Vegan Goes Carnivore, Gets Healthy

Vegetarian diets aren't as healthy as most people assume.  John Nicholson shared his story of transformation with The Independent.

Two years later, we decided to stop eating meat because we used to see all the cattle taken away to the slaughterhouse and we were growing a lot of our own food anyway. That's where the adventure into vegetarianism, wholefoods and healthy eating started. 

People didn't really get us and I was considered a bit of a freak for my diet. But then in the mid-Eighties, copying American guidelines, the British government's healthy-eating advice changed and it started encouraging people to base their diets on carbohydrates rather than protein and fat. By the early Nineties, the whole "five-a-day" thing came into play and diets that included a lot less animal and saturated fat and even vegetarianism became the default healthy-eating advice.

From the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

There are a few points to make here.  First, note that government dietary recommendations changed (first in the US) in the late '70s and early '80s.  It just so happens that's when obesity rates began to skyrocket in the US.  Besides the chart to the right, you can also view a time progression that illustrates it even more vividly.  Is it a coincidence?  Possibly, but I don't think so.

Second, when one removes meat from ones diet, one has to make up the volume somehow.  Few "vegetarians" and "vegans" make up that volume with vegetables.  They make it up with grains.  Consequently, most "vegetarians" are actually "grainitarians".  The problem with basing ones diet on grains is that humans aren't designed to do so.  Our digestive systems can't extract a grain's full nutritional value, and grains aren't all that nutrient-dense in the first place, when compared to meat and veggies.  Plus, grains cause insulin spikes that lead to fat storage, and inflammation that leads to joint pain, digestive tract issues and even heart disease.  For a full list of issues with eating grains, follow this link.

Back to Mr Nicholson...

We were very smug about our lifestyle, which we thought was both healthy and morally correct.

Is anyone more sanctimonious than vegans?

But after about six or seven years of being vegetarian, we both started to get slowly and progressively more ill.  The first thing was I started to develop what was later defined as irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS.

Right on cue...

By 1998, it was absolutely chronic. I went to doctors but nobody had a clue what to do about it.... I became clinically obese. I’m 5ft 10in and at one point I was 15 stone [210 lb ~ OS]: quite an achievement on a wholefood, low-fat, (and by this point) vegan diet. On top of that I had one of the highest cholesterol levels that the doctor who took it had seen – 9.2 – and in 2001 they put me on statins.

Yep.  Multiple symptoms of excessive carbohydrate consumption, particularly grains.  Some people are more sensitive to it than others, of course, and Mr Nicholson is probably one of them.

I would take food diaries to the doctor, who would tell me everything was fantastic, and congratulate me on not eating butter, cream and cholesterol. When I asked doctors whether I should change my diet, they told me no.

Even doctors are subject to human failings, like following conventional wisdom despite all evidence to the contrary.

I felt upset to leave veganism behind and took some convincing. In the end, I thought I might as well give it a go. The first thing I ate as part of my new diet was ox liver, so I really threw myself in at the deep end.

Organ meats are some of the most nutritious stuff one can eat.

The second thing I ate that day was a rare steak. That was when I had a transformative experience.... After 24 hours, I never had another IBS episode again. It went overnight. 

I stopped filling my entire meals with carbohydrates – wheat, rice and potatoes – and introduced all meats, butter, cream, lard and goose fat.   

I dropped three and a half stone [49 lb ~ OS] within the first six months. And it wasn’t just weight; what was really freaky about it was that I dropped loads of body fat, going from 28 per cent to 13-14 per cent. In fact, the entire composition of my body changed so I went from being apple-shaped to triangular. And this wasn’t doing a new fitness regime, it was just a change in diet. Even my cholesterol has gone down (on a high-fat animal diet full of cholesterol!) and is now 5.1. I stopped taking statins three years ago.  

My new diet went against all the health advice at the time, which was pretty much eat less meat, fewer animal products, and eat more fruit, vegetables and wholegrain carbohydrates, but I’d never felt better.

Granted, not everyone's experience is as dramatic as Mr Nicholson's.  He's probably more sensitive to the effects of grains than most people, but everyone can benefit from a diet of meat, veggies, fruit, nuts and seeds, little starch and no sugar.

Eat Paleo for Your Teeth

Nice chops, Grok.  Who's your orthodontist?

We know that eating a diet rich in meats, vegetables, fruits and nuts is good for your heart and athletic performance, but now it turns out it's good for your teeth as well.

