The Animal

There’s a movie of the same name that’s been around for over 10 years. It’s a really funny comedy if you’re a fan of Rob Schneider. I’ve seen it many times over the years but after learning more on exercise I’m looking at this movie from a different perspective. It’s one of those scenarios of being bullied and turning it into triumph.

 The story goes of a wanna-be who wants nothing more then to be a cop. The problem with him is that he’s a classic weakling and has symptoms of asthma and a lack of confidence in himself. He goes through an obstacle course for police training that keeps blowing up in his face and fails on the last piece of the course. He even goes as far to make himself lean and mean by buying a bodybuilding supplement called “Badger Milk.” After seeing in the infomercial what the product “does”, he orders it and tries it out and even likes the taste.

 One day there’s a call in a robbery and with all the other cops out at a sporting event, this lonely, weak looking guy takes the call and gets in his sad and pathetic looking of car. A wild animal is in the middle of the road and almost hitting it Schneider’s character swerves and starts rolling the car down a long mountain. Being more dead then alive, a man drags him out and carries him to a barn where he happens to operate on him. After being in surgery, the weak guy wakes up and find his way back home.

 What this surgery got him was a weird success of an experiment where he has different organs of wild animals like a horse, chimp, wild cat and what else was put in him. Because of this, he develops Wild Animal Instincts and he becomes stronger, faster, more stamina and aware of his surroundings. Not going to give you the rest of the movie away because I’m not that good at giving a play by play.

 What I’m getting at here is that you don’t need a doctor to turn you into an athlete when you can develop into one yourself. Building strength and fitness does take effort but if you want it bad enough, you will develop your body in ways you couldn’t imagine before. You can gain strength and power by moving your body in awkward positions just like the wild animals and nothing is stronger, faster, more agile and intimidating then a wild animal.

 During parts of the movie, the character finds it difficult to control his urges for food; sexual appetite and the way things happen that makes his instincts go haywire. Now even though this is exaggerated in the film, in real life, urges happen in us all the time. When you develop your body through great exercise, hormones are being built and you build levels of metabolism that shoots through the roof.

 Our instincts are as old as time and one way or another we follow what we feel, even if it’s wrong at times but when it comes to exercise, we want a great body and be able to do things that seem impossible. Throughout the years our priorities towards fitness slows down and being more civilized and use proper manners towards what’s wrong and right. Our instincts remain the same but are told what we can and can’t do and don’t use our full potential as not only a human being but using that wild animal that resides within all of us. Learn to use your instincts and when you exercise, learn the best things for you that make you strong, powerful and animal-like.

 Unlike in the movie where he developed powers overnight, that won’t happen in real life. If you want to be strong, athletic and functional, you got to put work into it but it doesn’t have to be stressful. You can create a program that’s fun and can be done just about anywhere. One of the key elements of success to having a great exercise program is to enjoy your exercise and be hungry for more. The more you love it, the more likely your results will come and when you add your imagination and think like an animal.

 I encourage you to go and get the movie because it’s not just good fun comedy but you can learn a thing or two about being weak and making it a habit to become strong and healthy. Have fun and get out there and go animal.

Fitness Russian Roulette

Ever heard of that ultimate and ruthless gamble? You have one bullet in a gun and you never know which part of the barrel it’s in. It’s a matter of life and death and you never know how long you’ll live until BANG!!! You’re dead.

 In the fitness world this type of gamble happens more often then you might think. You have that one chance to find the results you want, you keep trying this or that but in the end, that one bullet will come up on you and because of your stressful efforts you failed and bit that bullet. People gamble so much for their bodies that the odds of them succeeding are 100-1 in my opinion. Very rarely that bullet of failure falls out of that metaphorical gun and you just happen to accomplish a goal and you felt awesome about it.

 What about the game of Chicken? You know that gamble like in jousting where one guy lives and the other might not and one chickens out and turns the other way? Throughout the years this game has had cars to “toy with” and it doesn’t turn into a game anymore, again it becomes a matter of who might live or might die. This is where exercise and the person training can become very dangerous either physically or mentally. You’re scared that you’re not going to beat that exercise whether its weights or not and there is that piece of you that just gets so frustrated that instead of confronting it, you turn around to save your own ass.

 If you want to beat the game of chicken and Russian Roulette then the one thing you must develop to stop having that one bullet come up and hit you right through that thick skull of yours is to learn the love of enthusiasm. Learning this trait can bring you beyond the peak of turning dead end results into a consistent state of not only making your results possible but learning to keep them. It’s very important that you love and believe what you do and use your love for finding what works and keeping it a challenge.

