Category: Improving General Wellness

This category covers non-specific things that improve the quality of life or fitness but that do not really fit into any of the other categories.

Happiness Ends And Begins With “Me”

Happiness is a passion of mine. Always has been. Even when I haven’t always been happy I’ve always wanted to be happy. It’s a nice way to feel, a good goal state if I was forced to pick one.

I’ve noticed that I can recall two period of my life when I was truly happy – childhood up until I moved from Ireland at age 9 and building over the last 6 months with a particular dramatic jump in the last month. So, what going on?

Well, as good as I can tell, the exact opposite thing occurred at these two times. When the family moved from Ireland, I was forced, for the first time in my life, to see myself as separate and different from other people. This likely would have happened anyway, but when we landed in Canada in 1981 I became immediately obvious to me that I was not the same as my peers. They were Canadian and I was an Irish immigrant, I had an accent while they sounded the way I wanted to sound, my approach to school was different and the way I engaged people was slightly strange to others. The move introduced me to self-awareness’s jerk uncle self-consciousness who taught me how to see myself as not a part of what everyone else was a part of.

Move forward almost 30 years, with a fully formed prefrontal cortex and an abundance of information and experiences, I have been able to more accurately model the world as it actually is. But how is that? Well, it’s a lot like how it was right before I moved from Ireland – I am the same as everyone else, I have just been shaped differently. I am alone and unique, yet completely connected with everyone. I am no longer self-conscious, I am developing self-awareness. The self-awareness allows me to see that it’s all just a bunch of stories that we make up to give our life meaning. It is all pointless really so tell and sell yourself a decent story that makes you feel fantastic. The story I tell myself now is not that I am different from everyone else but that I am connect to everyone else, just most people don’t realize it.

Tell Me Your trauma Until It Gets Boring

I ask my friends lots of questions. I try to get them talking as much as they can. Sometimes I’ll deflect questions about me and try to get them talking again. It’s fun to do because I enjoy listening to people tell their stories. Most people like talking too, and about themselves even more. It’s a win win and I believe that people appreciate talking to me and being heard dramatically improves ones understanding about what they are talking about.

However, every now and then I try to engage someone who is fairly unwilling to talk. I keep asking questions and they keep deflecting them over and over. I can be persistent and think I can come off as kind of pushy. There have been times when I felt the need to apologize for probing. Friends are good about saying it doesn’t matter and I do back off so there isn’t much harm done.

But if they were to ask me why I’m asking them, what value there is in talking about the big issue I would tell them that they need to make their story boring and the only way to make it boring is to tell it over and over and over again. I need you talk about the feelings, the consequences of all the actions, what was said, and by who. What other stuff was going on at the time and how was it impacted by the traumatic event. If it’s a forward looking thing, how will life be different as a result of whatever happens, what do you think you will feel like, what do you think you will say, how will people respond, etc…. Take a 50000 foot view and zoom in to make everything as granular as possible talking about each detail as it being the most important thing in your life.

It will likely take a few conversations and a lot of talking before the story becomes boring, but it’s very important that you stick with it and keep talking it out. It will become boring for you to tell eventually and when it does, you will begin to break free.

This is effective at helping people get past issues because it gives them the chance to make their thoughts real by speaking and having another person hear what they are saying. Being heard is the best way to turn your thoughts into something real. By allowing the complete emptying about a subject, you are clearing your unconscious brain of the things that were actively simmering below the surface. This clearing helps to close mental loops which consume mental processing capacity and the end result is improved mental functioning and energy, and a sense of liberation / happiness.

I have used this technique on myself and with other people and it tends to make people feel significantly better. You can feel things leaving you and your mood improves as the story becomes more and more boring. Eventually you just stop telling it and break free.

If you are the type of person who doesn’t talk about their problems or the things that bother you yet seem to always have them on your mind consider talking about them with someone who has the patience to hear what you are saying and who can help you talk the thing to death. If done completely it’s going to present your problem in a whole new light, one free from emotional arousal and based on logic and clear thinking.

Essential Characteristics Of New Strength Coaches

Over the last 4 years I have interviewed a lot of people who were interested in becoming strength coaches as well has having worked with a large number of actual coaches. Below is a list of the 5 essential characteristics individuals must hold in order to be successful in the industry.

