Knock Out Fatigue and Feel Fantastic!

 

Correcting your poor posture will directly diminish your feelings of fatigue!  How’s that for a profound statement!  When you ask yourself why you are constantly rundown, it’s not a common thought to attribute it to your posture.  However, it’s been proven there is a strong link between good posture and feelings of well being.  Posture itself, of course, relates to your spine and in particular the excessive curvature of the upper or lower part of it.  So if you resemble Mr. Burns from the Simpsons or a candy cane, you should really be paying attention right about now.

The quick and dirty on how bad posture contributes to fatigue relies on the fact that your muscles and internal organs are connected and innervated.  These nerves are branching off from your spinal cord into each organ.  If you compress those nerves with bad posture your performance in the gym, and in everyday life, will suffer as they will not be able to communicate correctly with the rest of your body!

Good posture is characteristic of keeping your head and shoulders pulled back while standing and being seated. A few good drills for that are as follows:

Lying on a foam roller:  Lie flat on your back, placing a foam roller under you, running along your head all the way down to your tailbone, and relax your shoulders, letting them fall toward the floor. Do this for 5 minutes every day.  This will help reset all the key elements of your posture.

Replace your office chair or computer chair for a swiss ball:  This will force you to strengthen your postural muscles and keep your head up and your shoulders back!

Use a broomstick:  This is a weird drill but one of the best! Hold a broomstick horizontal, behind your butt with your arms extended down and palms facing forward.  This automatically pulls your head and shoulders back into correct position, do this for 5 minutes a day- the longer the better!

The lesson is clear, improve your posture- improve your mood and your life!

Thanksgiving Survival Training 101

Thanksgiving is definitely one of those holidays that can really set you back

Did you know the typical Thanksgiving meal has 2375 calories in it?!

Taking that into consideration I am planning my caloric intake to be around 8,000 calories!  I love the food and have zero self control when it comes to dressing and pumpkin pie, game on!

In all seriousness I love to eat, and Thanksgiving is an excuse to eat myself into a turkey tryptophan laced stupor and pass out on the couch watching Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation (a classic).  I am certainly not going to tell you to eat veggies and lean turkey and to skip the desert, because there is no way that’s going to happen for me.

However, I am going to give you the key to staying lean so you don’t end up packing on an extra ten pounds when all is said and done.  The main components for your tight tummy to survive the holidays include performing  high intensity cardio-strength training sessions, limiting Thanksgiving to ONE day, and a good old fashioned juice fast the day before.

Cardio-strength exercises combine cardiovascular exercise and strength training exercises for total calorie annihilation!  The day before the big fight with the fork and knife I want you to do the following  routine in the morning for eight total circuits.

A1) Jumping jacks for 30 seconds

A2) Clap pushups with hands shoulder width apart for 30 seconds (on your   knees or against a wall if the original version is too hard)

A3) Squat thrust holding 10 lb dumbbells for 30 seconds

A4) Kettelbell swings for 1 minute

Rest 30 seconds and repeat seven more times.

Later that evening I want you to follow a “metabolic booster shot” routine, set a stopwatch for 5 minutes and do as many of the squat thrust-renegade row combo as you can during that 5 minutes! You can find detailed exercise description from the link below.

http://www.oksportsandfitness.com/breakthrough-cardio.php

The final piece of the puzzle is a juice fast the day before Thanksgiving.  Juice two large carrots, two large celery stalks, a cucumber, and a beet and drink it down three times a day.  That’s all you get to eat the day before the big show!

• Thanksgiving morning do another full workout PLUS the cardio booster shot at the end and stick to the juice fast until the big meal.  The combined cardio sessions two days in a row will burn around 1000 calories and the veggie juice will stabilize your digestive system and give it a well deserved break before you put it through hell on Thursday!
• GIVE THE LEFTOVERS TO FRIENDS/FAMILY!  This is a huge reason people gain weight this time of year, they turn single days into weeks of gluttony!
• ATTEND MY METABOLIC MELTDOWN semi-private training classes Saturday at 12pm and Sunday at 2pm at 103^rd and Memorial to be forgiven for all your sinful ways of the past few days.  We train hard and burn a ton of calories, contact me for details and to reserve your spot!

Try this plan and let me know how it goes!  Have a great holiday!

Get to bed on time!!!

The biggest challenge I face coaching people towards optimal health is getting them to grasp the importance of going to sleep on time. It’s even harder than changing someone’s nutritional lifestyle. Human physiology is still dependent upon our natural rhythm of light and dark, seasonal cycles, regardless of the fact we have access to artificial light 24/7. This artificial light can bring chaos to our sleep patterns all in the name of updating our status, late night TV or the dreaded midnight deadline. We all truly underestimate the deleterious effects it takes on our health and well-being.