 There are two sides to every coin like ying and yang. One cannot coexist without the other. In order to build a solid foundation of both positive and negative sides to the coin you keep flipping over and over, you have to watch how your enthusiasm takes hold. If you have trouble finding what works and don’t know if anything is going to work, that’s the negative side of the coin. Now if you’re successful and know what works for you how do you kill two birds with one stone? Simple really, learn to smile when things don’t always go your way but one way or another you will be successful.

 One of my key successes in having a solid foundation in a fitness program is to learn what you’re getting into without knowing what you’ll get out of it. What I mean by that is you learn certain exercises or many of them and you know which one’s work and which don’t so you challenge yourself to see what results you will get from them. Many people fill out the sets and reps schemes and work the same reps in the same set. You do this for strength and that for endurance. For me, I gamble my exercises. In almost every workout, I never know what numbers are going to come up and when they do sometimes I’ll keep them as they are or double even triple them but I can always change course at the blink of an eye and make it an adventure instead of it being generic and dull. That’s what you want to make your exercise program, an adventure. You never know what’s going to happen but you damn sure want to find out. It’s like walking into the jungle, you never know what’s in it but you’re going to have the ride of your life whether you like it or not.

 There’s also another metaphorical gun you should avoid that has not just one bullet but beyond the loaded rounds and that’s the verbal gun. The majority of people will tell you that you can’t achieve something great and you won’t make something happen because you’re no good. This type of Russian Roulette is far more dangerous then being scared of being a failure. To avoid that stress and anxiety picture all those people that tell you that you can’t be successful. Picture them as if they were bullets in a loaded gun and if you even attempt one shot, most likely it will hit you hard. What you do is in your mind is think of taking that gun out into the ocean where no one will find it. Take it as far out as you can where no one can hear them or see them. Take out all the bullets and throw that bitch in the ocean and let it sleep with the fishes. You are a wonderful person who should succeed and if you want it bad enough you’ll go get it and not let one negative person stand in your way. Don’t pull the trigger.

The Forgotten Lift

Before anyone said “How much can you bench?” Before there were cardio machines reigning gymnasiums and long before the testing powers of Power lifting, there was one lift that gave you the most praises for your test of strength and that was the overhead press. This was the lift that told you how you belonged in the Physical Culture world and the two variations that became the stuff of legends were the Bent Press and the Two Hands Anyhow which means lifting 2 objects any way you can.

 In this day in age it’s very difficult to find almost anyone doing these lifts. The closest would be doing them with a kettlebell, rarely a dumbbell and almost never with a barbell. Why have these lifts fallen off the radar? Good question. Olympic Weightlifting has dominated the strength world and so has Power lifting and the Strongman competitions and have other tested feats of strength. However, these two lifts alone are one of the very pinnacles of what true lifting strength is and it’s also one of the most difficult to train. Yeah I can understand there are safety rules and injuries that can accrue but really, there are more dangerous lifts then these two bloodhounds.

 The man that not only made these two lifts famous but owns records that haven’t been broken in over 100 years was none other then quite possibly the greatest one-handed lifter of all-time Arthur Saxon. Saxon was a lifting god among the average man back in the old days of vaudeville and stage lifting. He and his brothers Kurt and Herman was the trio of strongmen acts that were unlike anything then and now. Their feats of strength were the talk of the world at that time and trained in very unusual ways. They drank beer, lifted, ate enormous amounts of food and trained day in and out for many, many years. In Germany, weight lifting and beer were the biggest draws and no one team of individuals did it better then the Saxon Brothers (aka Henning Family).

 When you talk about records you might think 762 career homeruns, 33,000+ career points in the NBA, 56 straight baseball games hitting 1 ball a game, Bret Favre’s consecutive games played in a NFL career, 100 points by Wilt Chamberlain in 1962 and even Wayne Gretzky’s most goals in a season, Saxon’s Bent Press should be right up there with them. His record of pressing 370 lbs. with one-arm stands the test of time and is a record that could never be broken. Think about that for a second, 370 lbs. with one arm. The majority of men can’t pick that much weight with two arms and yet one man defied the odds. His record of Two Hands Anyhow is 448 lbs, also an unbroken record.

 Those that have attempted to break these records have been on the receiving end of a failure. No one has come close and if it does get broken, I want to see it happen and I can probably see one guy I know do it and he’s determined to do it hell or high water in the coming years. It really is one of the ultimate challenges in the world of strength. Majority of men can lift something with two arms but to lift something with one-arm is a test of power, grit, world-class ability and the strength of a lion.