Prehistoric humans didn't have toothbrushes. They didn't have floss or toothpaste, and they certainly didn't have Listerine. Yet somehow, their mouths were a lot healthier than ours are today. 

"Hunter-gatherers had really good teeth," says Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. "[But] as soon as you get to farming populations, you see this massive change. Huge amounts of gum disease. And cavities start cropping up." 

In most "farming populations", most people eat a largely "vegetarian" (which is really "grainitarian") diet, as opposed to the meat-centric diet hunter-gatherers eat, because peasant farmers can't afford to eat meat, except for rare, special occasions.  The peasant farmers' grain-centric diet is high in simple carbohydrates, and low in protein and fat, as opposed to the high protein, high fat, low carbohydrate diets of hunter-gatherers.  What do all those simple carbs do to the teeth?

Cooper and his research team looked at calcified plaque on ancient teeth from 34 prehistoric human skeletons. What they found was that as our diets changed over time — shifting from meat, vegetables and nuts to carbohydrates and sugar — so too did the composition of bacteria in our mouths.

Not all oral bacteria are bad. In fact, many of these microbes help us by protecting against more dangerous pathogens.

However, the researchers found that as prehistoric humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming, certain types of disease-causing bacteria that were particularly efficient at using carbohydrates started to win out over other types of "friendly" bacteria in human mouths. The addition of processed flour and sugar during the Industrial Revolution only made matters worse.

As we already know, the problems caused by high carbohydrate, grain-centric diets aren't limited to the teeth.

"You're walking around with a permanent immune response, which is not a good thing," says Cooper. "It causes problems all over the place."

In addition to oral disease, those problems may include diabetes, obesity and even heart disease. 

This is yet another example of how "vegetarian" diets aren't nearly as healthy as they're cracked up to be. 

Gun Grabbers' War on Women

All last year we heard Leftists accuse those on the Right, and Republicans in particular, of conducting a "war on women".  The "thinking" goes that those of us who don't want to be forced to pay for others' contraceptives and abortions deny women's basic human right to never have to pay for their own contraceptives and abortions.

But let's think - and I mean actually think - about this.  The most basic of all human rights is the right to live, because one has to be alive to exercise any other right.  The right to live is spelled out in the Constitution of the United States.

No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

Note that life is the first on the list.  Why?  Because one can't exercise any of the others if one is dead.  Pretty simple, right?  If the right to live is the foundation of all other rights, it stands to reason that the second most basic human right is the right to defend ones life from those who threaten to violate ones right to live.

The right to self defense is not spelled out in the Constitution, probably because at the time it seemed to blindingly obvious that it wasn't necessary.  That is no longer the case, apparently.  However, the framers did include the most effective means by which a person can defend ones life.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The framers meant the 2nd Amendment as a last-ditch measure by which the states and the people could defend themselves from enemies, foreign and domestic.  However, by guaranteeing the individual's right to "keep (own) and bear (carry) Arms (firearms; i.e. guns)", the 2nd Amendment guarantees the individual's right to own and carry the most effective tools - guns - for defending him/herself from whomever might threaten his/her life.

The right to keep and bear arms, therefore, is the third most fundamental of all rights, because it supports ones right to defend ones right to live, without which all other rights are meaningless.

Though crucial for all humans, the right to bear arms is more important for women than men, because men are - on average - bigger and stronger than women and most criminals are men.  A gun can give a woman the power to defend herself from a rapist....



...or a violent home invader...

The woman was getting out of the shower when she was met by a strange man with a kitchen knife, police said.... 

The woman tried to fight the man off with a shower a rod, and he forced her into her bedroom, police said. They said she told her attacker she had money in the room. But she grabbed a .22-caliber handgun and shot the man nine times, police said. 

Police said the man ran out of a back door and collapsed in the yard. He later died at the Gwinnett Medical Center. The victim, who was injured in the scuffle, was also taken to the hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries.

...or defend her sister from a violent home invader.

Debi Keeney says she last fired her gun 15 years ago, when she took shooting lessons. 

Debi Keeney (right) and her sister Donna Carlyle

Keeney, 55, said a man forced his way into her apartment in Highland, threw her to the floor and then put her sister, Donna Carlyle, 47, in a choke hold. He demanded money as Carlyle gasped for air. 

“All I could see was Donna’s face going blue, like her life was being choked out of her,” said Keeney. 

The alleged intruder, 33, was being treated at a hospital Sunday for two gunshot wounds and was listed in critical condition, police said.

A gun can help a great-grandmother overpower two criminals.



A gun can even empower a little girl to defend herself from three criminals.



