Make Just About Any Angle Your Strength

The legendary Catch Wrestler Karl Gotch once said that to become strong and agile you always work your muscle from every possible angle. Muscles grow and look larger than life but like everything else there’s a consequence, if you work too much muscle and not enough of your tendons, you will be more vulnerable to injury. Isometrics is the key method not to just hit a muscle from a certain angle but every angle imaginable. Holding a certain position and hammering in only that particular spot will give you a sense of great strength from that position. One of the beauties of Isos is if you hit a spot where you can’t go anywhere else, that’s where you press, pull, squat or whatever to get beyond that position and no matter how you slice it, your strength will skyrocket with enough practice.

 If Isometrics had its own star pupil it would most likely be Steve Justa. This man has got to be one of the most odd ball characters in the entire realm of Physical Culture but yet the way he works his strength and power takes on a whole new dimension both literally and figuratively trust me watch what he does sometime. Out of everything he’s accomplished in the world of Strength, I believe his most treasured wisdom is when he brings up Isometrics. A lot of strongmen credit Isometrics but no one has put them in the same realm as Justa has. His story about his hay bailing and the way he told Bud Jeffries about his dilemma about Diabetes and how Isometrics both saved his life and job is nothing short of remarkable.

 I feel that if you want to accelerate your strength and speed in any sport you do, add in Isometrics and tell me if they didn’t improve your throw or shot or even your ability to kick a ball. Isometrics build positional strength and in sports you need to have a strong position from every possible angle whether its tackling, throwing a football or baseball, shooting a basketball from a long distance or kicking a soccer ball down the field you want to have the ability to be faster than the other guy. Think about this, you’re a pitcher for the New York Yankees; you have a good arm and can throw a hefty 93 mph fastball or a ok 86 mph slider, would you want to increase your speed of the ball by 3 mph on any of your pitches? Be pretty damn sweet if I say so myself and the ball will feel lighter in your hands as if it was the size of an egg, light and strong until it cracks the mitt like speedy Gonzales running into and past a brick wall. Each position you bring the ball as if simulating a pitch from little spots here and there will get stronger to the point where when you throw the actual pitch, it’ll take off like a rocket and the batter won’t realize what the hell hit him.

 Grip strength is the basis not just in sports and the strongman business but in your specific business like carpentry, plumbing, construction, landscaping even a bagger at a grocery store, you need to able to handle things and your hands need a certain amount of strength otherwise you won’t be able to do your job very well. Would you believe that most of your grip strength is mainly isometric? It’s true if you really tested it and if you practice holding an object with your grip for a short or extended amount of time, you’re going to feel it whether you like it or not. For us strongmen, we need grip strength to perform the feats we do, sometimes the things we do don’t always involve the grip but it is practically mandatory otherwise you won’t perform the feats you want to tackle. Bending steel and tearing phonebooks are two of the purist forms of grip strength and like I said before, Isometrics are usually the most credited method for pushing beyond the limits.

 Another form of Isometrics is Muscle Control which is mostly used in Yoga, Martial Arts and Bodybuilding. Contrary to popular belief, muscle heads are pretty smart when it comes to certain things and the way they pose is just unbelievable despite how big they are. Back in the day however, a few guys named Maxick and Otto Arco took this to a level that can never be duplicated again. Their posing was unprecedented and even bringing the little muscles were just off the chain. Check them out sometime on Youtube if you can find them and just watch how they can change from one muscle to the next in heart beat its awesome.

 Now that you’ve read a little more on Isometrics, I think you’re getting a sense that there really are no excuses and you can do this method just about anywhere, if you go to church and pray you can do it, think about it you put your hands in prayer and when you ask for guidance press the hands together hard and tell me you don’t feel a little more energized? You can be in class and press or pull on the desk and you can have no one ever notice it. You can be watching a movie and flex during certain scenes so don’t ever say you don’t have time to exercise because you usually can make the time but it’s up to you to make the effort.

