Guy Windsor

Consulting Swordsman. Writer.

Can breathing training help with asthma?

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Do you have asthma? If so, you might find that breathing exercises can help. But don’t just take my word for it….

I have been teaching breathing exercises for as long as I have been teaching martial arts- to my mind they go hand in hand. Over the last twenty years or so many of my students have told me that the breathing exercises have helped their asthma. This was not exactly unexpected on my part, but I certainly wouldn’t go about claiming that my breathing for martial arts practice is a cure for the condition. (Before I go on: I’m not a medical doctor. If you have any concerns about your health, go see one. Don’t get your medical advice from swordsmanship practitioners on the internet.)

Last week one of my students, Ilpo Luhtala, sent me this email (edited to remove surnames and email addresses):

You may remember when I told you a story about my asthma and the breathing exercises. I used daily medication for twenty years, I had an asthma, no question about that, it was tested several times. Then I started to do regular breathing exercises, the basic one (does it have a name?) every morning and the 12 step exercise on a weekly basis. Now I have been 7 years without any medication. Asthma has gone away…And it is not about my imagination, it has been tested and confirmed by doctors.

So I have told this story to several people. One of them is Johanna, my colleague from Skanska. And the following story is from her, a message to you:

“My 15-year-old son has been doing breathing practices that Ilpo has taught on a video and has found the technique helpful. We are very thankful for hearing about this technique. My son has had asthma for ten years and has had increasing amount of daily medication. Asthma has been following him on other seasons too, but especially during spring. In previous years he hasn’t even been able to go outdoors during the pollen season because of severe breathing difficulties. He has often been in hospital and doctors especially during spring because of the same reasons and treated with more and more medication.

Last spring my son started doing breathing exercises that Ilpo taught on a video. For the first time in ten years the spring time went without any hospital visits and he was experiencing improvement with his asthma. This summer his medication was reduced for the first time in ten years. Normally his medication has only been increased every year.

My son is keeping up with the routine and we both believe that the technique has really helped him. I am just amazed how doctors don’t encourage people more to try breathing exercises which seem to help with asthma cases and also with overall well-being.

I would like to say big thank you for teaching this technique to Ilpo as I don’t think we would have heard about this from any of the doctors. Thank you!

Johanna.”

You can imagine how pleased I am to have been able to help, however indirectly. However, the plural of ‘anecdote' is not ‘data', so while I'm pretty confident that there is a causal relationship between the breathing training done by Johanna's son and Ilpo, and their asthma improving, I'm obviously biased. But, there is an increasing body of medical research to support the idea that breathing exercises can alleviate asthma: these two studies are a good starting point:

2013 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3612953/

2014 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25122497/

With any intervention, the key thing is to estimate the costs and risks involved. (As with the corona cures I wrote about a while ago.) There is, as I see it, zero financial cost to breathing better, and a very close to zero risk of triggering an asthma attack with gentle breathing training. The worst case scenario is you try it and it doesn't help. So keep your ventilator handy and have a go at the exercises that Ilpo started with, if you like. I'd recommend doing perhaps 5-10 minutes, once or twice a day.

If you'd like to go deeper, you can find a 30-min class on basic breathing training included in my free Human Maintenance course, which includes breathing, meditation, and joint care. https://swordschool.teachable.com/p/bodymaintenance/

It’s free because your health shouldn’t be kept behind a paywall. I hope it helps.

Skittles beat Watermelon: blood glucose experiment update

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Watermelon is worse for me than Skittles.* Who’d have thought?

If you haven’t read my post on testing blood sugar response to foods, you’d better do that before proceeding. Just to recap briefly, here are the assumptions/opinions/beliefs I’m working from:

1) it is better to avoid spiking your blood sugar levels

2) your blood sugar response to specific foods is unique to you. What spikes mine may not spike yours.

And let me re-state for the gadgillionth time: I’m not a medical doctor. I’m not a biochemist or a nutritionist. I’m a martial arts teacher, documenting the results of some experiments I’m conducting on myself for my own reasons and following my own approach, and sharing for your entertainment and/or interest. It’s up to you what you do with your body. 

