Sunday, February 5, 2012

Who Says You Can't Do It?

A lot of people try to get strong and fit not because they believe in themselves but what others think of them. Believing what others say will make you a second rate wanna-be instead of being a first rate individual. "You're weak because someone said you are", "you're pitiful because you can't do a simple push-up", you can't be flexible and be big at the same time", "you will never be stronger then that guy" and my personal favorite, "bodyweight exercise won't make you big and all you're doing is endurance." What's so wrong with this picture? You are a person who has a strong individual waiting to shoot out and take on the world but first you must let aside those negative things people say and turn them into your strengths by going after what you want for yourself but not for them.

You have no excuse for what you want to achieve. What you want is waiting for you to take and take with a vengeance. You are more powerful then you think you are. That's right, I'm not giving you a hard time, not telling you how weak or pathetic you are, you aren't any of those things. If you want something bad enough you make it happen. No one can do it for you and those who say bad things about you want you to not achieve it because they have no will power themselves but you do my friend.

I'm telling you this right here, right now you are responsible for your own goals. If you want to succeed and become strong and mighty then you got to take it with a grain of salt, I can care less if you want to lift weights, do bodyweight exercise, use odd objects or cool looking tools the important thing here is that I believe you can do it and if you want it bad enough then go out and get it. Build the body of your dreams, in your mind you have a V-Shape back, powerful muscular arms, thoroughbred legs, tendons like steel cords, the neck of a lion and well rounded mighty shoulders but you have to make them a reality. It takes patience, time, hard work and will power to get what you want but if you work on the right things, everything will pay off in the end.

One of the key secrets to achieving your goals and achievements is to keep them to yourself. There are people out there that don't want to see you succeed and tell you its impossible or you're putting too much on yourself and something like this won't happen for you. That's a lot of bull because you have more power in you then they'll ever now and never let your dreams die. You are one powerful person no matter what someone says, good or bad. You have the ability to create something that's beyond yourself. Train for yourself an don't let anyone tell you different.

There are people out there however like me who believe in you and what you want to accomplish. These are the people to connect with and share with them what you would like to do but the golden rule is no matter how much advice you are given, you alone need to buil your own style of training and make it your own. Learn to become your ultimate teacher. You are the one who's making the choice.

Never settle for less then what you want to do. You are responsible for your own actions and you have no excuses for what you want to achieve. Don't let others take you down when you have more power getting back up. Its not the size of the dog in the fight, its the size of the fight in the dog. You need to train for yourself and don't let anyone tell you any different because you can do it and you will do it. You're the boss. Now get out there and make something happen for you. Become a giant among men whether you're short or tall, you can tower over anything if you put your mind to it.



Saturday, February 4, 2012

Lost Secrets Of The Old-Timers

In the Golden Era of Physical Culture you had mail-order musclemen teach the best ways to train and become strong and vibrant. Even bodybuilders of that era of 1900-1960 ran, swam, lifted weights, wrestled, boxed and performed feats of strength that would blow any one's mind out of the water. They taught you the most simple exercises whether it was bodyweight or weight lifting and the more basic the better results you made. Presses, Pulls, Grip Work and Squats were the mainstay and used Barbells, Dumbbells, Odd Objects, Push-ups, Pull-ups, Free Squats, Hand Balancing and Gymnastics.

This was before Steroids became a hit and wasn't used as much as it is today. Back then they relied more on guts, good food, hard work and old fashioned muscle building. Machines weren't big at this time and even today they're as useless as a fart in church. Record lifts in this time period are still unmatched in today's modern era of weights and strength. They didn't take supplements to "help" them get stronger, they used Progressive Resistance Training and did the best they could of their natural abilities. Today, you can't break a record in sports without having suspicion of someone using something to give them that edge and it's a damn shame.

Modern trainers can learn a thing or two of the old-timers in their programs. Back then, you didn't have the Internet, you didn't have hip hop abs or the biggest loser, hell not even P90X and yet those guys were far stronger and more importantly far healthier then the overly cautious and paranoid fitness nuts of today. Back then the average age capacity was 45-60 and a lot of them surpassed that, some lived to be 90 and one old-timer lived to be 104 and didn't die of natural causes. This is where one needs to learn what the important key is. Be happy with what you do and develop challenges. Yes our age capacity has risen in the last 50 years but a lot of it has come with a price. On another note more athletes today are dying younger then the athletes of yesteryear and its mostly due to drugs, drinking, steroids, very low or very high food intake that isn't safe and even fame has gotten through to their heads to the point where they'll do anything to stay at the top.

