Making Your Own Stock

2012-11-10_13-42-20_868

Alright already! Here’s how my wife makes it. I can tell you this – if you are not making your own stock and drinking a cup a day with a pinch of salt, you have no idea what you are missing!

Subject: Bone Broth recipe

Making good tasting stock is a fairly imprecise endeavor. I don’t measure anything or weigh anything. I just throw stuff into a pot and simmer for 24 hours or so.

Get a big stainless steel (never aluminum) lidded stock pot. Put in:

Whatever bones you want to use – I stick with (truly) pastured raised chicken carcasses (backs, necks, feet) and/or turkey parts. I’ll use duck bones too if I can get them at the farmer’s market (yummy stock). I will also use bones from (truly) grass fed cows and lamb, but I don’t like it as much as the poultry bones – comes out rather gamy tasting and can be made to make great stews and soups, but I like it less for just straight drinking.

Chicken feet make the richest stock. This stock seems to confer the greatest joint pain-relief benefit to Fred and maybe because there are so many joints in a chicken foot. I get them from a farm upstate, but I think you can get them at the Union Sq. farmer’s market.

Rinse the bones, especially if they are left over from a meal you already had (you can save up bones and carcasses in the freezer) — you want to make sure you’re not adding any salt to the stock. Trim the nails off the chicken feet (I use poultry sheers) and cut off any gross calluses or any other dirty looking parts (not sure if you really have to, but those parts gross me out). You can mix and match bones too – sometimes adding poultry bones to the beef or lamb, tones down the gamy flavor. Pork bones also make a great tasting, almost Asian tasting broth.

How many bones to use? It depends on how much stock you want. After you put them in the pot (I loosely fill my 15 qt. pot half way up with bones/feet) you will cover them with water so that they are submerged with an inch or so over the bones.

Then I add one or two ribs of celery – rinsed and cut into 3 pieces.

One or two medium sized carrots, scrubbed and cut into 3 pieces.

And one medium onion, peeled and quartered. If I have a bunch of parsley I will rinse it off and throw it in. I will also put in any leftover veggies in my veg. drawer as long as they don’t impart too much of a flavor – like broccoli and cauliflower (I throw in the rinsed greens that often get thrown away). I won’t throw in a bitter green, because I don’t know how it will affect the taste, greens like chard are fine. But the veggies are not necessary.

IMPORTANT: Add 1/4 cup organic, unfiltered APPLE CIDER VINEGAR to the pot. It won’t affect the flavor, but it will help leach all the minerals from the bones. DO NOT add salt – salt does the opposite.

The celery, carrot, onion combo is classic in stock-making. So I always use those, but I don’t care too much about the proportions (though some might say I should).

Then I bring the whole thing to a boil. Once it’s boiling, I might skim the “scum” that starts forming if there is a lot of it, but most times I don’t — it just goes away eventually. Then I put the lid on it, turn down to a simmer and let it simmer for 12 – 24 hours — the best stock has gone 24. It really should be just barely bubbling.

I turn it off and let it cool down enough to handle straining out the bones and stuff — this can take several hours. I drain it well, squeezing the veggies in a strainer to get all the liquid out. After I get all the big stuff out, I pour it through a fine strainer to get all the little bits out. I put the bowl in the fridge and let cool for another 24 hours.

The next day there should be a layer of fat on the top. I skim that off and discard (not because I’m fat phobic, but because poultry fat gets damaged in the long cooking process). Then I store in half cup portions (in glass containers) and stick in the freezer. It’ll be rather concentrated, so when you thaw it out to drink, you add equal parts water to it. At this point you can add a pinch of salt if you want.

Enjoy! And give the kids some too!

Knee Extensions are Good Exercises

Powerfully effective for strengthening the quadriceps musculature

I was contacted yesterday by someone who asked me the following question:

Dear Mr. Hahn,

I just wanted to say that I heard you on Jimmy Moore’s podcast, bought your book, and I’ve been doing slow burn for a couple of weeks now and have already started seeing results. I am 44 and concerned about getting injured, so I think your method is perfect for me.

I have a question regarding my wife. She is in good shape by appearances, but admits that her muscles are weak and could use some strength training. But she has a concern with doing the leg press or knee extensions. She has some joint issues (particularly in the knees), and a physical therapist once told her that no one should ever do a knee extension, as it is really bad for that joint. She is also concerned about squats and presses. Do you have any advice about how she can strengthen her legs without hurting her knees?

Thanks so much for your help!

I just hate these physical therapists. Well, hate’s the wrong word – despise is closer to it.

Let’s get down to it here – no matter what strengthening exercise you do HOW you do it matters. I think we can all agree that fast and explosive movements on ANY exercise machine or free weight exercise using challenging weight loads is a recipe for disaster. If you don’t agree with this, hit your back button and follow the election results.

Instead of flinging your limbs around like a rag doll when lifting weights, slow and controlled movements impart a much lower degree of force without compromising gains in muscle tissue – the ultimate goal of weight lifting for health and fitness.

