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Trainer's Blog
Follow my blog for a constant stream of great fitness tips and information.
Follow my blog for a constant stream of great fitness tips and information.
First Pearl: Don't Be Afraid To Ask Questions!1) If you own a dog, you should walk it. Cesar Millan recommends you walk your dog at least an hour and a half a day to satisfy their natural instinct of migration, and it calms them down too, so no more expensive dog obedience training! It will be a great bonding experience for you and your pet, and you’ll lose weight in the process! If you split you’re walking into two separate sessions a day, say, 45 minutes in the morning and 45 minutes in the evening, it’ll be more effective for fat loss than if you had walked an hour and a half in one session. Chrisitian Thibaudeau, a very well-respected Olypmic weightlifter and highly sought-after personal trainer for professional athletes, said it this way, "Dividing one's volume into two session will ALWAYS be more effective than doing the same work in one session. This is true both for growth(muscle gain) and fat loss. Specifically when it comes to fat loss. Two sessions have been shown to increase caloric expenditure moreso than doing the exact same volume in one session."
2) People who jog are what weightlifters call “The Walking Wounded”. You wanna know why? Just look at a jogger, usually they’ll have knee braces on, or if they don’t, they look as if they’re about to fall forward at any moment as they jog down the street breathless...
The type of gym you join is important. If you join a room filled with morons and useless “weight training machines”, you’ve not joined a gym, you’ve joined a money pit that’s gonna cost you not only in gym membership and hidden fees but in the potential savings (hospital visits, health insurance, etc.) you can get from improving your health not to mention the potential improvements in life quality that come from bettering your fitness and performance (fat loss, strength, balance, coordination, etc.).
Think you’re gym is a solid candidate for the "Best gym in the area" award? The following is how you can tell whether the fitness facility you’re considering joining or currently a member of is a great place to lift weight and achieve your goals or a fitness, performance, motivation and money black hole:
An Argument for Weight LiftingCardio is difficult, but weightlifting is impossible. That’s what many believe, and yet every year lots of people purchase gym memberships and then never go to the gym. Something in the back of these people’s minds must be telling them that there’s something to this whole weightlifting thing. That or they want to be able to watch a 46” TV while pedaling on a recumbent bike that has a computer screen on it with web access.
The truth is, of all athletes, weight lifters are the lazy ones. They do as little as possible to get the job done, and it’s less than you might think. If they don’t feel like running, they don’t run. You don’t really have that choice in sports like football or soccer. Weightlifters often don’t even do any cardio if their diet is okay. As for a weightlifter’s weekly exercise regimen, it’s laughable compared to what pretty much any other kind of athlete does. In football you train every day, sometimes two or three times a day. Triathletes train everyday too, running, bike riding, swimming, as long and as hard as they can, and wearing their iPod for as much of it as possible because they’re so insanely bored by it all.
Weightlifters don’t need iPods. They don’t get bored. Their workouts are short, intense, fun and constantly changing because of the highly adaptive nature of the body. There are so many different ways to lift that, if you...
Sleep is the best meditation - Dali Lama
Are you lazy? Do you abhor physical activity? Do you despise diets and calorie counting? Do you think pizza delivery isn’t enough? Would you, if you could, have the pizza guy come in, set the pie next to the couch and feed it to you? Well my friend, you’re in luck.
Science has found a weight management technique that is SO easy, you don’t even need to be conscious to pull it off. Matter of fact, you have to be unconscious. That’s right, I'm talking about sleep. Research has shown that getting enough Zs will not only cause you to be less hungry throughout your day but will decrease your desire for harmful simple carbs and sugars by up to 40%! This in turn will help you control your weight and keep you bright eyed and bushy tailed to boot!
This effect is accomplished via the regulation of the hormones leptin and ghrelin. Leptin sends signals to the brain telling it you are full while ghrelin stimulates appetite. Dr Michael Breus tells WebMD, “"When you don't get enough sleep, it drives leptin levels down, which means you don't feel as satisfied after you eat. Lack of sleep also causes ghrelin levels to rise, which means your appetite is stimulated, so you want more food."
In another study, it was found that sleeping 8.5 hours per night (in comparison to 5.5) led to the loss of TWICE as much fat and the maintenance of TWICE as much muscle! By the end of this study, the...
Sun Tzu, legendary Chinese General and author of The Art of War, wrote, “To win wars, you must know yourself and your enemy. If you don’t know one or either, expect to lose.” In the battle of the bulge, you are the aggressor and fat is the enemy. If you are to beat this enemy, you must first understand it AND yourself. At FastTwitch, we help you learn to understand and consequently control both.
The biggest and most common mistakes I see people making in the gym every day are the following: 1) They depend too much on will power and 2) they train without first learning and/or knowing how to train safely and effectively. At FastTwitch, we have a simple belief – Will power is crap. Don’t believe me? Are you a millionaire? Are you built like a Greek god? No? How’s that will power thing workin out for ya? It’s not, is it? Systems lessen the need for will power by providing a set of rules that are clear and simple to follow. Follow the rules, you succeed. Fail to follow the rules, you fail. Simple as that. This form of governing one’s self via systems developed by people that are more experienced and know better and/or more than you do is the reason the Bible and the US Constitution are, have been and always will be so incredibly effective and popular. At FastTwitch, we’re simply doing our best to follow good examples…
If you’re like 95% of the people that approach...
