High intensity interval training is an increasingly popular form of training that involves short bursts of very high intensity cardiovascular activity followed by very slow and relatively long rest intervals. The idea is that using this rather extreme yet short type of training will cause the body to gain similar cardiovascular benefits as to those gained from long relatively slow runs.
However, this type of training is something that shouldn't be undertaken lightly, especially for those who are just starting to train. While using a bike or other form of low / zero impact machine will have the benefit of reducing the amount of force exerted on the joints which can be problematic to those who are running, high intensity interval training will always place a large amount of stress on the heart. Therefore, it is a bad idea to undertake it if obese or suffering from any heart conditions.
To be entirely honest, HIIT or HIT really wouldn't be my thing personally. If I were ever in a situation where I was trying to lose weight, I would eat more vegetables (they leave you feeling fuller with less caloric consumption) and drink plenty of water (in the times of excess food intake we now find ourselves in, it is very easy to be dehydrated and not even realise it. Chronic dehydrated can manifest itself as a desire to eat more food, perhaps a useful adaptation to have when all food used to be very high in water, but with all the junk food around these days, this is more likely to be a problem than a treatment.) I would also eat my food very slowly as sometimes we can bolt our food down and this means our body doesn't have time to tell us we're full before a whole dinner is inside our stomachs.
So really, while it mightn't mean much coming from a perpetually skinny teenager, my advice for weight loss wouldn't be to try to eat less, it would just be to drink more water, eat more vegetables, and eat slowly. The best way to eat for maximal absorption is to put one mouthful of food in our mouths, then chew this down to a watery paste before eating anything else.
Saturday 17 May 2014
The Subconscious Mind
One of the things that I have been studying while taking a break from this blog is the subconscious mind. This is the part of the brain that is not under our conscious control. This means that we have little to no say in what is occurring. Things like our heart rate, blood pressure, and salivation would all be examples of functions that are carried out subconsciously. However, we can influence these things consciously and indirectly. Heart rate and blood pressure would be both increase if we listened to stimulating music for example, and if for whatever reason we wished to salivate, we could think about our favourite food when we are feeling hungry. But the actual process of increasing or decreasing these parameters is done by the subconscious, though we can place the necessary stimulus in our environment or ourselves in close enough proximity to the stimulus, or even imagine it within the confines of our own minds, and it will affect the subconscious' functioning.
Breathing is a good example of a function that is carried out by both the subconscious and conscious mind. If I were to tell you to start consciously controlling your breath, you could do it immediately and control each one as you pleased, yet it could just as easily keep on going without your slightest thought, if you were consciously absorbed in another activity.
Where this gets interesting for me however, is in our thoughts, feelings and emotions. If we are involved in a daydream about some past or future event (we cannot daydream of the present moment in front of us), then our subconscious mind takes over and replays existing beliefs and 'recordings' to any stimulus we presently encounter. What this means is that if you are an angry individual but do not wish to be so, then if you daydream of some other past or future event while doing housework or gardening etcetera, then you will probably get annoyed or upset if you drop something or for whatever reason if something you are doing "doesn't work out". This is because your subconscious is operating under the belief that if something goes wrong, then it should produce a response based on anger in that circumstance. The more present (conscious) that you are, the less your subconscious mind will take over the show. There are stories that I cannot verify the validity of regarding yogis or advanced meditators who are able to control otherwise unconscious / subconscious bodily functions, such as the passge of water through the digestive tract (they can move a column of water from left to right along their intestines) or control their heart beat to some extent or 'decide' whether to react to a loud noise instead of instinctively jumping in fright. Such people are also much more composed and much less likely to react subconsciously to any given situation. This is because they have trained themselves through many meditative practises to be fully present. I imagine that this would then allow their brain to re-wire itself in such a way as to give more power to the conscious mind, and less to the subconscious mind. If the aforementioned angry person were to be more like these people, then upon something going wrong, he would feel less angry, get over it much more easily and it would take more extreme circumstances to produce any such effect upon him.
The difficulty is in remaining conscious. I believe that each individual would like to be happy and feel fulfilled all the time and not engage in self-sabotaging acts. The question is; why is this not the case then if it is what everybody wants?
The trick is in the recordings I touched on above. The subconscious mind is estimated to be around 1 to 2 million times more powerful than the subconscious mind, which means it has much more oomph at its disposal. Any ordinary individual trying to experience positivity consciously while within an adverse circumstance has as much chance of remaining fully conscious as a wheelbarrow has of out-racing a Ferrari, if that wheelbarrow is being pulled by a dead cow... uphill. That's a little bit of an exaggeration, but my point remains, it isn't easy. I will cover this topic more fully in a later post though.
Breathing is a good example of a function that is carried out by both the subconscious and conscious mind. If I were to tell you to start consciously controlling your breath, you could do it immediately and control each one as you pleased, yet it could just as easily keep on going without your slightest thought, if you were consciously absorbed in another activity.
Where this gets interesting for me however, is in our thoughts, feelings and emotions. If we are involved in a daydream about some past or future event (we cannot daydream of the present moment in front of us), then our subconscious mind takes over and replays existing beliefs and 'recordings' to any stimulus we presently encounter. What this means is that if you are an angry individual but do not wish to be so, then if you daydream of some other past or future event while doing housework or gardening etcetera, then you will probably get annoyed or upset if you drop something or for whatever reason if something you are doing "doesn't work out". This is because your subconscious is operating under the belief that if something goes wrong, then it should produce a response based on anger in that circumstance. The more present (conscious) that you are, the less your subconscious mind will take over the show. There are stories that I cannot verify the validity of regarding yogis or advanced meditators who are able to control otherwise unconscious / subconscious bodily functions, such as the passge of water through the digestive tract (they can move a column of water from left to right along their intestines) or control their heart beat to some extent or 'decide' whether to react to a loud noise instead of instinctively jumping in fright. Such people are also much more composed and much less likely to react subconsciously to any given situation. This is because they have trained themselves through many meditative practises to be fully present. I imagine that this would then allow their brain to re-wire itself in such a way as to give more power to the conscious mind, and less to the subconscious mind. If the aforementioned angry person were to be more like these people, then upon something going wrong, he would feel less angry, get over it much more easily and it would take more extreme circumstances to produce any such effect upon him.
