Food Addiction

Fatty foods can be as addictive as cocaine...yet food addiction is the only form of addiction society not only tolerates but encourages. Even though obesity and weight issues kills more people than any other addiction. Things need to change. If you eat even when you are full...compulsively, this may be you.


http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/03/28/fatty.foods.brain/index.html

Today's Athlete

Today's athlete is a thing to marvel at but it wasn't always the case. The Olympic records for both the marathon 200 meter or whatever record you want to look at in the early 1900's is considered mediocre in today's standards. Not only is it mediocre but its mediocre compared to the top high school athletes who beat the world records of the 1900s by full 2 seconds or more, or in case of the marathon by a full 20 minutes.

How can this be? Because we have gotten more efficient and better in our training methods. As our athletes have gotten stronger, faster, and leaner our regular population has gotten fatter, bigger, and weaker. Back a hundred years ago the difference between a world class athlete and the regular person wasn't even something you could always detect with the naked eye. They sometimes just looked like a regular person, no one would know they were world class at something unless someone told you so. But overtime the differences have grown and grown and athletes have separated the gap and never looked back. I guess that's why we consider athletes to be elite, because they don't move in the pattern we do of getting bigger and bigger. They are something special, something not like us...but they shouldn't be. Even the athletes of yesteryear who looked like a regular guy or girl would look mighty fit in today's standards because the standards have well...frankly dropped. Athletes are athletes but you never saw them as something "elite." In another era is was not uncommon for a regular person to walk into a professional team or a college team and be one of the best players. Today you couldn't even imagine it.

Training for athletes has gotten better overtime. The workout and fitness routines for the regular person has historically...sucked and continues to suck. Instead of improving or evolving, there's just fitness crazes and fads which are the enemies of training evolution. As the trainers of athletes train in a similar manner, how regular people train, and even the training of personal trainers for the regular population changes from person to person. There is no uniformity but all types of science, even sports science should be universal.

So you can train like everyone else, or you can train like an athlete.


About the Author:

Sam Y. is a Personal Trainer, Coach, Performane Enhancement Specialist, Corrective Enhancement Specialist, and holds multiple certifications. He is also an avid Martial Artist, training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Kickboxing, Boxing, and MMA. He is also the author of the popular fitness blog All Out Effort as well as the popular martial arts blog Inner BJJ. You can find him in the Los Angeles area personal training his clients, or at home annoying his wife, or on Facebook at his personal fitness page.

Work Hard Play Hard

"Work hard, play hard" is a statement I can't stand as much as "it is what it is." It's one of those statements that really tells me nothing but sounds good to say (to the person saying it not the person hearing it.)

People always ask me, "can I get to my goals?", "are they do-able?", "will it take me a long time?" What I tell people is, getting to your goals is not a big deal. You can't put it on some pedestal. It's not even that hard. If you do the right things at the right time and approach it scientifically you will just get there. It's not some miracle. You just have to do the things to get you there. When you put together a bike, its not a big deal or a miracle. You just have to go and put it together, and you know the outcome will eventually happen because it comes with instructions.

Our body doesn't necessarily come with an instruction book, but that doesn't mean an instruction book doesn't exist. It does and people use it all the time, the scientific evidence based approach to fitness. When clients ask me how long it will take, I tell them it won't take too long at all as long as they do the work. When clients complain about an exercise, I tell them this exercise is no big deal. It's not hard work, you're not doing more than you can do, it's just work so let's not make it anymore than it really is. You're putting one piece of the puzzle together.

It's only hard work when you feel like there's something better you could be doing with your time, or you just hate it. BUT once you feel like there is nothing better you could be doing with your time, that you enjoy it, then it's no longer hard work and it's now become a lifestyle change. You have made the right lifestyle choice that guarantees your success. It's what separates the winners from the losers. And only when it becomes a lifestyle change does it become easy. All it means when sometime tells me they work hard and play hard is that they hate their work and they have to play harder to compensate. I love my work and never consider it hard.

I trained martial arts twice yesterday, one block for 2 hours, one block for 3. Would it make other people crumble? Yes. Did I consider it hard work? No because I enjoy it, it's a lifestyle choice I've made.

The thing I get confused about the most is when a person who isn't even burned out quits on an exercise just because they hate it. In all my years of sports and martial arts I've never seen a coach assign an exercise and an athlete quit on it unless they just collapse. But otherwise we never had an opinion about what we were doing because we wanted to be there, because we ultimately want to win. Exercises should be dynamic but if the "fun factor" becomes a primary goal and not a secondary, then you will have a funny looking body. There's too much emphasis on something being fun, too much emphasis on "feeling it."

People come into the gym with some preconceived idea that they should always "feel it" where they think they should feel it. The most important things in an exercise are:

Can you do it properly with no dysfunction.
Can you do it with proper posture.
Are you being challenged.
Is it safe.
Is there any pain.

These are the top concerns because feeling it is just superficial, it tells us a little about the muscle (that you obviously don't feel something in a muscle that's underdeveloped and you won't for a while until it develops more) but nothing about the nervous system. Throw all those preconceived notions out of your head.

At the end of the day, you may dislike it, you may have a lot of questions about what you're doing, you may have your doubts, all the negative thoughts and preconceived ideas that will bring you down. I can go on and on to try to reason with someone rationally but sometimes none of that works as well as telling someone to just "DO THE DAMN THING!"



About the Author:

Sam Y. is a Personal Trainer, Coach, Performane Enhancement Specialist, Corrective Enhancement Specialist, and holds multiple certifications. He is also an avid Martial Artist, training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Kickboxing, Boxing, and MMA. He is also the author of the popular fitness blog All Out Effort as well as the popular martial arts blog Inner BJJ. You can find him in the Los Angeles area personal training his clients, or at home annoying his wife, or on Facebook at his personal fitness page.