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   . . . exercise is catabolic?

    People often fail to realize that physical activity creates metabolic fatigue. When too much metabolic stress kicks up, performance begins to deteriorate due to muscles not being fueled properly. Over time, this creates a catabolic environment in your body—one which is suitable for muscle breakdown or atrophy.

   While exercise is arguably one of the best solutions to a healthy body, it serves no purpose when there’s no fuel to perform. So, an anabolic environment is desired instead. This is an environment which is suitable for the replacement of fatty layers in your body with leaner tissue.

   While the term “anabolic” is commonly associated to steroid use, the more proper association needs to be focused on metabolic efficiency. In other words, by staying anabolic before, during and after exercise, your body’s tendency of storing calories as fat decreases. This is one of the main reasons why smaller, frequent meals throughout the day help an individual stay leaner and perform better, regardless of their physical goals.

 . . . exercise and ego don’t mix?

    One thing that’s really annoying is how ego and pride have become dominating measures of good performance. More specifically, people often associate more time spent or weight used with a productive workout. The annoying part about this is when those specific time and weight quantities are casually thrown around in conversation with peers, often in a bragging sort of way.

   While there’s nothing wrong with being proud of yourself for doing more work, there is a problem when “more work” becomes the daily expectation. This expectation is the driving force behind an egotistical character at the gym. An egotistical person fails to acknowledge the fact that the human body is very dynamic, and exercise performance varies on a daily basis. They don’t account for the external stresses like work, lack of sleep or relationship problems that will invariably effect the quality of a workout. This is one of the main reasons why quality conquers quantity measures in life.

 . . . exercise variety can sometimes be counterproductive?

    While a workout with lots of exercises may look good on paper, too much variety may lead to poor performance. Moreover, the quality of a workout can often suffer when people fail to realize what works best for them. Instead of focusing on the how many muscle groups you hit, ask yourself if your workout was really efficient in terms of exercise range-of-motion.

   There’s much to be accomplished by the majority of the American population when exercises with larger ranges-of-motion become the major concentration of their workouts. More specifically, by including no more three main exercises

per session – deadlift or squat, bench press, and rowing variations – people can attack many muscles at once while revealing their strengths and weaknesses. Having less exercises to perform during a workout can also boost personal motivation, to not only maintain better rep quality, but potentially increase their frequency of training.

If you found the aforementioned information helpful, I’d love to hear about it.  Please just post a quick comment below!

Through good times and bad, relaxed or busy occasions, financially comfortable or stressed situations, there’s still one thing that everyone must do during the day to function properly. Everyone’s gotta eat, right?

The only problem is, everyone lives such a dynamic life that they really don’t understand the essence of giving the body what it needs to perform optimally. And then people wonder why stress, illness, or fat storage sneaks up on them so easy.

Well, I believe we all have the ability to perform physically and mentally optimal every day. It’s all in the matter of how we approach our daily nutrition. There are two schools of thought when approaching eating habits, and one of them allows us to conquer those environmental stresses by bringing us health and longevity.

Living to Eat

Someone who lives to eat primarily eats for taste and pleasure. While some healthy foods can be made quite appealing and tasty, the majority of calories consumed by a person who lives to eat are out of temptation. There is no structure to this daily eating approach, and the body becomes vulnerable to environmental stresses due to the absence of real, nutrient/antioxidant-dense food. More specifically, someone who lives to eat thinks of cravings – refined and artificial foods that satisfy an individual only temporarily – before health and longevity. As a result, when this person gets off track with their nutrition, it becomes quite difficult to shift their focus back to performing mentally and physically optimal.

Eating to Live

A person who eats to live understands that the human body endures various environmental stresses that it must adapt to in order to survive. In other words, food is viewed as a requirement to meet the physical demands that are placed on the body. Eating food for health benefits rather than out of temptation is made a priority, and frequent structured feedings of nutrient or antioxidant-dense food becomes an every day habit. More specifically, someone who eats to live seeks protein (lean, animal sources) and veggies – foods that satisfy an individual longer, yielding health and longevity – before short-term cravings. As a result, when this person gets off track with their nutrition, they are more disciplined to shift their body back into the momentum required for daily activities.

Eating to live is obviously the preferred style of eating if you want to get the most out of every day. For a similar, more elaborated template on how to eat to live consistently, I strongly recommend you check out “The Hero Diet” section in The Hero Handbook by Nate Green. Not only will this help you manifest better eating habits, but this free, “no gimmicks—just specifics” handbook will put life into a more fun and productive perspective. All he asks is that you pay it forward by spreading the word, as I just have. By the way, did I mention The Hero Handbook is free?

