Before I drive us all into the article, I’d like to share a little bit about the suspense thriller series I am writing. 

The second and third manuscripts in the series are complete and will be published in the near future. What will help more than anything is support through the purchase of the first book. Needless to say leaving 5 star reviews is also a big help from anyone that read the first book and wants to see how much hell the former medic, turned outlaw biker can dig himself out of in the next book. Should I spoil how it goes?

Maybe just a hint instead. 

Bodhi waking up in a mental hospital and being told by doctors he had a psychotic break, would explain everything right? 

I’d share more, (there might be a werewolf) but you better make sure you tell everyone about what happened in Governed by Independence first. 

What do we want? Higher PH balances, lower heart rates, to eat lightning and crap thunder... or is that the other way around and we want to crap lightning and eat thunder?

Hey yo Mick! Help me out here!

Home training?

Minimal budget, minimal equipment?

Reduce stress, reduce pain, increase function?

No pills? Well maybe some bitter truth pills ahead.

For the last three plus years, I have been home self educating and training (more time learning than doing) for several reasons.

Primarily a fixed tight budget, but also time constraints while working full time in the rescue field and keeping up with my family obligations.

Pretty recently I adapted what I am trying to achieve in a way to present it to anyone that can be used regardless of their means and opportunities for their personal advantage.

What I am about to share are simple fundamental principles that I have been applying during the last three years from an accumulated knowledge base that spans over thirty years in the martial arts world, nearly 20 years in the medical field, and from the bible.

Of those three areas of knowledge, I would consider myself a novice martial artist, a good medic, and blessed with Awesome from God. You can count yourself a rich person if you have as good or better, personal relationship with God as I do.

The why, how, and what of Diet, Exercise, and Meditation...COMBINED for the good of the Mind, Body, and Spirit.   

Test all things; hold fast what is good

1 Thessalonians 5:21

And because these are BASIC and easy principles that you can apply to your everyday activities, I expect a lot of people to not be interested in them, because this is not presented in a hollywood format with instant results and the flash and glitz and glamour to eat like junk food.

But how critical is it that you are correctly doing the basics before you build anything on them to master?

Now if anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one’s work will become clear; for the Day will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire; and the fire will test each one’s work, of what sort it is. If anyone’s work which he has built on it endures, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire. Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy, which temple you are.

I Corinthians 3:12‭-‬17

Meditation

Oh yeah, this is the part more important than anything else. If you don’t put it in practice, and you have tried everything and nothing worked… blame yourself, not me, your momma, or daddy not any diet or exercise guru certainly not God.

It's all you.

Body builder Kai Greene often quotes, "Thoughts become things."

All negative choices lead to negative outcomes. Simple math.

You have poor mental and or physical health?

Here you go. This part is all about connecting the mind to the body and restoring the spirit and giving you the keys to your car if you can prove you are not a drunken drugged dummy.

If you have this mastered, then you don't even need to read anything else about your diet and exercise, because I am just saying what you should already know and can likely teach me more about.  

News flash, the root cause from any and every mental or physical disorder you are suffering is from varying doses of stress and inflammation. Solve those issues, and you will absolutely promote yourself into better health. Think of crud on the brain manifesting into stress the way crud in the body manifests into inflammation.

I don't have to tell you if you have a messy house, it's time to get rid of the junk you don't need, and keep what you do need right?

Look what Jesus said in Matthew 12:43-45 and you will know why all this is important. 2 verses. Consider them exercise reps and read them.

Come on, you can do it, just a little more!

Exercise and or diet can alleviate those symptoms, but stress and inflammation are caused from a Spiritual illness that only God and not pills and doctors can cure.

And if your spirit isn’t making a connection to God, this is all just a self-gratification exercise that isn’t going to help promote your life, and instead will just lead you in a circle until you deal with your issues with God, or until you wreck yourself.

Your body is driven by your mind, your mind is driven by your spirit, and if God is not behind your Spirit, you are going to have a car wreck hopefully sooner rather than later as mass times acceleration achieves negative results on impact.

I am learning that meditation can be accomplished in nearly any practice you may have an interest in doing. Meditation is something you can do, consciously and subconsciously. Think of something you do and zone out while doing it, you were likely meditating and didn’t know it.