By the way, I freaking love that the gun she used to defend herself is pink!  Also, note that none of these women were particularly well trained.  Good training is always better, but the hoplophobes' (people with an irrational fear of armed citizens, i.e. gun grabbers) insistence that one has to be SWAT trained to successfully operate a gun in self defense is a lie (not that they'd let you own a gun even if you are "qualified").

But hoplophobes just don't see it that way.  They think you ladies simply don't possess the judgement necessary to even identify a threat, much less neutralize it with a gun.

It’s why we have call boxes, it’s why we have safe zones, it’s why we have the whistles. Because you just don’t know who you’re gonna be shooting at. And you don’t know if you feel like you’re gonna be raped, or if you feel like someone’s been following you around or if you feel like you’re in trouble when you may actually not be, that you pop out that gun and you pop … pop around at somebody.

Got that, ladies?  You're too stupid, flaky, paranoid and impulsive to be trusted with your own self defense.  That may come as a surprise to the following lady.

According to deputies, the woman says Sandoval grabbed a knife, put the knife to her chin and told her to take off her clothes. The woman told deputies she then reached under her pillow, grabbed a loaded gun and shot him. She fled from her home and called 911. 

Officials say Sandoval died at the scene.

Besides, according to "Liberal" blowhard, Bob Beckel, campus rape is a myth.



That might come as a surprise to Amanda Collins.

Amanda Collins is a young rape survivor. While in college in 2007, she was raped 50 feet away from the campus police department office at the University of Nevada-Reno and was lucky to get out alive. Her attacker was James Biela, a serial rapist who raped two other women and murdered another. He attacked her at gun point in a gun free zone. At the time of the attack, Collins was in possession of a concealed weapons permit but was not in possession of her firearm due to university policies prohibiting carrying concealed weapons on campus. She was also a second degree blackbelt at the time and walked to the parking garage with a large group of people. 

"If I had been carrying that night, two other rapes would have been prevented and a young life would have been saved...  I could see the police cruisers less than 50 feet away from me, from where I was being attacked but the moment I saw those cruisers, I knew at the same time that no one was coming for me....they were all off duty. The offices had closed. They weren't in their cruisers, there was no one there. A whistle wouldn't have gotten anybody's attention. It was isolated, it was late at night. It's really frustrating that I'm supposed to hand over my own protection to a man but they're not able to guarantee our protection and the comments that this representative made about women not knowing if they're going to be raped or accidentally shooting the wrong person was extremely offensive because he specifically targeted female students. So, is he saying that all women are unable to make sound decisions in the midst of that, that we should go against our God given gut instinct that something was wrong? I knew something was wrong the moment I was grabbed from behind." 

Red-tape and university policies led to this happening and empowered Biela while punishing Collins. 

"I was legislated into being a victim," Collins said.

Got that?  She was in a "gun-free", "safe zone" when serial rapist Biela raped her at gunpoint.  Boy, those "gun-free zones" sure prevent crime, don't they?  Just ask anyone in Chicago.

What advice would a hoplophobe give a potential rape victim on campus?

Be realistic about your ability to protect yourself.
Your instinct may be to scream, go ahead!  It may startle your attacker and give you an opportunity to run away.
Kick off your shoes if you have time and can’t run in them.
Don’t take time to look back; just get away.
If your life is in danger, passive resistance may be your best defense.
Tell your attacker that you have a disease or are menstruating.
Vomiting or urinating may also convince the attacker to leave you alone.
Yelling, hitting or biting may give you a chance to escape, do it!
Understand that some actions on your part might lead to more harm.
Remember, every emergency situation is different.  Only you can decide which action is most appropriate.  

Got that, ladies?  "Only you can decide which action is most appropriate", unless you decide using a gun is the most appropriate action to defend yourself, in which case, you're too mentally unstable to be trusted to make your own decisions.  Besides, urinating, defecating, menstruating, diseases and whistles are far superior defensive weapons than guns.  Everybody knows that.  Oh, and passive resistance, too.

A 36-year-old Miami mother of two was walking out of a restaurant Thursday when she was held up for her purse. CBS4 out of Miami reported even after she relinquished her bag, the robber still shot her in the face.

But those are just some morons in Colorado and an idiot on TV.  They don't represent "Liberals" in general, right?  Maybe they do.

“I said, ‘Jill, if there’s ever a problem, just walk out on the balcony here, walk out and put that double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house,’” Biden said. 