Now go eat to live consistently, and “become your own hero” in the process, as my friend and mentor Nate Green so eloquently puts it.

I’d love to hear about your progress in the comments below, too.

   In the U.S., we depend on computer technology for various tasks. In particular, the majority of Americans have a call of duty to be in front of a computer screen for their careers. As a U.S. citizen and young college student, I find my use of computers mostly for Google Scholar, viewing my favorite informational sites (like online publication sources and blogs), using the Salisbury University network’s educational resources and of course updating my website.

   Due to my various computer uses, I sometimes have a tendency to open too many browsers at once, or have my computer perform too many tasks. The result is something we all hate—computer slowness. I’ve realized that it’s important to stop this tendency if I want the computers I use to perform efficiently.

   As with developing better habits with using computers, I believe that knowing what to do is just as important as learning what not to do in order to reach fitness goals. So I’d like to share a few unspoken fitness rules, and explain what can be done to become more efficient at staying in good shape.

Stop seeking advice from people who don’t practice what they preach.

    Certifications and degrees don’t do much good if the associated health professional doesn’t practice what they preach. And it’s pretty obvious when their physical appearance is inconsistent with the advice they give others, too. In this capacity, I believe one of the ultimate qualifications for someone to give fitness or health advice is their physical body composition.

   Before looking to certifications and degrees, I encourage you to first determine what kind of body you’d like to achieve. Then think about anyone you know – could be a friend, an enemy, or a celebrity – who resembles your goal appearance. Find out what nutritional habits and training methodologies these people apply on a daily basis, and finally, tweak the variables to suit your own physiological profile.

Stop throwing away your workouts.

    Seriously—if you’re going to just go out and trash your body on the weekends, you mind as well not go to the gym at all.  Similarly, if you follow poor workout nutrition habits, you’re only throwing away all your hard work. What you put in your body is what you’ll produce anyway. Working out in a catabolic state – that is, an environment that suits loss of muscle tissue – is the ultimate negative outcome from any poor energy consumption practices.

   In order to minimize poor performance, simply set limits for your body if you decide to go on the dark side. Or just don’t give into temptation at all. The latter may be harder for the majority, however. This will enable you to train in an anabolic state more often – that is, an environment that facilitates lean muscle accrual – and to stop throwing away your workouts once and for all.

Stop following routines or programs that your body responds poorly to.

    Sometimes a routine from a printed or online media source will look pretty cool. That same workout may also work for others very well. But, if the methodology behind those set and rep schemes doesn’t fit your physiological profile, you definitely won’t benefit from applying them. So, the best way to address this issue is to start logging everything—from nutrition to your daily workouts performed. Logs are often overlooked keys to reaching goals more efficiently, and they will help you determine what your body does respond best to, indefinitely.

** |<| Do you know of any other good fitness rules? If so, I’d really like to hear about them.  Please feel free to post away, and share your thoughts in the comments below. |>|**

With the start of every new year comes a quest for resolving issues that have hindered our personal development and success in the past.  Whether or not we like it though, the real measure of our ability to personally develop goes beyond just kicking the year off on the right foot.  Our ability to follow through with our resolutions year round and inevitably conquer them is what allows us to adapt and become better.

While the psychology behind a new beginning is a very powerful motivator, I’d like to remind you how similar resolutions are to daily goals and dreams.  More specifically, every minute of every day, we are either taking a step forwards or backwards from achieving our goals and dreams.  The only real difference between resolutions and goals or dreams is that a new year is often associated with the former.  With this in mind, I’d like to point out some ways you can maximize your mental and physical capacities from a fitness perspective so that you’re in tip-top shape for conquering your resolutions and goals or dreams.

Mental Capacity

Maximizing your mental capacity involves:

Minimizing intimidation

No matter how good we are at something, we have to remain humble in the fact that there’s always going to be someone else out there who’s better.  This also applies to the large range of training experience present in the gym.  For those on the beginner end, it’s important to realize that just getting into the gym is half the battle.  As such, the atmosphere upon your arrival each day should not hinder your own motivation to gain some progress momentum – regardless of whether you feel intimidated or overwhelmed by what others are doing.  Find comfort in the fact that there’s a good chance some of the gym regulars are performing a movement wrong anyway.

For those lying on the more experienced end of the spectrum, it’s important to realize that your knowledge of various ways to train each area of the body automatically gives you more “space” in the gym when it comes to picking an exercise.  Not to mention, your prior knowledge of a gym’s general volume throughout the week is always nice for planning your own training sessions around others.

Listening to our body

There’s no sense in following a routine or program that your body responds poorly to.  After all, the only thing that delivers results on a given day is your body.  Sometimes this requires you to focus on doing more of what your body responds best to on a given day by sacrificing variety. 