Same way I did while driving an ambulance or giving patient care until I realized what was happening and started disciplining my mind.

The longer you stay in that zone, the more benefit your body will receive from your spirit.

I am not the one to ask what that says about me that I could get in that zone in the most high stressed situation any person can put themselves in with lives on the line and have the hardest time getting into meditation by sitting still and doing as nothing as possible. But that is what led me into, and back out of PTSD.

Speaking with former Ranger Lt. Col. Tom Kratman and learning what I had experienced was a phenomena not uncommon with Ranger Training was a huge relief I was not totally losing my mind, but what I was essentially doing to myself was something that could be disciplined.

So I am not going to tell you to sit in the dark and hum to yourself. But try to find something that helps you take the load off your mind and body, especially if you enjoy doing it. The junk you feed your mind has to be flushed out.

But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

Matthew 6:23

Positive choices lead to positive outcomes. But, again, if you aren't right with God, don’t blame the negative results on anything else but the drunk guy behind the wheel.

And the negative results from meditation practices have been known to send people to the ER for psychotic breaks as fast as people getting negative results lead to bone breaks.

Don’t let that scare you, I can guarantee their lifeline to God wasn’t connected by the bible, it was by something negative in the middle. The negative results from poor diet choices lead into the ER along with people making poor exercise choices.

"Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.”

Matthew 15:11

Quick disclaimer, this area is also what I have fought most of my battles over, with people near and very dear to me calling me a hypocrite and worse because I turned to God over modern medicine. I am all too personally aware of the persecution people go through over their faith and especially their mental health.

Where pills and doctors failed me, God didn’t. I failed myself because I had the basics all wrong.

If you need to talk to someone about your relationship with God to put things in order, let me hear from you.

But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.

James 1:25

I have hesitated on the issue of how to share what I have learned for a variety of reasons, mainly because I know at best it will likely be white noise in the background of all the fitness gurus and books and videos that tell everyone everything about diet, or exercise that can be covered. No doubt a lot of people eye rolled and dismissed this article because of exactly that.

They may think they have heard it all before and didn’t get what they were after from the other white noise they paid for. I might do the same unless someone I trusted gave me a reason to read this.

The other reason I am hesitant is I know enough to write a book on the subject and may in the future depending on how present events unfold, including putting it all to work for myself full time and achieving more personal life goals and ambitions.

Also... just giving away free knowledge, doesn’t seem appreciated, unless it is packaged as entertainment and as valuable as a youtube cat video

So I am going to ask something back from any person who reads all the way through this article, which will likely be as long as a book chapter to try to cover some of these three big topics.

Share this article to everyone you can from the facebook link and get people to like and follow the Regulator.Solutions facebook page.

And if I use hundred dollar terms, such as Muscular Hypertrophy you may not understand (and I will try not to for all laymen and common understanding), please look them up on your own so I do not extend this article longer than necessary.

I want people to better themselves, because EVERYONE benefits from being near better people. That is what I get back and I consider it a worthy investment to freely give what I have bled and nearly died to obtain.

See that no one renders evil for evil to anyone, but always pursue what is good both for yourselves and for all.

I Thessalonians 5:15

Which are the three daily practices of exercise, diet, and meditation that I realized at the end of 2016 I critically needed to discipline in order to control my PTSD.

My personal results from what I am doing?

No, I am no phenom of athleticism, nor am I the most lethal fighting machine on the planet.

However, I no longer have any symptoms from PTSD no matter what circumstances or stress I am going through.

Also, I have become dramatically more resistant to cold and flu bugs and seasonal allergies.

Whether I am in a life and death emergency with the responsibility of someone’s life in my hands, or dealing with people who want to see me destroyed by the unGodly choices they have made. I am still standing and setting new goals for my life to achieve, my decisions still save lives, and the people who have tried to take me down have no victories to brag about.

I will try to minimize the sermon about how I accomplished that, but it comes down to having God as my personal instructor and His focus on the areas in my life that needed the most critical attention to save me from the harm I did to myself through undisciplined choices.

Some people may think God is not important, for reasons going to the left or right off planet. It amazes me to run into people who think they have God, but don’t have physical or mental health more than it does for me to run into people who think they have mental and physical health and think there is no God.

