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We’ve written about it here many times before: too much sitting will lead to hip and back pain.

Even if you’re not experiencing pain (yet), tight hip flexor muscles are certainly limiting your athletic performance. Not to mention increasing your risk for injury.

But at least some sitting is unavoidable for most of us. That doesn’t mean you have to just accept having tight hips and a sore back, though.

Instead, you can try using some of your couch time to your advantage. Let’s take a look.

A Soothing Hip Stretch From Your Couch

The “couch stretch” has become a favorite among athletes lately, especially in the world of Cross Fit. This may be partly influenced by Kelly Starrett and his popular MobilityWOD site.

It appears simple, but paying attention to certain details and nuances that will help you get more out of it. An article in California Strength sums it up nicely:

The Couch Stretch is a strong quad and hip flexor stretch that is familiar to many athletes.  Instead of just jumping in, let’s first review and focus on a number of cues to help you take advantage of the full effects of this stretch. When done properly, the couch stretch is highly effective for lengthening the quadriceps and hip flexors, but with the variation below using a bench will provide a more intense stretch as well as an external stretch for the shoulders.

The article goes on to describe a way to perform the couch stretch using a workout bench. But you can feel free to modify using – you guessed it – your couch.

Here are further instructions:

• Begin the movement by coming down onto your knee while placing the top of your foot flat against the top of the bench. The knee should be in a straight line with the front edge of the bench.
• On the inhale, place your hands on the bench and press down with your front foot.
• On the exhale, press the knee into the ground while pressing your hip forward. Pressing the hip forward will engage the hip flexor stretch and intensify the quadricep stretch.
• On the inhale, place your hands on the bench, knuckles facing forward.
• On the exhale, push your hands into the bench while pulling your shoulders back (into external rotation). Think about pressing your shoulder blades together.
• With each exhale, deepen the quad stretch by pressing your hip and thigh forward.

See the entire article here.

If you want a visual demonstration, here is their accompanying video:

To modify this stretch for your couch instead of a bench, simply use your couch in the same way she uses the bench in the video above. We recommend getting a cushion to go under your resting leg in order to prevent knee pain.

Benefits of the Couch Hip Flexor Stretch

Stretches like this one help correct one of the most common imbalances in today’s world: a tight anterior muscle chain.

Injury prevention guru Rick Kaselj has been preaching the importance of opening up your hip flexors, and even has a simple program for effectively stretching and mobilizing them (you can read more about it in our review). According to him, not only will you reduce injury risk and improve athletic performance, but you might experience decreased anxiety and even improved sexual performance.

With that in mind, there’s no reason not to spend a couple minutes during your evening couch time working on opening up this critical muscle group.

Did your New Year’s resolution fall by the wayside?

Well it’s not too late to begin a new, empowering habit. A simple yoga practice could be just what you’re looking for.

It doesn’t matter how old you are or what kind of shape you’re in. You can find the right program for you and modify it to your ability.

But a yoga studio might not be the answer. There are a number of reasons why yoga studios aren’t for everybody.

On the other hand, practicing yoga from the comfort of your own home might be perfect for you. Whether you’re a complete beginner or you’ve been practicing for years, you can easily make a home yoga practice work.

To help you get started, I’ve browsed the web for advice from some of the most popular yoga blogs and experts.

Your Home Yoga Practice

There’s no right or wrong way to practice at home. But no matter what, it starts with your commitment to doing it.

That means finding the time. Kate Hanley writes in Yoga International about making time for your practice:

To build a consistent home practice, you need to carve out space for it—metaphorically as well as literally. Perhaps the biggest challenge is finding the time. In order for Pearce-Hayden to keep her home practice alive, she says, “I can’t allow myself to be swayed by the anxiety that nearly always pops up that I can’t afford to take any time away from getting things done.” Taking even a little bit of time to practice grounds you and inspires you, so that when you return to your to-do list, you are more focused and productive. “I’ve come to realize that when I give myself 10 or 15 minutes, the rest of my day feels more spacious,” she says.

This passage is from a longer article about beginning a home yoga practice. As you can see, even a brief window is all you need to get the benefits of practicing.

Now that you’ve made the time, you need to pick the right place. A quiet spot is essential. Esther Eckhart from Ekhart Yoga writes about it here:

Try and find a spot where it’s peaceful and quiet, with as much space around you as possible. An empty piece of wall can be handy too since the wall is a great prop. If you like, it can be nice and even helpful to create some atmosphere with a candle or an incense stick.