Getting Mad? Get Out & Train

We all have certain emotions that get to us through stress, certain people in your life and many other things but getting mad and taking it out on the wrong things can lead you to a path of destruction that you will have a lot of trouble getting back from. I have had a bit of temper and it makes me sometimes the biggest ass in the world. Whenever I got mad at something, it drove me to a point where I have put holes in door with one blow of my fist and have thrown certain things at a wall or even have punched my own window and shattered every square inch of glass from one hit. I’m not ashamed to admit this and have paid a price with scars both physically and emotionally. So after a few years of self discovery I wanted to learn to control my temper.

 Anger isn’t always the healthiest thing to have because it could affect your body in ways we can never understand and if you’re prone to high blood pressure it’s as fatal as you can get. Instead of just being angry and going off on someone or hit/smash anything, it’s better to just really walk away and whoever said “Oh if you’re mad just go hit a pillow till you cool off” must’ve been out of their god damn mind because that kind of thing will make things worse for you. One of my favorite de-stressers is just training, getting out and moving around, if you have a tire and a hammer, take it and pound that tire, one teacher showed me what you can do with a heavy medicine ball and just throw it down on the ground until you can’t take it anymore. Stress can make you crazy but doing something productive to channel your rage is healthier than just running around being angry at something.

 I have learned that when you’re mad or angry and you feel like you want to hit something or somebody, might as well be hitting yourself because you’re going to hurt yourself more than taking something out on someone or whatever. You want to find a way to relax and have those endorphins kick in that give you that sense of bliss. If you really want to get a natural high, go sprint on the track or up a hill and see how long it takes you to stop being angry. Sometimes training doesn’t always help, its understandable but that’s one way to help balance your emotions. Another way to balance things out if you get angry is to just walk away, go for a walk and breathe deeply, instead of breathing in anger, breathe in blissfulness and breathe inner strength, if you live near a lake or the ocean, go for a swim or go to your local pool and do a few laps, anything to get your mind off things and be happy with yourself.

 Lashing out in a positive manner can actually help you find what is wrong with your emotions and how you can prevent going into a big rage and turn into the incredible hulk and hurting someone. Sometimes certain people can’t control their emotions so they take meds to calm them down and even that can be harmful on the body itself. There are even people out there who beat the person they love so it’s complicated sometimes. Doing something productive that won’t harm you or others or objects is a great thing to balance out certain problems you may have just use it a safe manner that way it’s a win-win for everyone. I personally have never physically hurt anyone in my life and intend to keep it that way because if I did that I’m no better than a possible murderer so being smart about your emotions is a good practice to learn and use in a safe and healthy manner. Don’t hurt others or yourself.

Follow Blindly With Pride

When you first really learn something, you don’t know what to expect, if you did, learning wouldn’t be that fun or adventurous. When you first learn to walk as a baby, do you research and follow the mechanics, no because you don’t know any better and you learn to do it yourself by putting one foot in front of the other than before you know it you’re off and running. People have this belief that following a certain people blindly without looking into who they are or what they really represent feel that it’s stupid and you don’t know what you’re talking about.

 In the strength training world or in fitness for that matter, we follow all kinds of people, programs, diets, exercises and all sorts of things. Even the “experts” who have big egos try to take down those who don’t believe in their system and that they are blind to what they should really strive for. Hate to break it to you buddy but as cool as your name is on a piece of paper doesn’t make you god among men. Not all people in this industry are like that but it’s very annoying when they give you this B.S about facts and scientific methods that are proven and they expect you to believe them. This is where instead of listening to what they say; find out for yourself what works and what’s proven in your own experiment. Testing the waters is one of the best to learn from.

 When you train, don’t just go through the motions, followyour instincts and find what works for you and when that right program just hits you and you find a passion for it, support it and use it your advantage to what makes that program work for you. I’m not saying go out door to door like a Jehovah’s witness and preach that it’s the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel, talk about it as if to encourage it. Not every program works for everyone, hell I have followed more methods than I care to count and yet I don’t do all of them. I take the very best things I’ve learned and mold them into something that gives me and only me great benefit. I give my insights and encourage those to try it out at their own pace.

