The #1 Secret To Life Long Physical Excellence

Do you remember when you first learned how to drive a car?

The mere act of getting behind the wheel totally consumed you. Driving required so much of your attention and energy that you couldn’t even have the radio on.

But as time went on something magical happened.  Not only were you able to  drive with the radio on but you’ve now added talking on the phone and text messaging to the mix.

What was the variable in having the confidence and faith to safely and effectively navigate a 2 ton machine towards your chosen destination?

It was the Acquisition Of Skill.

When you gained the required skills of driving your car, the energy demand to perform the task was much less than when you first started.

The acquisition of skill  allowed you to divert your energy towards other tasks. It allowed you to drive with less effort. Gaining the skill gave you the confidence and the faith to know that you can succeed at will.

If you have achieved any level of physical excellence (i.e. weight loss, strength, endurance, etc) and are struggling to maintain your gains, then it is time to explore the concept of skill acquisition.

Real physical excellence, once achieved is a non struggle. It will still take effort but your efforts will be more effective because you are doing it with skill. If you have lost weight, acquiring the skill of weight management will help you keep it off. If you have truly acquired the skill of strength, then your training will be ever evolving. Elite physical excellence students rarely hit training “plateaus” because they understand that adjusting their nutrition and training by listening to their body is a skill that helps them continue to make progress despite changes in their energy levels and environment.

The mindset for achieving permanent physical excellence is to turn your goals into a quest for skill.

If you focus on mastering the skill the final result will be all but guaranteed…forever.

Much Chi..

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How The Body Thinks Part 2: Exercise The New Addiction

Let’s take a trip down memory lane..

It all started way back with the first Mr. Olympia Eugene Sandow. He was considered the world’s most perfectly build man of his time. He was lean, symmetrical, muscular and strong. Eugene was truly the total package. He not only had the “show” muscles but he had the “go” as well. His feats of strength was his original claim to fame but is audiences soon became more enamored with his bulging muscles than what he could lift. From this point on the era of Bodybuilding began.

The concept of bodybuilding has evolved quite a bit since Sandow’s day. During the early days of physical culture, there was a pride and focus on not only looking good on the outside but living a healthy lifestyle and feeling good on the inside.

Within the last 5 to 10 years, there has been a shift from physical culture to the era of extreme fitness. High-tech gyms and super-charged supplements have created the great divide between form, health and function.

Extreme exercise has literally become the new addiction.  At least in the 70-80’s you had somewhat of a clear boundary between physical culture and the party crowd.

Now people are replacing their hard drugs with hard exercise.They are replacing the high of narcotics  with the train till you puke mindset. Think about it. If you’ve ever exercised until you threw up, didn’t it feel the same as a hangover?

At it’s core they are one and the same.  People are trading narcotics for stimulants and extreme exercise in the name of health. It is a step up the evolutionary ladder but I feel that we can and must keep moving up.

Just because an exercise is possible does not mean it is to be done. Not all exercise is for everyone and until we understand this, we are going to have millions of people brainwashed into thinking that they have to kill themselves to get in shape. This is not a good thing if we are trying to inspire millions of overweight and out of shape people to exercise.

These extreme workouts is not training. They are events. It is the equivalent to  running the full 26 miles at every session if you are training for a marathon.

Elite Strength Coaches,(I’m talking about the Real Elite Coaches) know that the extreme fitness programs are just fads.

The definition of a training program is being able to duplicate an executed session.

If you cannot duplicate the session without injury or burnout, then it was not a training session, it was a maximal event.

If I did a maximal event 3 times a week, I’d need a Red Bull or Red line or Nitro something to get by as well. Here’s a novel concept..

Train to tolerance and then rest.  Gradually and systematically  progress your way to higher levels of intensity. This way your results “stick” and you build long lasting results.

Give it a shot..

Much Chi##

How The Body Thinks Part 1: Death By Gym

What you are about to learn could save your life.

To truly understand how exercise affects the body, there must be an understanding of human biology, physiology, and psychology.

All of these factors are affected by an exercise program.

Stay with me please…This is going to get a little deep.