Courses and Programs back then (the good ones from top notch strength advocates) were much simpler and easier to understand unlike today where you have programs that actually can injure you and put you in the hospital. Basic programs build superior results period. All of this specialization isolated crap today doesn't make you any stronger then a plastic door, you go through it and it rips apart just like that. A lot of programs today don't make much sense when if you move inch the wrong way, your exercise is shot to hell or you have to do this many reps or that many sets to determine if you're strong or weak. It's never common sense anymore and people end up quitting as fast as they started.

In my personal opinion using steroids for personal gain is just about the dumbest thing you can do to yourself. Steroids using injections and pills to gain an edge is just stupid. There's controversy as to how steroids are used either in sports or in medicine. In sports they're used to recover quicker, run faster, jump higher, gain enormous amount of strength, build more stamina and create over the top levels of testosterone . In medicine its to help patients with low levels of testosterone, help skin tone and help their immunity system. No matter how you slice it, there's side effects with artificial steroid use with the creams, pills and needles to which if not used wisely or correctly, it can cause almost the opposite effect of what its originally used for. It has to do with more pressure these days to be bigger, stronger and faster then your competition and plenty of men and women take it too far either as an addiction or for purely selfish reasons. Back in the day where steroids weren't in the public or even heard of there were athletes that looked far better and had longer careers then most athletes today and that was purely on how simple their training was and some of their records are still up today.

To become naturally strong and be a good athlete or strength fanatic yourself, look to the history of what those who trained in the past and how you can adapt their styles with yours. Don't do the same things they did, just learn the basic principles of what they taught and use them to build a style for yourself. In today's era we have very unhealthy people in and out of the fitness world and its time to get back to our roots of what hard work and busting your ass really meant.

Gorilla Power & Creating Animalistic Strength

Lions are known as the kings of the Jungle but I feel the incredible hulks of the Jungle are of the Gorilla. Gorillas have strength that surpasses more then 10x of the strongest men. Yes they're structure is different when it comes to walking but yet with chimps they're the closest to us humans, they have hands, they have feet and have torsos that resemble a human. They walk different because they're arms are longer then their legs and need to adapt to walking on their hands.

I personally feel that if we were to get strong then we need to reverse evolution from our modern methods of today. Today in most fitness circles we can't compare to the old school ways of training and that's most likely a good thing. Today we have people who are more overweight then any other time in world history, we have gyms that have just lost its roots to whats really important and looking good and being overly cautious has taken over. Very few of those that know the real secrets to strength & health look to what the animals and early men have done to become strong. Animals don't lift weights and try showing off their muscles, they use their strength to survive and early men strived to survive harsh weather conditions and move boulders to help shield themselves and swam to catch fish, run as hard as they can to get away from predators and used spears to kill their food of some of the wildest beasts of the time.

Getting strong using weights has its own benefits but modern trainers make it look like a joke and those old-timers from the golden ages of strength would be rolling in their graves. If you're going to use weights, do the simplest one's and stick with that, Presses, Pulls, Abs, Grip Work and basic leg training is all you'll ever need. Isolating muscles is only good for one thing and that's rehab other then that it's useless. When it comes to weights, the simpler, the better...Dumbbells, Barbells, Kettlebells and a few odd objects here and there is all you'll ever need.

When you learn to become strong, its best to look at not only the muscles of the strongest animals or the strongest of humans but take a good look of how strong the tendons are. I'd say the best animals with the strongest tendons are Gorillas and Wild Cats because they have to reach, climb, crush and pounce while defending against predators and/or fighting for food. It's better to pull a muscle than tear a tendon. Huge difference between the 2. Pulling a muscle recovers quicker, tearing a tendon however can put you out of commission a lot longer because the tendons are the things that help keep the skeletal structure together while the muscles are the tissues that cover the skeletal structure. Tendon strength creates a chain reaction of how strong you really are. Take a bodybuilder for example in this day and age. He's more into building muscle so he can look as big and powerful as possible but does little to no training in the tendons and chances are he's going to get injured quicker then any other athlete including fighters and major sporting athletes.

Developing Ape strength without weights is very simple an doesn't take that much time to learn or do. Look at the basic things they do, climb, walk, pull, push and move in awkward positions. Learning basic elements in their evolution can help you become 3x stronger then the average human. This of course means you won't build the strength that they do because its the way their structured and their nature is used but that doesn't mean we can't adapt. Some of things they do might seem silly but if you're open minded and look at another prespective you might realize that you can become stronger using those so called "silly" stuff.