I have been testing my blood sugar levels before and after meals, to determine what foods I’m eating regularly that I should actually avoid, and in the hopes that there will be foods I avoid for health reasons that I could actually eat without causing damage. By far the best part of this has been testing things like Skittles, FOR SCIENCE.

Let’s start with the testing techniques and process:

First, the finger prick. They say it doesn’t hurt. They lie like bastards. It hurts exactly as much as you would expect jamming a steel spike into your finger would hurt. But it gets much less painful over time, and it is quite subjective. My wife started doing the blood sugar tests and it doesn’t hurt her at all. My younger daughter decided to try too, and it didn’t hurt her much either. And, it’s a skill like any other. Especially for my wife, getting enough blood out to take a reading took some practice, as her skin is apparently quite thick, and her capillaries quite far from the surface. Shaking the hand before testing, and doing some fist clenches, both helped.

I bought an iPhone-compatible GlucoRX HCT blood sugar monitor. But it had a headphone jack on it, and didn’t work through the dongle. There was nothing on the sales page to say that the lightning port version existed for those of us on jackless iPhones, which was very annoying.

So then I bought a lightning-port GlucoRX HCT monitor. And that barely worked either. I kept getting weird error messages, and my first round on the phone to GlucoRX support came to not much- I got told to hold the monitor vertically. When in fact it should be at about 45 degrees, and the problem was a defective monitor, which I found out when I rang them back at lunch time and got not a customer service person, but an actual engineer! He was super-helpful, diagnosed the problem (“that error message ought to be impossible on that monitor as it doesn’t have an internal battery”) and got a new monitor, plus one of the standalone (no-phone-required) monitors added in for free, into the post to me that very day.

If I was to start this all over again, I would go with a continuous blood glucose monitor. It’s more expensive for a diabetic taking maybe 5 readings a day, but it’s about the same price as using the measuring sticks 20+ times a day for a month, but without the damn finger pricking, and with (as the name suggests) actual continuous monitoring. Matching up that data to a food diary would give a very complete record, with much less fuss. 

So armed with a monitor that worked, and with a large supply of very expensive test strips (about 32p per test, plus a few pence for each new lancet, which when you’re doing 20+ tests a day adds up pretty fast), I started taking some readings and recording them. First on the GlucoRX app, which is ok, and then I tried to add them to the Personalized Nutrition app. Oh my goddess, that app is a disaster. 

Here are the functions that that app is supposed to have: 1) record blood sugar readings. 2) record food intake. Those are the two critical ones. 

But it gives you three options for things to record: Exercise, Sleep (which you have to select right before you sleep- you can’t record it after the fact, so it’s 100% useless), and Food. But the much-vaunted massive database of foods to choose from doesn’t include toast. Toast!! 

And can you tell what’s missing? Right. You have to dig through two sub-menus to find the option to record your blood sugar. Every single time you need to record it. That’s 20+ times per day if you’re tracking every meal.

Seriously, somebody at the app design agency needs a beating with a very big stick.

So if you’re going to try this protocol, stay TF away from the Personalized Nutrition app. It’s shit.

Here’s what I’m doing instead:

1) I’m not tracking every meal every day. I did that for a couple of days, and it’s a pain. So I focussed on breakfast as the place to start, and I have already made some changes.

2) I record the time and the blood sugar reading, with a note about what I’ve been eating, in an actual notebook with an actual pen. Old school, baby.

3) I use my phone to photograph each meal I’m tracking. This gives me a time-stamped visual record to flesh out the notes. That way I don’t have to measure anything, and can tell meal sizes and details from the photos. This is important because quantity matters, as does what else you’re eating at the same time.

4) I’m only tracking meals I eat often. There would have been no point (other than curiosity) in tracking my mum’s killer chocolate cake that we ate last weekend, as it was a one-off.

5) I put the numbers into a spreadsheet (I’m on a Mac so using Numbers), and use that to create graphs to show blood glucose levels over time. 

