How to Boost Your Vitamin and Mineral Performance

[by Greg Perry]

Both resistance/weight training, as well as HITT/cardio exercise tears down your body.

That’s precisely the goal.

Hormesis Defined

I wish more people understood hormesis.

In simplistic terms, hormesis is the truth that many reactions in life don’t occur in a linear fashion. That is, if a lot is bad for you then a little is a little bad for you. Or conversely, if a little is good for you, then a lot is great for you.

That’s rarely the case.

Such as Exercise

Over-exercising without proper rest means your body never has time to heal the tissue and muscle tear-down that the exercise caused. The more strenuous the exercise, the longer you need to rest. Exercising too much and too frequently can easily cause long-term problems.

Pro Tip: HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) Want to get the proper dose of exercise? This is so cool! The problem with almost all exercise is people over-exert themselves because of the nature of hormesis. “If a little exercise is good, a lot will make me The Terminator (or a star on the Olympic Women’s Volleyball team).”

To maximize your exercise, ramp it down, and I mean like really down! (Full Disclosure: I’m not saying I exercise enough by the way!) I mean exercise less and then really do it even less. But make each session count! The cool thing about this is how few minutes it takes to exercise to maximum benefit with the least effort.

Pro tip: If you lift weights or do other resistance training more than 12 to 15 minutes each week, you are hurting yourself. A little hormetic effect here is great. More is worse. Here is the key and I highly encourage you to read more about Body by Science:

The Radon Lie

In the early 1990s, radon scares were all the rage. Without a knowledge of hormesis, many of us paid money to get radon gas test kits for our homes. A few, not us fortunately, then paid a lot more money to try to rid their home of radon gas.

Radiation is hormetic.

A lot of radiation is bad for you. A little is good for you.

Radiation does not affect people or animals or nature in a linear fashion.

We lived 6,000+ years, most of that time was without concrete slab floorings, and radon emanated from the earth as much all that time as today. (Given radiation’s half-life effect, perhaps the earth had more radon throughout the universe’s 6,000+ history.) People and animals didn’t die out from radiation exposure.

Note: I won’t go into the scientific literature confirming over and over how low-dose radiation improves health. I certainly don’t fear an X-ray once in a while, including annual teeth X-rays. You can easily find information. I’d start with Dr. Arthur Robinson’s writings.

Finally, I’m to Vitamins and Minerals!

Yeah, that was a long way to get you to here, but my writing’s so good, you loved every letter, comma, and period before now.

Our bodies adapt to vitamins and minerals.

Even worse, our bodies adapt to medicine.

Take thyroid medicine years on end and your body will eliminate all ability to make thyroid. (Yes, the thyroid medicine makers know this.)

Back to vitamins, our bodies get used to vitamins and minerals. As with exercise that you must increase intensity or resistance as you get faster and/or stronger, your body adapts to the vitamin and mineral levels you take on a regular basis. You need higher and higher dosages to get the same benefit.

That is not a good answer to the hormetic effect of vitamins.

Instead, you can easily improve your body’s ability to process the same level of vitamins and minerals right for you by cycling your vitamins and minerals!

Note: Just as exercising properly, such as keeping your weight-lifting sessions to 12 minutes each week saves time, cycling vitamins saves money. Your body wins, your bank account wins!

Here’s all you do: Take your daily vitamins and minerals six days a week. Take one day off.

Pro tip: I take a lot of vitamins and minerals. I take a second day off most of them, but that’s probably overkill. My all-off day is Sunday. My mostly-off day is Thursday.