Evolutionary biology tells us that ANY threat to the organism will create a stress response in the body.

Let’s define what threat means in a bit more detail.

A threat is anything that compromises human survival. ANYTHING..

We are hardwired to detect any and all stressors that can kill us. This  can be at the conscious level (i.e. what we are aware of) or at the subconscious level (i.e. what we are not aware of.)

Ok.. let’s now define both conscious and unconscious stressors.

First the conscious..

* being trapped in a burning car.
* falling off a motorcycle
*getting mauled by a hungry grizzly bear.
*being diagnosed with a terminal illness
etc…

Now here are some of the possible subconscious stressors

* poor breathing pattern; if your breathing is compromised in any way.. your body thinks you are going to die.. And there are 8 ways to Sunday that breathing can be disrupted, so this threat is real and quite prevalent.

*poor posture: if your physical frame is out of alignment, your body thinks it will not be able to effectively run from predators or hunt effectively and therefore thinks it will die. Consider that 90+% of society has some type of postural disorder.

*suboptimal food choices: if you are eating a food that your DNA sees as incompatible with life… your body thinks it will die. In other words any time you eat a meal that is not according to your metabolic type, your body thinks it a poison and goes into a state of stress.

I don’t think I need to give you a statistic for this one. Just look around.. Has anyone close to you to been diagnosed with cancer? How about heart dis-ease? diabetes? anybody obese? how about just a little overweight? How about can get pregnant? Etc….

It is the subconscious forms of stress that eventually produce conscious forms of stress (i.e. sickness and dis-ease).

Finally here lies the lesson..

Many people have a desire to improve their health, fitness and body image.

They are willing to put in the time and effort to exercise and “diet”.

A fundamental principle of Physical Excellence is that any exercise program will serve to do three things:

1. Improve the structure of the body: This goes beyond biceps, triceps and abs and emphasizes the development of the physical qualities needed to develop, restore and maintain a healthy, functional and vital human frame. If this happens, the fitness, fat loss and the aesthetic results will be all but guaranteed.

2. Improve movement skills. Your exercise program will promote the ideal expression of human movement. In other words, your body will move and function the way it was designed to.

The best way to describe this principle is with the following analogy:

What if you took your car to a mechanic to get a full service on it (i.e. brakes, tire rotation, alignment, tune up etc.). And the mechanic also threw in a free car wash and wax.

Now imagine as you drove the car home that it drove and performed worse than it did before you took it in to get fixed? Would you focus on the fact that your car is shinny or would you have a problem with the fact that the car is running like crap?

Yet I have consulted with THOUSANDS of people over the last 20 years that have been “working out” and they come to me with poor posture, dysfunctional movement patterns, and are “fit but sick”.

This phenomenon was unheard of 30 years ago.

It is only since the advent of diet pills, cheap garbage supplements that we now have people with six pack abs like a world class athlete and toxic livers and polluted intestines.  I digress for a moment but I think you get the point.

In summary: If your exercise and nutrition program is not in line with your specific needs, and are not accomplishing the above, then your body thinks it will die and produce a stress response.

Prolonged stress responses are detrimental to your health and that is not Physical Excellence.

Listen.. with the new changes in “health care (i.e. disease management)” in the United States, more of the onus will be on us to take personal responsibility for our health and well being, as it ought to be in my opinion.

We have more people getting terminal illnesses at younger ages than ever.

We as a society must approach our health and vitality from a different perspective.

A perspective that will serve to promote Physical Excellence to the next generation.

Will you help me do it?

Your tip for today,

Much.. Chi..

The Pleasant Paradox

Here’s a thought…

I call it the “Pleasant Paradox”
If you think you have no energy to properly care for yourself, where will you find it? Take a wild Guess…
By taking care of your self..

Think about it..
Much Chi..

Terrence

Pulling vs Pushing

I was listening to NPR the other day and the discussion was about weight loss.

One of the speakers was discussing how much weight they were trying to lose and how difficult it was to stay away from all of the bad foods. Then the other commentator chimed in and agreed that weight loss is definitely a test of will power.

With that said, here lies my point.