“You don’t need an AR-15—it’s harder to aim,” he added, “it’s harder to use, and in fact you don’t need 30 rounds to protect yourself. Buy a shotgun! Buy a shotgun!”

Not only is the VP's advice tactically unsound, it's illegal.

Garey said that under Biden's scenario, Jill Biden could be charged with aggravated menacing, a felony, and reckless endangering in the first degree.

But, more to the point of this blog post, the lady who asked him the question believes his answer was sexist.

“I think it was poor advice, and it comes off a little sexist,” Ernest added. “Like, ‘Let me tell you what you need’ versus, you know, ‘Arm yourself or protect yourself in a way that you feel necessary.’”

Here we go again.  Women just can't be trusted with an AR-15, which probably comes as a surprise to every woman who's ever served in the US Army and Marine Corps.  But, really, that's what it comes down to for all of us; "let me tell you what you need".  "Liberals" believe they know what you and I need better than you and I do.  What do you think?  Who knows better what you need; some politician somewhere, or you?

So, who's conducting the real "war on women"?  Nobody has the right to force anyone else to pay for their lifestyle choices, but unless a person has voluntarily relinquished their rights by committing a crime, every human being has the right to defend themselves.  "Liberals" want to take away a woman's best self defense tool, thereby violating her right to defend herself, thereby empowering anyone who wants to violate her.

"Liberals" are conducting the real war on women.

Gun Crimes Increase 89% in UK

How's that "gun control" working out for the UK?

The latest Government figures show that the total number of firearm offences in England and Wales has increased from 5,209 in 1998/99 to 9,865 last year  -  a rise of 89 per cent.  

In some parts of the country, the number of offences has increased more than five-fold.  

In eighteen police areas, gun crime at least doubled. 

The statistic will fuel fears that the police are struggling to contain gang-related violence, in which the carrying of a firearm has become increasingly common place. 

How can that be?  How could gun violence and "the carrying of a firearm" "become increasingly common place" in a country that declared itself a "gun-free zone"?  Isn't that what "gun control" is supposed to prevent?

At the same time, violent crime has dropped steadily in the US since its peak in 1991.  As I wrote recently...

the murder rate in the US was far lower in 2011 at 4.7/100,000 than its 1991 peak of 9.8/100,000.  

In other words, murder rates have decreased steadily since 1991, even though gun sales increased.

Still, there are millions of Americans who don't get it, and do things like make schools "gun free zones".  How's that working out?

Dressed in black fatigues and a military vest, a heavily armed man walked into a Connecticut elementary school Friday and opened fire, shattering the quiet of this southern New England town and leaving the nation reeling at the number of young lives lost. 

Within minutes, 26 people were dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School -- 20 of them children. Among the six adults killed were Dawn Hochsprung, the school's beloved principal, and school psychologist Mary Sherlach.

Once again, an evil, depraved person broke the law (surprise!) and took loaded guns into a "gun-free zone" and killed his defenseless victims at will and with zero opposition.

Young students described being ushered into bathrooms and closets by teachers as the first shots rang out. Janet Vollmer, a kindergarten teacher, locked her classroom doors, covered the windows and read a story to her 19 students to keep them calm.  

What if the government hadn't violated those teachers' Second Amendment rights?  What if at least one teacher had the ability to fight back?  How many of the people who are now dead would still be alive?

Glenn Reynolds highlights the insanity of "gun-free zone"-thinking.

"After a shooting spree," author William Burroughs once said, "they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it."

There are a lot of problems with this approach, but one of the most significant is this one: It doesn't work. One of the interesting characteristics of mass shootings is that they generally occur in places where firearms are banned: malls, schools, etc. That was the finding of a famous 1999 study by John Lott of the University of Maryland and William Landes of the University of Chicago, and it appears to have been borne out by experience since then as well. 

In a way, this is no surprise. If there's someone present with a gun when a mass shooting begins, the shooter is likely to be shot himself. And, in fact, many mass shootings — from the high school shooting by Luke Woodham in Pearl, Miss., to the New Life Church shooting in Colorado Springs, Colo., where an armed volunteer shot the attacker — have been terminated when someone retrieved a gun from a car or elsewhere and confronted the shooter. 

Policies making areas "gun free" provide a sense of safety to those who engage in magical thinking, but in practice, of course, killers aren't stopped by gun-free zones. As always, it's the honest people — the very ones you want to be armed — who tend to obey the law.

 Gosh.  Maybe "gun control" has nothing to do with preventing crime!

UPDATE: Psychiatrist, Dr. Keith Ablow, writes... 