Our hormonal system and brain think it’s morning whenever the eyes or skin are exposed to any kind of light, artificial or sunlight. Upon sensation of light energy, the photo receptors in your eye transduce this light energy into action potentials that conduct visual information to the brain via the optic nerve (COOL STUFF!) resulting in cortisol (stress hormone) release that prepares your body for daytime activities. Cortisol production naturally peaks around 6:00am and stays relatively high throughout the day. In the late afternoon it drops drastically, allowing melatonin, an increased level of growth hormones and repair hormones to take over as the sun goes down. If we followed a natural sleep cycle we would wind down and be in bed by 10pm and up and at 6am. Physical repairs mostly take place between 10pm and 2am, mental (psychogenic) and immune system repairs take place from 2 am until we wake.

A key point you should be picking up on is that ANY light source will register a cortisol release from your body, elevating stress hormones long after they should be put to rest. Shedding bodyfat and recovering from hard workouts are damn near impossible if chronically elevated stress hormones are running around amuck in your body. They must be stopped. TV, computer screens, brightly lit homes and cell phone screens all cause a cortisol release which takes hours to clear from your bloodstream, delaying the release of your rest and repair hormones. If you go to bed after midnight you have already lost 2 hours of your repair cycle! A good rule of thumb is that for every hour of sleep you get before 12pm will count as 2 hours of sleep overall. Late night and graveyard shift workers are commonly overweight, have anxiety issues, tons of nagging injuries and, let’s face it, just plain grumpy all day.

I worked as a bartender in college where the regular schedule of getting home at 4 am and sleeping till noon had some pretty nasty consequences. I suffered from all of the above ailments (and then some) simply due to my sleep cycle being disturbed. Below are some tips to help you with your sleep. I guarantee you will see a drastic increase in productivity and mood by putting them to use!

Sleep Tips:
1) Avoid Stimulants after lunch, Stimulants target your sympathetic nervous system and release cortisol! They can stay in your system for many hours depending on their half life. Caffeine has a half-life of six hours, so if you have a cup of coffee with 200mg of caffine at 4:00pm you will have 100mg of caffine in your bloodstream at 10pm. Even at 4am you will still have 50mg of caffine floating around which will impair your immune recovery and sleep.
2) Avoid refined carbs and sugar, When you eat a meal with lots of simple sugars your blood glucose goes sky high. In response, the pancreas secretes insulin to break down and store the sugar but often does too good a job leading to hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). This causes a feeling of lethargy and people often eat more sugar to compensate or take a stimulant for energy and the cycle repeats over and over. Your liver will automatically release stored glycogen if it’s in a hypoglycemic state, so if this post junk food lethargy happens wait it out and let your liver do its job. If you can’t resist the refined carbs and sugar, avoid compounding the problem- resist the stimulants!
3) Go to bed by 10:30pm!!!!!! This is huge! Give your body those extra hours to repair and recover.
4) Drink lots of water! Dehydration is a stressor on your body. Drink lots of water to avoid cortisol release and impairment of growth and repair hormones!
5) Exercise!!! This is a no brainer, most of my clients can’t wait to hit the hay after a training session.
6) Unplug all electrical appliances in your bedroom Most things with a power button have electromagnetic fields that can cause sleep disruption, even when the item is not “on.” The LED lights on consoles and screens also add interfering artificial light to the peaceful darkness.

There you have it, put these into play and let me know how you feel!

P.S. PLEASE SLAP YOURSELF FOR ME IF YOU READ THIS AT 11pm 😉

ASS KICKING CARDIO!

ASS KICKING CARDIO!!!

Look around you, on the treadmill next to you and in-front of you. These same people are doing what you have been doing for their “cardio” workout.

It’s a sure bet that long and boring treadmill time reminiscent of hamsters on a wheel dominate their gym time. If this worked then I would say have at it, but odds are those same people you just looked at still look the same month after month, so something needs to change if you want to change the way you look and feel.

A cool way to successfully give your body a kick in the butt is to combine cardio and strength training, or use a cardio-strength exercise in place of your treadmill time and after your workouts. These types of exercises will skyrocket your heart rate and are one of the best ways to lose body fat and gain muscle simply because they are brutally hard and create a big metabolic disturbance in your body.

A good example of this would be the Squat-thrust- renegade row – push-press combination exercise.

