Hi T

So I gave the cold shower a try last week and lasted about 3.50 seconds.

Took your advice yesterday on taking deep breaths before going in and somehow managed 2 mins.

I'm trying to lose weight at the moment so am going to the Gym in the morning and will be trying the cold shower after my workout.
Question is. I usually like to go in the steam room after my first shower (cold one). Is this OK for the body? I understand the cold shock is good. Is it OK from going from 9ne extreme to another or do I run the risk of getting sick or something else?

Thanks for all the great content in the podcast!

Nope, it's all good. Alternating uncomfortable heat with uncomfortable cold is one of the best modalities that you can do for exercise recovery. The problem comes if you overdo it. So I should stick to just a couple rounds, at least at the beginning.

Terrence, I read about your views on nutrition and diets on your blog but they are a bit old. How does you diet look like now?

Where on my blog?

I just updated post #3, I think that is still the high-level view of how I feel about things at this point.

How did we get this far into the cold shower talk before Adam knew about the fat loss benefits? (I just listened to episode 404)

I want to be able to do more push-ups.

Yesterday I did a set every time I came back into my office -- maybe 7 or so throughout the day. Each set was to failure and then I did a couple of negatives.

I'm not sore today. Does this mean I didn't work hard enough?

Do I need to do multiple sets with shorter rests between? Work harder to do more reps (maybe I'm wussing out too easily?)?

I do the reps relatively slowly, maybe a 2 count up and a 3 count down. I don't lock out at the top and go nearly but not all the way down.

What you're doing (a set every time you come back to the office) is commonly called "greasing the groove", and I think it's great for ~90% of people. I used to do the same thing by installing a chinup bar in front of the bathroom and paying a chin-up "toll" every time I had to go in. So I love it.

JKoon is probably more qualified than me on this, but you don't mention how many reps you can do now, which is fairly important. Below ~10 reps you're mostly in the ATP cycle and above that you're hitting the lactic territory (where you're more likely to get sore). I would not however trade consistency for soreness. We don't really want to overdo this and then have to take 3 days off. Or worse, try to push past the soreness and develop some kind of shoulder/elbow injury.

I think if I were purely trying to optimize for number of pushups and had a regular office job, I'd try something like:
Monday: Lift heavy weights, 3 sets of 3 bench/squat/deadlift. Rest 5min, then one set pushups to failure
Tuesday: "Back to office" greasing the groove pushup sets
Wednesday: recovery/light aerobic day
Thursday: Same as Monday but 10-20% lighter weights. Rest 5min, then one set pushups to failure
Thursday: Same as Tuesday
Friday: Same as Wednesday
Saturday: Hardest day of the week, 3-5 sets of pushups to failure with good form, 3-5 minutes rest in between
Sunday: Complete rest day

So that's only one day of the week where we're going balls-out trying to hit a max effort on the thing we're trying to optimize for, which is maybe unintuitive but generally works the best for breaking through plateaus. The idea is to create a cascade effect that goes hard-medium-easy-hard-medium-easy so that you're pushing yourself but still allowing recovery.

You don't mention if you carry around any extra fat right now. If you do, you may wish to low-carb on the easy/rest days and only go higher-carb on the hard work days. Lighter weight = easier pushups. If you're already lean then feel free to suck down sweet potatoes, rice etc because doing a very high amount of pushups is very glycolytic.

Thanks -- especially for the 'grease the groove' stuff. I hadn't heard of that phrase before.

Hi Terrence,

I am trying out the cold shower thing, and I have a question I can't seem to find an answer for: is it okay to take a normal/hot shower after a couple minutes in a cold shower? Does doing so diminish the benefits of the cold shower? I can spend a couple minutes under cold water and it's exhilarating, but to actually clean myself and relax I find myself wanting to make the water hot first.

thanks for your help.

Yes, finishing hot will diminish the effects of a cold shower.

If you are feeling dirty, do the soap/hot water part first. Then blast the cold, and finish cold. Some people who are harder than me will not even towel off; they will just air dry for the maximum sustained cold length.

Terrence, any concern about doing the cold shower after a workout? If you do a 2 hour gym session and then half an hour on the bike (or track) for cardio, is this still your go-to shower? Just wondering about recovery benefits of warm water after hard workouts vs. this idea.

The current evidence is that doing the cold shower within 2 hours of a hard strength workout can cost you some of those gains, but there's been no evidence that this is the case for endurance type activities.

Do you think person should be eating until not wanting food anymore/to satiety or should a person follow some calorie guide. What if peson has history of being overweight or has somekind of other eating disorder? Do yourself follow your appetite?

Primarily to satiety but depends on individual goals obv. Some people can and should feel a little hungry once in a while to reset their metabolism/hormones. On the other hand someone who is really trying to gain weight will have to eat even when not hungry.

I eat until I feel full, primarily in the post-workout window. In the morning, I don't eat until I feel hungry, unless I'm planning on doing an intense training session.

thanks for cool thread

any thoughts on training plan for 46yo guy looking to lose another ~10 pounds of fat, stay healthy(i.e. maintain or grow a bit of muscle), and train BJJ ~3 days per week. I am down about 30 pounds in the last year and have been doing BJJ 3 times per week, and lifting twice a week. I have been keeping the lifting pretty minimal to save energy for recovery from BJJ. typical workout has been one day of warmups and heavy TGUs, and one day of weighted chins, weighted push ups, kettlebell squats for 2-3 sets of 10s.

any thoughts or suggestions ??

Reducing bodyfat almost always comes down to optimizing testosterone, lowering cortisol etc. So there's a lot of things to that, but the vast majority of them are sleep and nutrition. 8 hours of sleep in a pitch-black room. Avoiding grains, sugars, and omega-6 oils. Lots of walking. 1-2x/week weights is plenty, with an emphasis on higher weight/lower volume.