But you both got the same problem and are too busy flinging stones at mirrors to know it.

When I saw public schools being shut down, the first thought I had was that a lot of parents are going to find out if they can homeschool and be better off.

Then I heard this virus, and others, has been from poor diet and hygiene from china and other third world regions.

Eating bats? Boiling live dogs? Swine flu? You mean all this could have been avoided by putting the chinese people on a kosher diet plan and teaching them the dietary laws from the Old Testament?

What is the flu? It is an exaggerated inflammation response in the body.

The Lord will strike you with consumption, with fever, with inflammation, with severe burning fever, with the sword, with scorching, and with mildew; they shall pursue you until you perish.

Deuteronomy 28:22 written 3000 to 5000 years ago.

Please let me see the reaction of any liberal snow flake’s face by telling them that.

Oh and stress disorders?

The Lord will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of heart.

 Deuteronomy 28:28

Hopefully I got your attention that these problems are not something science and education is getting us any closer to solving as the problems are growing to epidemic scales the harder we fight against God.

You can look up any professional medical journal and learn for yourself illnesses such as ADD, PTSD, and worse are all anxiety and stress related while respiratory, allergy, and autoimmune and chronic pain disorders all are inflammation responses.  

Diet

First you need to be conscious of something you may already know.

Foods are drugs, drugs are foods.

Including air and water.

The wrong doses of any drug or food will harm or kill you to death.

All foods are derived from a plant, animal, or mineral.

All drugs are...derived from plant animal or mineral.

Most are synthesized, but it is still a plant animal or mineral molecular combination.

Most foods are processed….. When you hear processed foods, think synthesized while you enjoy that artificial flavor and sweetener chemically sealed to preserve freshness.

The reason you may be taking pills for pain relief, or chronic illness… you are getting too much or not enough of something you need from an essential and balanced diet.

I can’t tell you what that is from where I am, that is on you and your decision to get off the pills or take the easy way out.

Here is a news flash…. Those drugs only mask the symptoms and add more problems in the long run. Your body is still suffering from an imbalance or injury you or your physician is not identifying and treating.

The last patient I treated was a male in his 30s in good shape, former military, serving in Law Enforcement and experiencing high blood pressure and racing heart and chest pains, the heart monitor showed a healthy normal beating heart that wasn't injured by heart attack, but his history showed this was likely caused by an anxiety attack(stress)...triggered by antibiotics treating a spider bite causing infection (inflammation).

That is not to say he did not need the medication and the takeaway from all this is not to stop taking prescribed medication and don’t go to a doctor when you recognize something is wrong, especially emergently wrong. The patient did the right thing, and called for help, and my team responded and got him to doctor's care in the ER.

What he did not need was to take the pills (affecting his daily diet intake), and “rest” (affecting his daily exercise) that started the symptoms leading to possible anxiety attack, and then getting into family drama. No exercise plus no meditation plus stress = sickness from all these factors coming against him at once.  That is a war triggering a fight or flight response without being armed to defend yourself against.

This is why my diet is as Paleo as my budget allows so I can recognize any physical symptoms I have, and find out what food I need to increase or diminish from my diet as my wants and needs vary. I experience negative and harmful reactions from medication as a consequence, so don’t take anything I say at all lightly.

Removing synthesizing, removing processing from anything and everything I can and getting it as straight from the original source as possible unless I am dealing with urgent or emergent situations that require more drastic measures.

I also recommend intermittent fasting.

The first time I heard about it, I dismissed it as something I was likely not capable of or wouldn’t work for me. But it has a connection to my meditative practices and I started trying and found I could do just about anything I set my mind to accomplish if I gave myself the time to adapt.

"Positive Preparation Prevents Poor Performance" ~ Kai Greene

Now I am enjoying health benefits from it along with easing the pain to my wallet.

I don’t have to mention how critical it is to be drinking pure straight water do I? Without it you will have a difficult time trying to flush out the crap that causes inflammation and are likely adding other drugs (and water is a drug btw) to the load on your brain.

When I was enlisted in the NAVY nearly 20 years ago before going into the rescue field, our RDC’s enjoyed using any excuse or infraction to punish us by drinking water until someone vomited from consumption. It was that or cut grass with toenail clippers in front of base command which I luckily never experienced.

