Alpha Male Manley Lectures: Lemon Ginger Shots...Why I Drink Them

Aaron Baker is my friend and mentor. When I first started at CORE Centers in 2013, he used an analogy, when talking about food-and-nutrition. It's one that's stuck ever since, and basically, you have to learn to visualize food as "fuel," then visualize your body as a race car.

Here's how it works: a 383 Chevy, built to 12.5:1 compression, can not run on 87-octane fuel. In reality, that motor needs an octane rating of at least 104, and if not, then someone's going to lose some motor bearings.

Translate that same language over to your body's physical fitness. As I've blogged about before, SciFit is one of the cardio bikes of choice at our little wellness center in Northridge, California. This year, I've produced a peak wattage of 614 @ 148-49 RPM.

Here's the twist: if I would've tried, on that same day, to put out that kind of performance on two slices of pepperoni pizza, my output would've been something more like 220-300 watts @ 120 RPM, and when I say "120 RPM," I'm being a little bit of what my old man's generation would've called, a "bench racer," because even that kind of power is hard to pull-off on an unclean diet.

Oh...I'm not saying that you couldn't scarf an In-N-Out burger, then hit the gym; in my '20s, I thought that I was a real bad-ass for doing exactly this. Why?! Because I would go to the Center of Achievement at Cal State Northridge. At the Brown Center, I would swim power laps. Keep swimming those laps, then hit the Jack In The Box on Reseda/Prairie for tacos, because apparently they were "meatless." And after all this, I could still work out!

BUT, at CORE is where things got competitive, and once I shifted into that mode, the only tacos I were allowed to eat were chicken, and in a Vegan shell. And because no combustion engine can run on bad fuel, the emphasis shifted to organic juice, as much as it did food.

Juice, like lemon-ginger shots, because unlike solid foods, organic juices can be absorbed by the body almost instantly. Racing fuel burns at a faster rate than does regular, and it has to burn clean as well. With lemon-ginger shots, the whole cardio run becomes more like a dyno-pull. But one that leaves behind a sense of energy that is as clean and natural, as it is consistent!