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High Blood Pressure & Your Health: Managing the Silent KillerHigh blood pressure, or hypertension, is a dangerous condition that affects approximately 30 percent of Americans, causing up to 60,000 deaths per year. High blood pressure is often called “the silent killer” because it typically has no symptoms until after it has done significant damage to the heart and arteries. In fact, almost 20 percent of Americans who have high blood pressure don’t know they have it and, therefore, don’t know that they are at risk for heart attack, stroke, heart failure, kidney disease and eye disease.Read on to learn more about high blood pressure, including information on screening and treatment. If you are already working with your healthcare provider to manage your blood pressure, click here for tips to help you stay on track for better cardiovascular health.What Is High Blood Pressure?Blood pressure is the force of blood pushing against the inside of the arteries as the heart pumps the blood through your body. Blood pressure readings are recorded with two numbers, listed as a ratio, with one number over another number. The top number, or systolic pressure, is the force of blood when your heart beats, and the bottom number, or diastolic pressure, is the force of your blood against the artery walls when your heart rests.A normal blood pressure reading is under 120/80 millimeters of mercury (mmHg).Prehypertension refers to blood pressure that is raised enough to be a warning sign for developing hypertension, is anything above normal up to 139/89 mmHg.Hypertension is 140/90 mmHg and above.Treatment is recommended if your blood pressure is 120/80 mmHg and above. In most cases, treatment includes lifestyle changes and/or medications.Why Is High Blood Pressure a Silent Killer?High blood pressure typically has no symptoms, but it causes progressive harm to the cardiovascular system. When blood pushes with too much force through the cardiovascular system, it can damage the walls of the arteries as well as the heart muscle. Damage to the arteries that supply the heart muscle with blood can eventually contribute to a heart attack. Similarly, damage to the arteries that supply the brain with blood can contribute to a stroke, and damage to the arteries that provide the kidneys with blood can lead to kidney disease.How Will I Know if I have High Blood Pressure?The only way to know if you have high blood pressure is to test for it. Your healthcare provider will not diagnose you with high blood pressure based on one reading. Typically three elevated readings are needed to confirm the diagnosis. This is one reason you may be asked to use a blood pressure cuff at home or a machine at a pharmacy and keep a log of your blood pressure readings over several days.How Can I Work with My Healthcare Provider to Manage My Blood Pressure?If you are diagnosed with high blood pressure, your healthcare provider can help you bring your blood pressure under control and reduce damage to your cardiovascular system. Treatment usually consists of a combination of the following:Monitoring. You will need to have your blood pressure tested periodically to make sure that treatment is keeping it in a healthy range.Lifestyle changes. Exercise, weight loss, salt reduction, quitting smoking and stress reduction all can help lower blood pressure. Your healthcare provider can refer you to resources that can support your efforts to make lifestyle changes.Medications. Your physician may prescribe medications, such as diuretics and beta blockers. The medications work in various ways to reduce the pressure of blood against artery walls and the workload of the heart.Interventional procedures. While not yet approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an innovative procedure called renal denervation is being tested for its ability to safely lower blood pressure when lifestyle changes and medications don’t work.Questions to Ask Your Doctor About Your Blood PressureIs my blood pressure too high?If I have borderline high blood pressure, what can we do to prevent or slow its progression to hypertension?What can we do to manage my high blood pressure?Should I be monitoring my blood pressure at home?Should I be taking medication to treat my high blood pressure?What lifestyle changes may help lower my blood pressure?What are my options if I have hypertension that is resistant to treatment?How often should I see you to make sure my blood pressure is in a healthy range?Often referred to as the “silent killer” because it may show no symptoms, high blood pressure puts you at an increased risk for heart disease, heart failure, and stroke, among other things.

