Crock Pot Diaries. from CrossFit Football

This time we journey away from the other white meat to the only meat that really matters: red meat.

I also selected one of my favorite cuts, ribs. They are tasty and with the meat conveniently attached to a bone…they are a home run. I have always thought ribs are to meat as stick is to corn dog. And since I don’t eat corn dogs anymore, I have to substitute with ribs.

Enjoy this latest thriller from the Crock Pot.

Crock Pot Country-Style Beef Ribs

Ingredients:

4-6 lbs Beef Ribs
1 ½ cups of beef stock
2 cloves of fresh garlic
1 small onion, peeled and cut into slices
2 pinches of Big Bubba’s Chipolte Rubba or chipotle powder
1 tablespoon of maple syrup
1 pinch or salt & black pepper
1 large helping of golden beets cut into slices

Place sliced onion and beets in bottom, and sprinkle garlic on top. Rinse and pat ribs dry, and place them on onion. Pour bone broth and maple syrup over top, and then sprinkle with Big Bubba Rub, salt and pepper, put lid on and cook on LOW for 8 hours.

Once the 8 hours comes, remove the lid for a few seconds and blow the steam away. Using a fork remove a rib and start eating. Once done with the first rib, eat some beets. Repeat this until the ribs are gone and nothing is left but the juice in the pot. This works best if you use your favorite beer to cool your mouth from the hot ribs, but this is optional.

Serve 1

*Timing: Remember the rule for slow cookers is 1 hour on HIGH = 2 hours on low, so if you wanted to make these twice as fast, you would cook them for 4 hours on HIGH. Since all slow cookers cook at different temperatures and different efficiencies, it pays to “stick a fork in it” an hour or two ahead of time and see if it is done!

WOD

A:  Push Press 5×5

B:  Complete 6 rounds:

1 Minute of Calorie Row
1 Minute to perform 15 KB Swings – 2 pood

*You have one minute to row for calories. You have the second minute to perform 15 KB swings.

Post total calories rowed to comments.

The Giant Women Experiment

November 10, 2012 by Jason

Many of you will remember Deb from some of my previous posts (here, and most famously here).  Of all the examples I have given you, she is by far the most popular because of her age (now 53) and the extremely regressed condition she came to me in (see the linked posts for details).  Well, along with being a great client and friend, Deb is valuable to me for another reason: she trusts me enough to participate in my wacky experiments.

If you follow my work here on Everyday Paleo, you know that I am quite passionate about persuading women to lift weights, regardless of their goal.  I have attacked this topic from a couple of different angles (here and here), but I still hear from women on a regular basis who are worried about lifting weights because they think it will make them look like men.  So, I felt that we needed to hit this one head on.  Despite the fact that we have never seen anything close to too much mass on any woman who has ever trained in my gym, and no woman has ever told me their muscles were getting too big and they feel they should stop lifting, I decided I was going to try to purposely pack as much muscle mass as possible on a few ladies, IF I could find willing subjects.  See where the trust part comes in?

There were actually 3 women in my experiment, but I am only sharing Deb’s results with you here today.  If you want to see the rest, you will have to wait for my book.  (Yep, that was a shameless plug.)  For 3 months, Deb trained like a bodybuilder and ate as much food as we could pack into her, but she did not stray from paleo.  She did not eat a fat loss version of paleo, either.  Instead, she pulled out the stops and tried to eat dense calorie sources as much as possible.  She lifted weights like a mad woman, using high volume reps and sets commonly used for hypertrophy (mass gain), and she did absolutely no huffing and puffing throughout the entire experiment.  That means no cardio and no metabolic conditioning.  The only steps I may have been able to take to put more mass on her would have required garbage food and drugs.  I would be a fraud if I condoned either.

Deb ate at least 3500 calories per day, every day.  Her average day looked like this:

Breakfast – 6 eggs, 4 strips of bacon, salsa

Lunch – 1 pound of ground beef cooked in a pan with approximately a cup of vegetables.

Dinner – Grass fed beef steak (approximately 16 ounces), with extra fat left on by the butcher, and sometimes vegetables.

