Get your exercise

Work out for 35 minutes per day, every day, around 4 hours before you go to bed.  Any form of exercise is likely sufficient although cardio is most proven to be effective.  Make sure you work out strenuously enough to get your heart beating.  Try to eat meat about an hour before the workout.  The purpose of this exercise is to push tryptophan into the brain, which is fuel for the Pineal Glands to produce melatonin, and you need tryptophan (from meat or other sources) floating around in the blood stream for this to work.  Don’t exercise any closer to bedtime than this – you risk setting off the fight or flight instinct in your body and producing anti-sleep hormones that it thinks are necessary to survive.  Why else would you be exercising at night other than to run for survival?  Humans can’t really hunt or do much of value at night; we don’t have night vision.  Night is when we sleeep and prepare for sleep. Feel free to exercise more than 30 minutes/day, just make sure any additional exercise  comes more than 4 hours before bedtime.  Outdoor exercise is recommended.  Indoor exercise tells the body that it’s evening, when it should really be preparing for sleep, not working out.The bottom line: If you exercise 4 hours before bed, you’ll sleep better and produce more melatonin.  If you don’t exercise, you won’t properly absorb nutrients that are required for proper sleep.

FAQ:

How does exercise prevent acne?:

In addition to the benefit of improving your sleep and nightly melatonin production by pushing tryptophan into the brain, exercise likely helps in a number of ways:

• Exercise regulates the testosterone linked hormones Dihydrotestosterone and Dehydroepiandrosterone.  Your adrenal glands produce fewer hormones that are thought to be related to acne.
• When you exercise, stress hormones are flushed from the body and you become more relaxed and less anxious.
• Exercise helps your body absorb other nutrients in food that it uses to function properly.
• Exercise is good for your overall health, short term and long term.
• Exercise gets the blood flowing and improves blood circulation, reduces stress, balances your hormones, and probably stimulates hundreds of systems in your body.
• Acne is heavily linked with depression (studies show those with acne have 2-3 times the rate of acne in the general population), and exercise is a proven treatment for depression.  Logical thought leads to the possibility that the same thing that causes depression causes acne.  If exercise treats the root cause of depression, it might treat the root cause of acne.

Because the mechanisms that cause acne are not fully understood, we strive to create maximum health along with tweaking every acne trigger we can identify in the right direction.

Does sweat cause acne?

Possibly, but probably not.  We don’t really know what causes acne.  Sweat might cause acne if you have clogged pores from topical medicines that dry skin, which clogs pores.  Realistically, no one knows.  It’s the experience of those on this system that sweat is not a problem with acne.

• You are not using topical medications.
• You are following the other steps to the system.

Since the evening exercise is close to bedtime it’s easy to shower and wash your face after you workout without increasing the total number of times per day you wash your face.  Just be sure not to wash again before you go to bed.  The alternative:, not exercising to avoid sweat, seems more likely to produce acne than some sweat coming through your pores.  Over the long run, not exercising is very dangerous for your health.