Here’s a video showing some guy doing them wrong:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijX2ojGxlQs?feature=player_detailpage&w=440&h=360]

Here’s me doing a very heavy set of knee extensions (heavy for ME that is) a couple of years ago. Bear in mind that I have severe knee arthritis due to 25 years of Karate, jogging, etc. and perrform this exercise with ZERO knee discomfort.

Also bear in mind that I always train myself, so, you’ll see some questionable exercise form. Bear further in mind that I was a little tubby then from rice and sweet potatoes creeping into my life. I was trying to carb up a bit to increase muscle fullness and it resulted instead in a fat gut. Lesson learned.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJk-FN2C-Gk?feature=player_detailpage&w=440&h=360]

For people with knee issues, I’d advise a rep range of 6-12 repetitions. This keeps the weight a bit lighter.

Now, some therapists and personal trainers will argue that the exercise isn’t “functional.” They claim that we don’t use our legs in this fashion in real life, meaning, we don’t extend our knees against resistance while sitting on a chair. My answer: So what? The issue is the strength of the quadriceps and nothing more. Do these therapists think that if I make Mrs. Smiths quads 50% stronger by making her quads more muscular they will look nice but won’t function any better?

They also claim that it puts undue pressure on the kneecap forcing it to crush up against the femur causing compression and potentially injury. But of course, these same therapists go out for their morning jog. The reason for knee injury when doing leg extensions is not due to the exercise itself. It is due to HOW you perform it.

You can’t jog carefully and slowly. If you put a chimp behind the wheel of a car and it crashes, don’t blame the car.

As the saying goes, slow and steady wins the race. Your thoughts?

Imagine…

Imagine a world where everyone strength trained twice a week for 15 minutes.

Imagine a world where everyone ate real, unprocessed foods.

Imagine a world where everyone rushed off of a bus to help a feeble, elderly person on to it.

Imagine a world where no one littered, ever.

Imagine a world where everything one did was to objectively better the human condition.

What are we waiting for?

You Gain When You Rest

A long standing female client said to me the other day:

“Well Fred! You look in such good shape. How often do you exercise? Everyday I’ll bet!”

The brainwashing runs deep. While I appreciated the comment very much (all I did was take off 10 pounds), it bothered me to no end that, once again, I failed to educate.

Now, if she – a client for over 10 years – thought this, what must all of YOU be thinking about exercise I pondered. Do you still think the more exercise better? If so, allow me to explain.

Exercise, when done in a manner that stimulates the process of positive tissue (bone, muscle, tendon) remodeling, requires that the person allow for adequate recovery. All of the little physiological gizmos that roar into motion after performing exercises that cause muscle tissue “breakdown” need to go through their entire rebuilding process before more of the same happens again if you want the best results possible.

Exercise = breakdown. Rest = recovery. Recovery = physical improvement.

A good analogy is the process of a wound healing. You get cut. Now your body has to “knit one, pearl two” and go about repairing and regenerating new tissue. This takes time. Since we all have experienced a cut or wound in our lives, have any of you ever been cut and the the very next day the would was completely healed? Never right? And the severity matters as well. The more severe the injury, the longer the recovery takes. The more intense the exercise, the better the overall stimulation but more recovery is required.

Now about rest and recovery. I’m not saying you need to act like Rip Van Winkle and sleep for 20 years. What I mean is time away from exercise that is strong enough to cause breakdown. I’m not talking about a walk in the park with your honey-bunny or a leisurely bike ride in the park with you 10 year old. I’m talking about hard, intense exercise – the kind you know will cause you benefits.

Research shows that most people need at least a full day away and in my experience 2-3 days away from the tough stuff in order to recover fully. This assumes you are putting a hard effort into your training. I define hard as working the muscles enough that in each of your exercises you reach a very deep point of muscle fatigue.

Currently I strength train twice weekly. I have trained three times a week with good results but the results were not much better if better at all. If I train just once a week for too long of a period of time (~2 months) I experience losses in strength and my physique appears less robust – to me at least.

The point is this – you enjoy the benefits from specific exercises that cause benefits when you are resting.

Allow me to repeat myself – you derive the benefits from exercise when you are resting, when you are resting, resting, resting, resting, resting…

High Intensity Strength Training in Today’s Financial Times

In today’s Financial Times there’s an article about high intensity strength training that I feel is worth shouting about. More people should know, especially seniors, how beneficial and time saving this type of exercise is.

Please enjoy!

Once a week, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the former chief executive of insurer AIG, leaves his Park Avenue office and travels across New York’s Central Park to a nondescript basement crowded with Rube Goldberg-esque machines in a brownstone building on the trendy Upper West Side. While Mr Greenberg is renowned for his strong views on business, this claustrophobic room is where the 87-year-old builds his remarkable physical strength.
Mr Greenberg is among a small group of busy New York executives who make a pilgrimage to a place called Serious Strength, a gym that specialises in a technique called high-intensity resistance training, to get a complete body workout in just 30 minutes a week. Unlike spending hours jogging on treadmills or pedalling exercise bikes, high-intensity weight training promises all the benefits of aerobics plus more strength in just a fraction of the time of conventional workouts.

