Every once in a while I browse through my collection of random health notes and I thought it might be nice just to share those on Bare 5. Let me know if anything triggers questions or thoughts with you or if you would like to see me expand on anything here.

My Notes/Thoughts

Free Play
Is lack of free play for kids the biggest problem our world is facing? I say it just might be. Think about that. Free play is where kids develop imagination, creativity, movement skills, coordination, patience, social skills, competition, management, and on and on. Free play is what makes kids who they are and shapes what they will become. When we give kids a steady stream of iPhones, video games, computers, after school activities, tutoring, structured sports activities and all of the like, we are robbing them of developing their true spirit and development. Not enough activity in general OR too much/too early specialization are two of the biggest reasons why lack of free play is ruining our children and future adults.

Will Power
Will power is the most important muscle in the body. It needs to be trained, just like your biceps, legs or abs. Challenge it, exercise it, then give it rest. Overtrain your will power, however, and it will fail you. It is at its most powerful and effective when you train it to be strong and then use it every once in a while. When you don’t wear it down all day, day after day, it will be well rested and won’t let you down when you need it.

Drug Credit
Are drugs/medications like credit cards? The body runs out of resources ($) so we use drugs and medications just like credit cards to keep getting by on the same lifestyle. No doubt, just like in credit card land, there will be interest to be paid for sure. If we don’t make changes to our lifestyle and keep living on “credit” it won’t be long until we need to open up another credit card, and then another and another until the creditors start calling and they end up collecting and we end up in big, big trouble.

Exercise
Exercise is a stimulus. The goal is not the workout. The workout is a stimulus that leads your body toward your goal. Training hard just to “work hard” is very rarely working toward a goal and in most cases is likely taking the body further away from the desired end result. Bottom line: If the training is not helping you move toward the goal- change the training. More often than not the problem is treating workouts as the end result and not as a stimulus for the body to respond to that leads it toward a goal.

Chess
The body is like Garry Kasparov: always two or more steps ahead of us. So much is going on inside our bodies and so many adaptations are happening every second, minute, hour and day of our lives that it is very difficult to stay ahead of the body. It is like a Grandmaster Chess player, always trying to outguess us: using everything from what we are experiencing and have experienced, clues from the environment, genetic patterns, hormonal status, psychological patterns and anything else it can take clues from our environment and is an expert at instantly adjusting to the game of “body chess”. To survive, and particularly to thrive, it must always play a game of prediction. When we make a simple adjustment the body is already prepared and adjusts accordingly and prepares for our next moves in the process. Make a drastic change and the body is right there with you, adjusting right back. Think we have the body figured out? Think again, the body is the Garry Kasparov of the biological world, and is always two steps ahead. It’s not a bad thing, we all are playing with masterful bodies that know us better than we know ourselves. Understanding that is the key to playing a smart game of body chess and living optimally.

That’s it for now, hope some of my thoughts stirred up some thoughts in you.

Thanks for reading, have a great day!