7) I keep track of which meals don’t spike my blood sugar, and which ones do, and the overall shape of the spikes.

8) For the ones that do spike me, I try the meal again but removing the most likely culprit, and test again. Sadly, my breakfast oranges have to go 🙁

9) I put those graphs into a Pages file with the photos and notes, so I can see, for example, the effects of:

  • my usual breakfast; 
  • the same meal minus the orange; 
  • the same meal minus the toast but with the orange 
  • the same meal minus the orange and minus the toast; 
  • and so on.

The critical thing is to change only one thing at a time, so I can be sure what is having the effect.

Here are three breakfasts, and their results:

Breakfast 1: toast with smoked salmon; toast with peanut butter and blueberries; orange; coffee; crossword.

Breakfast 2: toast with smoked salmon; toast with peanut butter and blueberries; no orange; coffee; crossword.

Breakfast 3: smoked salmon with lettuce, peanut butter and blueberries, coffee, crossword.

And the results from those three versions:

In general, I can predict the effects of most foods. Eating Skittles after dinner sent my blood sugar predictably up to 10.7 mmol/L (about 194 mg/dL for my American friends). There was no immediate crash though, it took about two hours to get gently back to baseline. I don’t usually eat Skittles at all, but I love them, so had to try…. Bye bye Skittles 🙁

But eating watermelon after a vegetarian chilli with sweet potato… that got me over 11.1mmol/L 202 mg/dL, and I was back to baseline in an hour. My poor pancreas. What a trooper. (This one result is my entire basis for the somewhat misleading blog post title.)

The chilli by itself put me up over 8mmol/L (145 mg/dL), the springboard from which the watermelon leapt into action, but salmon with white rice and vegetables (which preceded the Skittles) got me only up to 6.9 (125 mg/dL). White rice! I was amazed- I was very much expecting it to be a metabolic hand-grenade.

Some meals push me up to over 8mmol/L, and keep me there for over two hours (such as my daughter’s favourite gluten-free pumpkin pasta). With others I stay under 7, and get back to baseline in an hour. Incidentally, it’s very clear that I’m in no way diabetic or pre-diabetic (I wasn’t concerned, but it’s nice to know anyway).

I am not planning to share my data here because it would take me hours and hours to make it presentable, and indeed most of it is still in the notebook. I can read the numbers just fine off the page- the handy graph visualisations are unnecessary for me at this point. Besides, spreadsheets and I do not get along well. Also, while this protocol may be useful to you, my data is not: the whole point of this exercise is that your blood sugar response is unique. Knowing what’s bad for me doesn’t help you.

Now that I’m familiar with the system and the effects of some foods, I can cut some corners and am taking fewer readings (which further reduces the usefulness of the data to an actual scientist). Having established the ranges of my sugar spikes, I have a general goal of keeping my level at 30 minutes after eating (timed from the beginning of the meal) to below 7.0. This is quite easy to accomplish. I would also like to drop my fasting blood glucose level to the middle of the normal range. At the moment, it’s hovering a safe margin below the top of the normal range. I’m already seeing it trend in the right direction, now that I’m able to predict and therefore avoid sugar spikes.

And of course, I have a lot of foods left to try. Including Nutella. I couldn’t quite bring myself to face the awful truth… 

*I am well aware that blood glucose response is not the only measure of a food’s healthiness, and that watermelon may have components that are helpful, and Skittles may have components that are actually harmful, beyond the sugar issue. Adding cyanide to food completely prevents a blood sugar spike- because you’re dead before the sugar hits your system! Also, I massively overstated the difference between watermelon and skittles, and haven't taken the pre-existing rise from the dinner into account, and not discussed the time taken to recover back to baseline into account. So it's not objectively true, I am taking massive licence for rhetorical effect. But this is not a scientific paper, it’s a blog post. M’kay?

The (myth of the) ONE TRUE diet

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It’s generally accepted that it’s a healthy idea to avoid spiking your blood sugar. Spiking your blood sugar regularly can cause insulin resistance, obesity, cancer, heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and so on. Some years ago I came across a study from Drs. Segal and Erinav of the Weizmann Institute which proved to my satisfaction that different people may have different glycaemic responses to the same foods. In other words, a croissant may spike my blood sugar but not yours. And I may be able to get away with eating chocolate that would send your blood glucose through the roof.

