Miscellaneous
Today we bring on guest, Simon Bachofner, Crossfit owner/instructor at HubCity Crossfit. He is not only a Crossfit owner and instructor, but also a registered nurse working on a Master’s to become a nurse practitioner. If you’re a male over 30, let’s look at the 4 major lifestyle elements you can incorporate to maximize your testosterone. Simon: Would you like to ask some questions about men’s fitness specifically? Meredith: Sure; what are some specific issues you see in men’s health? Simon: Going back to the wolf pack, I think this is an important idea for men to be OK with and find. I think that is something that sways people to Crossfit. I also subscribe to the idea to put a holistic or comprehensive spin on things. I talk to them about food, fitness, sleep, and stress management. Within those four areas, I talk with them about a few things; one of them is androgen/testosterone optimization, and why (in each of the four areas) If you lift heavy weights, your testosterone goes up. In the aging male, we know that testosterone drops around age 35, so trying to optimize it as we age is important. For food, I try to hone in and identify if there is insulin resistance. As blood sugars rise, we get more insulin resistance and aromatization of testosterone to estrogen. That’s not what we want. Carb control is a big deal, and so if vitamin F (fat intake). Our steroid hormones are built on cholesterol so the two I really hone in on are coconut oil and olive oil. Then there’s sleep; we want to effectively recover from the training. We’re going to lift heavy as long as bodies can tolerate it. When you sleep, that’s when you’re releasing spikes of growth hormone and testosterone. We want to make sure we’re not doing things that are going to carve into that restorative sleep time. Finally, stress management. Busy people, lead busy lives, and it is always go, go, go, next thing . . . one of the thing that Crossfit allows you to do is take an exit from that part of your life and have this be the best hour of your day. Spend an hour working on yourself. From a stress management practice, this contributes to having practices in place to keep cortisol level down. As cortisol level drops, DHEA buffers our cortisol level. If we’re stressed out the DHEA will try to buffer the cortisol elevation, but we need the DHEA to help us make testosterone. If we’re using it up buffering stress hormones created by our lifestyle practices, then we’re not optimizing our steroid production systems. So those are the four things: food, fitness, sleep, and stress management. My big thing is to keep men working. In my professional healthcare life, seeing a 40 year old man on disability. If you’re on disability for whatever reason, you’re now in a socioeconomic status that can’t be changed. That income pattern leads to poorer health outcomes. My goal in the gym is to keep you as functional as possible. We’re all trying to stay in the workforce and be productive members of society for as long as we can. Meredith: That’s where I really appreciate your dual background in healthcare and Crossfit to show how the four principles you focus on really help men stay in the workforce at a profound level. Life skills, as well as answering the question of how to optimize vitamin T (testosterone) without injecting it. I think you’ve given people pearls to hang on and think “hmmm; here’s what I do need to focus on in getting back into health, and here’s how Crossfit offers not just a workout, but also a scalable solution and wolf pack community. Is there anything else you’d like to add? Simon: I need to mechanically move soundly with consistency before I add any intensity. Intensity can be defined as speed or weight. Slow down and revert back to good mechanics consistently. We do ask you to do challenging things, but Olympic lifting—they give gold medals for that; don’t expect to go into a Crossfit gym and ace your first snatch workout. There are certain positions and movement patterns that people spend years just to add one or two kilos. They give big gold medals for that. You have to go at your own pace with mechanics first and check your ego at the door. Be there for the right reasons; be there for the community; be there for health and your own well-being. If its not working for you at your gym, there are plenty of others. Crossfit is going back to why they started in the first place . . . for the person on the couch; getting off the couch and into the gym. I wouldn’t be scared; the hardest part is stepping through the front door. Meredith: I really appreciate how you bridge health and fitness with what a people can find inside a Crossfit box should they have the bravery to walk through the door and take that first step. Simon's closing thoughts: The farther you move into fitness, the farther you move away from illness. Simon’s contact info: HubCityCrossfit.net in Albany, Oregon. You can reach him on Instagram and Facebook as well.