The Dow Dominion

Among all the beverages available for consumption by humans, tea is the most popular drink in the world , second only to water.  While a majority of that tea is generally black tea--made from the fermented leaves of the Camellia sinensis bush--an increasing amount of people are trying out green tea.  Green tea is also made out of the leaves of the Camellia sinensis bush, but the leaves are only dried and heated, not fermented.  It has a relatively similar flavor, it comes from the same plant, it is just as easy to prepare, and it may have benefits that are not realized from drinking black tea. Camellia sinensis Although I have heard purported positive health effects from drinking green tea from friends, family, co-workers, television ads and fitness/nutritional websites, I decided to take a look at the research myself to see what science has to say about it.  Despite many trials finding little to no effect, there are quite a few studies showing very real posi...

The meager amount of people following this blog might know I am an avid weight lifting fan.  There's plenty of reasons I could list for why weight lifting is so great, but the list of references backing it up are too numerous too count, and requires multiple articles just to cover the basics. Today, I want to briefly touch on something a bit more specific: The concept of being a weight lifter while also being a vegetarian.  This is a goal I am currently in the process of testing out for myself, which is going pretty well, actually.  What enticed me, an avid meat-eater, to try out vegetarianism, you ask?  There are multiple reasons, but I have to admit that the one thing that motivated to try it was a TED talk I watched before work one day on YouTube: In the video, Mr. Knox isn't too specific about any research, but he does talk about his own personal experience about going almost completely vegetarian.  He claims his cholesterol dropped considerably, he l...

It's been quite some time since I have written a post for this blog.  Over a year, in fact.  In that period of time, my interests seem to naturally rotate from one to another in a cycle loosely based on the seasons. In the winter, I tend to become more interested in personal finance, as it is obviously too cold to grow food from plants (at least here in Asheville).  The temperatures also demotivate me from weight lifting, as I train in my unheated outdoor garage. When winter is nearly over, and spring is on the horizon, gardening starts becoming my main focus during this time period.  A new year of working and experimenting with different plants and different growing conditions dominates my thoughts as I envision the fruits of my labor in the coming months. As the heat of summer hits, my interest in physical fitness--weight lifting, to be more specific--reaches an all time high.  Since growing up in hot and muggy Florida, my body seems to naturally enjoy h...

As much as I am interested in fitness-related information and material, I realize that there are people that can offer much more reliable and original information on the science behind working out, nutrition and other fitness topics than I am willing or able.  Thus, I have decided to turn my fitness blog into a gardening blog.  While I admit there are already a ton of experts with way more information about gardening than myself, I feel there is much more room for experimentation with gardening, allowing me to deliver original, engaging content without having to know the in's and out's of the scientific research ,or rip off someone else's content. So, without further ado, I present the new blog of nate2d.blogspot.com:  Asheville Amatuer Gardening .  My goal for this blog will be to help myself and others understand how to grow vegetables and fruit that yield the maximum amount of food possible per plant, to outline strategies that are simple, effective and cheap t...

February is drawing to a close, and that means a lot of people are preparing to start leaning down as temperature increases.  I, on the other hand, have decided to bulk up as much as I can before July, which is three months before my wedding to my wonderful fiancee.  At that point, I will have 12 weeks to lean down, but for now my goal is to gain as much strength (and lean mass, hopefully) as possible. Since I haven't updated my workout routine on the blog since I was doing body weight circuits, I figured it was time that I laid it all out on the table for others to read about. Previously, I had trained at a commercial gym with loads of equipment and during that time I managed to get fairly strong.  However, my form on most exercises was atrocious and I didn't really understand how my training was affecting my body... other than the basic "train, eat, sleep, grow" philosophy.  After a long break from training, I decided to restart from the ground up, training as...

It's been quite a while since my last update on this blog, and my training has progressed past the body weight program I was doing back then.  My fianceé bought me a barbell weight set for my birthday back in November, and I been researching the subject of resistance training as much as possible ever since then.  Today, I am going to share some of the most important findings of my research on resistance training.  It may be a bit long-winded, but I promise it'll be worth the read.  So without further ado...   • Use compound lifts Compound lifts are the best choice for beginners, and usually even more advanced trainees.  They are exercises that use the largest muscle groups simultaneously, which induce the greatest training effect from weight lifting.  Whether the goal is muscle gain or fat loss, compound lifts are the "go-to" exercises that should be the foundation of the routine.  Isolation lifts--exercises that target a specific muscle--have...

November 3 Upper body A1. "T" push-up @ 211     1. 8     2. 6 A2. Inverted Row @ 211     1. 11     2. 6 B1. Door pull-ups @ 222     1. 7     2. 3     3. 3     4. 3 B2. Dips @ 211     1. 8     2. 5 C1. Decline push-ups @ 111     1. 12     2. 12 C2. Pike push-ups @ 222     1. 4     2. 4     3. 3 C3. Bicycle crunches @ 111     1. 15     2. 15 November 2, 2011 Lower body A1. Bulgarian split-squat @ 333     1. 14     2. 12 A2. Hip-thigh extension @ 333     1. 4     2. 4 B1. Partial co-contraction lunge @ 333     1. 6     2. 5 B2. Step-up @ 201     1. 17     2. 17 C1. Partial squat @ 333...