It was about a year later that, news hit of a recruit in Ft Sam who died from water poisoning.

I had a very difficult time getting myself to drink water again, and I suffered during the lapse leading up to my PTSD and only recently got over that hurdle by applying everything together that I am preaching here.

What could I do to increase more gains? Spend more money on better food.

Ultimately, I can’t tell you what diet or foods to eat… it is on you determined by your personal goals and needs. However, make your diet as balanced and as healthy as possible and look at what other areas in your life are lacking attention and compensate accordingly. I am more than confident that a crap diet with good exercise can achieve what you want as easy as a great diet with crap for exercise...as long as you have God making you Awesome.

There is a reason why exercise gurus are NOW saying you can’t get six pack abs by exercise alone. And you won’t get muscle development and conditioning from diet alone while staying on a couch or behind a desk all day every day.

During this china virus situation, I am noticing a trend in “Home training” as gyms and dojo’s are being shut down, and the same question rises that I have over public education I mentioned above, how is this going to impact the industry in the future?

Especially with rockstars like Pat MacNamara and Ted Kennedy posting videos to keep you fired up and stay motivated, moving, and maintained.

BTW, if you are reading this Mr. Kennedy, I got a few things I would love to pick your brains over any time you wanna holler at your Texas neighbor.

And of course, I am personally connected to some of the best trainers in the world here at Regulator.Solutions

Exercise

Aside from working in the streets and fire fighting, I also worked in emergency rooms for over six years in twelve hour shifts three to five times a week. According to electric step counters, I measured on average more than 10 miles a night between walking to patients rooms, treating, and moving them to other areas in the hospital with short breaks in between for documenting at a desk. If I was lucky I got a thirty minute lunch break, but usually ate on the fly and scarfed down whatever I could grab to carry me into the next battle, the way I always did for over 20 years in the field.

By all accounts I should have been bodybuilder ripped, and some nurses and medics I worked with were. Most of them were putting more time and budget into diet and exercise than I thought I could afford at that time.

But I was carrying tons of stress on my mind that I was not processing (zero meditation). Stress that went from my mind, to my body, and I did not get any gains from all the good I was trying to do.

Instead I was coming home exhausted from lack of sleep and half injured from plantar fasciitis (inflammation again) that I likely qualified for foot surgery over. No doubt any nurse, waitress, beatcop or someone with a job that stays on their feet all shift knows what I am talking about.

Three years ago God started pushing me outside (in my short spare time between running 911 calls and fighting personal wars) and simply start moving, stretching and breathing here and there whiddling on everything I had learned from various martial art systems over the years.

I then picked up a book on Qigong, realized I was already doing it or at least trying to, and just needed to polish what I was doing and work out the rough edges. Biggest problem I have had all my life has been improper breathing.

Either from being taught wrong which triggered my exercised induced asthma, or it was genetic…it doesn’t matter. Point is I knew from martial arts, if you can’t breathe you can’t fight...you can’t live.

Then I ran across Wim Hoff on youtube (also interviewed on Joe Rogan) … and started adding cold water therapy. The intermittent fasting plus cold water therapy = big health gains that I can't emphasize enough and are worth your time to research.

You sleep apnea sufferers better pay attention to everything I said and am saying because you should know you are dying even if you are lucky enough to not be on a machine like too many of my patients.

Last thing anyone should want is to wind up with any kind of pulmonary obstructive disease after what I have witnessed… and I know I am at risk for a number of reasons… either bad habits or genetics.

The Qigong led to my personal study of my own art system that I am exploring. The art led into conditioning, which I am learning.

The first lesson I learned is that it is less important for me to do things correctly by the Qigong way, or yoga way or any other as it is for me to do things the correct way by God for the way He made me to become.

For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. ~ Jeremiah 29:11

Thoughts become things, remember?

The conditioning entails the following guidelines (more than rules), you can apply to whatever your art or exercise is.

Rise, Kill, Eat.

Also think “Green, yellow, red.”

Also too… think maintenance, conditioning, and development.

And… may as well throw in Endomorphic, ectomorphic and mesomorphic. But those three are terms you will have to look up if you haven’t heard of them yet.

I am about to dump a bunch of philosophy on you in a very condensed package, heads up.

