In promoting the DWF, (daily workout and food) we follow the classic Crossfit 3 day on 1 day off. We work in a car park with just a dumbbell a kettlebell and a skipping room. In the square next door, we have access to some benches that we can step up onto or jump on.
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Whilst everyone likes a rippling physique, there are exercises that are simply good for you, sometimes, for reasons that are not immediately obvious.
The L sit can have an impact on your stress levels. It was recently established that there is a connection between your core, your brain, your adrenal glands and thus the release of the stress hormone cortisol. It’s only been tested on Monkeys, but it’s very interesting.
Classically it was thought that most of the body systems worked top down. You think it, and the brain sends out the memo.
Basically, the primary cortex portion of your brain (or M1 for short) contains a map of your entire body including regions like your legs, arms, face, and your core.
To everybody’s surprise, boffins have discovered a large number of neurons in the M1 that controlled the adrenal medulla. Plus, most of these neurons were located in the axial muscle region of the M1. Stated plainly: “Well, lo and behold, core muscles have an impact on stress,” says Peter Strick, PhD, a professor and chair of the department of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute.
“One clear implication of this organization is that the sympathetic responses which occur during activities such as exercise, the performance of demanding cognitive tasks, and the experience of emotions are generated by neural activity from the same cortical areas that are responsible for these behaviors.” (The mind–body problem: Circuits that link the cerebral cortex to the adrenal medulla)
This isn’t that much of a surprise although as the mind body connection has been fairly known, or boringly worked to death, depending on your perspective. What we are beginning to see is the pathways for a body mind connection.
How you treat your body has a direct impact on your emotions .
The psychologists, hippies and new age weirdos had always talked about this connection. I went to a charity fire walk in Liverpool Street, London several years ago, and we were made to power pose (stand there, legs astride, “being powerful”) o prepare us for the rigours of the fire walk. to come Without such preparations, we would clearly have died
Whilst power posing per se isn’t at all guaranteed (other studies found it to be utter tosh), its enough to understand that:
“specific multisynaptic circuits exist to link movement, cognition, and affect to the function of the adrenal medulla. This circuitry may mediate the effects of internal states like chronic stress and depression on organ function and, thus, provide a concrete neural substrate for some psychosomatic illness”.
All of which is a long winded rambling way of saying, do the L sit! ‘Cause your core sort of chats to your stress bits. Like”.
It’s OK. I hang around with some really trashy people and have picked up some filthy phrasing habits.
To own the L sit, here are the stages! It’s vaguely abusive in places
Stage 1. Notice the burger you are scoffing
Stage 2 put the burger down
The abusive thought behind stage 1 & 2 really is unnecessary. You can get good strong abs and still eat crap, you probably won’t be able to see them though. Although eating crap per se is bad for you.
Stage 3 grab the edge of the health and safety checked chair and push your ass off the seat, Notice how your bum is behind your hands. Find a balance. Practice for a few weeks (less if its easy)
Stage 4 Build on stage 3 , then stick one of your legs in front of you.Yikes. It’s hard for some, not so for others. You are lucky or you are not. Practice this and stage 5 together. One leg, then the other. Feel free to cry. Everyone likes people who can express emotional weakness
Stage 5, is the other leg!
Stage 6. Hurrah, both legs out “purleez”
Stage 1-6 can be almost instant or its 6 weeks worth of work.
Then you can do it on the floor with paralletts
Then you start your disgusting journey to 2 minutes!
You’ll love the abs you get, the core control, and of course you’ll be calm and stress free!
Get L sitting, like you were born to it. It will soon become easy ( this is a lie: it will always suck. If you have Abs of steel,I can always put weight on your feet)
This is a PDF of this article The L Sit
The sketches are from is.tatsuo@gmail.com
TODAY’S WORKOUT
You’ll need a watch in todays workout which is a fun 10 v sits, 50 meter sprint, 20 squat, rest 1 minute affair. Aim for 5 rounds. Try and keep it sharp and punchy. Sprint the sprin.
We train in our car park so we do a 30m fast run, turn around with a 30m all out sprint back to our exercise mat!
The sprint is useful as it’s short enough to actually build a different pace than the normal shuffle jogs people fall into.
TODAY’S FOOD
Thanks to Leanne for this veggie Feta salad meal: Not far off a 3 block zone meal
Well its Saturday, and day 2 out of this training block of 3 days.
Todays workout is 12 minutes of :
10 burpees, 5 dumbbell push press L, 5 dumbbell push press R
This is nastily crafted as yesterday you had the push up grind. Today you will really want to drive your hips on the push press and you’ll probably want more of a sprawl on the burpee.
Still, super compensation, aside, it was surprisingly yuk!
Enjoy.