Step 1- The Squat Thrust

Start off standing up straight holding two D-bells (anywhere from 5 to 20 lb D-bells). Simply bend at your waist and put the D-bells on the floor. Then kick your legs back at the same time so you land on your toes with your arms extended. At this point you are supported by your arms and toes in the pushup position grasping both D-bells.

Step 2-The Renegade Row

In the pushup position brace your core and keep your abs tight and lift one D-bell off the ground keeping your other arm straight and glutes, abs, and core tight!! Repeat with the other arm. Then, in one fluid motion jump your feet up towards your hands to a crouch position, and stand up!

Step 3- The Push Press

After you have finished the squat thrust portion described above you are now ready for the push press. Simply curl the D-bells up to your shoulders and press them simultaneously overhead, then lower them to your shoulders. Now you are ready to start over at Step 1.

Step one, two and three combined equal one rep!!! repeat that process for as many reps as you can get (shoot for 10-15 reps).
Compare this to your usual “cardio session” and let me know what you think!

SECRETS OF BODY FAT LOSS!

When trying to lose body fat it is EXTREMELY important that you do not skip meals and that you have the willpower not to cheat.  Your diet is very important.  For guys who want to have those sexy V’s on your hips, you have to follow your meal plan to the T.

Since skipping meals and eating too many cheat meals will absolutely ruin your chances of impressing the opposite sex with you shirt off, you have to find ways to solve your dietary pitfalls.

While training my clients I have heard all of the excuses in the book, namely you don’t have time to eat the right snacks or you couldn’t resist that cupcake because you were “starving.”

Well, here is the solution.

The secret to staving off excess hunger and that unplanned cheat meal is branch chain amino acids (BCAA’s) taken with 20 ounces of water.  Drinking more water through out the day will help with hunger and BCAA’s will help help get you to your goals.

Branch chain amino acids are the main amino acids depleted by resistance training and taking these at the right times can help your recovery and assist in burning off body fat.  Taking them with 20 ounces of water will fill your stomach up and put an end to that unplanned cheat meal.  It’s a win-win situation.

Biotest makes some great BCAA pills.
http://www.t-nation.com/productInfo.do?id=1123403

Take as directed with 20 ounces of water to increase your recovery or whenever you feel the need for a burger.  Skipping meals altogether shortchanges your body of nutrients and increases the likeliness that you’ll be starving when that double chocolate cupcake is staring at you.  Eat smart and follow your meal plan to your goals.

STAY STRONG
Philip

Twitter!

Hey Everyone!

I now have my very own twitter account setup!

be sure to follow me for updates, gripes, and fitness insights at

twitter.com/nationtraining

Stay Strong,

Phil

Chin-ups for Pin-ups!

Its summer time again and as sure as the newly crowned miss USA will have some illicit pictures or video from her past “discovered” this month, the squat racks at local gyms are going to be filled with guys doing barbell curls in a futile effort for bigger arms.  I’m sure that she really did need the money, and I can let her slide as we all should. However, doing curls in the squat rack trying to add some muscle to your biceps simply will not be given the same forgiveness in my book.  The old adage “curls for the girls” is outdated at best and a blatant lie at worst.  I’m sure that many of you reading this have done a lot of curls, but still have no girls.

However, don’t get too angry, it’s still possible to build up some impressive guns worthy of any fitness center vixens hands to be wrapped around; you just need to use a different approach.  Here is the skinny on why guys with 12 inch arms should ditch the curls so they can finally get some girls.

As an example I will use the typical trainee that does barbell curls with 90 pounds.  Let’s say this 160 lbs trainee can curl 90 pounds for 5 reps.  With a simple modification I can get him to move almost 160lbs for 5 reps.  How would I do this?

I would simply have him drop the curl bar and grab a chin-up bar!

By simply replacing his barbell curls with close grip (hands 6in apart) chin-ups I have almost doubled the amount of load that his biceps are exposed to.  I have turned an exercise that is predominantly an isolation exercise into a compound exercise, and I have laid the groundwork for more poundage to be lifted if he is still stubborn enough to go back to curls when he finishes his 6 week chin-up plan.  Listed below are the main factors in my selection for chin-ups over curls.

1) Load

The main limiting factor in muscular development is load (the amount of weight lifted).  If you are serious about making your muscles get bigger you need to subject them to heavy weights, and keep increasing that weight.  The more weight you lift the more muscles you recruit (size principle) and by recruiting more muscles you can lift heavier weights.  Chin-ups allow you to lift more weight than curls thus making your upper body move more weight, this equals bigger muscles!   