Why does this matter?

Well, there is no field of human health more riven with disagreement (in the scientific literature and in popular culture) than what we should eat. It’s massively affected by culture, family tradition, and contradictory studies demonising this way of eating or praising that. You can see my approach so far here. Leaving aside the ethics of what you eat (such as animal welfare, climate change, and so on) and looking purely at health outcomes, it is impossible to determine one diet that works for everyone. The Weizmann study went a long way towards explaining why this is the case: we all respond differently to the foods we eat.

Consider some of the variables in play when a specific food (such as that delicious croissant) hits your digestive system:

1. Human genetic variation, which affects digestion, enzyme production, etc. etc.

2. Gut biome variation, which also affects everything from mental health to nutrient absorption.

3. Environmental factors (such as the historic availability of certain foods to your immediate ancestors, your exposure to various chemicals, the list is endless).

4. Exercise, which affects blood sugar levels- intense exercise causes the breakdown of glycogen, for instance, raising blood sugar levels, if only briefly. It also affects blood distribution (away from the gut and into the muscles, for instance).

5. Time of day: bodies operate on a circadian rhythm, and will respond differently to different stimuli and different times. 

6. What else is ingested with the croissant: marmalade? Ham? A glass of orange juice? Lots of artificial additives?

7. We’re talking about human beings here, so psychological factors such as the placebo and nocebo effects are probably also significant.

8. People change over time, so what happened last month may not happen today.

This makes it effectively impossible to predict safely what effect a particular food will have on a particular person. Sure, broccoli is less likely to spike blood sugar than ice-cream, but that ice-cream may actually be fine for you, but not for your friend sitting next to you on the couch holding a spoon. And a virtuously lo-carb steak may act on your pancreas like a boxful of doughnuts does on mine.

It would be easy and natural to throw your hands up in despair and cry “it’s too damn complicated, I’ll eat what I like!” But if you accept the idea that once you are getting sufficient nutrition the most important issue of diet is to avoid blood sugar spikes, then there is an Alexandrian Sword at hand to sever this Gordian Knot.

Enter the blood glucose monitor. Familiar to every diabetic, and costing considerably less than a night out in a decent restaurant, it promises to separate truth from falsehood. I’ve bought one, and am about to start measuring my blood sugar on waking (to establish my baseline), before every meal, and at intervals after every meal. With that data and a food diary, after perhaps a week or two I should have a good idea of what foods I’m commonly eating that I should avoid, and what foods I’m commonly avoiding that I could be eating (I am praying that Nutella on toast will leave my blood sugar remarkably unchanged…). If a particular meal spikes my blood sugar, I’ll try eliminating the most likely culprit within the meal (such as switching out rice for more vegetables), and see what that does. 

There is no sense in testing individual foods individually; it would take forever, and as the food combinations are also a factor, it would produce false positives and false negatives. Nutella out of the jar with a spoon is not the same as Nutella on a banana (oh my goddess that is delicious). 

In this way I should be able to get a handle on what works for me. As I’ve been saying for years, the key to success in any field, including diet, is find out what works for you then do that. So you may be wondering why I haven’t gone the glucose monitoring route before now. I think its a combination of being basically happy with my diet, weight, etc., so I’ve got no feeling of urgency about this, and I fucking hate needles. Literally my entire job is finding out ways of not getting stabbed. I’m not fussed about blood; as a woodworker I bleed regularly- I once counted 13 separate scabs on my left hand alone. I just don’t like needles. Fortunately, a modern blood testing kit uses a special lancing device, so you don’t actually see the needle. And, not being diabetic, I won’t have to inject myself at any point.