Things like candles and incense are just extras, and by no means necessary to practise yoga. You can do yoga anywhere as long as you have enough space around you without the risk of bumping into tables, chairs, etc.

Full article originally published here.

You may need at least one pice of equipment, though, and that is a yoga mat. Although you could achieve many postures without one, they help quite a bit and can even be found for cheap online.

Guided or Self-Directed?

After making time and space to practice, you need to decide what to do. As I said earlier, there’s no rule here.

If you’re a beginner, following an instructor will be necessary. Don’t try to make it up as you go if you don’t know any yoga poses.

You can watch all kinds of different yoga instructors on YouTube. Or you can get a more structured coaching program like the one we review here.

Once you become a little more advanced, you’ll find a lot of benefit in doing a self-directed yoga flow. This is ideal since you may need different things from your practice at different times. As Meagan McCrary and Mary Jo Cameron write for Gaiam:

If you are fatigued, you may want to do a more restorative yoga sequence. If you’re feeling energetic, a more flowing, fast-paced or rigorous set of yoga poses may feel more satisfying or help you channel that energy. Many like to do an energizing yoga practice in the morning and a calming restorative practice in the evening.

Full article here.

If you’re used to taking classes from an instructor, a self-guided sequence might seem disorienting at first. But you’ll quickly get used to it as a part of your practice.

What types of poses should you work into your practice? Here’s what the article recommends later on:

Sun salutations are a time-efficient way of practicing yoga because they thread together poses that involve different parts of the body. Sun salutes are also commonly practiced as a warm-up, followed by standing poses such as Warrior I, II and II — and ending with forward bends, twists and restorative poses.

As you advance, you may want to move into more challenging intermediate and advanced yoga poses such as arm balances, inversions and backbends.

Read the entire article here.

All in all, a home yoga practice is a great way to improve your health and enrich your life. The barrier to entry is low, so if you’re not already doing it there’s no reason you can’t start today!

You’re probably not digesting your food enough. Most people aren’t.

We hear so much about proper dieting, but we hardly ever hear about how to digest better. The focus is always on which foods to eat and when.

But in the eyes of many functional medicine experts, poor digestion is one of the main culprits underlying a lot of modern health problems. Here’s the good news: you can easily fix this issue.

The Problem With Poor Digestion

The whole point of eating food is to absorb it and let it nourish our bodies. But when food isn’t properly digested it can muck up the gears for a lot of natural biological processes.

Poor nutrition is one of the obvious results of incomplete digestion. Our digestive systems are specially made to absorb the maximum amount of nutrition from food. When chunks of food speed through our system too quickly we miss out on all the benefits.

Another problem is something we’ve all experienced: indigestion. Whether it’s gas, bloating, heartburn or worse, we all know how uncomfortable and embarrassing indigestion can be.

Wasting Too Much Energy

Our bodies use quite a bit of energy digesting meals. This is normal.

But we make things harder for ourselves by eating the wrong foods, eating too quickly, and failing to replenish our digestive enzymes. So our bodies have to work extra hard to digest, which uses up a lot of our precious energy.

Harming Your ‘Second Brain’?

Gut health is a concept that’s received a lot of attention lately (and for good reason). We’ve learned that a healthy gut helps not only digestion, but our overall health and well being.

Don’t just take my word for it. This article from Johns Hopkins Medicine describes the importance of gut health:

If you’ve ever “gone with your gut” to make a decision or felt “butterflies in your stomach” when nervous, you’re likely getting signals from an unexpected source: your second brain.  Hidden in the walls of the digestive system, this “brain in your gut” is revolutionizing medicine’s understanding of the links between digestion, mood, health and even the way you think.

Scientists call this little brain the enteric nervous system (ENS). And it’s not so little. The ENS is two thin layers of more than 100 million nerve cells lining your gastrointestinal tract from esophagus to rectum.

What Does Your Gut’s Brain Control?

Unlike the big brain in your skull, the ENS can’t balance your checkbook or compose a love note. “Its main role is controlling digestion, from swallowing to the release of enzymes that break down food to the control of blood flow that helps with nutrient absorption to elimination,” explains Jay Pasricha, M.D., director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Neurogastroenterology, whose research on the enteric nervous system has garnered international attention. “The enteric nervous system doesn’t seem capable of thought as we know it, but it communicates back and forth with our big brain—with profound results.”

Read the full article here.

As the article explains, a healthy gut is critical for maintaining a positive mood and good overall health.

