Experienced Personal Training, Evidenced Based Nutrition and Intelligent Conversation!Posts RSS Comments RSS
Because there are no legal barriers to entry, such as state licenses, basic educational requirements or sufficient experience, most personal trainers are unqualified to do their job. Not only do I make it a point to be qualified to do the job, I make it a point to never stop being “over-qualified” to do the job.
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World-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, in decades of research on achievement and success, has discovered a truly groundbreaking idea–the power of our mindset.
Dweck explains why it’s not just our abilities and talent that bring us success–but whether we approach them with a fixed or growth mindset. She makes clear why praising intelligence and ability doesn’t foster self-esteem and lead to accomplishment, but may actually jeopardize success. With the right mindset, we can motivate our kids and help them to raise their grades, as well as reach our own goals–personal and professional. Dweck reveals what all great parents, teachers, CEOs, and athletes already know: how a simple idea about the brain can create a love of learning and a resilience that is the basis of great accomplishment in every area
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Lasting satisfaction and peace of mind are more likely to come from inner growth and physical development; but the majority of us spend the bulk of our time seeking things and acting on things that won’t make us any happier or any healthier.
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The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported in a past article that physician error, medication error and adverse effects from drug and/or surgery kills over 225,000 Americans every year; over 100,000 of these American deaths were from unintended consequences of a drug that was provided at an accurate and normal dosage.
Remember, physicians and the medical establishment may save our lives in an emergency situation, we are lucky to have them, but relying on them for disease prevention and sound health is foolish and not their responsibility. The road to good health begins in prevention and the majority of physicians know NOTHING about it.
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Look at your path closely and deliberately… and do this frequently throughout your lifetime. Going off course can be gentle and subtle without any awareness of your misdirection. As Carlos Castaneda wrote “if your path has heart, then your path is good, but if your path has no heart, than your path is no good”. Careful consideration should always be given to the mere 24 hours in your day. Not a day should be wasted or simply tolerated. Make the most of it by choosing your path
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A desire for men to be as big as possible is pervasive in this culture; it’s a symbol of manliness, machismo, dominance and even success to many.
The bottom line here… unless a man is naturally large, it’s nothing more than a sign of obesity, health problems and premature death.
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Fitness is a personal process that can very well run the course of a lifetime; the more we know about it, the more we understand it, the more we practice it, the more profound the results. It’s a process, not a finished product.
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You will fight how you train. This is the theme of Fighter’s Fact Book 2: Street Fighting Essentials and when you’ve mastered the skills taught in the book, you will truly be ready to defend yourself in some of the most desperate situations imaginable. Nearly a dozen veteran instructors of street oriented martial arts have come together with Loren Christensen to teach you how to defend yourself against multiple attackers, violent dogs, knives, close quarter attacks, and attackers impervious to pain. Then they show you how to make your street techniques fast and explosive, and how to prepare yourself mentally to use extreme force. The skills taught here are not for the faint hearted. These are hardcore techniques intended to save your life or the life of a loved one.
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Strengthening your mental and physical weaknesses while maintaining your mental and physical strengths; to become a better version of yourself, year after year, even while experiencing the aging process.
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Fitness and exercise get more important, rather than less important, as we get older.
Therefore, we should take a long-term approach to exercise, an approach that’s designed to keep us training for a life-time. Weight training is the first priority here, not only to increase personal fitness through enhanced muscular strength and muscular endurance but to maintain a dynamic balance between opposing muscle groups; which equates to a healthy range of motion throughout the body and its joints when practiced consistently. This is how range of motion is maintained or re-acquired as we age – stretching is NOT the answer to maintaining or increasing flexibility!
Consequently, consistent and intelligent weight training builds a robust foundation that aerobic exercise can be built upon. Aerobic exercise persued habitually, without a strategic resistance training program, is a recipe for imbalance, future injury and burn-out. Furthermore, as we age, imbalances occur naturally (as well as unnaturally) throughout our bodies due to work related repetitive motions, trauma from accidents and muscle tissue loss due to inactivity (which can occur as early as 25 years of age). As we age time spent resistance training should increase!
To summarize… no health and fitness program is complete without both elements – weight training and cardiovascular training. Unfortunately, both are typically not practiced consistently (or at all) and often when they’re executed they’re performed incorrectly by the majority of end users; the selected exercises, technique, frequency, intensity and duration are all keys to long-term progression and success.
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Our appetite is more controllable after a good workout; our stress is managed more effectively after a good workout; thinking is clearer and more lucid after a good workout; decision making and judgment are greatly improved after a good workout; we feel better about ourselves and our lives after a good workout; our focus and patience is improved after a good workout. Each workout matters!
