Getting On Track To Live Healthy & Strong

I don’t consider myself the model for health, strength, and performance.  However, I’m not trying to be, either.  What I can say, though, is that all three of those categories mean something to me and have played varied roles in my overall wellbeing throughout the years.  There have been times where I felt like my health was fine, but I wanted to get stronger or improve my stamina.  More recently, my focus has been on the health piece as I seek to fine tune the variables that affect how physically good or bad I feel.  Many men I have spoken with feel as though one or more of these three areas of physical wellness represents a challenge for them.  Likewise, I know several men that have made great progress in one or more of these areas and have wisdom to share. 

For me, I can sum up my health focus in a simple sentence.  I want to be healthy and fit so I can perform well at work and with my family, and be able to get through each day without feeling like crap. In my experience, there hasn’t been a single variable that I can put my finger on that I can say is the silver bullet to fix my health problems.  Granted, I have the challenge of managing a disease that dramatically affects my health, but even still I can say that the successes I have realized in health, strength and performance have come from making changes in nutrition, supplementation, and exercise. With nutrition, I try to identify the ingredients of the items I put into my body and limit anything God didn’t create. This means I try to avoid or severely limit foods with artificial ingredients, chemicals, sugar, and anything genetically modified. Why? Because I have come to experience how my body was not designed to process those things and, consequently, they make my body work harder at best and at worst, lower my immune system by causing inflammation. I am, by no means, perfect in this area, but it is certainly something I am doing better at today than I did 5 or 10 years ago. With supplementation, I have come to realize that I am not getting all the nutrients out of my food that my body needs to operate optimally.  That said, I supplement those nutrients with high quality supplements daily.  The mix has changed over the years, but certain items like Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and Vitamin K2 are a few that have been consistent.  Finally, there is the component of exercise. While this has helped me by increasing my metabolism, lowering my body fat, and adding muscle, I can definitively say that without putting effort into the first two areas of nutrition and supplementation, my efforts in exercise would not have been as impactful. 

This week, we will focus on health and I encourage anyone that has made progress in their health, strength, and/or performance to share what they have learned.  We should all recognize that one size doesn’t always fit all, but there is likely something to glean from each man’s progress.