The Best Health and Fitness Articles of the Week #101 – Gluten Free Vegan Pancakes, How to Squat and Strength Training Tips for Women

gluten-free-vegan-pancakes

Here’s a recap of the best health and fitness articles I’ve read over the past week.



How to Make Gluten-Free, Vegan Pancakes and Waffles

In last weeks update I linked to a blueberry pancake syrup recipe that I hadn’t tried yet. Well, earlier this week I worked from home because I didn’t want to go out on icy roads and since I was at home, I decided to make pancakes and that syrup recipe. I’ve been wanting to go gluten-free so I recently purchased a couple bags of Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free Flour from Costco. I decided to do a search for a gluten free pancake recipe using Bob’s Red Mill flour and this is what I found. It was delicious!



6 Minute Microwave Brownies

Need a recipe for a cheat meal? This one only takes 6 minutes! I haven’t made it yet, but I will 😉



How To Squat

This article goes through hand position, un-racking the bar, stance, foot position, head position, how to descend and lots more info. Read this and I’m sure you’ll have something to take away and incorporate into your own squat routine.



What to Do If You Can’t Squat Deep

I’ve had trouble with squatting deep and now I’m currently working on it by resetting myself by squatting with very light weight and progressing back up to really heavy weight again. I understand this is a bit different than what this article is talking about though, so if deep squats are impossible for you for other reasons, check out all of the exercises listed here to get nearly the same benefits of deep squatting.



120 Tips on Strength Training for Women

These are all things that Bret Contreras has gathered over the last 6 months while working with his female clients. I should warn you, some of these observations may be offensive and/or misogynistic to some of you, but there are some very helpful tips here that I think everyone should read.



Limit protein to 20g per meal?

I’ve never heard anyone ever promote the idea of consuming a minimum amount of protein before, so this idea is new to me. As this article shows though, there are actually a lot of great benefits of consuming protein, aside from simply building muscle. Of course you don’t want to overdue it, but the suggestions here for each meal every few hours are 20-30g for women and 40-60g for men.



Restaurant Guide – Vegetarian Resource Group

Why have I not heard about this until now? I mean, I’ve been vegan for nearly two years! I found a whole bunch of restaurants I’ve never heard about. I can’t wait to visit some of these.



Your Brain On Porn

The purpose of this site is to inform people about the dangers of Internet porn and how regular exposure can negatively alter the brain, one example being that it can damage a libido. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here. I know it sounds a little crazy, but they claim to be a non-commercial website focused primarily on science-based research.



6 Year Old Asian Kid Has Amazing Strength

I don’t know if that’s an olympic sized bar, but if it is, that kid is way strong. That would be about 55-65 lbs! Even if it’s not a 45 lb. bar, that’s still a strong kid. Most fitness professionals recommend only bodyweight training until around mid-teens, so hopefully heavy weight training doesn’t do serious damage to this kid’s body before he fully matures.



Excessive Alcohol Use When You’re Young Could Have Lasting Impacts on Your Brain

I grew up in a bit of a troubled neighborhood and had many friends of bad influence. I started drinking somewhere around the age of 15-16. Like real drinking. Binge drinking. I’ve always regretted it. Even before reading this study, I knew that the way I treated my body as a youth has probably had quite the negative effect on my body. But the rest of my life is dedicated to good health and hopefully repairing the damage I’ve done, at least as much as is possible.

Vegan Cocoa Hazelnut Banana Pancakes

I came across this recipe for vegan cocoa hazelnut banana pancakes last week and I couldn’t resist making them over the weekend. Mine didn’t look as fancy as the ones in the original recipe, but they still came out tasting great. They aren’t what I’d call healthy, so if you’re not trying to cut calories or if you’re looking for a cheat meal, try them out!

I’ve also calculated the nutritional information. This is one serving, considering that the entire batch makes 4 servings. For me, this added up to 4 pancakes at about 4-5 inches in size.

Calories – 630
Fat Calories – 273
Fat – 32g
Sat. Fat – 13g
Trans Fat – 0
Cholesterol – 0mg
Carbs – 76g
Protein – 15g
Fiber – 14g
Sugar – 22g
Sodium – 415mg