The only time you'll ever see an Ape lifting weights is if researchers experiment to find out how strong they are in that area and if you see some knucklehead meatball of a bodybuilder trying to lift some weird looking weight. Apes carry strength that makes most weightlifters look like chumps and who's to say we can't try to imitate and build superior strength ourselves. We can really learn the true secrets of creating Animalistic Strength with the simple points of observation, experimenting and adapting. In the world of fitness it's not a bad thing to turn reverse evolution and become the strongest person we can be.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

My Secrets To Daily Training

If you want to build the greatest foundation for creating great programs for you and your goals you must absorb as much information as possible. They say knowledge is power, well the more you learn and the more you experiment, you will start becoming your own trainer.

When you train, get a feel of how the exercises are in the beginning and work your way up at a pace that's comfortable for you. Listen to how your body responds to soft training and tough & brutal type training. Work on things that give you a sense of power and a sense of well-being. Learn to use your instincts when your body gets tired and how your body responds to certain exercises. There are some exercises you shouldn't do which is fine but you need to find out which ones work and which don't.

There's a big difference between training for an hour at one time as if you trained a full hour throughout the day. Your concentration is different and your structure is different. Your speed and pace is different. This is where you need to learn on how to pace yourself in a workout. Spreading an hour throughout the day is a good ideal because you get to focus on the things you want to work on. For this benefit it helps you with your schedule as you may not have a lot of time to train but doing things here and there set the pace for how the rest your day goes.

Many people can't find that amount of time dedicated to a workout. Now working out for an hour straight or resting in between sets within the hour can be a good thing as well but your mind structure is different cause you are training for a long time and concentration is key in this case. Training at a good clip for an hour straight is also different especially on specific exercises that can be ballistic and tough plus in my experience doing tough workouts for an hour just makes you feel not that good and your body doesn't have the capacity to train hard for that long.

I feel the best benefit of training for an hour straight shouldn't be hard training at all. It should be soft, concentrated and meditative. Work your joints, tendons and ligaments while taking the time to do deep breathing because working on these elements can create huge jumps in your training later on as you can do more speed and concentration on shorter workouts and work your body the way you feel needs to.

Me personally I rarely ever train for a whole hour at one time or throughout the day as I get bored very easily. I have some ADD type moments in my workouts because ten minutes to me is too long and I need to regroup and think about what I want to do. This is where shorter workouts are more simpler then doing the same routine of 30 minutes of this and an hour of that. I have a bit more time to kill then most people ad even I can't do that much work, its boring, not fun and makes me want to punch someone in the face for whoever came up with that idea.

Pacing yourself in a training session is critical because you don't want to go so fast you lose your form and you don't want to go so slow that you get bored and just hate what you're doing. Work on finding your own pace and speed according to how your body responds an your mind is in the right place while maintaining the best form possible. Its not bad to go fast in a workout, hell that's a favorite for me because I want a great workout in the shortest amount of time as possible. Its not bad to go slow either so you can focus on certain exercises like holds and working your flexibility safely and productively.

One of the real keys to being your trainer is to change up your exercises and tempos on a frequent basis and make your body need to adapt. This is sometimes called muscle confusion but in my line of training its making progress on developing fresh and exciting workouts. I have to change up all the time but I'll use the same exercises while mixing them up and working at different paces. Some exercises I move fast on, with others its more focused and more on movement. I also hold certain positions for a certain amount of time. This works the muscles and tendons in a different setting and is sometimes more relaxing then just moving and moving.

There's no one way to train and everybody trains differently no matter how much you teach them. A lot of trainers make the mistake of trying to show a student an exercise exactly the way they think it should be taught and the student just doesn't always get it right and its not their fault. A person should work an exercise according to his/her body structure whether they're small, average, thin, muscular, overweight or tall & short. I learned this the hard way from a teacher I once had who taught us how to do side steps and plyometrics. I'm 5'10 and well over 240 lbs. and have some arthritis in my leg due to my accident years back and although its strong and flexibility in some areas, in others it isn't and she tried teaching it exactly the way it worked for her which cannot and logically cannot work the same for someone my size or smaller. I ended up hurting myself and eventually quit after nearly a month. So even with all my training experiences from doing hardcore training methods and doing stamina training that makes most people want to puke it be hard to believe that I needed to quit after going through that.

