. Once you become adapted to nutritional ketosis, or keto-adapted, there are several benefits. You rely less on the limited amount of carbs your body has and can more easily and quickly rely on your body’s fat for fuel. You increase the rate at which you utilize fat and you no longer ‘hit the wall’ at 2 ½ hours into an endurance event, even if you don’t have food available. In fact, the recent FASTER study demonstrated that fat-adapted athletes oxidize (i.e. burn) fat at a rate more than twice that of high carb athletes, which means the body has a better ability to access its fat and oxidize it for fuel.

2. You can recover faster

Being a successful high-performing endurance athlete isn’t just about the moments when you are working out or competing. It is also about how quickly you recover so that you can resume your usual workout regimen. Most athletes are familiar with the inflammation, soreness and swelling that comes after any hard workout or race. While some inflammation is necessary to increase muscle strength and is part of recovery from exercise, too much inflammation can interfere with the body’s repair process. It’s a balancing act. Many athletes will try just about anything to reduce post-workout inflammation, from ice baths to taking anti-inflammatory medications to chugging beet juice.

The less pain and soreness you have post-workout, the sooner you can go hard in your workouts again, and the better you might perform in the next race. After fully adapting to nutritional ketosis, I felt (subjectively speaking) a lot less sore and got rid of frequent nagging things like inflamed achilles tendons following the same workouts—racing my wife up Mt. Tamalpais [A 2,500-foot peak in Marin County, CA—just North of San Francisco], while just as strenuous as the times I had done it as a high-carb athlete, didn’t leave me with the same muscle soreness in the days after. It turns out that ketones don’t just function as important energetic molecules, but they have positive effects on cellular processes as well. Studies show that a well-formulated ketogenic diet reduces inflammation levels. Furthermore, I can get right back on the bike the very next day, meaning that I can train more frequently and don’t need as many recovery days.

3.  Your health may not be what it appears

The appearance of physical health and “fitness” can hide serious medical issues. Even if you are fit, strong, and lean, you may not be metabolically healthy.

I had no idea that this was true for me until around 2011-2012. I became a triathlon world champion in my age group and found out that I was prediabetic and metabolically unhealthy—my glucose values were consistently way above healthy ranges. Despite my years of high-level endurance sports, strict performance diets that perfectly aligned with the dietary guidelines, and very low body fat, I was on my way to developing type 2 diabetes. I was shocked to find out that following the low fat and ‘quality’ high carb dietary recommendations had led me to the brink of diabetes, but I was also determined to dig myself out of this hole. Type 2 diabetes and prediabetes are typically treated with medications (and, for some people, eventually surgery), but I wanted to try fixing my metabolic health myself. If following the dietary guidelines had led me to prediabetes, I thought there might be a way to reverse prediabetes—perhaps even by following the opposite approach.

My deep dive into published research led me to realize that the high carb diet recommended for athletes instigated my prediabetes by constantly spiking my blood sugar, and that my intense, regular, high-volume exercise had not been enough to keep my blood sugars in control. It turns out you can’t exercise enough to outrun bad nutrition advice. After finding peer-reviewed clinical research demonstrating that a high-fat, moderate protein, and low-carb ketogenic diet could help me reverse my prediabetes, I completely changed my nutrition plan and started tracking my blood sugar and ketone levels. I was amazed at how useful the regular biomarker information was to tweaking my diet around my body’s individual response.  Everyone truly responds differently to the same foods based on genetic differences, and you never know for certain until you test regularly. By switching to a well-formulated ketogenic diet and a data-driven approach, I successfully reversed my prediabetes and improved my metabolic health across the board.

The bottom line is that sustained nutritional ketosis has allowed me to:

Increase my endurance capacity by providing me access to a larger fuel tank

Reduce post-workout inflammation and thus recovery time, increasing valuable training time

Reverse my prediabetes and improve my metabolic health

You can learn more about nutritional ketosis here in an FAQ by Dr. Stephen Phinney.