Passion for working with people. Passion is contagious. If a coach is passionate when they engage their athletes, there’s a very good chance that they will be able to boost the performance of the athletes and help to create better training experiences, results and compliance to the demands of year round training. The inverse is absolutely true – a coach who lacks passion will lower the performance of their athletes. Passion may not be enough to reach all of the people you train but it is absolutely critical for reaching those people who can be reached.

See gaining knowledge and experiences as valuable uses of your time. Unless you are really good, very experienced or you own the training center, there’s a good chance that the money you earn will be kind of low. For this reason, you need to be able to see the value that time with the athletes, creating programs and running the center. These experiences are what will make you a better coach and allow you to demand more money in the future. You will not learn everything you need to know at school and don’t really have a choice but to gain years of experience before you can consider yourself a professional. If you don’t hold your professional development in a high regard, this industry isn’t the right one for you.

The ability to accept that other people know more than you. Given that you are there to learn and gain experience, you need to be open to just how little you know about particular things. Part of this is regarding others as experts or as more expert than you are.

The ability to listen and hear what other people are saying. This applies to feedback you receive about your coaching and especially the feedback / verbal reports from your clients. With your athletes and clients, you need to know if they are feeling a movement the way they are supposed to feel it, if they are experiencing any pain vs. work and if they are working with the required intensity. With reference to your coaching actions, you need to be able to hear what people are saying in order for you to make the call on the appropriateness of your coaching. You need to be able to hear the bad, because these are the things that you will need to change in order to move your abilities forward. As important is hearing the good as these things will let you know that you are doing the right stuff as well as making your job very rewarding.

A willingness to try new things and follow the advice you give to other people BEFORE you give it to them. There is a story about Ghandie that illustrates this well. A women brought her some to Ghandie and said “Ghandie, please tell my son to stop eating sugar” to which Ghandie said “bring him back in 2 weeks.” The women shrugged her shoulders, left with her son and returned two weeks later. Upon arriving, Ghandie looked at the boy and said “stop eating sugar.” The boy agreed and as they turned to leave the women looked at Ghandie saying “why didn’t you say that two weeks ago?” Ghandie replied “two weeks ago I was still eating sugar.” I think this is more important than almost everything because you cannot come from a place of authority if you have not done what you are asking your athletes to do. This doesn’t mean that you need to have won a world championship in order to coach a world class athlete but it does mean that you need to have done contrast training if you are going to be programming it for your athletes

So there you have it, 5 characteristics that you MUST have if you are going to start to work and excel in the strength coaching industry. If you are missing any of these, take a moment to consider your decision to move into this area of work. It may not be the right fit for you.

Supplements – When They Are The Answer

There is a disturbing trend in the fitness / strength and conditioning industry to sell supplements to create another profit center for a gym. This is a big mistake and it’s going to be the next black eye to an industry that is still suffering the consequence of aggressive sales approaches and double dipping with pre-authorized payments.

In principle, I believe in supplements. They are needed for most people. We don’t eat enough fish to get sufficient amounts of fish oil and the good fats that it contains. Those who supplement with fish oil tend to enjoy great benefits such as reduced inflammation, reduced body fat, improved skin health and improved cognitive functioning. I would also say that most people would benefit from taking a high quality multi vitamin given that they don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables to consume the bare minimum amount of nutrients. In the case of those people who are trying to lose body fat or gain muscle, a high quality protein supplement is probably in order to boost protein intake or to replace the calories that have been eliminated due to diet. There are a few others that may be useful, but these three – fish oil, multi vitamin and protein – would be the stables.

You can, however, get by without any of these IF you get your diet in order. There were lean and muscular people before fish oil supplements and protein powders were created; the supplement industry has been around for a long time, but not as long as there have been healthy people. Supplements and the supplement industry is a relatively new player in the health field. In fact, and I’m not implying causation, the supplement industry has grown almost in line with the obesity rates in north America. Supplements do not necessarily cause obesity and when used correctly they won’t cause it but the industry exists BECAUSE of obesity.