Incomplete Digestion Limits Your Athleticism

Given what we’ve covered so far, it makes sense that poor digestion will hamper your goals in the gym.

Athletes pay a lot of attention to the amount of protein and other macronutrients that consume. But those amounts aren’t meaningful if they aren’t digesting them. What’s the point of drinking so much protein powder if it’s just going to sit there in your intestines and rot?

This is something that vegan bodybuilder Wade Lightheart has been advocating for a while now. He says that consuming a lot of protein without digesting it properly will not only deprive you of muscle fuel, but it can actually increase your risk for disease over the long term. In fact he is the creator of the Masszymes enzyme supplement, which we have written about before.

Although enzyme supplements can help solve the problem, they aren’t the only solution.

Easy Ways To Improve Your Digestion Today

For most people, poor digestion is a result of bad habits and bad food. Of course you should always consult your doctor if you suspect you have a unique situation, but otherwise these fixes should help considerably.

1. Chew Your Food More

How many times do you chew before you swallow food? Chances are it’s not enough.

Our saliva contains amylase proteins which are the first step in breaking down food. If we rush through this step, we send incompletely digested chunks of food down our esophagus and miss out on a lot of nutrient absorption.

Try chewing at least 30 times before swallowing. If this doesn’t sound like a lot, count how many times you actually chew next time you eat. I can almost guarantee it’s far less than that.

By the way, chewing doesn’t only apply to solid foods. When you drink smoothies, take some time to “chew” the drink in your mouth before you swallow it. Those salivary amylases need to work their magic on liquid food, too.

2. Eat More Digestible Foods

Again, another seemingly obvious tip that we usually ignore. Processed foods lack natural enzymes and often contain ingredients that we aren’t evolved to digest well.

You also need to pay attention to the probiotics and prebiotics in our foods. What does that mean? Here’s what Fitness Magazine has to say about it:

Consume more fiber from fruit and veggies and cut back on processed foods, animal protein, and simple sugars, all of which feed harmful bacteria and contribute to obesity and disease, says Carolyn Snyder, RD, a dietitian at the Cleveland Clinic. Choose foods that have the fewest ingredients listed on their labels, and chow down on those that contain probiotics (including milk, sauerkraut, and yogurt) and prebiotics, which are certain nondigestible ingredients (found in high-fiber fruit like bananas; whole grains, such as barley and rye; and vegetables like onions and tomatoes) that act as fertilizer for the probiotics in our guts.

Full article published here.

If you’re wondering whether a certain food is easily digestible, a good rule-of-thumb is that the foods we typically consider healthy are also going to be gut-friendly.

3. Enzyme Supplements

By simply chewing more and choosing better foods, you can eliminate a lot of digestive problems. But taking a good digestive enzyme supplement is a safe and easy way to help even further.

Dr. Joseph Mercola, a renowned expert in natural health, provides some helpful guidance on this issue:

If you suffer from occasional bloating, minor abdominal discomfort and/or occasional constipation and suspect your enzyme production is low, you might want to consider a digestive enzyme supplement in addition to eating more of your foods raw.

Keep in mind that digestive enzymes should be taken WITH a meal, whereas systemic enzymes, taken for other health reasons, are taken between meals (see following section). There are hundreds of digestive enzymes on the market. Ideally, look for an enzyme formula with the following characteristics:

• It should contain a mixture of different types of enzymes, to help digest all of the different components of your diet (including lipase, protease and amylase)
• The ingredients should be high-quality, all-natural and free of allergens and additives
• The supplement should be labeled as to the enzymatic strength of each ingredient, not just its weight
• It should be made by a reputable company with rigorous quality control and testing for potency

Read the full article here.

The full article is worth reading because he describes these issues in a lot of detail.

In Conclusion

It should be clear by now that proper digestion is critical to your health and fitness. And fixing it can be done easily, without expensive treatments or special diets.

Old habits are hard to break, but by implementing these suggestions little by little into your daily life, you will start to see major improvements in the way you feel.

When you picture a vegetarian or vegan, you might picture some skinny person wearing birkenstocks. That’s been the stereotype for a long time now, and it still persists today.

Well tell that to world-class vegan body builders like Torre Washington. Or fitness moguls like Mike Mahler and Brendan Brazier, or professional cyclist Molly Cameron. I could go on and on about how many dominant athletes follow plant-based diets, but I think you get my point!

In fact, there is some evidence that suggests a plant-based diet is the most healthy and efficient way to get lean and muscular.