After my blood glucose monitor arrived last week I thought to re-check the study that set me off on this… and wouldn’t you know, Drs Segal and Erinav have a book out: The Personalized Diet (affiliate link). I read it straight away, and it goes into the background of their research, the argument for using blood sugar monitoring as a way to measure whether a food is good for you or not, the gut biome and why it’s important, and even a detailed description of when and how to go about measuring your blood sugar, how to record your findings, and so on. If you don’t want to take my word for this blood sugar thing (and why the hell should you? I’m a swordsman, not a medical doctor or nutritionist) then buy the book or get it from your local library. How I missed this when it came out in 2017 I’ve no idea- except perhaps I was already sold on the idea from the study, and so stopped looking.

I should also note that blood sugar spiking is not the only measure of a food’s effect. Allergies and sensitivities are also important. Nutritional content is obviously key: just because Nutella on toast doesn’t spike my blood sugar doesn’t mean it’s actually good for me, or constitutes a complete and healthy diet. If I find there are nutritionally important foods that I shouldn’t eat, I’ll have to find substitutes for them. Maybe cabbage replacing cauliflower. And, let’s face facts. Unless a food is directly and immediately fatal, if I love it I won’t eliminate it completely, metabolic consequences be damned. My daughter baked this Pride cake recently: see the rainbow?

No way in hell I’m not having a slice, regardless of what it does to my blood sugar. But it would be helpful to know for sure what foods are bad for me in this respect.

If I was a proper modern person I’d no doubt do a daily vlog sharing my blood sugar data, details of my diet, etc., etc. But I’m not. The very notion of telling the world what I had for breakfast is just weird. What I will do though is report back with my experience of doing this, and my findings, whatever they may be. Wish me luck with the Nutella thing…

How to sleep

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With the right preparation and diet, people can function just fine without eating for a week. But absolutely nobody functions just fine without sleep for even a couple of days.

Rest is part of training. Poor or insufficient sleep will wreck your whole life, not just your sword practice. It's worth spending some time and effort getting it right.

Let's start with this section from my book The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts, pages 245-247. One of the people who reviewed it on Amazon (and gave it five shiny gold stars, yay!) expressed surprise that I'd put a section on sleep in the book. To me, it's such a fundamental part of training it never occurred to me to leave it out!

***

We live in an absurdly sleep-deprived culture. When someone tells you they pulled an all-nighter, you should not be impressed by their dedication: you should be appalled at their lack of organisation and understanding of basic health principles. It is simply childish to think of staying up late as some kind of cool thing to do. Read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep: the New Science of Sleep and Dreams (affiliate link) if you don’t believe me.

There are three kinds of sleep: REM (dream sleep, in which your brain is very active), light sleep, and deep sleep. Your body and brain cycle through these in a rhythm that takes usually about 90 minutes, with deep sleep usually coming towards the end of that. You will need about four full cycles per night, minimum. How do you know if you’re getting enough sleep? If you wake up naturally without your alarm clock, and if you are not tired during the day, then you are sleeping enough. Otherwise, you’re not. Almost everyone (according to Walker at least, and he should know) needs about eight hours. If you suffer from any kind of insomnia, go to the doctor. Avoid sleeping pills, obviously, but there are many kinds of sleep problems, and many of them are easily treated. If you snore, get yourself checked for sleep apnea. I had it for a long time, and eventually went to the doctor and had it treated with a minor surgery. I suffered the worst sore throat ever for about three weeks, but within a couple of months the difference in my energy levels was incredible thanks to improved quality of sleep. Friends of mine with apnea caused by being fat (when the muscles of the neck relax in sleep, the weight of the fat in their neck literally crushes their airway, so they choke and wake up) have found that a CPAP machine (continuous positive pressure; literally pushing air into the lungs, keeping the trachea open) has made a gigantic difference. Help is available.