The typical gym or health club approaches supplement sales in the same way they approach membership sales – they sell them by creating hope. If you join this gym you will lose 30 lbs and feel great. If you take this supplement, you will lose body fat and feel great. Some of them are even more aggressive with the sales of both and basically tell you that you CANNOT achieve your goal without working out at their gym and buying their supplements. The first claims is false in 99% of the cases – some gyms are better than others so if you join a good one that hires good trainers and staff, you will be more successful; but only because you are getting the guidance you need or the experience of attending the gym is so positive that you continue to attend the gym – the second claim (that you won’t be successful unless you take their supplements) is false in 99.9% of the cases. The truth is, you can be equally successful if you consume a good quality diet or you can be equally successful if you buy the same supplements else where.

My beef is that gyms that rely on selling supplements to boost revenue have lost their way. They have conceded one of two facts, either their services are not good enough to generate sustainable revenue or they don’t actually care about the services they offer and are in the business to make money. Both, when it comes to health and fitness, are not the way the business should function. First off, if your services are not good enough to generate sufficient sustainable revenue, you are in the wrong business. Second, if you are in the fitness business to make a lot of money, you are in the wrong business. Fitness and health promotion is tough. It requires more than skilled salesmanship, flashy marketing and overpriced supplements, it requires skill, knowledge/wisdom and empathy. If you can sell anything to anyone but don’t know how to get someone to do a safe split squat or lunge you need to stop selling the belief that you CAN teach someone these movements. If you can sell protein powder at a huge mark-up but cannot get someone to complete a food journal, review it and offer feedback, you need to sell something else.

There is a time and a place for supplements but that time isn’t always and that place isn’t anywhere. They should be taken to eliminate gaps in your whole food nutrition or when they are the only thing that will work. Whey protein after a hard workout to promote protein synthesis, a carbohydrate solution during intense exercise when solid food would not be digested correctly, fish oil with breakfast, lunch and dinner, a multi vitamin with breakfast and before bed. There may be some use for other supplements but one should proceed with caution when considering them and they should get their defenses up when someone is telling them that they are completely necessary.

CanFitPro – Certification I Now Hold

I attended and took a lot out of the 2008 CanFitPro conference in Toronto. I was like 1000’s of people who attended with the intention of gain new qualifications, certifications and experiences that will make their journey through the fitness land-scape more rewarding and more enriching for those they interact with. I now hold two certifications that I didn’t hold before – my Spinning certification and my CanFitPro PTS certifcation.

So What?

I’m now qualified to be a personal trainer and to teach indoor group cycling classes at places other than GoodLife; given that my LMI RPM certification only qualifies me to teach at GoodLife in Canada.

What now?

There are two things I need to consider now, the first is the easier of the two and that is to create and market some All Terrain cycling classes using my own choice of music and my own choreography. This shouldn’t take me too long given that I’ve been riding while listening to music for the last 4 years. Things I need to complete before I’m ready to launch my class include getting my computer set up with music editing software so  I can cut and paste songs to create the specific profile that a track requires, track objectives or scenarios, riding and hand positions and their names, class format stuff (e.g. length and pacing) and the materials to teach participants about zone training.

The tougher of the two things is setting up a personal training company. I say this is going to be tougher because unlike cycling classes, I’m NOT already doing this. While I have trained before, it was working at GoodLife and at SST, but this is going to be the first time that I have gone out on my own to do it. I’ll need to come up with waivers, educational materials addressing nutrition and lifestyle behaviors, templates for workouts, assessment materials and tests, goals sheets, designing workouts, creating and pricing a list of services, training clients, building a client base and marketing myself as a trainer and a brand.

There is a good connection between teaching cycling classes and being a personal trainer given that both are natural next-steps for the active person. They are a great complement for each other in that those who do a lot of riding should also be doing some weight training and those who do a lot of resistance training should be doing some intense cardio based training.

It’s going to be a fun and challenging venture and I’m looking forward to see how this next chapter of my life works out! Stay tuned for updates!

The Truth About Nutrition

The Truth About Nutrition, An Interview with Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S. by T-nations Chris Shugart reveals some interesting facts about nutrition that go against the traditional view of how human physiology works. Much of what he says isn’t new to the body building or peak performance group but it does challenge some of the more pervasive views of our food consciousness. For example, whole grain cereals as being a healthy choice for breakfast; as if they are not the well marketed equivalent to an extra large cup of triple sugar coffee and a doughnut.