Internal Conditioning

A lot of mainstream gyms today help you build your body from an external point of view as in you see what’s in the mirror and for most that’s the only thing that counts. Some even go on extreme diets and do extreme type workouts that not only can hurt you from the outside but more on the inside. Have you ever thought of what it’s like to feel alive both in and out?

 Building the body from the inside is a key ingredient to your fitness success. The reason why that is it’s because your body is a system of not just bones and tissues but your organs as well. The organs are what are keeping the body alive. You have your heart, liver, lungs, spleen, kidneys and the largest organ of them all, your skin. Too many people neglect training these areas because to them either they take it for granted or don’t realize how important they are.

 Working the body internally is not just taking a few deep breaths no, its loosening the joints to keep them fresh, strengthening the organs to keep your energy floating like a beautiful river stream, it’s opening up the meridians (pressure points) in your body that help you stay energized and vibrant. Deep breathing is essential to any program but when you learn to target certain parts of the body that can help cleanse the body of toxins and breathe new life into your system.

 In Chinese medicine, it’s said that there are 300 pressure points on the body. Now whether there’s more or less I don’t know I’m not a doctor but because of that many you only need a few to help energize and vitalize the body. Did you know that certain pressure points hit spots on the body that hit in places that you never thought they’d hit? There’s a pressure point on the body that’s within your own hands that can help relieve headaches. Didn’t know that did you? There’s even a pressure on the wrist that opens up the heart in a way that vitalizes it and helps blood flow. How about a certain spot just below the navel where it gives you sexual energy like crazy and no it’s not your sexual organs. My personal favorite is a certain spot on the sternum that after I slap it a few times I end up smiling more than a kid on a Christmas day.

 Now do you have to be a hardcore gym rat to practice this type of training? Hell no. Most of the time it’s usually for people who have crossed over to the middle aged range but who says you can’t do it far younger say in your teens, 20’s or 30’s. They say life goes downhill after 40. I don’t believe that for a damn bit. I may be in my 20’s and not that far from 30 and I do this type of program almost every day and for good reason. It wakes my ass up more then a cold shower, gives me more energy that I need throughout the day for both my mind and my body and it puts me in a blissful state that you can’t get from anything else.

 Let me put it this way. You strengthen your organs and joints you get stronger internally and the amount of energy you develop can be used in other forms of training. You have a much higher chance of living longer if you practice a program like this. It’s not that difficult to learn and you can do it anytime, anywhere. You can even do it just before your regular training or do it in the morning before you leave for work, ditch the coffee. Your long-term health is in good hands if you practice it regularly. Build your body from the inside out and get your body on the track to superior health and vitality.

Finding The Flow Of Your Training

All of us have different perspectives about the flow or high we get when we train. It can be a real hardcore workout, smooth and methodical, powerful or having the feeling of just taken on the world and won it in a glorious fashion. When you find how you flow through your workouts, you’ll be getting a sense of what true strength and power lies, not in the muscles but in the mind.

 What is the perfect workout? Is it hitting a certain sets and reps? Is it perfecting the very best exercise performance? Or is it just finishing everything and going home to rest? The answer can be any of those three things but to me the perfect workout is neither one of them. The very perfect workout is when everything comes together and you flow through it like the waves of the ocean. It’s when you create something special that you rarely ever do and it’s powerful and strong but at the same time it’s peaceful and vibrant. Very few people experience that but again it’s never the same for everyone so your definition will most likely be different then mine but that’s the beauty of it.

 Nine times out of Ten your workouts will be great or boring or even good to call it a day afterwards but that one time, that workout will make everything else look like nothing but you accept it and it gives you a sense of accomplishment. All leading to that one moment where you feel the world is yours and you take it in your hands and you felt like you were Zeus himself on the top of Mount Olympus. It may for you often or very rarely it doesn’t matter, what does matter is how you portray that one conquering moment where everything falls into place and you enriched in glorious freedom of power and might that even for a brief second, it consumes you and you want to keep that moment.

 There will be times in your workouts where everything falls into place and you have secured your perfect training session. How can you make this happen? Well, honestly it takes more then a couple workouts. Takes practice and patience and never expect the perfect workout to come, let it come to you and when you least expect it, it’ll happen like a bolt lightning.

 Don’t just find your flow in your workouts, you can find your flow in other things. Did you know the ancient samurai weren’t just warriors of combat and lived/died by the sword? They were artists, poets and men of honor. Like them, the Shaolin monks, the Vikings, the Romans and other ancient warriors of combat they learned many aspects of life that had nothing to do with war or fighting. When you learn many other things, that’s where everything with you comes together to create your own moments of self-discovery and find how things work for you. Find your flow and you’ll find who you are as a person.