After that's taken care of we can get into the other testosterone "hacks" like fish oil, eating more dietary cholesterol (e.g. egg yolks) and yes, ice cold showers. But sleep/stress reduction/good food is going to get you there.

Terrence,

Earlier in the thread you mentioned avoiding Omega 6 and vegetable oils. I'm curious to know why? Since vegetable oils are off-limits (I usually cook with Grapeseed oil for higher heat) would you recommend only using regular olive oil, or perhaps extra virgin olive oil for cooking?

Lots of great information in this thread. Appreciate all that you and Jason have written.

Please, do not cook with grapeseed oil!! Grapeseed oil is mostly polyunsaturated fats (and mostly omega-6, which we'll get to in a second), which become oxidized when heated at high temperatures, and this a massive risk for cancer/mortality. In general, do not heat any oil that has the word "seed" or "flower" in it. (In fact if you poured all of these down the drain, you'd be just fine imo.) When cooking, stick with saturated fats: avocado oil, coconut oil, butter, or palm oil.

http://draxe.com/grapeseed-oil/

So on to your question about n6 oils. n6 isn't bad in itself but the ratio in the Western diet is totally messed up. Humans were evolved towards an omega 3:6 ratio of about 1:1 to 1:2, but estimates of the average US diet have it somewhere between 1:15 to 1:25 which is a huge factor towards cancer/heart disease. Seed/vegetable oils are mostly to blame for this, as they are much much cheaper than omega 3s and saturated fats. (Corn and soy being are of course heavily subsidized and so there's massive incentive for farmers to overproduce them, meaning they have to do something with it.) So the bottom line is that people have n3:6 ratios that are totally out of whack, even people who cook at home.

tl;dr:
Cook with: grass-fed butter, coconut oil, palm oil, avocado oil, macadamia oil
Eat at room temp (e.g. salads): olive oil, flaxseed oil, sesame seed oil, plus any of the above
Use to fix squeaky doors: Most of what isn't above, but specifically vegetable oil, canola oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil

More detail here: The Definitive Guide to Oils

*pours his big bottle of grapeseed oil down the drain*

TC, what are the health benefits of eating 100 McNuggets at a single sitting? Asking for a friend, obv.

I believe he's covered this already....

You'll probably die , so disease free forever

Hey, I found this thread while searching for something else. Seems old but still active, so I thought I'd mention as an additional resource there is an excellent 2p2 thread to ask beginner health and fitness questions here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/85...thread-639746/ Generally a subforum big on research and references... go figure, there are a bunch of nerds.

Additionally, several (and also several erstwhile) poker players have logs in that forum to provide feedback, advice, review of form on videoed lifts, support and of course trolling. K.

How would you explain that some people thrive on vegetarian diets?
I try all different diets and can't find a good one. There is always price of hunger I need to pay to keep slim. Do you think tha is price some people just need to pay? I listen to a few podcasts on nutrition a day and read a lot but for some reason your opinion makes it more clear what is right in the ocean of information.

Where do you get your information from besides robb wolf, ben greenfield?

There's a sense in which every diet "works", in the short term. This has actually been really well-documented. Everything from vegan/vegetarian, paleo, gluten-free, Zone, Atkins, low-fat, low-carb, juice-fastingyou name it. It kind of all works in the short term. The reason is because diets generally work on elimination. What happens is that when people make a commitment to not eat X, whatever X might be, they generally improve the quality of their food. They eat out less and prepare more food at home. They buy less processed/packaged food at the grocery store, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual diet.

One simple example is say pizza, whether out of the frozen food section or Domino's. Vegans won't eat it because of the cheese. Paleo won't eat it because of the bread. Low-fat won't eat it because of the fat content. Low-carb won't eat it because of the carb content. So whatever diet you're on, you end up substituting something that fits in the diet, which is almost certainly going to be healthier than the Domino's. Repeat this example over and over (ice cream, fast food, whatever) multiple times a day for three weeks and people are going to do better.

There are lots of other reasons why every diet works well in the short term. Placebo effect is a huge one. The fact that you think you're doing something well for yourself likely reduces stress, which will make the pounds come off. Additionally, people who go on diets often get social support from their peers/loved ones and those types of bonds are generally beneficial for lifestyle.

Yet another reason is that cycling off virtually everything is probably fine in the short term. We are creatures that are built to survive and in fact thrive to some extent with some scarcity. Ancestrally, if we found ourselves in a patch of land where it was hard to hunt, well, we became vegan for a few weeks. Similarly if we were in an arid area without much vegetation, we'd be low-carb meat eaters (or eat very little at all). If we stumbled into a patch of land where fruit was plentiful, we would probably gorge ourselves on that fruit for a while, until the seasons changed and the trees started producing. So you can see that elimination diets correspond in a way to this scarcity that we're adapted to, even if (and perhaps especially if) the thing that's being eliminated is fairly random/arbitrary. So again whether the diet is low-fat, low-carb, low-protein, low-sodium, gluten-free, vegan, or whatever, you're naturally cycling off some nutrients for a while which may lower digestive stress and create better well-being. So even the most devout meat eater will likely do well in the short term going vegan.

I do think in the long run vegans run up against a number of huge nutritional deficiencies. B12 is most commonly talked about but there's research that many people do not convert plant-based EPA/DHA well in their bodies. These are critical and there's no way around this because you'd have to eat an obscene amount of algae to get the amount of EPA/DHA (after conversion) you'd get from a couple fish oil caplets or a can of sardines.

As for being hungry all the time, no, you definitely shouldn't feel hungry all the time. You should feel hungry maybe a couple times a week. Try shifting ratios towards fat, as it tends to be more filling. Also something like a BCAA supplement may be useful on low-calorie days.