A few things to consider that I took out of the article:

  • The food you eat should rot fairly quickly – notice the shelf-life difference between boxed cereal and blue berries.
  • Food is only as good as the environment that it was produced / raised in. Cows that don’t have the chance to walk around and have to eat grain (cereal) that isn’t part of their naturally evolved diet tend to suffer a lot of ailments that lower the quality of their meat.
  • When alcohol is in our blood stream our body stops processing fat for energy – beer and a few slices of pizza WILL boost fat storage more than eating too much pizza alone.
  • Carbohydrates are non-essential. The body will make whatever glucose it needs from protein. This doesn’t mean that you will achieve peak performance if you don’t eat carbs, you just won’t die as you would if you didn’t eat either fat or protein.

There is a lot more in the article and I recommend you give it a good read.

CanFitPro Toronto 2008 – Some Lessons/Observations

I attended the CanFitPro conference in Toronto this weekend. Rachel volunteers at it every year and brought me along so she could share the experience with me. I had a really good time and learned a lot. I took the Spinning orientation course on Thursday because I want to start creating my own indoor cycling classes and didn’t have the credentials to do it; now I do and will write more about that in a later post. Below are some of the things that I took out of attending the conference that didn’t relate to indoor cycling:

  • Whey protein is both anabolic and anti-catabolic. People who have normal kidney function will not run into difficulties by taking it. In fact, the positive effects of taking it are so great that almost everyone should be taking it.
  • When someone has an allergy, their body’s cannot handle a certain protein that a food contains. People who have difficulty with lactose are intolerant and NOT allergic to it. For these people, they may be able to consume whey isolate because it contains almost no lactose.
  • Elderly people, children and some athletes do not get enough protein. The protein requirements for endurance athletes are greater than all other athletes because once the stored glycogen is used up, the body starts to use protein to create glucose to keep movement going.
  • The absorption rate of creatine is almost 50% when taken with 90 grams of carbs or with 45 grams of whey and 45 grams of carbs. Therefore, if you are taking creatine, you should be taking it in your post workout shake and never by itself.
  • Free range or wild meat is better for you than commercial meat because it contains less chemicals and it grew-up eating what it evolved to eat; not relying on humans to create a diet. It’s important to realize that commercial farmers are going to feed their livestock to maximize profit vs. boosting nutrient density.
  • I have developed a sort of immunity to beautiful sales people. I’m more likely going to listen to what an average person has to say about a product vs. a beautiful person. When I talk to beautiful people about what they are selling I get that feeling in my gut that someone is trying to control me. I credit “Blink” for this sense and it is still most important book that I have ever read.
  • The fitness industry is loaded with trends and distracting products and marketing. Is it any wonder why many outsiders don’t want anything to do with fitness professionals given the line of crap that many of us spew? I don’t believe that standing on a vibration plate for 10 minutes is the same workout as running on a treadmill for 60 minutes; but many people are convinced to believe this and are out thousands of dollars because of it. Oh, and gym sticks are so hot right now.
  • Almost anything works for as long as it takes the body to adjust to it. Time under tension is one variable to control, but you’ll get good results not caring about it for a while so feel free to switch things up every now and then.
  • Power endurance is built by eliminating the rest time between the strength move and the power move during the super set – do your heavy front squats and move immediately to your jump squats instead of waiting 45 to 60 seconds between them.
  • It’s a bad idea to schedule a pre-season NFL game the same weekend as a fitness conference. Buffalo and Pittsburgh played at the Rogers center on Thursday. When I walked out of the convention center and happened upon 1000’s of NFL fans I couldn’t help but notice the difference between these two groups of people. On one side is a group of people who care about their health and fitness and on the other side are a group of people who care about football and tailgating. It took me a few minutes to figure out what was going because I had been inside most of the day where the fitness people were looking like fitness people being lean and eating fruit and healthier food. Outside the people had a different type of mass, there was lots of beer and the smell of sausages filled the air. Both groups got along in so far as the fitness people could feel superior about their lifestyle choices and the football fans knew they could kick some ass.

I had a lot of fun and look forward to going back to it next year! If you have never gone you may want to consider it.