Even though this sounds like common sense, listening to your body is a skill that must be acquired over time.  Therefore, its ultimately up to you to determine how to tweak the variables (exercises and rep schemes + loading mechanisms, nutrition and diet overall, and supplementation if used) to suit your body and goals.  One word of caution: Do not use this as excuse to be lazy because of a little metabolic fatigue or to skip from one training methodology to another just because of impatience.

Physical Capacity

Maximizing your physical capacity involves:

Getting rid of distractions

The two outstanding distractions I’m referring to are cell phones and food advertisements.  Basically, do anything and everything possible to keep cell phones out of sight and sound when training. This is out of respect for others and especially yourself.  Cell phones take away from the quality of a productive workout by influencing your mental capacity to stay in the zone.  As a result, physical performance becomes hindered, and the training effect for a given day is gone.

In terms of food advertisements, suffice it to say that we are what we eat.  This cliché demonstrates that, if you eat junk, you’ll produce junk.  Although the gradual move towards healthier dietary habits is getting better, the majority of food advertisements present junk in the most attractive way.  In reality though, when’s the last time you ate at a fast food restaurant and the food looked exactly like the picture on their advertisement? 

Healthy food can also be attractive.  And the benefits from an attractive healthy meal are very real.  Real food instills that “healthy full” feeling.  This  isn’t something that can be felt after consuming refined foods.

Training rather than working out

Some days the body performs better than others.  On those days you feel really good, why not become even more engaged toward getting the most out of that workout?  Taking advantage of these ”on days” is paramount to your success in the gym.  When you do this, you are no longer working out.  You are training in effect to surpass previous efforts.  This feeling can only happen if you are truly in the zone, which means you’ve already maximized your mental capacity and you’ve eliminated oustanding distractions for a given training session.   You can reproduce this training effect every time if you really want to.

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So it’s up to you–the individual.  I’ve simply reminded you of a few necessary requirements for maximizing your mental and physical capacities on a given day.  Hopefully these reminders will help you keep pushing hard and conquer your resolutions and goals or dreams.

If you’ve ever felt like something was missing during your breaks from work or school, there’s no doubt your outlook will change for the better when you become mentally and physically active. There’s just something about staying engaged in daily activities that gives us that natural adrenaline rush. We like to stay “busy” even when we aren’t.

We have the tendency to seek out activities that bring us a sense of self-accomplishment, regardless of everyone’s personal meaning for the word. I believe a great deal of this self-accomplishment is related to staying in shape mentally and physically over breaks, so here are a few reminders along with a bonus workout since you know I’m all about fitness.

Realize that there’s no such thing as the off-season.

A true athlete or average person that wants to maintain a lean body year round understands that there’s no such thing as the off-season. While rest has its time and place, your muscles need to be activated often so they’re ready for daily activities and future workouts. The cliché, “if you don’t use it, you lose it” therefore needs to be exercised mentally and physically if you want to maintain or improve upon your body’s current capabilities.

Make New Year’s resolutions short-term goals.

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions because people typically get in the habit of focusing on too many objectives at once and turning those into one yearly goal. This mentality is what leaves them falling behind in terms of progress. So instead of making a long-term yearly goal, focus on one thing at a time by breaking down what you want to accomplish on a weekly or even daily basis.

As a strong advocate of fitness, my weekly goal is to progress in my overall performance during workouts by increasing the quality of reps of less, equal, or even more weight for select exercises. My daily goal is to do whatever it takes to fuel my body with healthy sources of energy—for performing optimally during workouts and when using my noodle. What are your short-term goals?

Maximize the efficiency of your workout space.

I’m typically a strong advocate for getting into the gym, but sometimes reality sets in with weather and leaves you with suboptimal driving conditions. This is often the case with winter weather, so you have to remain indoors. You don’t have to miss a quality workout, though. Regardless of season, the take home point is to use bad weather to your advantage. How so? You’ll begin to understand the importance of applying space-efficient workouts, whether at a crowded gym or in your own home.

I’ll expand more on space-efficient workouts in the future. But for now, I’ll leave you with a teaser workout you can apply over break. The emphasis is to be explosive on your reps while still maintaining good form for each exercise in the circuit below.

Let’s put those words into action . . .

Special thanks to the demonstrators in the video!

DB Goblet Squat

DB Swing

DB Overhead Press

In sum, it’s important to do whatever possible to stay in shape mentally and physically over breaks because “if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it!” So even if fitness isn’t your forte, I encourage you to stay mentally active by engaging yourself in a book of interest or watching an intellectually stimulating movie.