Do What Works

    Let's face it boys and girls when it comes to training, if you hate what you're doing it's not the fault of the exercises, it's you. When you do something so often and you feel miserable by the end of it where are you really leading yourself towards? Hating your training is not meant for you. Sure we have our good days and bad days, I know I have and I train 7 days a week and have been for 9 ½ years. There have been times where I just wanted to push myself even I couldn't stand the exercises I was doing and I desperately wanted to feel like I can have a very muscular body like an old school bodybuilder or impress the ladies with the gun show (my arms smartass, get your head out of the gutter) and all it got me was feeling like shit and I wanted to give up because it wasn't going anywhere. After doing some heavy meditation every now and then, I made a decision to stop doing what everyone else was doing or listening to those marketing pricks who tell you "you can get ripped in less than 6 weeks" and just focus on the exercises or movements that made me happy and let the universe work itself out. Everything happens for a reason and the way things go end up going the way they're supposed to whether we understand it or not.

 
    One of the real keys to getting results is not always what you eat or what program does what for the body; it's the passion and the fire that burns when you do exercises that you can't help but love to do. When it comes down to it, I always end up going back to the Gorilla Exercises I learned from a program that is now buried in the graves of fitness and conditioning but can still find a few of them in Eddie Baran's Animal Kingdom Conditioning Programs 1 & 2. When you get that feeling of just letting yourself go and train the way you want to, it's no longer a work out, it's more like game you play or something exciting to do. I have a sister who lost over 100 pounds in 2014, that's insane and as her little brother I couldn't be more proud of her, I may not condone what she ate or drank to lose the weight but she busted her ass and she trained hard and if it works for her great more power to her. However, I don't see too much passion in her training from what I've seen and at least in my opinion, she did exercises just to see how far she's willing to go but that's not the same thing as passion. In the end, she has done something very few women has ever achieved and that is one of the most kick ass things I can think of that pits her in a high level of fitness. Back to the task at hand, you can bust your ass all you want but if your heart isn't fueled by fire where you can't wait to train and just have a blast than your results aren't going to come the way you wanted because it's not just physically getting into it, your mind needs to be there too.

 
    You can go to a trainer, you can go to a seminar, you can get consultation from a top ranked fitness pro for all I care but only one real person knows your body better than anyone and that's you. I realize I may not be the best guy to get advice from, I'm not 200 pounds of rippling muscle or look like a smaller version of Arnold Schwarzenegger hell I'm no damn supermodel; I'm 5'10 over 255 lbs. with thick musculature and have some fat on me but yet unlike a bodybuilder or most models I can swim pretty damn hard, sprint 100 meters like my life depended on it, have done over 500 push-ups in a workout, struck a tire over 1200 times with a 15 pound thor hammer in under 35 minutes, can pull myself up 5-6 times from a dead hang all the way up to my chin, fall back into a bridge on my head from standing and mere inches from doing the splits so I think I'm doing pretty damn good. You learn how your body feels when you figure out how your muscles react to certain things, how your joints feel from certain stretches and how fast you get the muscle fibers going. It's awesome to learn from others and see their perspective but to truly master your training is to find what works best for you, not just physically but mentally as well. Most only care about the physical and what the outside becomes and don't realize what they're doing to themselves mentally or emotionally. My passion runs far deeper than most because as much as I want to feel the physical side of it, my mind is just as important and I want to mentally feel good from start to finish otherwise I'm just bouncing through all the over the place like those balls that bounce and you never know where it's going to go.

 
    The only to know what works is to experiment and get a feeling physically and mindfully of what you are getting into, one of the key secrets and philosophical way of knowing this goes as follows….

 
The exercise feels like your best friend and you can always count on it
When you want to exercise for no apparent reason
It suits your personality
It gives your body signals to help you push harder in those intense workouts
It lets you know what parts to recover when needed
Teaches you how to go after harder exercises
You have fun and it stops feeling like work
    If one of these hits you, it's the beginning of a beautiful friendship (Humphrey Bogart voice), 2 of them hit you, the big picture is starting to zoom in, 3 of them hit you something unbelievable is happening, 4 or more hit you not only are they keepers you are figuring out the very best ones that give you results, the love of fitness and you are on the road to self-mastery. You can have the best workout of your life nearly every single time you exercise if you find just the right ones that suit you and what you want out of them. When you begin to hate exercising and they're becoming something you despise, your results are going to drop, you'll feel like crap mentally and you'll resist the urge to challenge yourself. Relax, find the right flow and make it work for you, not because a trainer told you to or because you watched them on a DVD or read them in a book but because you chose them and they make you feel powerful, vigorous and good about yourself. So get your awesome ass out there and research and find the very best that just rocks your world and gives you something to look forward to whether it's tough, easy or just plain brutal you'll be in charge of your challenges.