Todays Healthy Food Option
To add more variety to this blog, I’m inviting guests into share their favourite meals. First up is a Cajun chicken dish from Fresh Fitness foods.
Chicken – P: 27.83 | C: 0.73 | F: 3 | Kcal: 141.24
Broccoli – [ P: 2.52 | C: 3.2 | F: 2.42 | Kcal: 35.66
Rice – [ P: 2.8 | C: 26.5 | F: 0.75 | Kcal: 123.5 ]
Cajun Chicken Ingredients
Method
Roasted Broccoli Ingredients
Method
Zesty Rice Ingredients
Method
If you want to try Fresh Fitness Food go here https://www.freshfitnessfood.com/ then use the discounts GABDOU10 for 10% off and GABDOU for £50 off your first order.
Have a great weekend, stay active, eat healthily, see you tomorrow, and join the mailing list
Well, it looked ok, but may I introduce you to a bit of tasteless beef.
So, its 4 block of tasteless beef ( lovingly slow roasted for 3 hours: that was a waste of electricity), 3 blocks of potatoes at 150g, and some nice cabbage with a block of extra butter (between the 2 of us) chucked in, otherwise Kate won’t eat it.
looked ok, tasted of nothing.
TODAYS WORKOUT
This mornings workout was 20 box jumps (or step ups) 20 push ups, 400m run . As many rounds as possible in 15 minutes.
Join the mailing list and get hints and tips sent to you
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Today is a rest day. We have trained the previous 3 days, so day 4 is rest. You get stronger by resting and recovering from training, not training all the time. You only get stronger during the rest!
I had struggled to knock up the evening meal, as I’d run out of most things. I ended up with an onion, a pepper some garlic , some ginger a spoon of coconut milk, 200g of lamb from last night, gravy from last nights lamb, a tin of tomatoes , some curry powder and some bits of frozen chilli, some powdered coriander, and 3 frozen bits of spinach.
This blog isn’t meant to be a detailed cooking blog, just one that nudges you into the possibility of health eating by doing some basic cooking and following zone diet principle and trying to balance 40% carbs, with 30% protein and 30% fat.
But as a rough guide, fry the onions and pepper, garlic and ginger fry them, add a little bit of water add the curry powder, fry it all, throw in everything else and simmer
I have an ongoing battle with heat in curry so after last times “no heat curry” I thought I’d add a bit of chilli in a game of Chilli Roulette. A game that I had lost, so I had to hunt about to drag these bits out!
Now for future recipes I need a vegetarian to send me in some veggie meals that balance carb, protein and fat ( think 7g protein, 9g carb, 1.5g fat x 4). Email me your ideas to andrew@andrewstemler.com and I’ll post them with a big credit to you. See if you can send me photo of it and you .
In fact any good, healthy meals will be welcome !!!
If you crave something physical, it will probably be a good time to remind yourself that even on a rest day, you need 10,000 steps
The meal I’ll analyse today is my lovely Kate’s favourite meat which is roast lamb.
Voila
4 blocks of lamb, or 112g ( that’s the protein) , 3 blocks of potato (150g) and my hope that the odd bit of fat that I rubbed over the meat before roasting was about 4 x 1.5g . The zone diet assumes that all meat has some fat in it.
You’ll notice I’ve slung peas and green beans on my plate, but without really measuring them. I think “pile on the ( non starchy) veg”, but don’t let this take you away from measuring the more carb dense food!
POINTS TO NOTE: when you start to properly manage your weight 1) don’t hunt out weird exotic meals to make. Try and stick with stuff you know and can cook. 2) learn to portion control the important stuff. Dont obsess if you had too much spinach or 3 more fork fulls of cabbage! Learn to recognise the high calorie food. still include it! But manage it.
Todays car park workout was an ‘up down ladder”
Mark out a 10m shuttle run, get a suitably nice, or nasty dumbbell to snatch
On the way up dumbbell snatches 2-20 (2, 4, 6) , on the way down shuttle runs 10-1(10, 9, 8)
Disgusting
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Today, it looks like I’m in the gym in the morning, so I’ll probably do a basic deadlift, squat and press strength workout. Kate (my beloved) will either join me or go for a jog. Your choice, go to the gym, or go for a run ( or a mono structural cardio activity like a row, or a bike, or a Cross-trainer). btw, do go to the bottom of this post as there is a free kettlebell guide
The food I want to analyse is this spaghetti bolognese .