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The Warrior Ethos goes well beyound soldiers and battlefields… in other words, we all fight our own personal battles, frequently far away from open and armed conflict. We work to define why we exist and what matters to us. We struggle for our position in society and for what we believe in. We fight for our families, our friends and even against the aging process. I believe in this kind of fight and what it can make of us.
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One of the largest studies ever to examine the dangers of male and female abdominal fat was recently concluded – and those with the biggest waistlines have twice the risk of dying over a decade compared to those with the smallest waistlines. A bulging midsection also leads to an increase in dementia, heart disease and breast cancer. Carrying all your extra weight in the middle of your body comes at a big risk! It’s time to eat better and start exercising more if this applies to you.
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The majority of us devote ourselves to daily pursuits that will not and cannot make us happy long-term; when these banal pursuits and their superficial effects wear thin, we begin to question the pointlessness of our once important activities; the mid-life crisis has officially begun. Inner wisdom and outer strength is the antidote and we can work on that here.
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This is the only independent biography of Bruce Lee, and it is complete in terms of both the martial arts and the movies.
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Because supplements are primarily a waste of money, personal trainers who promote, advise or sell supplements fall into one of the following categories:
A. Don’t know or understand the basics of nutrition or human physiology.
B. Believe the subjective opinions and marketing hype in which they’re subjected.
C. Have determined that personal financial gain is more important than being honest.
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In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.
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The loss of muscle mass, strength and motor control that we experience as we age is called sarcopenia; it generally becomes noticeable in our early forties and increases with age. If sarcopenia is left untreated we steadily lose control of our physical abilities. Weight training, when applied intelligently, is the natural inhibitor of this condition. Dependent upon the severity and our age, we can slow down or even reverse sarcopenia by simply weight-training.
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Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer
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Learning to live amid plenty is now the challenge for many while learning to live with scarcity is no longer the problem. For example, it’s astounding that too little food and too much food can frequently have the same dire results. The modern challenge is in knowing when enough is enough and to consider others just a bit more and perhaps, ourselves… just a bit less.
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Dr. Mehmet Oz is a legitimate cardiothoracic surgeon, who just happens to host an eponymous television show that’s filled with various products, procedures, ideas and advice. He admittedly does not use the vast majority of products, procedures, ideas and advice discussed on his show. I strongly recommend that you do the same.
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There are many mistaken notions concerning lactic acid and exercise. The greatest, by far, is the idea that there is lactic acid in the human body – there is no lactic acid in the human body, NONE.
Most of us believe “lactic acid” is an end product of exercising hard and that it causes local muscle fatigue and muscle failure (a burning sensation by increasing the acidity of the tissues to the point where they can no longer function effectively). This is simply not true, what we are feeling are pain (nerve) receptors sensing a chemical breakdown of energy production that is reaching its physiological limit, it’s not lactic acid.
I find it interesting that so called “professionals or experts” still bandy this term around as well.
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Mountain biking presents unique challenges, and noted expert Joe Friel addresses them all in his latest book. Covering every aspect of training, he helps riders maximize their experience and minimize problems.
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Gradually, many of us tend to fall asleep at the wheel; sometimes the wheel release is volitional, and sometimes it’s so imperceptible we don’t even realize when it took place.
We gain weight, we drink more, we stop learning or we allow our affairs to fall into disrepair for example.
Letting our bodies and/or minds go into a slow fade is not acceptable; we all have people who depend on us to be our best, we owe it to them, as well as ourselves, to find the motivation to get our hands back on the wheel, to regain control and to reverse this process.
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There’s so much health and fitness nonsense circulating that only a dedicated health and fitness professional can decipher fact from fiction.
What the majority of people do, including personal trainers, is subscribe to what’s been done in the past, or what’s currently being done now, without taking the time to investigate the origin of the approach or the validity of the message.
Examples:
Supplements are good for you, right? Myth! Vegetables and Fruits are good for you!
Stretching increases flexibility, right? Myth! Resistance Training increases flexibility!
Low intensity exercise burns more fat than high intensity exercise, right? Myth! Exercise burns calories, so go burn some!
Extra protein is required to build muscle, right? Myth! We already consume more than we need, just go exercise!
Expensive running shoes prevent injuries, right? Myth! There’s no correlation with expensive running shoes and prevention of injuries. In fact, specific running shoes that correct a particular foot strike (i.e. over pronation) cause the most injuries.
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There’s countless ways to stay fit and active while aging, but there’s only one way to maintain a strong foundation for all of these activities, and that’s resistance training.
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There’s a large and substantiated drop in disease rates among those who have been sedentary who simply begin to exercise moderately. Get Moving!
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Despite what is written on your treadmill, and various other fitness equipment for that matter, slow, or lower intensity exercise does not put you in some “magical” fat burning zone; this notion was made popular by treadmill manufacturers in order to keep health club members on their treadmills longer, requiring many gyms to purchase more treadmills in order to keep club members satisfied in regards to treadmill availability.