One other thing:  Those who call for gun control after incidents like this contribute nothing to the solution.  Gunmen like Friday’s plan their actions, right down to wearing military garb.  They could certainly procure illegal firearms or use incendiary devices to kill.  I only wish the kindergarten teacher and principal in Connecticut had been armed.

I suspect that those who call for gun control after incidents like this don't actually want solutions.

Why We Home School (Continued)

Michigan's teachers apparently can't be bothered to teach their students (only 7% of Detroit's 8th graders read at grade level) but they do have time to protest Michigan's recent right to work law. 

Some 26,000 Michigan students did not attend school Tuesday after hundreds of teachers called out sick in protest of a right-to-work law that many fear will deliver a crippling blow to unions.

Because what's most important is the unions' power, not the kids' education.  Got it.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed the controversial bill into law Tuesday afternoon, hours after the Republican-controlled state House passed the legislation in a 58-51 vote.
........
The law makes it illegal to require nonunion employees to pay unions for negotiating contracts and other services.

And that's what makes the teachers so angry.  Naturally, people who deny parents the right to choose where their kids go to school also deny workers the right to choose whether or not to voluntarily pay union dues.

Then again, considering that these teachers can't even spell the governor's name correctly, maybe the students are better off without them.

But we're the crazy ones for home schooling.

Intensity vs. "Cardio"

For decades now, doctors and "fitness experts" have prescribed long, boring, low-intensity "cardio" workouts (running, swimming, cycling, elliptical machines, etc.) to people who need to lose fat as the most effective method of doing so.  I recently wrote about research that demonstrates that excessive endurance training is not only less effective than high-intensity conditioning at burning fat,  but can even be harmful to the heart.

Pepperdine University is studying the metabolic effects of CrossFit on the body, which no one has ever done before.  If the CrossFit Games weren't enough to convince you, now there is scientific evidence for the effectiveness of such training.  The following videos explain what goes on inside the body when we train at high intensity, and why that kind of training is more effective than "cardio" at burning fat.  If you don't have time to watch the whole thing, skip to 7:00 on the second video.

Running on Empty

Long distance runners know that their sport leads to all kinds of chronic overuse injuries: plantar faciitis, shin splints, iliotibial band syndrome, patellar tendinitis - the list goes on and on.  For some reason, they see this as normal, which makes zero sense, but I used to be one of them, so I guess I shouldn't judge (too harshly).

Now, it turns out that excessive endurance training (of any kind) can damage the heart.



World Triathlon Grand Final in Auckland, New Zealand

 Those two studies—presented at recent medical conferences—follow the publication in recent months and years of several other articles finding cardiac abnormalities in extreme athletes, including coronary artery calcification of a degree typically found in the utterly sedentary.

That's right.  Spend hours a day torturing yourself running, cycling and/or swimming, and your reward may be the heart health of a couch potato.

Opinion is nearly unanimous among cardiologists that endurance athletics significantly increases the risk of atrial fibrillation, an arrhythmia that is estimated to be the cause of one third of all strokes. "Chronic extreme exercise appears to cause excessive 'wear-and-tear' on the heart," the editorial says.

In case you think the doctors behind these studies are couch potatoes trying to justify their sedentary habits...

The most vocal proponent of cutting back for cardiac reasons is Dr. O'Keefe, a 56-year-old cardiologist and former elite athlete. From 1999 to 2004, he won outright the largest sprint distance triathlon in Kansas City, a testament not only to his athletic abilities but also to hours and hours of early- and late-hour training.

But a sense that this regimen was aging him prematurely, coupled with the mounting awareness of cardiac issues in extreme endurance athletes, prompted Dr. O'Keefe to slash his running to below 20 miles a week, never faster than eight minutes a mile.



American marathoner, Ryan Hall



This article surprised me.  I've known for years - from painful personal experience - the damage that excessive endurance training does to the muscles, joints and bones.  But I had no idea it also damaged the heart.  On reflection, however, I shouldn't have been surprised. 

When a person focuses exclusively on one component of fitness, all the others will decrease.  In other words, if you focus exclusively on endurance, your strength, power, agility, balance, etc. will inevitably suffer, which means your overall fitness will suffer.  Fitness and health aren't the same thing, but they're closely related.  It makes sense, then, that if your overall fitness suffers, your health will too.

This isn't even new information.

...for years the endurance-athletics movement has prompted words of caution from none other than Kenneth Cooper, the Dallas physician widely credited with launching the aerobics movement nearly half a century ago. "If you are running more than 15 miles a week, you are doing it for some reason other than health," said Dr. Cooper...