Structural Balance And Your Max Lifts

In my Training – Then vs. Now post I made reference to training rotator cuff and the lower trap muscles to help maintain muscle balance. I mentioned that my posture had suffered as a result of neglecting these areas. I failed to mention that improving performance is another very good reason for training these area.

Why will doing external rotation and lower trap movements improve your lifting numbers?

Metaphoric reason – a well tuned car will run better than a car that misfires on one cylinder, even if each car uses the same amount of gas in the same period of time. Well the body is the same way so if it is well tuned (has proper muscle balance) it will be able to move a greater load with the same amount of energy. When someone suggests that you do external rotation movements to help you improve any of your lifts, the goal is to restore or establish balance in your body.

Practical reason – balanced rotator cuff muscles allow the shoulder joint to move in a natural way thus reducing impingement’s while balanced trap strength allows an athlete to retract and set their scapula correctly before lifting to ensure proper movement patterns.

Balanced lower traps and rotator cuff muscles will allow for appropriate recruitment patterns given that the body does not have to overcome false load vectors due to bio mechanical compensation caused by misaligned force vectors (if your not moving the load in the right direction, part of your body needs to pull it into the right direction which will waste effort). What it comes down to is if you are able to use ONLY the muscles that move the load in the direction that is needed more of the recruitment energies go to those muscles and your lift numbers will increase.

Aren’t traditional shoulder pressing or lateral raises enough work for the rotator cuff and lower traps? No. There is almost no humeral rotation with laterals and overhead pressing so, with these movements, the rotator cuff muscles play only a stabilizing roll. These isometric contractions do not improve strength significantly throughout the entire range of motion so the benefit of these movements is mostly to the primary movers (deltoids). Therefore, these movements are not sufficient to correct strength imbalances in the rotator cuff and lower trap muscles; with someone who is balanced however, they will often be enough.

If you want to lift heavier you need to correct any rotator cuff and lower trap imbalance as soon as possible. Doing so will not only improve your numbers, but it will also improve the quality of the movement sparing your shoulder joint a lot of unnecessary stress.

Training – Then vs. Now

Recently I’ve reconnected with some old friends who I used to workout with at the high school weight room. Given what I know now, when I look back on those days I see that I did more stuff wrong than I did did right. The purpose of this post is to outline the 5 things I would do differently if I had it all to do over again.

1) I would train rotator cuff and lower trap muscles. For most of my life, my posture has been horrible – my shoulders have been extremely internally rotated and my upper back has been rounded. The day of my grade 8 graduation I dad told me to stand up straight. I didn’t listen. Worse still was that I started lifting weights in high school and trained chest every other day – essentially doing the exact opposite of what I needed to do to correct the problem.

Now I do a lot of external rotation movements and lower trap work along with being very conscious to retract my scapula when doing any lifting. I also train chest once every two weeks. Balance is being restored for the first time in 25 years and I’m walking taller, feeling better and lifting more.

2) I would train my weaknesses. I was a tree climber when I was young because I spent the first 9 years of my life in Ireland. I wasn’t exposed to any of the throwing sports until I moved to Canada so I had very little reason of raise my arms above my head. As a consequence, I never really developed the ability to recruit and fire the muscles in my shoulders and upper traps so these body parts tended to lag behind. Given that these body parts didn’t grow when I trained them in high school, I didn’t put very much time into them. I’ve been playing catch-up ever since.

3) I would train my legs more. Most than 50% of our muscle fibers are in our legs. Given that the body will only get as strong and as big as it needs to be, neglecting them is going to slow mass development. It is also going to eliminate any of the growth hormone and testosterone boosting effects that aggressive leg training promotes. More importantly, I wouldn’t have looked imbalanced for so long. A huge upper body balanced on tiny chicken legs is not a good look for anyone and it hurt my credibilty as a fitness professional.

While squatting 225 lbs isn’t exactly the most fun you can have in the gym, it is very rewarding to be able to lift that much. It’s probably strength that I will never use but my brain has adapted to the neurological motor unit recruitment requirements that lifting heavy loads necessates so lifting things is easier as a result. It’s better to have more strength than not enough.

4) I would rest more. I trained too much when I was younger and I didn’t allow enough time between workouts to fully recover.