The basic principles of getting enough sleep are:

  • Go to bed and get up at the same time every day. Earlier to bed is better: my Grandma used to say that “one before eleven is worth two after seven,” and as usual, she was right.
  • Avoid caffeine for at least six hours before bedtime, or ideally twelve. Using a sleep tracker I was able to confirm my suspicion that simply not having tea or coffee after 2 p.m. made an enormous difference – not to the total amount of sleep I was getting, but to the amount of deep sleep.
  • Avoid alcohol for at least four hours before bedtime. Again with the sleep tracker, I found that a couple of glasses of wine made no difference to sleep quality, so long as the alcohol was out of my system before going to bed.
  • Avoid eating a heavy meal for at least three hours before bedtime. This makes a huge difference, I find. If my body is working on digesting a big meal, my heart rate remains much higher all night than if I go to bed long after the last calorie went in.
  • Avoid screens for at least an hour before bedtime. If you absolutely must be using a screen, on an iOS device enable Night Shift, or use F.lux or something similar to adjust the wavelengths of light your screen emits. 
  • Avoid social media for at least an hour before bedtime. There is nothing more likely to keep you awake than some foolish thing said on the internet. Remember that social media companies hire really clever people whose only job is to get and keep your attention; and nothing says you’re not paying attention like falling asleep.
  • Keep your bedroom as dark as possible: use black-out curtains, and cover or switch off any sources of light pollution such as luminous clocks or devices with LED lights on them. This to me is one of the hardest things to get right when travelling. One hotel room I stayed in had an illuminated light switch in the middle of the headboard of the bed. I had to get my old boarding pass out and stick it over the damn thing with chewing gum to get any sleep. Eyemasks are ok, but I find they come off in the night.
  • Create a wind-down ritual that persuades your body that it will be going to sleep soon. Keep it gentle. I find reading a good novel is hopeless, because I stay up late to get to the next bit, but reading a fairly dull but useful non-fiction book is great.
  • Get a decent mattress. It’s worth it. You literally cannot put a price on sleep.

I also use naps extensively. If your schedule allows it, cutting your night time sleep by an hour or so is okay if you get a full sleep cycle (so a solid 90 minutes of sleep) in the afternoon. Shorter naps can be helpful, but nothing replaces deep sleep. As this book is also concerned with history, I should mention that throughout most of human history artificial lighting was incredibly expensive. It is only in the last century or so that ordinary people can afford brightly lit rooms after nightfall. Thanks to Roger Ekirch’s book At Day’s Close, Night in Times Past (affiliate link), we know that at least some Europeans used to sleep in two blocks, with an hour or two of wakefulness in between. In the 1990s, Thomas Wehr (a psychologist) found that people who live in darkness for fourteen hours per day spontaneously develop a similar pattern, so it may be very natural. It’s worth experimenting with, I think. 

For a layman’s overview, see the article entitled “The myth of the eight-hour sleep” by Stephanie Hegarty, published by the BBC on February 22nd 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

The key with this – as with every aspect of health habits – is to experiment carefully, and track what makes a difference for you. 

***

In lockdown it may be even harder than usual to get good sleep, especially if you are living in a confined space. Ideally, you would do nothing at all in bed except sleep, so that your mind associates going to bed with going to sleep. (The only exception I'd make to that is sex.) If you work in bed, watch tv in bed, use the bed like a sofa, and so on, then your mind may associate going to bed with getting work done, or playing video games. If your bed is your sofa, then you can work around this by having a day set-up (such as covering the bed with a blanket and some cushions), so ‘bed' becomes ‘sofa', and then as part of your going to sleep preparation, you re-set the “sofa” into a bed. So long as you perceive it as a separate space set aside for sleep, it should work just fine.

There's a lovely video on how to create separate spaces for different activities in lockdown here:

(With thanks to Stefan Geritz for pointing me to it)

If there is one thing to take away from this blog post, it's this: take your sleep seriously, and guard it as well as you possibly can. It's absolutely fundamental to your health. If you are having problems sleeping (as many do, including me), then make it your top priority to get more and/or better sleep. You deserve it!

Scaling new heights

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I’ve taken up indoor climbing as a hobby. Nothing too serious, and no hanging off skyscrapers. Some friends of ours invited me along, and it was fun, physically and mentally demanding, and reasonably safe. 

