Posts Tagged: strength training

8 Badass Ways to Get Healthy

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Eat like a badass

Last year I wrote this for a somewhat edgy foreign publication that seems to have been cryogenically frozen, if not gone the way of the Dodo.  I think it deserves a relocation from the files on my laptop to the blog.  Enjoy…    8 Badass Ways to Get Healthy Take a moment to relax.  Breathe in deeply.  My buddy Daniel Larusso does it.  And when he does, wow!  Watch out!  We were once traveling in Okinawa together and he broke like 10 fat slabs of ice with a single karate chop!  Actually, come to think of it, that was a movie.  Sorry.  I grew up in America.  Try as I might, I spent so much of my childhood in front of the television that I honestly have trouble separating my actual childhood… Read more »

What I Want to Be When I Grow Up

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Boxer abs

Ever since I can remember, I had a deep, burning desire to have a striking physique.  In Kindergarten we were asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?” to be presented at our graduation ceremony.  I had watched a lot of sports on television at that age, and loved boxing and greats like Marvin Hagler.  Marvin had deep, ebony skin tone and was very lean and defined.  Put some sweat on him during a hard boxing match and he looked like he was a man carved out of wood with a fresh coat of paint laid down on him.  I proudly announced to my Kindergarten teacher, precisely because I was so enamored with this look, “I want to be a black boxer.”  I’m not making this up. … Read more »

Heavy Weights Low Reps

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heavy weight low reps

I don’t have much time to post today, but I received an email from a girl just the other day, and she mentioned jumping back into Crossfit after resting and refeeding for about a month.  Not good.  She experienced major insomnia as so often happens when doing really grueling exercise, which seemed to only worsen as she continued.  Research and ideas I came across touting the benefits of high intensity interval training managed to seduce me a couple of years ago.  While it may be true that higher intensity exercise (like Crossfit or HIIT) yields certain benefits, the fact of the matter is that really hard, grueling exercise has some negatives too – and I just don’t find it very sustainable.  There’s only so many times that you can realistically motivate yourself… Read more »

Healthy Stress? Health Benefits of Acute Stress

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female-deadlift

Inspired by Matthew Bowen, I wanted to briefly discuss the concept of acute stress’s POSITIVE role in good human functionality.  What is acute stress?  Acute stresses are things that are so damn cute it actually elicits a stress response in your body.  I mean, look at those freakin’ puppies.  So acute. Acute stress can also be stress that’s comes in at an angle less than 90 degrees.  Or if you go around a curve that’s tighter than 90 degrees really fast in a car while riding in the passenger side.  That’s an acute stress. Okay, I’m not funny.  Well, some people say I am, but I just assume they are the dorks that watch AFV and actually own post-Gilmore Adam Sandler movies.  People who don’t find me funny typically put… Read more »

Strength Research Project

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scrawny

I‘m looking for a few good men (and some women too).  Using some principles gathered from both research and experimentation that I’ve done, I feel pretty confident that I can create a pretty remarkable and foolproof method for increasing strength with basic exercises.  Perhaps the best part is the miminal amount of exertion required to get this strength increase.  My own benchpress has increased about 30 pounds in the last 6 weeks with just a couple minutes of total exertion.  This 30-pound increase equals the increase in bench that I’ve experienced from age 14 to 34 with sporadic training, and a ton of total work overall, so I’m pretty psyched.  Of course, a recurring theme here is getting the most reward for the least amount of time, effort, and life disruption… Read more »

No Diets in 2013!

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no more diets

Happy New Year everyone!  It’s usually around this time every year that I encourage and empower people to, instead of gearing up to set goals in opposition to oneself (New Year’s Resolutions), especially as it pertains to exercise and dietary habits - to actually commit to spending a whole year without being on some kind of diet.  Instead of writing some passionate essay about it, I defer to what is arguably the most popular post I’ve ever written – Weight Fixation: “Waist” of Time. 2012 was a big year.  Just last week I was reading through an old book of mine, and it was like I was reading the writing of a stranger.  It made me think about just how far I’ve come since the days of paddling through the sea of conflicting ideas and… Read more »

Benefits of Strength Training for Women

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go kaleo butt

By Amber Rogers (Go Kaleo) I started strength training 4 years ago because my doctor told me that it can help improve function for people with osteoarthritis of the knee. At 36, I’d recently dislocated my kneecap, which exacerbated the arthritis I’d already developed from carrying around 80 extra pounds for 25 years. I was dealing with chronic pain, stiffness and reduced mobility and couldn’t even climb a flight of stairs like a normal healthy adult. I was desperate, so even though I’d hated exercise all my life I decided to give it a shot. My results far exceeded my expectations. Over the next few years my knee mobility improved and my pain started to subside, my strength and functionality returned, and I started seeing health improvements in areas I’d never… Read more »

Persistence Is Better Than Perfection

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persistencedeer

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Last week the the Stoner and I caught up, and I mentioned the idea I’d been keeping close to heart recently, that “persistance is better than perfection.” I don’t know where I heard it first, but Google turns up plenty of hits for that or similar phrases. He liked it and suggested I share a few thoughts on that theme. Matt has this great expression: “The perfect diet is very unhealthy.” I think you can read that a few different ways: the belief in a perfect diet is itself unhealthy a diet that is ‘perfect’ is immune from revision or criticism and long term leads to imbalances that we don’t adjust for so long as we remain fixated on its “perfectness” a diet that… Read more »

Sarcopenia

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best-of-sarcopenia_1

I’ve been thinking a lot about aging lately.  My grandfather, age 87 and my last living grandparent, ain’t doin’ so hot.  And yes, he’s old.  He’s falling to pieces.  He’s going to eventually die.  I’m not fighting that, and tend to look at whether it happens now or several months or even years from now as pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.  Sure, he’ll miss a few golf tournaments and football games on tv, but from this point forward it doesn’t really matter when the big day arrives.  The world will go on whether he is alive to watch The O’Reilly Factor or not (Yeah I know that’s kinda mean, but he’s at the bedridden diaper stage – the stage where most people promise themselves and their loved… Read more »

Stalling the Aging Metabolism

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old-man-5

My girlfriend’s daughter just turned 7.  We were eating some food at a restaurant the other day and I watched her eat 2 cheeseburgers, half an order of French fries, a small milkshake, and a few good sips of a soft drink.  I looked up all the nutrition data for her meal, and it totaled, by modest estimates, 1,200 calories.  She weighs a whopping 49 pounds.  That day she consumed over 2,500 calories.  No I don’t meticulously count all her calories.  But I did that day because her appetite was extraordinarily large, and well, you know, I’m a nerd.  Metabolism has been the epicenter of my research for the last several years, and that’s just too impressive not to calculate and ponder. To put it into perspective, that single meal… Read more »