Survival knives should absolutely not be double edged.The activity which causes the most wear to the edge of a survival knife is called batoning. This important activity involves striking the spine and unsharpened side of the tip of a survival knife with a stout stick, called a baton, in order to drive the edge of the knife blade through a small log or tree limb so the wood splits into smaller pieces.The main purpose of batoning is to access dry wood in the center of a log or limb and increase the surface area of the wood so it can be more easily used to start a fire. Fire is very important because it helps prevent hypothermia caused by rain, wind, snow, or just plain cold temperatures.Hypothermia is a scary thing because it starts when the human body’s core temperature falls below 95 °F (35 °C). For context, the human body’s normal core temperature ranges from 97.7–99.5 °F (36.5–37.5 °C) — that means the body’s core temperature only has to drop a few degrees for hypothermia to start. The condition initially causes shivering and mental confusion, both of which make doing tasks to warm back up more difficult. As hypothermia progresses, the shivering and confusion becomes worse, amnesia starts, and fine motor skills degrade. After that, breathing and blood pressure both decrease, heart rates usually decrease, and hallucinations often start. Eventually these all lead to death. There’s also a phenomenon known as “paradoxical undressing” which can occur when victims of hypothermia have their bodies trick them into believing they’ve warmed up and consequentially start undressing in an attempt to cool back down which only ends up accelerating the severity of the hypothermia.With a single edged survival knife, as long as the knife is made of good steel and well constructed, hitting the spine and the tip of the blade with a wooden baton won’t break the knife and make it unusable because the baton is hitting the thickest and strongest parts of the blade. Attempting to baton wood with a double edged knife requires hitting one of the edges with the baton. Since edges are thin by their very nature, they are relatively weak and more likely to break when struck.But as if being more likely to break wasn’t enough, double edged knives just aren’t very good for batoning or even more general purpose cutting the first place due to their blade geometry. The best blade geometry is a relatively narrow, flat wedge shape and that’s usually reflected in good survival knives. Such geometry splits through wood well and tends to hold a usable cutting edge for a long time. On the other hand, two relatively thick wedges facing away from each other don’t split through wood well, are often hard to sharpen to a usable cutting edge in the first place, and don’t hold a usable cutting edge well because the blade geometry is pretty blunt to start with. On top of that, trying to exert fine control over the typically bad edges of a double edged knife is difficult. Pressing into the spine of the blade using a thumb just isn’t an option because you’ll risk cutting yourself doing so.In summary, there isn’t an advantage to flipping from one suboptimal edge to another on a double edged knife to prolong the time between resharpenings when the alternative is a single really good edge which lasts longer and cuts better. Furthermore, double edged knives are unambiguously worse for preparing firewood and kindling so you don’t die from hypothermia.

Let’s say you have two twins, Nate and Steve, both starting at 70kg.They both start training.Steve starts with steroids right away.Nate decides to stay natural.Steve does whatever he wants with his training, for the simple reason that anything he does works. Literally anything. He could do 1 rep maxes on biceps curls or squats on a bosu ball. He could do nothing but pushups and grow.Yes, sitting on the couch with 600mg per week of testosterone gets you more lean mass than actually working out naturally-and almost as much strength.And that’s just a moderate dose of ONLY testosterone!Nate has to figure out what works and what doesn’t work, because it actually matters. His programming, sets and reps, exercise selection, progression, volume, intensity and frequency all need to be monitored-at least subconsciously, and probably more actively. He keeps a training log. Unlike his twin, he cannot get away with not learning.If he does not learn, he just won’t grow.He gets feedback on the efficacy of his training in how he progresses.Steve does not, and that’s VITAL.Diet-wise, Steve can eat anything he wants and grow. High protein, low protein, high carb, low carb, keto, vegan, alcohol on the weekends or all the time, clean, dirty, IF, macros…it really doesn’t matter. With dozens of times the normal levels of hormones surging through his blood, he can eat however, whenever and whatever he wants and gain muscle, probably losing fat at the same time. So, he does. He eats whatever he wants. He couldn’t read a food label if his life depended on it (plot twist: it does).Nate isn’t so lucky, at least in the short term. He needs to find out the diet that