As a general point, when you decide to blend protein with other stuff ( be it a sauce or tomatoes or whatever), you’ll need to make judgement as how you divide the end product. So this is 255g of protein to be divided among 3 people( the zone block is 28g of beef , so Im slightly over allocating the required 84g to make 3 blocks). I’ve added a pepper, some garlic, some herbs, an onion, a glass of wine. I threw in a block of kidney beans (sorry, I had them, and I accidentally defrosted them). Ive not really counted in, but it is among 3 people. If I start obsessing about a pepper or onion, I think I’m screwed!
When I came to serve, i just divided it into 3 portions!
Here is the killer. Spaghetti is pure carb. To make 3 blocks I put in 36g of dried spaghetti, that I think gives me three blocks of carb.
Knowing how sparse this would be, Ive added some green beans ( and ignored the minimal carb content)
It was a nice meal, although kate demanded a sprinkle of cheese.
Back to the exercise component
I constantly use kettlebells in my morning workouts. This old guide I wrote years ago may be useful. Have it for free!!
[emaillocker] https://andrewstemler.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/7bcd3-kettlebell-crossfit-london.pdf [/emaillocker]
You have to learn to create manage and know your regular meals. Once a week we have this “fry up”
There is a bit of “rough and tumble” in my zone calculations my 2 eggs are 2 blocks, my 3 rashers of bacon is another block ( although Im going to get an exact gram measurement in the future) my fried bread is 2 blocks of carb and I define my 50g of black pudding as a carb block (9g of carb) and I sort of ignore the bit of protein floating about. After the photo, I sneaked a squirt of tomato ketchup and a cup of tea, so I’m probably unbalancing the block system and having a bit too much carb (so a possible insulin stimulating issuer) but its important that I give you an idea of what people do in the real world.
Im assuming the fried bread sucked up the balancing fat of 4 blocks
At the same time, I don’t mind the occasional 9g of carb mistake. Get your diet ok, not perfect.
Perfect is for losers.
WHAT IS YOUR TAKE AWAY?
Most people have regular meals. You’ll have a favourite breakfast, or dinner or snack. You may have it everyday, you may, like my breakfast, have it once a week. Here is your task. Put it into block form or, at the least workout its calorie content and how to control that calories/portion size content next time you make it.
Slowly you can build a library of carefully planned meals you can make without stress. Ideally the ingredients can be stored in your freezer, and you take them out the night before. Make it easy, make it doable! Join the mailing list below for future hints, or drop me a line if you need some one to one help Andrew@andrewstemler.com
TODAYS WORKOUT
with a constantly running clock, 3 rounds of
1 minute squats
1 minute double under
1 minute lunge
1 minute kettlebell swing
1 minute rest
x 3
Feel free to only do 30, or 45 seconds out of each work period. Feel free to pick up the kettlebell and use it in the lunges and squats. Enjoy
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As I’m 60, it means I was brought up when freezers came in and changed our world.
However, even today, I hear people talk against using frozen vegetables. I use frozen vegetable extensively as they are cost effective, keep well and convenient. I ask my weight management clients to have stock in too!
I recently noticed a comment where someone suggested that the cheapie frozen veg available in the supermarkets that supply common folk like you and me, was inferior and to be avoided.
Just incase you have this doubt, check out “Mineral, fiber, and total phenolic retention in eight fruits and vegetables: a comparison of refrigerated and frozen storage” available here
What the report said was “Minerals, total phenolics, and fiber were analyzed in several fruit and vegetable commodities to evaluate the differences between fresh and frozen produce. Magnesium, calcium, iron, zinc, and copper were evaluated in corn, carrots, broccoli, spinach, peas, green beans, strawberries, and blueberries. Each commodity was harvested fresh and split into two batches. Half of each commodity was kept fresh, and the other half was frozen. The nutrient content was analyzed over three storage times per treatment. The retention of nutrients was highly dependent on the commodity, but the majority of the commodities showed no significant difference between fresh and frozen for all analytes (p ≤ 0.05)”
This report does imply that some vegetables are not as good as others as holding onto their frozen nutrients, but, when I get home in a rush, it’s great to reach into the freezer and know you have a portion of veg for the evening meal.
For those who want to dive into the exact difference between fresh food and frozen, I offer you Nutritional comparison of fresh, frozen and canned fruits and vegetables. Part 1. Vitamins C and B and phenolic compounds is an interesting report
To be even handed , if you can go and live in a farm or you have a fantastic garden, it must be great to reach out of the kitchen window and pluck some veg. Thats very rare, and to be honest, I remember my mother “blanching” our garden veg back in the 70’s when that lovely chest freezer arrived.
Outside in the vegetable patch , you can stagger your vegetable crops a bit, but the reality is that you’ll get a glut at sometime. So the freezer is your number one call. As a reflection, we went blackberry picking recently and loved it. We went again, then one more time, and now we cannot face the prospect of another blackberry. We should have frozen those later batches.
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Andrew Stemler 