Snack – 6 eggs, 4 strips of bacon, salsa (same as breakfast)

She cooked everything in coconut oil or butter which adds more calories to this list.  For those of you who are members of EPLifeFit, take a look at Deb’s food logs and you will see that this extreme intake is not actually very far off of what she has always eaten.  Deb has a voracious appetite and loves meat.

Without further ado, let’s get to the results.  Here is Deb on day one of the experiment:

And here she is after 12 weeks:

I know, I know, these pictures were taken in different lighting and different distances from the camera.  That’s why we have measurements.

Yes, that’s correct, Deb actually got smaller on every single measurement we tracked.  And this is a women who just spent the last 3 months doing things like bench press with a pair of 45 pound dumbbells for multiple sets of 10 rep, as well as back squatting 125 pounds for multiple sets of 10 reps.  I wonder how many women reading this post would dare do such things, especially since training that way is supposed to make women look like men.

Just for fun, here she is in street clothes looking small and feminine and shining like a beacon of hope among most women her age:

Now let me clarify some things.  First of all, Deb is relatively advanced in her fitness, having worked with me for a few years and gained considerable strength prior to beginning this experiment.  If she had been completely deconditioned, we would have seen more dramatic differences in her measurements, but that would be because she would have begun with less muscle, not because she would have somehow ended up with more.

Second, I am in no way suggesting that any woman reading this post should train specifically for maximum muscle mass and eat 3500 calories per day, nor am I suggesting that, under the same circumstances, your results would be the same as Deb’s.  This experiment was not about finding the perfect way for women to get fit and healthy, and there are certainly better paths to your goals.  This experiment was about proving that women do not tend to have the ability to grow manly muscles, even when they try really hard.  As I mentioned earlier, there were 3 women in this experiment (although I’m only sharing Deb with you for now), but these are still anecdotal cases and I am not claiming to prove anything.  I am simply trying to appeal to you logically and get you thinking.

I have yet to meet a woman who ever went to the gym and got a masculine physique by accident, and you have never met a woman like that either.  Women with big muscles put A LOT of concerted effort and years of their lives into that endeavor.  BUT, women who lift weights and eat a solid paleo diet almost always find a shorter path to improved health, and improved health translates to sustainable improvements in the way their bodies look.  Please, just give it a shot.  You will be glad you did.

Go forth and be awesome.

WOD

A:  Front Squat 7X1

B:  For time:
10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 Reps of:
Front Squat 135/95
Burpee Pull-ups

Post results to comments.

Are you stuck?

“I was a VP at a soft tissue rehab center that worked on pro athletes and Crossfitters, Olympic Athletes and us regular folks. I’m friends with over 30 chiropractors and know some Orthopedic Surgeons as well. Why do you care? WELP- If you’re ‘stuck’ at a certain squat/deadlift weight or push press, or clean/clean and jerk weight then you may want to look at the opposite part of your body.

For my… clients who need to PR @ squats and DLs, I’ve noticed that their upper back is weaker in proportion than their lower body. Same is true for the upper body…lower body is lacking.

Our BRAIN runs the show. The spinal column is DIRECTLY plugged in to the brain. Now, if any part of your back (upper or lower) is lacking or weak, ya AIN’T gonna have a PR and if you force it with a crazy pre-workout or hormones, then you’ll get hurt. The brain constantly (and I mean that in EVERY sense of the word) sends signals down your spinal column. The brain is the BOSS, not you. So it’s best to work with it, not against it.

Also, you want to be sure that you’re REALLY stretching your joints and foam rolling DAILY. Yes, daily. The fascia can cause ALL kinds if issues and is widely responsible for a lack of range of motion in the joints.

My point???

If you consistently take care of ALL of your body equally, baby your muscles and fascia, you’ll have a good time.”

Coach Prime – Mindset, Nutrition, Health and Fitness Life Coach

WOD

A:  20 Minutes to find a 1rm:  Snatch

B:  Every Minute on the Minute for 15 minutes Perform:
2 Snatches@ 75% of above
5 Bar Facing Burpees

Post results to comments.