 When it comes to following a blind method of training, nothing broke that barrier more than how Slim The Hammer Man became the world’s strongest man for the specialty feats he performed such as chain-breaking, scrolling steel and his trademark, Hammer Levering. An old man taught him the best ways to tap into the mind and go after a feat that just seemed impossible yet made it happen. This was decades before the internet and cell phones, so the only way to do something is just that do it and see where it leads you. In a sense, Slim followed this old man’s methods blindly by just focusing on what worked and didn’t work. He eventually found that itch and developed his own style of training just by experimenting with his own research and look what happens, he became a beast of a legend, sure he hit a few rough patches along the road to success but it didn’t matter.

 There are millions of blind individuals in this world and it’s a shame that they can’t see the world and look into the eyes of the people they treasure the most but not all is lost, sometimes if you watch really closely (no pun intended) those same individuals develop other senses that are more powerful than the gift of sight. The main proven method today is Eco Location where the senses are sought by vibration kind of like a bat in a cave where the method came from. Why am I telling you this? Have I gone off course and just went off topic? The answer is no I haven’t. I’m telling you this because like blindness, when you follow a certain program or experiment with it, you might find some new senses and find that although you can’t tell if it’s going to work, your body will tell you to either adapt or fail. Your mind is very strong, your muscles adapt and your awareness gives you a keen sense of how certain things will play out. When you find that right moment and all that experimentation pays off, you’ll increase these senses and you’ll be able to adapt to that program however you want.

 One of the greatest masters of wrestling Billy Robinson pointed out that in the beginning, you learn, yet in the end you’re still learning. There’ really no such thing as ultimate mastery. If you stop learning and act like a total expert with an ego than you really haven’t learned a damn thing. Mastery is learning how to learn. You never stop finding that key program or exercise or method that keeps you going for life, you develop new things, new ways to come up with what you learned. Also kinds of like Yoda’s quote “You must unlearn what you have learned.”  If you stop learning and not using your mind, how will you be able to know who you really are and what you can help teach others? Teaching is great tool but yet teaching while also learning about yourself gives great insight to how you follow something while others do the same. Following someone blindly isn’t always a bad thing, just make sure you don’t get hurt or end up killing yourself, give it time and if it doesn’t work for you, move onto something else, keep learning and keep building your own senses to what brings you that ultimate high.

Big Muscles Don’t Mean Jack Shit

In every major muscle magazine, you’ll find a minimum of 3 articles that “teach” you how to build giant looking muscles. Come on are you fucking kidding me, most of these guys can’t write a single program that shows any realistic approach to building massive muscles with functional strength. Having big muscles can actually ruin your chances of having success in your exercise program, sure some are genetically built to have big muscles and still find a way to be extremely flexible and very strong. If you don’t believe that then take a look at a couple of muscle bound looking guys I know of.

 In my opinion, if you have 23 inch biceps, so what, sure they look cool and sometimes grotesque but just because you have them, doesn’t always mean you’re a strong dude. What can they really do except look good in a pose down? Big arms can only go so far but when you have strong tendons to go with them that are a whole new ball game. Back in the day when Bodybuilding actually meant something, they didn’t just train to look good on a stage but had superior strength to back it up, one of the very best of them was John Grimek who was by far one of the most massive men of his time actually pulled off some fucking awesome feats of strength such as phonebook tearing, nailbending and tearing decks of cards, I don’t even think he liked bodybuilding that much he just got stupid strong with a mega boy to go with it, next two would be Bill Pearl and Reg Park. All three of them had a powerful physique but yet overshadowed their even greater functional strength.

 Functional strength is essential to everyday life and not always in the gym either, holding groceries, opening a jar of pickles, saving one’s life and even taking up furniture for that matter. Training for everyday functions is a key to your vital success in having a strong body. Just looking good has far more disadvantages than you’d believe, seriously pal, if you have a great body but can’t defend yourself or even please a woman in the bedroom than you got some issues. I don’t care who says it and whoever doesn’t believe it isn’t helping himself very much but sex is the best exercise there is period. Now I’m not all about that, sex alone isn’t the mainstay for a healthy body or even a healthy relationship, there are other factors to be done there but with the right resources and techniques you can learn, you’re in for a hell of a good time my friend. So for my sake, value your body as a strong, functional and healthy practice and you will see certain things come about you didn’t even realize before.