In Sami’s journey to becoming bonk proof, he painstakingly tracked his progress in repeated laboratory tests where he measured fuel substrate utilization while riding a stationary bike at a comfortable pace. The results as explained in this graph series (below) are astounding. Ditto for the details of the highly regarded FASTER Study, which compared the fat oxidation rates among elite ultramarathon runners who were on a low-carb, fat adapted diet to elite counterparts consuming a traditional high carbohydrate diet. Dr. Peter Attia, one of the most brilliant minds in the keto scene who now focuses on longevity medicine at his private practice in San Diego and New York City, has also chronicled his amazing transition from sugar burner to fat adapted cyclist at EatingAcademy.com. Attia went from burning 95 percent carbohydrate calories at anaerobic threshold to burning 25 percent carbs and 75 percent fat at the same threshold heart rate after a devoted period of dietary transformation. What’s more, Attia achieved an increase in wattage output at anaerobic threshold when fat adapted—in other words, he went faster on fat! This data shatters the notion that keto is only for long, slow endurance performance.

Take a look at Sami’s graphs from repeated performance tests in the Stanford laboratory, as he progressed from pre-diabetic sugar burning machine to a fat burning beast:

Graph 1 (above): Results of Sami Inkinen’s initial performance test from 2009. At 300 watts, he is burning almost all carbohydrates—destined to bonk after a couple hours, maybe three if he can slam down some gels en route.

Graph 2 (above): Sami’s second performance test at Stanford, coming off three months of devoted carb restriction and fat emphasis in the diet. Here, at 300 watts, Sami has doubled his fat oxidation to over 400 calories per hour, going from burning almost all carbs to about half carbs, half fat.

Graph 3 (above): Sami’s third performance test, on the heels of his amazing Clydesdale-style Wildflower victory, where he beat some of the nations best amateurs despite carrying 200 pounds (due to preparing for an interesting trip to Hawaii—details follow.) Notice the fat utilization at low intensity of around 85 percent of total energy and 750 calories per hour—triple that of the levels he delivered on his first test!

Sami’s successful transition to fat adapted athlete tee’d up one of the most remarkable endurance performances you will ever hear about. He and his wife Meredith Loring rowed a small boat from San Francisco to Hawaii—2,400 miles in 45 days. In the process, they raised $300,000 for the Institute of Responsible Nutrition, an advocacy group headed by anti-sugar crusader Dr. Robert Lustig. Because their journey was unsupported, Sami and Meredith traveled with some one million calories—ultra low-carb, high-fat selections like dehydrated beef, salmon, and vegetables, along with fruit, nuts and olive oil. Sami also lost 26 pounds on the journey, indicating that a combination of ingested fat and stored fat were his main fuel sources. A feat like this completely reframes the carb paradigm that endurance athletes have long existed in, whereby sustained endurance efforts were highly dependent upon successfully ingesting and absorbing a steady stream of carbohydrate calories. No, there was no bonking allowed aboard a twenty-foot rowboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean! I don’t know how much more convincing you need to try ditching carb dependency and become fat adapted than this absolutely mind blowing data and enthusiastic message from Sami.

Check out our Primal Endurance Mastery Course to get the step-by-step guidance you need to achieve this objective without the high risk of backsliding and burnout that comes from an ill-advised approach. This online multimedia portal is the most comprehensive educational experience ever created for endurance athletes, with a robust video library of expert interviews as well as bite-sized video presentations that take you through the entire content of the Primal Endurance book. We also have a free sample video series so you know what your course experience will be like.

Note: After co-founding and selling the popular real estate website Trulia.com, Sami has embarked on a fantastic new venture as the CEO of Virta Health. They offer, “the first clinically-proven treatment to safely and sustainably reverse type 2 diabetes without the use of medications or surgery.” Their mission is to reverse Type-2 diabetes in 100 million people by 2025. Check out their cutting edge program.

Thanks for reading today, everybody. Let me know your thoughts below, and have a great week.

(function($) { $("#dfAcTNg").load("https://www.marksdailyapple.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=dfads_ajax_load_ads&groups=674&limit=1&orderby=random&order=ASC&container_id=&container_html=none&container_class=&ad_html=div&ad_class=&callback_function=&return_javascript=0&_block_id=dfAcTNg" ); })( jQuery );

Want to make fat loss easier? Try the Definitive Guide for Troubleshooting Weight Loss for free here.

The post Can Keto Actually Work For Hard-Training Endurance or Power/Strength Athletes? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Article source here:Marks’s Daily Apple