In the last episode, Mimic Your Ancestors Before Eating, I suggest using what are currently being called ‘exercise snacks’. Today, it occurred to me that I might not have gone into enough detail and you might go just a little bit overboard with it. So today I'm going to clear that up for you.
Hey there. It’s me, Kore. And you're listening to Exercising Self-Control: From Fitness To Flourishing.
If you need to recap, check out that episode.
Broadly speaking, the idea is that you exercise two to three minutes just before you eat to tap into our evolutionary development of effort and then reward. So, instead of just eating whenever we feel hungry, we will earn our meal just like our ancestors used to. And that changes the relationship that we have with movement itself and the food that we're eating.
I gave you some suggestions: repetitions, exercises. What I forgot to mention is that you do not want to be doing this day after day and meal after meal at a level that makes you feel like that was an entire workout. The intensity shouldn't be too high.
Now, there's a method called Grease the Groove that was developed by Pavel Tsatsouline. He popularized kettlebell training in the West and is the founder of a company called Strong First, and it's a fitness education training company. And with Grease the Groove the idea is that you do sub-maximal sets of an exercise over the course of a day. From as few as three to four to as many as 10 plus, depending on obviously the exercise you're doing or the opportunities that you have to do the exercise.
Here's how Grease The Groove works.
You would pick one exercise and you would do this exercise, like I said, three, four, maybe even 10 plus times a day as frequently as four to six days during a week. And this would be on top of your normal workouts.
Now here's the interesting thing. The sets themselves would be at an intensity of maybe 40% to 70% of what you would normally be able to do at a maximum effort. So let's say that you can do 16 push-ups and that's with great form. Go all out. 16 push-ups; that's it. So if you're going to use Grease The Groove to become stronger with the push-ups every time you would do a set you would only do somewhere between six to as many as nine push-ups. That would be right around that 40% to 70%. I didn't whip out my calculator. If my math is off, you can call me on it. In between each of those sets, over the course of a day, it would be as little as maybe an hour or as much as three hours.
This type of training improves neuromuscular efficiency. It's not about building bigger muscles but it gets the nervous system to be more effective at recruiting muscle, the muscle cells themselves, for that particular movement. In this case, push-ups. So, to put it one way, you are actually increasing the skill of the exercise. In fact, Strong First, Pavel Tsatsouline's company, has the slogan: Strength Is A Skill.
This is the mentality that I would like you to have and use when you are doing those exercise snacks. So before you choose to eat you would do submaximal effort. Enough that you would still raise your heart rate perhaps but quite often when people think about a workout, they think about going all out. Maximum intensity. You'll see it often. It's popularized online; videos. People are sharing photos of their ‘sweat angels’ after they've sprawled on the floor. They gave it their all.
This is not an intensity level that you can maintain from workout to workout to workout. You need to approach those levels strategically. It's much wiser to practice the skill of exercise. The body will adapt even to sub-maximal efforts. You'll get fitter. And then there's a level at which you will then start to feel “This is too easy.” And then you can take it up a notch or two. It has to do with more about the body learning how to move efficiently and that neuromuscular adaptation.
I wanted to make that clear in regard to exercising before your meals and your snacks. If you do decide to use that method, which I hope you do.
You can imagine that the goal, again, thinking back to our ancestors, was not to run and run and run in order to become as fatigued as possible. It was to run fast enough but also in a way that could be maintained in order to catch up to the animal. The exercise that we do now is artificial. Most of us do not have physical enough jobs that we can maintain our health unless we choose to exercise. But chasing fatigue for fatigue's sake is not what we're trying to get to. We're trying to become efficient and effective in the movements.
We're always striving to use good form, excellent technique, and to train the skill of strength itself. You can consider exercise, the movement of the exercise that you're doing, as dance or a martial arts form or practicing shooting a basket or an archer aiming to hit the bullseye of a target. Those are skills.
When we become skilled we also avoid injury. Good technique helps us avoid hurting ourselves. No one wants to be in pain from exercise. We actually exercise to avoid physical pain. We become stronger; we become more flexible; we become more mobile. Think of those when you are exercising. Think of the skill that you're practicing and you want to master and become excellent at that skill.
I hope that clears that up. If you have any direct questions please do let me know.
That's it for today. Catch you next time.