 Big muscles really aren’t good enough to get by on realistic strength and fitness, just because you got a pump doesn’t mean you’re superman. Building strong tendons however, give you that level of strength that you can’t justify on just muscle building itself. It’s more important to build tendon strength rather than building muscle. If your tendons aren’t up to par, your strength is rapidly diminished and your big muscles are going to wear down on you and then who’s the bitch now.

 Bodybuilding from 1900-1960 was the type focal point of physical culture, many guys weren’t that big back then, at best the biggest guy that had a great deal of muscle of him was no more than 220 lbs. and didn’t just have a great physique but had strength that still holds records to this day. From 1960-present day, Bodybuilding has become a steroid infested culture that just lost it pride and joy of being a great physical culturist, not all bodybuilders today do steroids and some have lived long and healthy lives, it’s the habit of wanting more and more and too much of anything isn’t good for your health but yet these dumb fucks don’t give a rats ass to what they do to themselves. Today Bodybuilders are like supermodels, they put so much on themselves, one type nearly starves them to death to have that “beauty” look and the other tries to pack on so much muscle that they deprive themselves of walking like a normal human being and it’s sickening to me.

 To be truly strong, you want to have real muscles that can do things for you in your time of need or do things that give you the most benefit for the muscles you want to build. Muscle building is about learning your body, what can work for your particular structure and how to build the tissues and tendons that hold everything together to get the complete package. If you want real muscles than you need to find the realistic approaches to get them and they’re much closer than you think. Learn and find a way for you to build some raw, functional and some real fucking powerful muscle.

Living With Incredible Health

Throughout the world and more famously in Asian and Middle Eastern cultures, health is a journey of learning to find the best qualities in the body, mind and spirit. Finding health doesn’t always mean finding the right exercise, the best meditative practices, the right kind of food to eat or even believing in a higher power, all these things have great advantages but the real key to building superior health is finding your true self and how you apply it to make yourself vital, vigorous and living a long and happy life. Today however, health has become a near last-on-the-list mockery of what we’ve become in this country, too many bad foods, too many TV commercials and way too much exposure to the wrong kind of what health is believed to look like.

 Looking at certain models, pro athletes, global entertainers and hate to say this but gurus as well that really take looking at health down a spiral of bad influences and a lot of egotistical people. I’m not saying all these people are like that but seriously, you’d rather trash your body for a few bucks than to actually get a grip on it? The mind/body connection is a symbol of our yin and yang of life; one cannot exist without the other. Think of a great and beautiful looking Ferrari, what does it need, gas, oil, water and parts to keep it not only together but to drive in a smooth and ferocious fashion, if our bodies are weak, so are our minds and vise versa. Superior health starts combining the mind and body as if they’re one whole unit other wise our conditions won’t be the way we really want them to be.

 In exercise, certain methods are way overrated and have nothing to do with building health. Some people who train others don’t really have a keen sense of what real health is, certain exercises should not be done by some people but yet those who teach them don’t know what they’re getting themselves into and that’s a scary thought to think about. Real training is finding methods that bring that natural high of endorphins that help bring blood into our systems (I’m not talking pumping iron here) that help keep us young, vital and strong for real life things. There are many ways to help build superior health such as versions of qi gong, Isometrics, Muscle Control, Yoga and Animal Training that bring your body into alignment not just in the body but in the mind as well. Certain forms are tougher than others so we must progress and find what suits our bodies to bring the best of what keeps us in shape.

 When people talk about the real sources of power, they sometimes think of certain body parts or their brain being the ultimate source or the types of exercises that give the most benefit but the true power is in your imagination and your organs. The organs harvest your body’s system for blood flow and great energy. Each organ cannot really exist without the other, if even one organ is missing you are at greater risk of dying and taking 2 or more you might as well be dead. Certain exercises teach how to strengthen the organs little by little and with practice, your life force or Chi has a greater chance of keeping you alive for a long time.

 Your vitality is a key ingredient to your success to superior health because it doesn’t just mean meditating or finding various exercises, it also means how you use your attitude and your balance of negative and positive stress. A healthy attitude helps lead down a road of healthy living and using connections from various sources bring that vital success to new levels of enlightenment, sexual energy, and great blood flow to the body that brings levels of growth hormone that keeps you young and living life with gusto. Get healthy the best way possible that helps make your life and those around you at ease and balance stress that’s both positive and negative.