Plant-Based Diet Myths Busted

There are a lot of myths out there regarding plant-based diets. (And for simplicity, let’s focus on strictly vegan diets that exclude all animal products including dairy and eggs.) Even though they’ve mostly been debunked, they still persist among athletes and bodybuilders today.

Myth #1: Plant-Based Means Low Protein

One of the most common questions vegans and vegetarians get is: how do you get your protein?

Setting aside the question of how much protein we actually need to grow muscle (more on that later), let’s look at the facts:

• There is virtually an unlimited number of plant-based sources of protein
• Plant foods that are rich in protein tend to also be rich in other essential nutrients
• More and more protein supplements are vegan if you’re still not getting enough

A diet rich in lentils, beans, quinoa, nuts, hemp, and tempeh will give you more than enough protein to pack on muscle. A cup of lentils contains about 18 grams of protein. Combine that with a cup of cooked quinoa (~8 grams of protein) and you’ve got an incredibly protein-rich lunch.

But some will say: That’s still not as much protein as chicken breast! True. But do you really need to take in 30-50 grams of protein each meal?

Myth #2: You Need To Eat Tons of Protein To Build Muscle

This might be the most stubborn muscle-building myth of all. Visit most bodybuilding forums and you’ll see claims like “You need to eat 1.5 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight.”

These claims are almost always based on anecdote and not real evidence. A person might build muscle while eating 200+ grams of protein every day, but that doesn’t mean they built muscle because of all that protein.

So how much protein do you actually need in order to build muscle?

According to Robert Cheeke, vegan bodybuilder and author of Shred It!, only 10-15% of your total macronutrients should be protein. This breaks down to around 0.5 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight – much less than what typical gym-goers say you should eat.

Myth #3: Plant Protein Is Incomplete

This is simply false.

It’s true that you need to get all of our essential amino acids if you want to build muscle, but you don’t need meat and eggs for that. The American Heart Association studied this over a decade ago and concluded that plants can indeed give you all the amino acids you need.

Myth #4: Plant-Based Meals Are Tasteless And Boring

Wrong again! Of course this is a matter of opinion, but suffice it to say that vegans eat a lot more than just tofu and salad. Popular books like the Forks Over Knives Cookbook or The Thrive Diet provide tons of unique ways to make vegan food delicious.

Myth #5: Vegans Become Too Deficient In Iron and B-12

It’s true that most people get their iron and vitamin B-12 through meat. But it’s still possible for vegans to get plenty of each. It just requires proper planning.

If you switch to plant-based you will experience many health benefits, but you need to be diligent about getting your iron and B-12. Failing to do this will result in anemia and neurological problems. I’ll address this issue later on and will provide some good resources for more information.

Now that we’ve debunked some of the most common myths, let’s take a look at how to use a plant-based diet to build some serious muscle!

How To Build Plant-Based Muscle

There are three main components to building muscle: diet, training, and hormones. In this post I’ll mostly be discussing diet, but let’s take a brief look at the other two components.

Training

There are a million types of exercise that will help you build muscle. It all boils down to breaking down muscle through resistance training, allowing your body to build it back bigger and stronger (a process called hypertrophy).

If you’re a beginner, or if you’re trying to get back in shape, any type of resistance training will help. A simple routine consisting of bodyweight exercises (pushups, crunches, bridges, air squats) will get results. Add in some cardio like walking, jogging, bike riding or swimming to improve your circulation and you will see very fast results.

For those of you who are already regular exercisers, bodyweight exercises are still extremely effective for building muscle. If you can already do 50+ air squats easily, try doing pistol squats or burpees. If you can do 50 pushups without pausing, try pushup variations like diamond pushups or wide-grip pushups. You can also develop your back with pull-ups and chin-ups.

Weight training is still valuable, though, and can be a great way to supercharge your gains. There’s no single correct weight training regimen, so you’ll need to browse around to find something fun and challenging for you.

Hormones

There is a ton of information out there about optimal hormone levels. Unfortunately a lot of it is written by people trying to sell you supplements. While supplements to balance your hormones might be necessary I recommend them as a last resort.

In reality, the best way to achieve the right hormone levels is to start with the basics: nutrition, sleep, and decreasing stress. A huge proportion of hormonal issues are due to problems with at least one of these three things. So if you’re concerned that yours are out-of-whack, I suggest you take a look at your diet, sleep and stress levels before you buy supplements.