The difficulty is in remaining conscious. I believe that each individual would like to be happy and feel fulfilled all the time and not engage in self-sabotaging acts. The question is; why is this not the case then if it is what everybody wants?
The trick is in the recordings I touched on above. The subconscious mind is estimated to be around 1 to 2 million times more powerful than the subconscious mind, which means it has much more oomph at its disposal. Any ordinary individual trying to experience positivity consciously while within an adverse circumstance has as much chance of remaining fully conscious as a wheelbarrow has of out-racing a Ferrari, if that wheelbarrow is being pulled by a dead cow... uphill. That's a little bit of an exaggeration, but my point remains, it isn't easy. I will cover this topic more fully in a later post though.
Buteyko Update (May 2014)
So I haven't written in this blog for a while, but I have remembered it, for the one or two of you that view it each month.
I stuck with the principles of Buteyko breathing but forewent the breathing exercises. This means I continued to breathe through my nose at all times when awake and tried to sleep on my left side at night. I alsodid a lot of walking in these past few months and my CP is now around 22-25 seconds during the day (the length of time that I can comfortably hold my breath without any involuntary physical movement, for example, like stomach tensing inward or unconscious swallowing / throat movements). I have noticed that I usually feel more awake, have a better memory, and my extremities are much warmer these days.
I used to have very cold hands and feet, whenever the air was even slightly cold my hands would turn purple and get these orange-highlighter-type blotches all over them, it was kinda freaky, especially since it happened due to the slightest provocation. It wasn't like it had to be a cold day for this to happen at all, really just any sensation of cold would do it. Now, even when I do feel significantly cold, my hands will actually appear as though they belong to a human being, which I find rather comforting to be honest. My feet are still purple nearly all the time, but it is a much lighter shade, and I am confident that if I keep looking after my body and adhering to the principles of Buteyko breathing, that they too will improve.
The results I have had from this experiment could happen a lot faster, i.e. within a week or 2 if the person doing so was of a more healthy frame of health to begin with and also practised more diligently than I. I retained the unconscious training in the sense that I would automatically breathe through my nose and into my stomach and would immediately correct any mouth or chest breathing while I was awake. I feel that this is a beneficial practice to have in life because it stops one from falling to the lowest depths of breathing disorders. The worst thing you could do is constantly breathe in your mouth and into your chest, causing jaw joint dysfunction and unnecessary oxidative stress upon the respiratory system, not to mention the entire body which becomes fatigued by being forced to participate in such an inefficient exercise for many thousands of repetitions daily. It is such a small change to make just to get into the way of carrying out breathing in a more healthy manner, yet it can bring about very large differences.
I think that for me, I really need to be drinking more water, I notice now that I am almost always dehydrated and this will certainly affect the rate at which I breathe (more dehydrated = more minute ventilation (the amount of air breathed in and out per minute)). The smaller the amount of air you can tolerate breathing in each minute, the less effort breathing takes up for your body and less damage is done to your lungs and related tissue by the act of breathing in oxygen, which in itself is quite a damaging gas, albeit essential for life.
I stuck with the principles of Buteyko breathing but forewent the breathing exercises. This means I continued to breathe through my nose at all times when awake and tried to sleep on my left side at night. I alsodid a lot of walking in these past few months and my CP is now around 22-25 seconds during the day (the length of time that I can comfortably hold my breath without any involuntary physical movement, for example, like stomach tensing inward or unconscious swallowing / throat movements). I have noticed that I usually feel more awake, have a better memory, and my extremities are much warmer these days.
I used to have very cold hands and feet, whenever the air was even slightly cold my hands would turn purple and get these orange-highlighter-type blotches all over them, it was kinda freaky, especially since it happened due to the slightest provocation. It wasn't like it had to be a cold day for this to happen at all, really just any sensation of cold would do it. Now, even when I do feel significantly cold, my hands will actually appear as though they belong to a human being, which I find rather comforting to be honest. My feet are still purple nearly all the time, but it is a much lighter shade, and I am confident that if I keep looking after my body and adhering to the principles of Buteyko breathing, that they too will improve.
The results I have had from this experiment could happen a lot faster, i.e. within a week or 2 if the person doing so was of a more healthy frame of health to begin with and also practised more diligently than I. I retained the unconscious training in the sense that I would automatically breathe through my nose and into my stomach and would immediately correct any mouth or chest breathing while I was awake. I feel that this is a beneficial practice to have in life because it stops one from falling to the lowest depths of breathing disorders. The worst thing you could do is constantly breathe in your mouth and into your chest, causing jaw joint dysfunction and unnecessary oxidative stress upon the respiratory system, not to mention the entire body which becomes fatigued by being forced to participate in such an inefficient exercise for many thousands of repetitions daily. It is such a small change to make just to get into the way of carrying out breathing in a more healthy manner, yet it can bring about very large differences.
I think that for me, I really need to be drinking more water, I notice now that I am almost always dehydrated and this will certainly affect the rate at which I breathe (more dehydrated = more minute ventilation (the amount of air breathed in and out per minute)). The smaller the amount of air you can tolerate breathing in each minute, the less effort breathing takes up for your body and less damage is done to your lungs and related tissue by the act of breathing in oxygen, which in itself is quite a damaging gas, albeit essential for life.
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