It Ain’t Easy Being Green

All of us have different traits, physical structure and certain intellectual abilities, however, being different scares people period. Many people want others to see the world the same way they see and force you to not challenge their opinions and philosophies. Fitness is a lot like that too, if you challenge the system, they’ll ridicule you and make you feel guilty that whatever you’re doing is wrong and their system is the end all be all.

 People have different opinions about the would whether in sports, life, fitness, politics or whatever but if you go out f the norm and do something that isn’t according to their standards, you’re considered a freak or a person who doesn’t belong with them. In strength training too many trainers put their own egos in with what doesn’t work for them and have people believe the same thing when in fact it’s a bad way to help people. Being different and unique has a lot of qualities that certain people just can’t understand. Take for example doing feats of strength, you do things the average person doesn’t want to exert himself to and yet they give you a hard time for what you, they say everyone loves a strongman but a good number are jealous because they want that kind of strength but don’t do anything about it.

 Ever heard the song “Rainbow Connection” by the Muppets, god that’s a cheesy tune but at the same time it’s inspirational because it teaches you how to find your own path. Connecting your dreams and finding that end to your own rainbow gives you the chance to find out that you really are and that being different is powerful and a unique view as an individual. However you choose to be, make it happen for you, finding who you are is the greatest and most challenging journey, you will have road blocks but you can’t give up on what you want to become. Forcing your beliefs on someone isn’t a healthy way to approach people, take them for who they are and give them the chance to be themselves, besides who the hell really wants to be the same person anyway or follow the same program of somebody else, it’s just unethical. Nothing wrong with being inspired by somebody but you don’t have to be exactly like them. I have learned from many people over the years and mold what I find best about their qualities and make my own interpretation on them to find my own unique style.

 Many groups have this notion that if you don’t follow what they say and don’t play by their rules you can’t be apart of them. Us strongmen are really a band of brothers who give everything we have to be the best we can be and help others what we have learned from not only each other but others outside our little group. The only rules we really have is that you work hard, play hard and find who you are by becoming the strongest you can be in many aspects and not just strength. We learn from one another and help push each other, we may not agree with everyone’s opinions about various things but we have a found respect for one another and teach those who want to earn that respect. Sometimes getting respect means you go out of your element and challenge those that don’t believe in what you do. If you believe in yourself first, the rest is easy.

 Too many people back off from making something happen because they’re afraid it’ll backfire. Certain things will backfire but giving up just before it reaches its peak is a deadly game of cat and mouse, which one are you going to be. One example would be Bud Jeffries who’s had plenty of setbacks in his life and yet he pushes beyond the brink of making something happen because he knows he can, on the opposite end, take a guy like Barry Sanders, quite possibly one of the greatest running backs of all-time, was at the peak of his career and abruptly just walks away, a lot of people criticized him for that but at the same time, he gave up a true potential to become better than the biggest legends in the NFL and not just in their class of legend but a legend of his own class. Certain people just crack when it really gets awesome.

 Our greatest journey is to find out where we belong and find the best that won’t judge you or ridicule you, who will support you and give you a chance to shine in your own way not theirs, push you when its time to push you and give you the chance to bring your potential beyond the very core of your own abilities. Where you belong is up to you and if it means being different so be it, you are your own person, make it happen for you.

Steel Cords From Isometrics

Picture for a moment and see your tendons and ligaments as if they were cords of steel and it would take a ton of pressure to break if they can break. Those cords are not only stupid strong but just as supple with a dose of great flexibility and power at the same time. Would you want that kind of strength? I bet you do.

 A great notion about isometrics is the way it burns off fat in ways you duplicate with regular cardio exercise and/or weights. The amount of exertion to not move a single muscle but to contract so hard, fat is literally running out of your body is a miracle in itself. Imagine your entire body as if it’s one big steel rod that’s so powerful its scary. Think of having those Popeye forearms having held an isometric whether for 10 seconds or 1 minute, what would it feel like? One of the greatest strongmen of all-time Slim The Hammerman pointed out that just building muscles may not be quite enough to develop the strength you need but to develop your tendons, that’s real power. Arthur Saxon knew this, Bruce Lee knew this, Alexander Zass knew it too and many other physical culturists knew the secret to super strength was tendon strength.