works for him.He needs to experiment. He needs to read. He needs to learn.He doesn’t have the luxury of everything working, so he needs to find what does. In the short term, this might mean periods of zero growth. This might mean times when he doesn’t look great. This might mean times of going backwards!It’s HARD! It’s FRUSTRATING! It’s AGONIZING, especially seeing his twin get fucking huge.But, even if he doesn’t know it, he’s gaining a lot from all of this-the knowledge and experience of what DOES work. That’s something he can use for the rest of his life.Five years later…Not surprisingly, Steve is more jacked than Nate. He weighs 105kg to Nate's 90kg, and is noticeably much bigger.However, Steve is losing his hair. His liver function-if he bothered to test it-is less than stellar. His kidneys are also starting to fail. Little does he know, but he has proteinuria-protein in the urine.His buttocks are ravaged by pockmarks from injection holes-he’s tried to hide his usage but everyone knows it anyway. He’s had to increase his dosages of hormones over the years, because eventually his body adapted to the high levels, and he stopped gaining. He’s desensitized to steroids and must take more and more and more. He looks older than Nate, despite being just a few minutes apart in age. He has acne. His eyes have a yellow tinge and his face looks puffy all the time.He has gynomastia-growth of breast tissue-which he’s scraped together the last of his money to get surgery for. He spent most of it on increasingly large cycles of steroids. He’s hoping he can get a sponsorship to cover the costs. He gets headaches. He’s occasionally so nauseous that he cannot train. His face is constantly red from high blood pressure.RIPHe’s considering going on GH and insulin as that’s what the pros use, and they are bigger than him, so it must be the key-it couldn’t be training or genetics, right? He keeps getting tendon problems from all of the quarter squats and partner-row-assisted bench pressing he’s been doing. He saw them in a YouTube video of a Mr. Olympia competitor, so they must be good. He’ll alternate not stepping foot in the gym for a week or two and relying on androgens, with an insane three times per day schedule to make up for it. He has no libido, but it doesn’t matter anyway-his wife divorced him because of his obsession with getting swole.His nuts are the size of raisins.Nate feels great. He got a health panel recently, and everything is 100%. He looks younger than his age, feels full of vigor and is slowly but steadily progressing in the gym-somewhere around year two or three he really found a program that worked well for him.He’s learned a lot about himself and has grown immensely both physically and mentally. He uses full range of motion when training, has a reasonable exercise selection and has never suffered a serious, long-term injury. He rarely spends more than an hour a day in the gym, 5–6 times a week.He’s consistent, safe, disciplined and smart about his training, because he has to be.He cannot afford to not be on his game-so he IS.These stories are two extremes, but I’ve seen both happen firsthand.You don’t need steroids to have a great physique.If you do choose to go down that road, do it LATER.The longer you wait, the better.Not because of some bizarre “you gotta earn it!” kind of thing, or a “rite of passage”.It’ll just be far better for your health and long term results by building a natural base first, and that takes time.If Nate from the story above DID decide to start using somewhere in the 5–10 years after starting time-frame, he’d get great results.He’s very sensitive to them, having never used.He’s near his natural genetic potential anyway, and can use them to springboard past that.He knows how to train and diet, and that’s something you NEVER forget.Unlike Steve, he’s not going to use steroids to AVOID proper training and diet, in fact he’ll be EVEN MORE on his game when using because he wants to make the cycle worth it.He’ll read and research the hell out of what he puts in his body, because that’s what he’s always done with exercise and training-he’s had to.He’ll put his health first and cycle responsibly.Irresponsible cycling.Getting to the point to where you LEARN to make gains naturally will teach you so, so much more than making gains with steroids.Steroids aren’t evil or bad, unless they are used in situations like natural bodybuilding shows. Then…that’s pretty clearly immoral. Other than that, I couldn’t care less what someone puts in their body; it’s just that, their body.Oh, and what happened to Steve?His health problems got so bad that he finally had to stop using. He lost the majority of his muscular gains. That’s what happens when you go off-cycle.You somehow never see pics of Arnold in the off-season. Here’s one, because I think it’s FAR more educational than seeing another at his peak.That’s the reality-if you don’t keep USING, you start LOSING.What you build naturally, you keep…naturally.What you build artificially, you only keep…artificially.Follow me on Instagram or YouTube for diet and training tips!