Clearly stated: 30 minutes of high intensity exercise on a treadmill will burn more calories than 30 minutes of low intensity exercise on the same treadmill, in the same conditions; obviously burning overall calories and not regaining them through consumption post workout is integral to maintaining or losing weight.
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Isolated nutrients (such a vitamins, minerals and antioxidants) taken as supplements to our existing diet or artificially added to a product found on a store shelf where it’s then called fortified, is simply a misunderstood concept and grossly inadequate for good health. For instance, vitamin C, is only one single compound of hundreds of compounds found within a single fruit or vegetable. Consuming more of it, when there’s no dietary deficiency (which is normally the case for all of us) without the other compounds, is misguided and unsafe. Vitamins, minerals and antioxidants consumed singularly, in large doses typically found in many store bought supplements, have proven to actually increase disease in carefully performed research on humans; so much so, the studies were halted early because cancer rates were increasing significantly in the participants – not decreasing as desired!
Case in Point: The majority of our bodies are made of water (65-70% of our bodies); drink normally and things function as they should. But, supplement your normal drinking habits with excess water and you end up in the hospital with Hyponatremia (a metabolic condition in which there is not enough sodium in the body fluids outside the cells because of over-hydration).
If something is good for you, then more must be better… is simply poor thinking.
Many of us fail to realize how smart and complicated our physical bodies really are; they are indeed very clever machines that know what they require; real food and real ingredients provide what our bodies need, don’t believe the mass-marketing of supplement companies.
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We don’t need special diets, human engineered pre-packaged foods, fancy supplements, powders or magical potions… the unpopular and unprofitable SIMPLE truth concerning almost every health ailment we suffer from in our culture can be cured by eating fruits and vegetables, beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains, avoiding artificial ingredients, exercising regularly, sleeping adequately and maintaining healthy relationships.
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By Maggie Fox NBC News
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When we become comfortable, we stagnate and no further growth occurs.
When we push our boundaries we become uncomfortable, stay there long enough and eventually we become comfortable again, extending our boundaries.
This process can be repeated over and over again throughout our lives in order to continually grow.
Caveat: Not all things are worth getting comfortable with… know the difference.
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As we work to achieve our own personal goals, we should work to care, help and serve others along the way. This “give and take” mentality is a good way to insure balance and lasting success.
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Amazon Description:
Linking the time when karate was a strictly Okinawan art of self-defense shrouded in the deepest secrecy and the present day, when it has become a martial art practiced throughout the world, is Gichin Funakoshi, the “Father of Karate-do.”
Out of modesty, he was reluctant to write this autobiography and did not do so until he was nearly ninety years of age. Trained in the Confucian classics, he was a schoolteacher early in life, but after decades of study under the foremost masters, he gave up his livelihood to devote the rest of his life to the propagation of the Way of Karate. Under his guidance, techniques and nomenclature were refined and modernized, the spiritual essence was brought to the fore, and karate evolved into a true martial art.
Various forms of empty-hand techniques have been practiced in Okinawa for centuries, but due to the lack of historical records, fancy often masquerades as fact. In telling of his own famous teachers-and not only of their mastery of technique but of the way they acted in critical situations-the author reveals what true karate is. The stories he tells about himself are no less instructive: his determination to continue the art, after having started it to improve his health; his perseverance in the face of difficulties, even of poverty; his strict observance of the way of life of the samurai; and the spirit of self-reliance that he carried into an old age kept healthy by his practice of Karate-do.
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Although there are numerous challenges in life that we all face, one of the biggest challenges is simply the passage of time.
Many will fail the test of time with wrong thought and wrong behavior; those who generally pass the test of time follow right thought and right behavior.
Both approaches have eventual consequences that become crystal clear in time… work to make those consequences something you can live with.
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People with less wisdom don’t seem to see the importance of living a life of excellence. Characteristics such as discipline, restraint, patience and empathy are lost on the foolish. Excellence appears to be much work for little reward; it seems only the wise can see the great benefit in living in this way.
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Seeking to be liked and respected by everyone should never be the goal, rather, the goal should be “to be worthy” of everyone’s affection and respect and simply not worry about what others think.
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Amazon Description:
When the undefeated samurai Miyamoto Musashi retreated to a cave in 1643 and wrote The Book of Five Rings, a manifesto on swordsmanship, strategy, and winning for his students and generations of samurai to come, he created one of the most perceptive and incisive texts on strategic thinking ever to come from Asia.
Musashi gives timeless advice on defeating an adversary, throwing an opponent off-guard, creating confusion, and other techniques for overpowering an assailant that will resonate with both martial artists and everyone else interested in skillfully dealing with conflict. For Musashi, the way of the martial arts was a mastery of the mind rather than simply technical prowess—and it is this path to mastery that is the core teaching in The Book of Five Rings.