So, what  do Drs. O'Keefe and Lavine suggest?

• Avoid a daily routine of exhaustive strenuous exercise training for periods greater than one hour continuously. An ideal target might be not more than seven hours weekly of cumulative strenuous endurance ET.
• Once or twice weekly, perform high-intensity interval exercise training to improve or maintain peak aerobic fitness. This is more effective in improving overall fitness and peak aerobic capacity than is continuous aerobic exercise training, despite a much shorter total accumulated exercise time spent doing the interval workout.
• Incorporate cross training using stretching, for example, yoga, and strength training into the weekly exercise routine. This confers multi-faceted fitness and reduces the burden of cardiac work compared to a routine of daily long-distance endurance exercise training. 
• Avoid chronically competing in very long distance races, such as marathons, ultra-marathons, Ironman distance triathlons, 100-mile bicycle races, etc., especially after age 45 or 50.

At the same time, a recent study claims that strength training increases life and health.

CONCLUSION: Muscular strength is inversely and independently associated with death from all causes and cancer in men, even after adjusting for cardiorespiratory fitness and other potential confounders.

The good Drs. make more suggestions, and I can't say I completely agree with all of them, but let's summarize all these results.

Basically, what the results tell us is that a complete fitness program that trains all components of fitness, while using short, intense, interval workouts and lots of strength training, is best for fitness and long-term health.

Gosh, where have I heard that before?

Again, this shouldn't surprise anyone.  Humans aren't designed to specialize the way other animals are.  Think about it.  No human can swim like a dolphin, but we can swim, and dolphins can't run or climb.  No human can run as fast as a cheetah, but a cheetah overheats and dies if it attempts to run further than 800m (0.5 mile).  No human can climb a tree like a gorilla, but gorillas can't swim. 


American decathlete, Ashton Eaton


We're not designed to do any one thing extremely well.  We're designed to do many things tolerably well. 

In sports terms, we're designed to be decathletes, not distance runners or body builders.  Decathletes, by the nature of their sport, strive for complete fitness, because they compete in...

• 100m dash
• long jump
• shot put
• high jump
• 400m run
• 110m hurdles
• discus throw
• pole vault
• javelin throw
• 1500m run

Obviously, Olympic decathletes aren't just "tolerably" good at all those events.  They're world-class athletes in all those events.  They could probably qualify for the Olympic trials in each event, if they tried.  But Olympic decathletes, like all elite athletes, are genetic freaks, to which we ordinary folk should not compare ourselves.

So then, why do I say we're designed to be decathletes?  Olympic officials introduced the decathlon in 1904 to prove who was the fittest athlete in the world.  To that end, the ten events, together, test the athletes in all 10 components of fitness.

• Strength
• Power
• Speed
• Stamina
• Endurance
• Flexibility
• Agility
• Balance
• Coordination
• Accuracy

That is why the gold medal winning decathlete receives the title of "World's Greatest Athlete".  We should all train across all ten components of fitness, just as decathletes do, because that is what our bodies are designed to do.



Chad Mackay 



But that would take too much time, right?  If training for a pure endurance event requires hours of training per day, then training across all 10 components of fitness must require ten times as much time, right?

Wrong.

CrossFit's prescription of constantly varied functional movements performed at high intensity accomplishes that goal in just minutes a day.  Most CrossFit workouts train multiple components of fitness.  Some train all 10. 

What if you're an endurance athlete and don't want to give up your sport?  Try CrossFit Endurance.  If you follow their prescription, you'll run fewer total miles (preventing injury), improve all 10 components of fitness and spend less time training.  You don't have to be weak and frail, like your average endurance athlete, to excel at endurance.  The 2012 CrossFit games began with a triathlon.  Australian Chad Mackay won that event, despite being the heaviest athlete in the field.

Who looks fitter and healthier to you; marathoner Ryan Hall, or all-around athletes Ashton Eaton and Chad Mackay?

My purpose here is not to diminish the accomplishments of marathoners, ultramarathoners and triathletes.  My purpose is to inform the ordinary person who wants to be fitter and healthier that following that kind of training regimen will achieve neither health nor fitness.

Of course, some people will continue their chronic cardio ways regardless of the risk.

"Even if I knew for sure that running fast had an element of risk, I don't know that I would back down," said Foiles, the 56-year-old runner who lives in a Kansas City suburb. "To finish at the front of my age group, yeah, that's an inspiration."

But let's not pretend that they do it for their health.