Mind, Body, and Soul

At BAJA IBOGAINE we believe in the big three: mind, body, and soul. Many of the addicts that come to see us require building across all three of these domains. An oft-repeated belief by many who cross out threshold is that: “I wish I had never tried {insert drug of choice here} the first time, none of this would have happened.” However, the hard-to-reckon-with truth is that the scientific research around addiction completely belies this notion. It is fanciful thinking that allows addicts to distance themselves from responsibility for themselves. We work to quickly disabuse people of this notion when they come see us at our ibogaine treatment center in Mexico.

Rat Park

The Rat Park¹ experiments show that addiction is caused by deep seated unhappiness, social isolation, and poor coping skills. People that do not have systems in place to care for their mind, body, and soul are at highest risk for addiction. We see this most starkly in the domain of nutrition, with many of the people walking thru our door desiring to exist on a diet of cigarettes, candy and those all-too-tempting Mexican Coca Colas.

When it comes to the body, nutrition is critical but we will discuss it in another article. However, rest assured, we serve the finest foods designed to launch you into a life of recovery at our ibogaine treatment facility. This article will focus on exercise, particularly lifting. As the only ibogaine center with a complete squat rack, we felt it was important to embark upon a lifting program ourselves, in fact that’s why we bought it. We believe that it is essential for us to model good behavior for our patients so that they can leave having seen strategies for good living implemented before their very eyes. Plus, there is really nothing quite like a few sets of heavy squats after an ibogaine treatment.

In order to pursue barbell progressive overload² training across the “big four” (squat, deadlift, bench press, and shoulder press) a person must determine their 1 repetition maximum. One way to do this is to actually attempt a 1 rep max lift, but this is not recommended for beginners.

Calculating 1 Rep Max

For beginners, the recommended way to determine their 1 rep maximum is to use the NSCA formula. But before we can use the formula, we have to create the raw data that we will plug into our formula. To do so, we will pick from the big 4, in this case, I chose the bench press, and do 6 total sets to get some information about the state of our strength.

• 10 reps with only the bar
• 8 reps with light weight
• 6 reps with moderately heavy weight
• 5 reps with a heavier weight
• 5 reps with a heavy weight
• 5 reps with an increased heavier weight

All throughout this process, we will make sure to keep our form in check and we will try to make out sixth and final set utterly exhausting. In my case, my sets looked like this:

Set	Weight
10 reps	Bar (45lbs)
8 reps	65lbs
6 reps	75lbs
5 reps	95lbs
5 reps	115lbs
5 reps	135 lbs

Great so now we know that I can do 5 x 135lbs with good form to near exhaustion. Now it’s a simple matter of plugging in these numbers to a 1 rep max calculator. I chose to use the following calculator and it spit out something like this:

So my 1 rep max = 152lbs. The reason that knowing our 1 rep max is so important is because any sort of progressive overload programming that we endeavor upon will require this value in order to help design the training schedule.

Now it’s just a matter of repeating this process for the remaining three lifts and we will be able to design and schedule our progressive overload training regimen for the next few months. When we have made significant progress we will need to occasionally re-test our 1 rep max either by attempting a new high, or using the above method, with some tweaks as we go from being a beginner to a an intermediate lifter.

Lifting + Ibogaine = Nirvana

As discussed earlier, we are the only luxury ibogaine clinic in Mexico that has a squat rack. Our patients love using those first few days after treatment to instantiate a good habit and we can help you do that here at our private luxury ibogaine clinic. The energy in the aftermath of ibogaine treatment can be almost overwhelming, so we figured we’d make sure you have the best equipment to channel it into.

If you are coming to Rosarito for ibogaine treatment, we highly recommend giving us a call before you make any final decisions. This is just a tiny sampling of what we do here. We are the only full service ibogaine provider that provides care for the mind, body, and soul. In the coming weeks we will continue to publish more about how we cover those three bases.

1. Wikipedia — Rat Park Experiments ↩

2. Wikipedia — Progressive Overload ↩