I have a general rule not to take up new hobbies that don’t have a social component. I spend more time alone (usually writing) than is probably good for my mental health (I may be an introvert, but I’m not a misanthrope), so any new activity must include other people. Climbing fits that, because I usually go with the friends (Ross and Katie). I should also mention that the climbing centre (Avid, in Ipswich) is a relaxed and friendly place, staffed entirely by really good climbers, who are always happy to advise on climbing technique, and make beginners feel welcome. It passes the ‘would I want my kids to train here test’- and yes, I do take my kids every now and then.

As you can imagine, being an experienced martial artist I picked up a lot of the basics quite quickly, and I’ve come up with an informal training approach that you might find useful to think about as it can be applied to any discipline.

As I see it, climbing has three aspects:

  • Skill
  • Strength
  • Bravery

Or, if you prefer, mental, physical, and spiritual dimensions. 

Mental training: Skill

Being able to see the route is a skill, and I’ll sometimes have to work out how to approach a particular route. Often, I can’t do it in my head, and have to get someone who knows what they’re doing to show me. But with experience comes the ability to see the way up. It’s very rewarding.

Physical training: Strength

My agility is perfectly up to the task- so far I haven’t failed on a route because of lack of flexibility. But strength? Oh my. Compared to climbers, martial artists like me are weak as underfed kittens. No, that’s not fair. Compared to climbers, my hands are weak as kittens. But my hands are actually pretty good… 

Sometimes a route requires the ability to generate force in odd directions, and I find that even though I’m strong enough in most dimensions, I just have never needed to generate force that way before. It’s awesome.

Spiritual training: Bravery

As with all challenges, the key to growth is to get to the edge of failure. Because of my particular phobias, climbing can generate a kind of existential dread or terror that is really challenging to confront even though it’s a very safe space. It’s a lot like flying trapeze in that way (though actually less scary than that). 

As regular readers will know, I’m always on the lookout for things that generate irrational levels of fear. Some routes in the climbing centre are really quite easy, but scare the crap out of me. Others are much harder, but not scary at all. Overhangs, and not being able to see the footholds, are both good stimulators of fear. Being able to generate irrational fear allows me to practise remaining calm when frightened.

Structuring the session around the three elements:

I go about twice a week, until my hands give out (usually about an hour). I structure each session like so:

10-15 minutes warming up. This starts with normal warm-up stuff such as squats, quadripedal exercises (aka funny crawling), rolls and so on, and continues with relatively easy routes. I have no joint issues (thanks to decades of careful training, and no bad accidents), so I don’t have to be especially careful, but at the age of 45 it pays to have a cautious approach.

Then I look for technical challenges, especially routes I’ve failed on before. Figuring out how to get past the difficult bits. This is usually mostly mental. If the problem is near the end of the route, I’ll usually ‘cheat’ my way there, and just work on that one move until I’m happy with it. I try to avoid fatigue in this stage.

Then I do at least one scary bastard. One not-very-hard route gave me what felt like a panic attack. It was really unpleasant, but very useful for practising remaining in control when my amygdala is going haywire.

After the fear-practice, I go for physical exertion. At Avid they have a circuits wall, with numbered routes (you’re not supposed to skip a hold, and should go in order). They are really hard. My forearms feel like they’ve been mangled. It’s great.

If my feeling after the circuits is that I nailed it, I stop there. Otherwise, I’ll find a route I know I can do and climb that. Every session must end with a success, which is defined entirely subjectively.

On any given day, I’ll be feeling stupid, or weak, or fearful. I still challenge the weakest aspect, but more gently, spending more time on the areas where I feel up to the task.

One final thought: I don’t fall very often, and have yet to fall more than a metre or so. This is what limits my progress and, far more than technical skill, separates me from the expert climbers. They fall off the wall like apples off a tree in autumn. The place practically vibrates with really good climbers hitting the mats. But us beginners? We’re like limpets stuck to the wall.

The experts are that good because they are always pushing their boundaries. They are trying routes that are just out of their reach. And failing over and over again. I’ll never be that good because I’m not willing to risk those falls (even though the mats are deep and squishy). And that’s okay- my priorities are different, and I don’t mind how slowly I progress. I’m doing this for fun!