 Isometrics can be done anywhere at anytime. Making them a habit is a key to your vital success in strength, health, mind power, even cardio and flexibility. If you learned Isometrics the way Bud Jeffries and the other old-time strongmen did them, you can create so many attributes into one session and it won’t take you that long either. You want cardio training from isometrics, hold certain positions for about 3 minutes, that’s nothing or is it? Want muscle building; try doing Muscle Control for 10 minutes and find out if you hadn’t gotten a pump yet. This type of training can break through your weak points in every exercise you do, again hold certain points and keep going until you have hit your range of motion. This is one of the best for rehab, pressing a weight, doing pull-ups, going a little further in a stretch; it’s all there for you to take.

 Arguably the greatest wrestler of all-time Gama took isometrics to a level no one before or since has mastered. As a little boy until his competition years, he would get up every morning and tie a belt around a tree and with all his might; he never took down the tree but yet when he wrestled, he threw his opponents like they toys and most of the men he wrestled were monsters not little guys. He once threw a champion wrestler 13 times in 13 minutes, you how much the man weighed, almost 300 lbs. of pure muscle. That is power and strength. When you practice Isometrics, you can learn to exert so much force that it can be the equivalent to doing an insane amount of reps. Want to know another story, how about letting Bud Jeffries tell it and believe me, knowing this story is one of the biggest inspirations to learning this type of training.

 When you exert so much force and with the proper breathing, your muscles will begin to take on a form of great vascularity and muscle pump that you can’t possibly achieve with anything else. One guy who takes vascularity to the max at a level that only a handful have achieved including the greats Bruce Lee and Alexander Zass is my boy Matti Marzel at www.ferociousstrength.com. If you watch some of his videos bending steel, you will notice that during the bends his muscularity changes and for brief moments shows the shrededness of his physique that is just in awe and needs to be seen to believe. The closest I’ve ever seen a man his size have that much muscularity is Bruce Lee and I stand by that statement.

 A key secret in superhuman strength through isometrics is not how much exertion you put into it but how your mind brings to the exertion whether it’s 40% of your power or 100%, the mind makes the body strong so when applying isometrics, dive into the mental side as well and the physical will come right after. This type of training can take you to levels of strength that can only be explained by experience and by those who are best to teach it.

Opening Your Mind To A Whole New World

When it comes to mental strength, people look at certain methods that help open the mind but not enough to walk through the door itself, very few methods do this such as some meditation, chi kung, postures in yoga or even muscle control can be a form of mental training. I have practiced this type of method and it’s given me a new look of the world both reality and imaginative and that’s coloring Mandalas. Mandalas are the different shapes and sizes of patterns that can have many angles and never knowing which one’s come next. To me it’s the adult version of a coloring book.

 Coloring in a Mandala takes practice but it’s a fun and healthy practice as you look inside your mind and see which colors go with certain patterns and shapes. Sometimes depending on your mood, you will find colors to draw in based on that particular mood and you won’t even realize how you did it. The best way in my opinion from personal experience to color mandalas is to use big bright colors that sparkle throughout the patterns and each color represents what you have brought to life. The beauty of this is, there’s no right or wrong and you don’t need to think too much about it. After good practice and finding what colors suit you, you can make your own masterpiece and turn it into your own Picasso or Degas painting that just captures the human eye and opens up a world only you possess and feel as your own.

 As far back as ancient Asian and Egyptian cultures, developing patterns and drawing was a form of meditation to teach the mind and body how to see the world through their own eyes. The Samurai are famous for this type of meditation because they weren’t just trained for battle and the life of the sword but were trained in many arts to view the mind from many angles and from different backgrounds of the mental side of the martial arts.

 One of the very keys to practice while coloring mandalas is to not concentrate so much on what colors go with what pattern, it’s to just learn to be calm and instinctive and opening up your imagination. Just choosing a color to go with a certain pattern isn’t going to help you be calm and instinctive, you choose the colors but the colors will do the work for you as you instinctively color in that pattern that gives you inner comfort and gives you the power to create what you want. This is one of the best ways to be creative because when you look at various patterns no matter how big or how small, you will find one way or another to use your imagination and see the colors in your mind. Even better is to come up with your own patterns and coloring them in. There are pre-made patterns you can find on the net and print them out so you can do what you want with them.