Consider the notion that “How you do anything is how you do everything”.

Also consider that everything has a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual connection to it. In other words it’s all connected to the same “energy” source.

Now ask yourself is it easier to push away or resist temptation than it is to reach for or “pull” towards your goals?

Think about any time you have ever achieved anything in your life. Were you pulling or pushing?

Instead of pushing away from bad food, reach for the food that will help you reach your goal.

We all have applied this strategy to get what we want in other areas of our lives. Now let’s apply it to achieving Physical Excellence.

Food for Thought.

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Motivation-Inspiration

If this don’t light your fire then your wood is wet.

Enjoy…

Be Not Afraid To Die on A Treadmill…

How I missed this when it was first aired is beyond me but I’m glad to have found it now.

If you have ever desired to achieve anything, this video will put it all in perspective.

See Will Smith tell it like it is…

You may need this after watching the video..

Much Chi…

Release Your Fear

“You block your dream when you allow your fear to grow bigger than your faith.”

Mary Manin Morrissey.

Physical Excellence and Your Mind.. Make The Connection

Coaching clients for over 20 years, I have realized that the goal of physical excellence and body transformation is a shared goal, it seems that the path to achieving it is often quite different. Without exception, these separate paths are determined by their present mental state. I have found that clients who enjoy and embrace the process of becoming more fit have a more pleasurable journey towards feeling and looking better. However I have also discovered that clients who are only concerned with an end result have a more difficult time with their fitness journey.  They will encounter more obstacles along the way and the reason for this can be summed up in two words, core values. In other words their actions do not match with their deepest personal belief systems.
Achieving a great body is not a destination but rather a process that gradually manifests itself during your life. To view it any other way can potentially lead to misinterpretation of what you are be actually be striving for. A zero resistance way to see your fitness endeavors is to think of everything that you want to accomplish as a long highway composed of never ending experiences that you encounter along the way.
To make your fitness journey work in your favor, become aware of your perception of yourself as it relates to fitness.  In other words your mind and body must be on the same page. This sounds very elementary but the reality is that it is often overlooked.  Think about for a minute!  When you first started to exercise, what was your initial goal? Now take it a step further and ask yourself what was your mental perception of that goal? What did it feel like? Can feel exactly what it would be like when you had accomplished or encountered this experience? Did you set mental accomplishments for yourself that coincided with those of your present physical condition?  If you did not, I will assume that your journey towards physical excellence is being met or has met some stressful resistance. If you do not make a mental picture of what you want to do i.e. your goal, how will you ever be content with any progress that you have made.  One law of the universe states that you can never have what you deny. Enjoy the “pit stops” along your journey and you’ll build the mental emotional strength to keep going.
To make your fitness journey as enlightening as possible, decide what is it that you wish to experience.  This can happen only when your mind and body are in harmony.  Often times the physical aspect of fitness is emphasized which is normal considering that our society places great importance on the superficial.  With this thought in mind you ask yourself; will your FITNESS goal be enough?  Will your mind be in harmony with your new level of physical prowess?  This is a very important concept to ponder for a moment.  If your mind is not in place with our physical self upon achieving your objectives you may not acknowledge your accomplishments but rather than dwell on what could be or should have been.
Being happy with your present accomplishments is paramount to making your fitness journey enlightening and successful. The key to doing this is to absorb all of your experiences and learn from them be they positive or negative.
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The Real Health Cost of Going Cheap

I saw a TV segment about how the health of Americans is suffering because of the economy.

The general consensus was that the financial stress is forcing many people to settle for the less expensive
foods.

Although things may be tight right now for many people, I do believe that with a shift in perspective, you don’t have to compromise on your health.

Consider the following..

1. Organic food may be more expensive than fast food and conventional foods but they keep longer.
You also don’t eat as much because the food is more nutrient dense.

2. Eating quality food will lessen the need to buy all the other stuff associated with the poor quality food such as
laxatives, antacids, breath mints, aspirin, nasal sprays and anything else that is used to treat the symptoms of food additives and preservatives.

I do agree that this is a time to focus on the bare necessities and eliminating the processed food is a great start.

Think about it.

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