Health matters

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I've been thinking a lot about health lately, which will come as no surprise if you've read my previous blog about injuring my back.

I think of health as a three-legged stool. The legs are sleep, nutrition, and exercise. I cover the principles I use in some detail in my new book The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts, but I don't go into my personal routines all that much, because they're probably not relevant to most readers. The underlying message is ‘diligently study to find out what works for you, then do that'. So what do I do?

This morning, I got up before my wife and kids and did about 20 minutes of breathing exercises, 20 minutes of calisthenics (push-ups, stretching and so on), before making my wife a cup of tea and going back upstairs to deliver it before having my cold shower, then getting dressed and having breakfast. This is normal, and doesn't count as ‘training'.

But today, I did walk the long route to the gym (about 3 miles, fast, with nordic walking poles), and did my 7-way legs, hex bar deadlifts (I'm back up to 60kg, but won't go higher for a long while as my back recovers), arm exercises (such as the ones on my free arm maintenance course), and the rest of my routines. The walk and gym time totalled about two hours 20 minutes, which means that by the time I got to my office, I've done about three hours of health-dedicated exercise. I don't do that much that often because I'm not a fan of ‘more is better'. I prefer to find the minimum effective dose and do that.

Perhaps the hardest health practice I do is fasting. Not because fasting itself is hard- it isn't, or at least it doesn't have to be. The difficulty is I don't want to normalise not-eating for my daughters. They are heading into the age where anorexia and other eating disorders become a significant risk, and one of the things I'm doing to try to mitigate that risk is model healthy eating and a healthy enjoyment of food. (Other things include never praising them for their looks, letting them not finish their dinner if they are really not hungry, or stop eating when they're full, and above all giving them a firm sense of being in control wherever possible- this includes things like letting them choose a recipe, do the shopping, and prepare the meal (or more commonly, cake), even when– especially when– I wouldn't make the same choices.) But they were away for a couple of nights, so I managed to get some fasting in. I set it up like so:

Dinner as normal, but a bit early, on Sunday (roast lamb with all the trimmings). Then Monday morning, a small ketogenic breakfast, made up of some lightly steamed cabbage with a tin of mackarel, some nuts, olive oil, and MCT oil, with a dose of raspberry ketones and a dose of BCAAs. That put me straight into ketosis, which I prefer for fasting because a) it prevents muscle mass being digested for calories and b) it hugely reduces hunger, making compliance much easier. I don't fast for character-building or spiritual reasons; this is all about biochemistry.

Then I just ate nothing at all until breakfast on Tuesday morning. I drank only water. The only other thing I ingested was, on Monday night, I could feel I was thirstier than normal, and as I usually eat a lot of salt, and had just had a long hot bath, I figured I might be low on salt, so had a pinch (I was right, it helped immediately). Monday was a training day, so I went to the gym for a couple of hours in the afternoon. Being in ketosis means that there's no problem with ‘low blood sugar', which (except for diabetics and people with other conditions) is a bullshit reason for feeling unable to train anyway. If you can't train when hungry, then there's something wrong with your diet, or your training. If everything is working properly, there should be no energy drop from low blood sugar unless you are fasting the hard way (i.e. not triggering ketosis first), and are in day two or three. If you've eaten in the last 24 hours, you ought to be fine. If that's not the case, then you have some metabolic work to do!

Do I think you should do this? I have no opinion whatsoever, as I don't know you, your medical history, or anything else. But folk ask me about this stuff, so I'm sharing.

If I had to pick one thing I think is most useful and important, out of all the things I do for health reasons, it would be breathing exercises. I do them every day. They are the one constant over the last 25 years of training. They combine a kind of meditation, some useful movement, and provide a back door into your metabolism that is startlingly effective. That's why I created an online course covering the basics of several styles of breathing training, so you can find what works for you. I'm offering a 50% discount on the course that's valid until the end of April, just use this link.

Try it out! The course comes with a 30 day money back guarantee, so if it's not your thing, no harm done.

I look forward to seeing you on the course.