 The great end to coloring mandalas is what comes to life after whether 10 min or 1 hour of drawing it. Bringing a mandala to life is one of those moments that just give you a rush of pure unbelievable happiness that only happens when you make it happen. One way to look at it is, breathing is essential in all forms of training whether physical, mental and spiritual and when you breathe into your mandala, it almost seems like as if reading about God breathing life into Adam and becoming this awesome being with feeling, a body and a soul that is born innocent and pure. Not that I’m religious or anything but for those that are, drawing mandalas is one way to look at different aspects such as that notion from the bible. Find your own mandala, create it the way you want, not how it should be but what you make it to be.

 As kids, coloring was fun to do and saw different drawings of animals and designs of cartoonish delights, as a painter, you see the color and picture beforehand and you grasp it as if you can reach out and touch it with your very own hands, sculptors have that exact same passion and mandalas are no different. At the bottom you’ll see a mandala I colored in over a year ago and it’s still as beautiful today as it was being colored in at the time I did it. It’s fun to see something you can appreciate not just as a person but a creative individual.

There Is A Magic Pill

Now that I have your attention, got you didn’t I? In reality nothing gives you results like a serum given to Steve Rogers turning into a Captain America. However, you can get magical results from putting in the effort and finding a whole new you in the mirror after doing great workouts and giving yourself the rest you need. Tablets can kill you, putting in the effort is actually safer and more efficient. If you want magic, find a wishing lamp, good luck with that.

 With a realistic approach and finding the right resources and programs for your goals, you can achieve great weight loss; build great strength, staggering flexibility and surreal stamina that triathletes would envy. It’s the time and effort that you put in that gives you the best results you can achieve. You don’t have to spend hours in the gym and working out so hard you pass out; you can bring that magic with only less than 30 minutes a day and doing less than you need to. Let’s face it, for most people, you don’t have a lot of time but you want to make the effort to get in shape but don’t know how, it’s really much simpler than you’d think.

 Morning workouts are best if you’re in a hurry to get to work or dropping kids off at school. Stretching is a key ingredient to start off your day, get up a little earlier than usual and do less than 20 minutes of stretching that loosens the joints and ligaments while also building good solid functional strength and flexibility. Magical results happen only in the Disney movies so what would be the point of just wishful thinking when you can make the results happen. If you want to be in the best shape, you got to learn from the best. Building a foundation from the very people who want to help you instead of just taking your money and making you feel like crap is one of the keys to achieving the results you want. Real magic comes from effort and making it happen.

 Do you think a magician just happens to make his tricks seem as easy as apple pie, no? He makes the effort to make magic look believable and awe-dropping. Magic doesn’t happen overnight like Cinderella or Aladdin, it’s a journey of learning who you are and what you can teach your own body and mind to create the things you want. Magic is creativity and magic knows what to create without anyone else knowing the secret.

 I’d like you to meet a real, world-class magician that has taken audiences to new levels of awe-inspiring tricks and spectacular ways of controlling magic as if it was so real you would never know if it was. His name is Garin Bader and this man alone has revolutionized strength training and entertainment in a way that can’t be duplicated and is one of the best entertainers of his time. Do you think he just happens to know magic and music along with strength training on a whim or at the snap of his fingers? At the moment he does but it’s more than a 20 year journey that goes into that effortless result of tricks and power. Let’s put it this way, a man who paints a five minute masterpiece was asked “wow, you did that so fast, how did you do that?” the painter says “that’s more than 20 years that went into that 5 minutes.” Now I’m not saying you need to do 20 years of training to make the best results but the real magic is making the journey to get the best results you want and whether it takes you a few weeks, a few months or whatever, it’s all about Mastery, making it second nature, real magic isn’t about tricks, it’s about mastering your own being and making the impossible possible.  