And if you do decide to try a supplement (like one of the many “testosterone boosters” that men are buying these days), talk about it with your doctor. Hormones are complex and there’s a good chance a cheap supplement on the internet won’t help you at all.

Diet

Now that we’ve covered exercise and hormones, let’s talk about the most important component: diet. Of course all three are important, but a solid diet plan is absolutely essential to building muscle. It can even make up for shortcomings in the other two areas.

Screw Calories! Pay Attention To Macronutrients Instead

Macronutrients are the main building blocks in our diets: carbohydrates, fats, and protein. Calorie content alone is basically meaningless.

Robert Cheeke recommends a breakdown of 80/10/10 or 70/15/15, meaning 70-80% of your macronutrients should be carbohydrates, 10-15% fats and 10-15% protein. This is much different than 25-30% protein diets that many bodybuilders preach.

Now, if you’re not a professional athlete or bodybuilder, keeping track of these percentages can be inconvenient. Instead what you can do is keep a list of staple foods that have roughly this same ratio of carbs-to-protein-to-fat. You can build each meal around them and that should give you the right ratio at the end of the day.

The Staples: Eat These Foods Regularly and You WILL Build Muscle

You’ll be able to build a lot of muscle if you eat these foods on a regular basis:

• quinoa
• kale
• broccoli
• nuts (almonds, peanuts, cashews, walnuts, macadamia nuts, pistachios)
• sprouted grains (Ezekiel brand of bread is perfect)
• seeds: sunflower, pumpkin
• fruit
• yams/sweet potatoes
• mushrooms
• carrots & turnips
• lentils
• beans

These staple foods will give you the right ratio of macronutrients for optimal muscle building.

I know it seems counterintuitive to not include things like eggs and fish and chicken breast on this list, but that’s because popular health publications have been preaching the high-protein gospel for a long time now. The people who promote them aren’t necessarily building muscle because of all the protein they eat. And they may even be hurting their health by consuming too much of it.

Stick To Real Food

Author Michael Pollan wrote a book called In Defense of Food, which was about limiting the amount of unnatural food in your diet. He says you should stick to foods that your great-grandparents would recognize – whole foods that haven’t been processed or engineered in a lab.

This is a great way to think about your diet. There are almost no processed foods that are positively healthy for you. Your body has a much easier time digesting the same types of foods that humans have eaten for hundreds of years.

A Note About Digestive Enzymes

One of the reasons a high-protein diet is a waste of time is because we can only digest a limited amount of protein. Our digestive enzymes in our stomach and intestines need to break down protein into its component amino acids in order for our body to utilize it.

Unfortunately our modern diets have eroded our natural digestive enzymes. Processed food is extremely difficult for our bodies to digest. And since our energy is limited, if we keep eating foods that we can’t digest well then way too much of our energy will be devoted to digestion. This makes you fatigued and hurts your fitness goals long term.

One solution is to eat lots of plant-based food (surprise!) because they tend to have digestive enzymes built in. This makes digestion much more efficient and ensures that you make the most of what you eat.

Another solution is to take a digestive enzyme supplement. There are a number of such supplements on the market, and you tend to get what you pay for. Look for the quality digestive supplements at your health food store, or find a reputable supplement online (like this one made by a vegan bodybuilder).

Iron and B-12

Iron and Vitamin B-12 deficiencies are common among vegans, but they can be avoided.

A few of the staple foods I listed have a high amount of iron, including sunflower and pumpkin seeds, and kale (plus other leafy greens). If your diet includes plenty of these foods then you should have adequate iron in your system.

Vitamin B-12 is a bit trickier, as not many foods have it in large quantities. It’s also not very efficient taking it in pill form because most of it ends of getting excreted. I recommend liquid B-12 extract that you can squirt under your tongue for quick absorption.

Gaining Mass Versus Getting Lean

The beauty of following a whole food, plant-based diet is that it’s very difficult to gain excess fat. Your body is able to utilize all of the foods in our staple list and the chances of leaving fat deposits is low. Just by following this diet (and avoiding processed junk) you will likely burn fat, even if you don’t pay attention to overall calorie intake.

Now, if you are already carrying a lot of extra fat, you can simply stick to 2 meals a day instead of 3, and snack as you go. On the other hand if you’re skinny and want to gain more muscle weight, you can just eat an extra meal or two using our staple foods. You’ll be able to add lean muscle without adding fat, so you won’t be stuck on the types of “bulking and cutting” cycles that are popular these days.