“The amount of weight I can push or pull is multiples of my own strength,” boasts Mr Greenberg, who is now chairman and CEO of CV Star & Co, a financial services firm. “I’m exercising more strenuously than I ever have in my life. In just 30 minutes a week you can see progress in what you’re doing and how good you feel.”
While high-intensity weight training has been practised since the 1980s, when an entrepreneur named Arthur Jones began making gym equipment under the Nautilus brand, the technique has only recently garnered sufficient scientific support to back up its many claims of superiority as a workout regimen.

Books such as Body By Science, by a South Carolina-based emergency room physician named Doug McGuff, and The Slow Burn Fitness Revolution, by Fred Hahn, who owns Mr Greenberg’s gym in New York, describe the scientific basis for exercising compound groups of muscles to total exhaustion using very slow movements. In practice, that means five or six exercises done for just five to six super slow repetitions, or just 15 minutes of actual lifting. Some adherents, such as Dr McGuff, believe that just one workout a week is sufficient, while Mr Hahn and others prefer two workouts.

“High-intensity resistance improves blood pressure, increases the level of good cholesterol in your blood, lowers triglicyeride levels, maintains blood sugar, helps with insulin sensitivity and builds not only muscular strength but muscular endurance,” says Mr Hahn.
Dr McGuff, meanwhile, flags up the medical benefits of the high-intensity workout, which he says can help eliminate “diabetes, hypertension, gout, hypercholesterolaemia, and all the consequences of being sedentary and eating a diet of modern food”.

Although exercise fads come and go, high-intensity is in the unusual position of advocating that people actually practise it less. Hardcore bodybuilders have raised doubts about whether the system is really superior to their many hours spent in the gym, but proponents such as Mr Hahn say that while you can build muscle in long workouts, why bother when less time spent in the gym can produce such good results. Proponents also point out that everyone has a genetic limit to how strong they can get or how big their muscles will grow, no matter how much exercise they do.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the high-intensity method seems to have gained more popularity in Europe than in the fitness-crazed US, where it faded from the cover of magazines after a brief surge in popularity about 10 years ago. Dr McGuff thinks this is partly explained by the fact that recent scientific support for the method comes largely from European and Canadian universities.
“I also think Europe lacks that ‘more is better’ culture that North America has,” he adds. “We have this work ethic where the answer is always do more and do it harder. I think that makes people a lot more sceptical about an exercise system that restricts volume and frequency as a way to get results.”

While it is possible to do a high-intensity workout with barbells or even body weight, most gyms that specialise in high-intensity use machines originally designed by Mr Jones such as Nautilus and Med-X. This is because it can be dangerous to lift a heavy free weight to exhaustion. These machines involve rotation around several joints, working a large group of muscles at one time, reducing the overall time in the gym.

At least initially, the workout consists of what is termed “the big five” – a seated row, chest press, pulldown, overhead press and leg press, each done for about 90 seconds. Dr McGuff says he even gets good results doing just three exercises, provided they are done extremely slowly and to complete exhaustion, followed by several days of recuperative rest.

While 15 minutes may seem like too short a time for a complete workout, this reporter noticed a distinct impact – along with considerable soreness the next day.

One company that has capitalised on the workout’s appeal to businesspeople is Kieser Training, a Zurich-based group that has set up high-intensity gyms in Europe and Asia.

“We target the professional, middle-aged executive who wants to exercise in a serious manner,” says Marcel Haasters, a German who runs the Kieser Training gym in London’s Camden Town. “There is no music, no mirrors on the wall and no juice bar. It’s not for typical gym users but people who don’t like gyms.”

Kieser appeals especially to mobile executives because for a £580 annual fee, travelling businessmen can use any gym in the Kieser Training system from Zurich to Australia. The gym uses special machines licensed from the late Arthur Jones’s estate and features rehabilitative training as well as pure exercise.

Steven Bailey, a video games analyst for Screen Digest who lives near the City of London, says he has been doing the Kieser Training for three years and that it has changed his life. “It’s great for people like me who have a sedentary lifestyle and sit at a desk all day,” Mr Bailey says. “Before Kieser I used to collapse around 3pm but now I have a lot more energy.”

A particularly impressive piece of equipment offered by Kieser Training looks like something out of the Spanish Inquisition. Once you are strapped down and screwed into the machine, your lower body and hips are immobilised, which allows it to measure accurately the strength of your lower back muscles – which are often the bane of desk-bound executives. The Kieser machine has a computer database that compares your back strength to other individuals of your age group, and is then capable of training your back to make the muscles stronger.

Alastair McLellan, who uses the gym in Camden Town, started the workout about six years ago to help with his bad back. “The fact that I can build this strength in just one short session a week and solve my back problem makes it very good use of my time,” says the 48-year-old editor of the Health Service Journal. “It’s also allowed me to do a lot more exercise – I now cycle to work most days.”

However, the workout’s proponents admit that while the method has many benefits, a high-intensity workout or any gym programme is unlikely to help executives completely lose those unsightly guts gained from years of eating expense-account lunches. For that, dietary changes are the most important ingredient.