William Scott Wilson’s translation is faithful to the original seventeenth-century Japanese text while being wonderfully clear and readable. His scholarship and insight into the deep meaning of this classic are evident in his introduction and notes to the text. This edition also includes a translation of one of Musashi’s earlier writings, “The Way of Walking Alone,” and calligraphy by Japanese artist Shiro Tsujimura.
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For Ego-Rejuvenation… spend time doing what you enjoy and being with people you enjoy.
For Ego-Depletion… spend time doing what you don’t enjoy and being with people you don’t enjoy.
Simple to follow and easy to implement – a good life can be just this simple.
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Wisdom, knowledge and understanding; mental determination and emotional stability, as well as physical strength and endurance have all been personal characteristics worth possessing in the past… and remain so today.
Human potential is founded within these very worthy traits and they cannot be purchased at any price, they can only be earned.
As Churchill once stated “never have so many wished for so much while expending so little.”
If you think you have these qualities, but you don’t work to have these qualities, then you don’t have these qualities.
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Disrespectful, arrogant, aggressive, rude or insensitive behavior is frequently just nothing more than a failed personal interpretation of what it means to be confident, assertive and strong.
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The vast majority of us settle for mediocrity while that same majority would vehemently argue they’re not mediocre; work consistently to develop your mind and body to the best of your abilities and your excellence will show.
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“Making Your Life Extraordinary”
The Warrior Lifestyle is the last installment of the award winning Warrior Wisdom Series. This amazing book has been dubbed as highly inspirational and motivational by many of today’s top martial artists. If you want to live your life to the fullest and live a life of excellence, you need to read The Warrior Lifestyle. In The Warrior Lifestyle, you will learn:
* How to live a life of honor and integrity
* What honor, courage and integrity truly mean
* The true meaning of respect and character
* What your foremost responsibilities in life are
* The components of true self-defense
* How to develop your own code of honor
* What it means to “Live by a Higher Law”
* And much, much more…
Forwarded by top martial arts author, Loren W. Christensen, this amazing book guides the reader through what it takes to live the warrior lifestyle. The warrior lifestyle is not a lifestyle of violence as many assume, but rather a lifestyle of character, honor, and integrity. It is a way of living a life of excellence in every area of your life. Don’t settle for an ordinary life; make your life extraordinary! The insightful advice and universal wisdom shines through on every page of this intriguing book. This is a MUST READ for every martial artist and is also a great book for anyone who seeks to live his or her life with character, honor and integrity.
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Many of us value learning and knowledge, if at all, for the sake of a career path; instead, many of us should simply value learning and knowledge.
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There’s no problem with having a weak thought, it’s certainly the behavior that may soon follow that thought that matters most.
Primary emotions and impulses originate in our lower “automatic brain” called the cerebellum, and frequently, if not most of the time, without our personal volition.
The cerebrum (the higher brain) is where we decide to give merit and eventual action to these involuntary emotions and impulses or to willingly redirect them in a more positive and constructive pattern of thought.
In other words, we can’t always control the initial emotion or impulse, but we certainly have the capacity to decide what to do with them, instead of simply following them.
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Those with a lower tolerance for stimulation (up to 50% of us) would be wise to choose a job that reflects this predisposition. Within this aforementioned 50% there’s another 20% who find themselves “highly sensitive” and do not thrive at all even under moderate stimulation. This is an important personal quality many have that should not be ignored. To find meaning and enjoyment in our lives, it’s important to understand and listen to ourselves… to “know they self” is an important concept worthy of our time.
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I have always considered internal objectives to be more important than external objectives and I recommend that you do the same. Work to improve from the inside out.
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A Manual for the Way a Modern Warrior Should Think
A step-by-step approach to applying the Japanese warrior’s mind set to martial training and daily life.
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I’ve repeatedly found that the majority of people spend the majority of their time each day doing things that don’t bring them much benefit. That’s what I would consider to be a great sacrifice, with very little reward. With great sacrifices, should come great rewards! Are you getting great rewards for your time?
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The majority of personal trainers are simply not qualified to train their clients; they lack any real depth of health and fitness knowledge and their personal experience with health and fitness is merely superficial. Young and attractive is frequently their primary asset…
The personal training industry is virtually swimming in certifications. Whereas some certifiying programs demand a broad-based understanding of human anatomy and physiology, others require much less from their participants, usually just a few of their dollars. There’s no standardized testing in the industry; applicants often can get away with taking either a weekend course or even just an online exam before calling themselves personal trainers and many will even skip this rudimentary step before doing so.
Look for depth in health and fitness knowledge (Degree and Certification), decades of personal training experience and an on-going participation in physical activities and athletics!
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