Learn the exercises you want to learn, master them and work with them as often as possible and supplement other exercises to work weak areas and to help you recover. Doing this type of progress and finding what works best for you puts you ahead of the pack and you learn the ultimate key of training of becoming your own trainer and that's Self-Reliance. Don't ever copy someone else's program but your own because you won't be achieving first rate training, you'll be a second rate wanna-be and this is something that should never happen to you. Don't go looking for a trainer and be second rate student, look to yourself and learn what you want to learn for yourself and become a first rate teacher of your own ideals and programs.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

What Torture?!!!!

People have this belief in the fitness world that they need to torture themselves in their workouts in order to get into shape. They do the 30 minutes of Cardio and the hour of weights and some don't last that long at all. There's a fine line between good torture and bad torture n your training.

Good Torture means in your mind you're training to the best of your abilities and you love what you do and you also find it fun and creative. Its never a bad thing to love your workouts the rule of thumb however is to not love it so much that you forget what you're trying to accomplish. A lot of people fall into this trap at times because they push so hard and just don't want to stop that at some point injuries will occur and they might never realize it till its too late. Taking the time to put your heart and soul into what you do and feel like a million bucks afterwards puts you on good terms of how torture means to you.

A perfect example of Good Torture is my friend Bud Jeffries, he is one of the strongest men on the planet but also one of the fittest men as a super-heavyweight at 270 lbs. He often does High Rep workouts while combining strength training at the same time lifting weights that range from 53-1500+ lbs. and has been known to do reps as high as the 3000 range. For most people that's just ridiculous and is doing far too much work but infact that type of training has not only made him lose well over 100 lb. but has given him vitality and endurance that can be used for long-term effects for other things in life. Is this the type of training for you, most likely not as you don't need to be this extreme but you can put yourself through workouts that your body will thank you for and can take them to extremes on a safe and productive basis.

Bad Torture means you're training hard just for the sake of training or it could mean you don't know how to use certain form and just go through the motions when really that can lead to injuries and you torture yourself far too often and your mind isn't in the right place. Even more people fall for this trap because this type of torture is disguised as some programs in the fitness magazines and this more frequently has more people quitting the gym and training all together. This has more short-term effects and not in a positive manner as you find certain workouts you want to try but your body can't handle the stress therefor if you keep it up you will get hurt and hurt bad physically, mentally and emotionally. Trying a program that you're not ready for and pushing through it anyway is never a good idea.

An example of this is the modern bodybuilding and some strength workouts from the muscle magazines where steroids and supplements run rampant. This is not productive and long-term training and 99.9% of the time it isn't safe as well. Torture workouts like these are for those who have been training for years and never is this at a beginning level as the Cowardly Lion would say "Not no way, not no how." It is this type of torture that brings long-term problems to bad backs, hernias, joint pain, neck spurs and who knows what else. It isn't just the magazines but also those infomercials as well as they have you do hard training you're in no shape to perform and some of the exercises are just ridiculous and can do more harm to the joints then anything else. They don't give you well rounded structures so you're physically and mentally ready for the challenge. Torture like this won't get you anywhere and won't let you live a productive and healthy life.

I have been through torture myself good, bad and just downright ugly and have had a plethora of problems when I went through my weight lifting days to the point where when I woke up in the morning every inch of my body felt like bone rubbing on bone and it hurt like a motherf*cker and that's something nobody should experience ever. When I became smart and used torture from a different angle I went through workouts that would've kept me out of training for days on end but instead only went to extremes on a few occasions during weekly training. Never under any circumstances torture yourself daily no matter how tough you are. Putting together programs that help recovery is just as important as your extreme workouts.

Some hate going through tough hard workouts and feel if they don't do it they're not going to reach a goal. This should never be a type of mindset. What you should be doing instead is on your extreme days, set your mind to loving the workout and make it fun to the point where yes its hard work but your mind is saying "This is fun I'm loving this." Using that type of mental training can you surpass goals and achieve results more then you bargained for on a positive basis. If you're training at a park and having a tough workout, most would call it torture and run away but to you its just another training session. This is where mental training is critical and should be as important if not more then physical training.

Taking control of a torturous workout is very difficult to do. Your mind needs to be focused, your body needs to handle the stress and you must know what you're getting yourself into. Its not easy to jump into hard and tough work when you don't have the right preperation. Taking the easy road by just going for it and not giving your body a chance to learn to handle certain things can get you in trouble big time. Controlling Torture takes practice and a lot of mental strength so learn what you can and work your way up going through progressive phases at your own pace. Study your workouts from how your mind and body work together and trust your progressions. Learn how torture can turn into a powerful experience with the right mind set and the right & safe progressions.

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