Crazy to think that we’re already on volume 26 here. Half a year of Sunday Coffee let’s gooooooo!
Given the milestone, I’ve been thinking about how to better align Sunday Coffee’s formatting to the mission here - making health + fitness more accessible for all of you.
2 of the problems I see most people run into on their health journey are:
Not knowing enough quick + healthy recipes to meal prep
Feeling overwhelmed learning new workouts, and thus falling into a pattern of repeating the same ones for years
So, I’m going to try a new format here to address this. It’ll be 3 sections:
Recipe of the week (ROTW)
Movement of the week (MOTW)
And our main topic (TOTW)
ps: I’ll put a poll down at the bottom about this switch, please do let me know if you prefer the new or old format 🙂
ROTW: Honey Lime Chipotle Chicken Bowl
Brooke and I have made this for the past 2 weeks for dinner and it’s become one of my favorite meals. It’s super quick and easy, and you can eat it out of a bowl (which is my favorite way to eat).
Here’s the recipe, s/o to Emily Koch @cookwithkoch for this one:
Ingredients:
Chicken Thighs or Breasts
1 Lime
1 avocado
1 cup corn
Jasmine Rice
1 tbs Honey
2 Tbs Olive Oil
1 tsp garlic
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp basil
2 tsp smoked paprika
2 tsp chipotle
Instructions:
Cut the chicken into bite sized pieces
Mix all seasonings in with the chicken, put in a bag or bowl and let it marinate for 30-60 minutes
While chicken is marinating, mix avocado, corn, and juice from ½ of the lime together in a bowl
Cook your chicken + Rice
Mix together, use the other half of your lime for garnish + flavor
MOTW: Kneeling Cable Crunches
Kneeling Cable Crunches are a great way to build a strong core for a few reasons:
It’s a weighted exercise - allowing you to incorporate progressive overload
While it’s tough to isolate any muscles in your core as they’re all connected, this movement does a pretty great job of isolating your Rectus Abdominus (front abs) when performed right
Because you’re kneeling, you don’t have to focus as much on hinging your hips or balancing. You can use heavier weight and focus more on the ab contraction
I’ve linked a video on how to do these below (my mobility is still limited by my achilles but made these work)!
Your arms should act primarily as levers to help you hold the rope or bar of your choice, but the moving of the weight itself should come from your abs. Really try to focus on moving through that full range of motion.
TOTW: Making Light Weights Feel Heavy
How do you make light weights feel heavy?
Ah a riddle! Just kidding I wouldn’t do that to ya.
You increase your time under tension, tiring out your muscles and making it harder for your body to lift them.
There’s 2 ways to do this:
Perform more reps
Spend more time doing your reps (tempo work)
We’re gonna talk about the ladder today, specifically, incorporating negatives into your training.
What are Negatives?
First, let’s cover what negatives are.
There are 2 main types of movement when you’re lifting weights: concentric and eccentric.
Concentric is when a muscle squeezes and gets shorter, like when you lift something up.
Eccentric is when a muscle stretches out and lengthens, like when you’re lowering the weight.
Negatives are when you focus primarily on being slow and controlled through the eccentric (lowering) portion of the movement, usually to a certain tempo.
For example, 3 seconds to lower the weight on a sumo squat, then 1 second to explode up and do it again, as shown above.
Why use Negatives?
Negatives have been found to be fantastic for building muscle. The increased time under tension forces your muscles to recruit more muscle fibers and thus does a better job of causing muscular hypertrophy.
Results showed that eccentric muscle actions resulted in a greater effect size (ES) compared with concentric actions. The mean percent change in muscle growth across studies favored eccentric compared with concentric actions (10.0% vs. 6.8, respectively).
TLDR: focusing on the negative portion of the movement led to more muscle growth than focusing on the positive. That said, both are still great for it and extremely important tools to use.
Wrap-Up
Tried a new format today that I’m hoping makes this
ROTW: Honey Lime Chipotle Chicken Bowls
MOTW: Kneeling Cable Crunches (abs/core)
TOTW: Making Light Weights Feel Heavy (aka using Negatives in training)
Let me know how you liked it below and have an awesome rest of your Sunday 🙂
Dane