My exercise essentially involves warm up (rise) of Qigong/martial arts, followed by killing it with calisthenics and bodyweight exercise (think burpee’s and being back in gym class), ending with basically yoga type stretching and exercise to eat success for the day on.

If you already are at your personal target weight and just want to maintain, this doesn't have to take more than 15 minute daily sessions 6 days a week which anyone has time to do, even and especially if that means cutting into your entertainment in front of a TV.

That will greatly diminish the load of stress and inflammation your body is carrying. Especially if you are intermittent fasting (which frees a TON of time) and taking cold showers.

My biggest bad habit I had previously been carrying over that, was the belief I needed to go to the gym and devote at least an hour to exercise while I was there, which meant a time investment from my day of at least 2 hours when I was already cutting sleep to make time for work and family.

You do know sleep rest is critical for your health, right? That is something I was improperly trained against doing and believing. Don’t ask me how many times I went days with no sleep while working 24 hour shifts, or snatching 4 hours for extended portions of my life over 20 years. That is something that was necessary for me to make a living...that was silently killing me while feeding my ego. Your body and mind is in 100% meditation mode while sleeping.

At 15 minutes in a good environment, exercising can get all the bad juju out of you and help promote your body to restore function and mobility.

But pay attention to your own limits and your body signs. This is where the colors are good indicators.

Green (rise) your comfy and moving at your normal baseline. Yellow (kill) you are pushing it into uncomfort. Red your done before your uncomfort turns to pain indicating injury requiring more than a day to recover. In other words stop and eat before you get eaten.

Don't stress over rep counts, although you should consider heart rate monitoring in correlation to stay in your target zone.

Note on the Red.

Injuries should not be your goal unless you are trying to achieve muscular hypertrophy (warned you) and you are breaking old limits and trying to achieve new goals.

True injuries never fully repair 100%. At best the injured tissue becomes a scar, and the tissues connecting to that scar are likely weekend and ready to tear again, and again, and again if they don’t get the full recovery time needed to repair and heal.

In short, you done went too far in the red and now you are going to spend days to weeks or longer recovering from that injury.

With muscular hypertrophy you are trying to achieve this at a cellular level before you get to tissue so that the cell itself is totally destroyed, and reborn newer better bigger badder faster.

This is why the work is done in the “yellow” with your exercise under muscular load via tension verses movement. Isometric vs dynamic? Use what works for you.

You can stay in the green/yellow zone and maintain what you got and even increase functionality, rehabilitate from injuries the closer you stay to the green. The harder you push against the red, the more into conditioning and development you can work.

Let me give two different examples from each of two exercises that achieve two drastic differences.

Running and weightlifting.

People running a marathon want to be in the green while they run. To train for that, they push against the yellow and focus on technique while relaxed tension and movement. The results you see in a marathon runner are generally someone lean and leathery tough with no spare flesh and not a lot of muscle.

Now look at a short sprinter. Everything is maximal effort pushing against the Red with focus on maximal exertion as fast as possible. Results are someone who is bulky in muscle and has a lot of strength for short periods.

Weightlifting

Powerlifting versus bodybuilding

Powerlifting, maximal effort, pushing into the red with as much load on the muscle as possible.

You wind up with a strong bulky build.

Bodybuilding

All technique under relaxed movement with tension.

Results, supposedly without drugs (cough) and with the right diet you get mega muscles that you can’t wipe your butt with that people think are pretty to look at. (sorry Kai Greene)

Is there a middle ground?

Of course, that is why there are hurdle runners and strength training through functional exercises like...dare I say crossfit?

Any gains you are trying to go after are going to be determined largely by your genetic predisposition. See endomorph, mesomorphic and ectomorphic, which likely oversimplifies since there are obviously people who genetically blend between those three profiles.

And no matter what your crossfit coach claims, TECHNIQUE is critical to prevent injuries and promote gain.

But let me make it easy for you to understand by putting you in your boxes.

If you are an ectomorph, don't worry about moving something heavy, go spend a day in a marathon.

If you are an endomorph, sorry big guy, avoid marathons and find something heavy to move around.

If you are a mesomorph, freak make up your mind and learn to use what God gave you.

What do I need to do to get personal gains?

Spend more on equipment?

Or stop being a freak and learn to use what God gave me.