Training Like A Superhero

Ever since we were children, we were fantasized by the extraordinary powers of Super Heroes, if you were a DC Comics fan, you were in awe of Superman, loved the gadgets of Batman, wanted to wear the ring of the Green Lantern and if you were a woman, you wanted to battle like Wonder Woman. As a Marvel fan, you wanted to see Spiderman swing through the streets of New York, watched and read about the X-Men and wanted to triumph like Captain America and so on and so forth. Super Heroes are our every fantasy of being strong, fight for injustice and have powers beyond belief than you come back to reality and for some your life sucks to you. It doesn’t always take a Super Hero to do extraordinary things, some people are just like you and me but when that light turns on and you have to run from a mugging or rescuing someone, you can find the strength that goes beyond the levels of your own abilities and I’m here to tell you, you can make those things a reality.

 In reality, we can’t even fathom of having powers or the great minds of our favorite Super Heroes but we can however with the right amount of training, we can turn on that imaginative switch and have the power to pull off many things we couldn’t do before. Think of the Flash, to me he’s the fastest hero next to Superman with blazing speed and explosive strength. Increasing your speed isn’t that far of a stretch. If you learned to tap into your mind on how you can bring your speed up even a small percentage would you do it? If you want blazing speed, you do sprints or move in an exercise very fast. Doing this will not only build your explosiveness but will jump start your metabolism like a bat out of hell. Another look at increasing your speed is through Isometrics. Isometrics teaches you to hold a certain position and stay there, in other words a non moving exercise. If you don’t believe me try it out for yourself.

 When it comes to reflexes, I immediately see Captain America or Spiderman. Their senses are so keen and accurate that whatever jumps at them turns to dust. One of the best ways to learn your reflexes is playing handball, take a tennis ball and bounce it off a wall and see how quick you catch it. One guy who emphasized this greatly was the late Karl Gotch. Reflexes help your awareness and your accuracy to react quickly. Reacting to something will help poise your confidence to get a sense of things around from every possible angle.

 No hero used a hammer better than the Mighty Thor. Hammers are the axes of explosive power, strength, and lever strength. We are fascinated on how a hammer can be used in ways that can’t be duplicated with weights, machines or even bodyweight exercise. It’s also a great stress reliever and you want to pound the living hell out of a tire. To learn Hammer Strength is to take up just that and practice many elements from levering to swinging to holding and everything in between.

 If you took the strongest men on the planet and molded then together, you still won’t have the strength like the Incredible Hulk. Back in the late 70’s, Lou Ferrigno brought the tall, green and powerful to the Silver Screen and nobody did it better than he did. To have that much strength to the point where it would make Hercules scared out of his wits is to build a level of mind and body together to create a level of strength that’s beyond belief. In the movies you see Hulk throw tanks, choppers, and toss cranes like they were softballs. How would that would a realistic approach to training for Hulk-Like strength and power? Progressing lifting heavy objects is one way to do it but if you don’t have access to a gym or weights, you can always find a way to do tire flips, toss kegs, lifting logs, holding up heavy barrels or do partial lifting and get the most bang for your buck. Creating this level of strength has to come from the mind as well and learn to surge that power and tap into level of electrical charge that resides in all of us.

 Spiderman is really the only superhero that has somewhat of a normal build, lean, not heavily muscular and has great definition but has enormous strength for his size and you can develop that as well. If there were any real Spidermen in the world it would be rock climbers, those dudes are just freakishly strong and can climb up the highest of mountains. Another way to be a bit of a web-swinger is learning the strength and agility of a gibbon where you brachiate on your hands like in hand balancing or moving across the monkey bars at the park. Progressing in this manner takes patience but with time you can move in ways that the average person would run for the hills from. Almost like becoming a real life Tarzan. If there was a real life Spiderman in the fitness world, Brad Johnson would be just that. The way he moves is just insane and nobody can do pull-ups like he can.

 We all have special powers within us whether physical, mental, emotional or spiritual it all depends on what gives you the most benefit to develop powers of your own. Finding that power within you is more reachable than you would believe. Once you find it and can tap into it anyway you want, you will see what it’s like to have great powers and using them to benefit your goals and to help others. Practice them, learn them and tap into them the best way you can possible because there’s no greater feeling than developing your own superhuman powers.