2) Kinetic Chain

Unless you are a genetic freak the human body grows in chains and not in isolation.  It is very hard in fact to “isolate” a muscle.  Truth be told when you do a bicep curl the first muscle that activates is not your wrist flexors but your calf muscles in your lower leg!

Chin-ups hammer your grip, forearms, upper arms, shoulder girdle, abs, lower back, glutes, and pretty much every muscle in your upper body and curls simply do not.  Your body responds much better to exercises that work more muscles, especially exercises that humans were born to do such as chin-ups.

3) Entire upper body development

Entire upper body development is essential if you even want to do curls with heavy weights, this is why you don’t see 150 pound kids curling massive weights as their upper body cannot even support the load.  Chin-ups can develop the shoulder girdle and along with other upper back exercises such as deadlifts the trainee will eventually build enough meat on his upper body to even hold heavy poundage’s on the barbell curl.

There you have it, I suggest you ditch the bicep curls and grab a chin-up bar, and when you can do 5 reps start adding weight to your chin-ups, not reps.  Shoot me an email and let me know how this works out!

Stay strong and do some chin-ups for pin-ups!

Well, its time for another journey into blogdome!

Since its almost summer time I thought I would share an easy tip that can either increase your muslce mass or your rate of bodyfat loss.  This is very simple methodology that everyone can implement the next time they go to the gym and odds are it will be a nice change of pace from anything you are doing now, its known as unilateral training.  This basically means selecting single limb exercises for the upper and lower body instead of traditional bilateral exercises like squats, deadlifts, chinups, or bench presses. 

 The key to making unilateral training effective is to use VARIATIONS of traditional exercises that use lots of muscle and involve the legs and lower back and NOT pick lame exercises like the sinlge arm bicep curl. Did you really think I was going to let you slide from doing your deadlifts or squats?

Single leg D-bell stiff leg deadlifts, D-bell Split squats, D-bell snatches, single arm D-bell overhead presses, and Single arm D-bell rows are big “money” exercises that are allowed on my single limb assault program.

The benefits to single limb training are numerous.  For starters, the fact you are using either one leg or one arm you will activate more core muscles in your abs and lower back that will lead to impressive abdominal development, especially with heavy one arm overhead presses or one arm D-bell bench presses. 

Second, performing single limb work forces your body to do twice as much total work, activating more muslce and burning more fat.  For example, If you did a set of single arm D-bell presses for 5 reps with the left arm, you will need to do the same for the opposite arm, forcing your entire body to do ten reps of total work instead of five reps when using both arms at the same time, get it?

The resut is exposure of your core and entire upper body musculature to twice as much work as it would encounter from a bilateral exercise where you would use both limbs at the same time.  Again, five reps on the left side plus five reps on the right side equals ten reps overall for your upper body and shoulder girdle, in contrast to 5 reps overall when using both sides at the same time.  

Third, single limb training simply gives your body a break from training with a heavy barbell.  Squatting with a heavy barbell on your spine or lifting a heavy barbell off the floor are mentally and physically draining.  Using D-bells and single limb exercises will force you to use lighter weights and require you to recruit more muscles.  The result is a happy nervous system since it got a break from heavy lifting, it will usually result in helping you lift more weight when you go back to bilateral training since its fresh and not fatigued.

Well, there you have it, put those concepts into play and let me know how things workout!

My First BLOG!

Well, its time to become a blogger.  I must admit I am behind the times with this stuff so its time I got my butt in gear and started getting my blog on!

Since this is the first blog I want to address an important issue that most neglect in the gym, an issue that really makes or breaks your fitness goals.  That is the ability to choose an appropriate progression method.  If you dont choose the appropriate progression method you will just be spinning your wheels.

Since most of my clients want to gain muscle and lose fat I will give you a sample progression method for that very goal.  A great progression method for losing bodyfat is cutting rest periods between sets, this will really elevate your fitness levels and provided your eating correctly, take off some bodyfat. 

A great method for adding muscle mass is adding sets to your workout, this provides your muscles with more stimulation from workout to workout but your still lifting the same weight so it is not as fatiguing as adding weight or reps.

I like to combine these methods in the same training cycle to minimize burnout and avoid overtraining.

For example,

If you are using 5 sets of 5 on day 1 cut rest periods for 3weeks.

 So if you currently take 60 rests between sets shave 10 seconds off each week.  

If your day 2 workout consists of 6 sets of  4 reps add a set each week for 3 weeks so you will end with 9 sets of 4 reps.

Follow these progression methods however you want but keep the same principles and this will surly work for a leaner and more muscluar way to start the summer!