Today’s show is about the good, the bad and the ugly of fitness challenges. Fitness challenges are all the rage, usually they take some form of single exercise or circuit of exercises and you do them over a pre-determined course of time documenting your improvement and sharing it with the world. The most common example I can think of is the plank challenge that circulated a few years ago where you would plank everyday for a month and try to go from 30 seconds to 3 minutes over the course of that time.
There are many things to consider when deciding whether or not you should do a fitness challenge and today we’re going to cover all of those things.
Today is a must read episode and we’re covering one of my favourite fitness books of all time, Intervention by Dan John. He takes a simple and straight forward approach to health and fitness. If we all took a page out of this book we would all be a lot healthier for it. Get out your thinking cap, because we’re going to reshape how you think about health and fitness.
If you're trying to eat less, eat healthier and/or trying to lose weight and you don't have enough time to cook or you think it’s too hard you should listen to this episode. We're going to give you the silver bullet to help you with all of these things.
These are some really common comments that we hear from clients, eating healthy takes a long time because it takes so long to prepare the food, I get really hungry through the day and sometimes I just don’t know what to snack on so I eat cheese and crackers or trail mix, because what else can you really snack on, right? These are valid concerns, but there is one thing you can do that is the silver bullet to all of these problems...
Today’s question is in from Debbie: How can I make exercise fun?
This might be our most passionate episode yet.
Here’s the deal, you want a stronger core. How do I know this, because every time I ask someone if they want a stronger core they say ‘yes’. In fact, I’ve never heard any one say, ‘No, my core is strong enough I don’t need to strengthen it anymore.’ All that to be said most people only target their Rectus Abdominis which is their ‘6 pack’ muscle. I know a ‘6 pack’ is important to many of you, but if you’re really interested in a ‘6 pack’ go back and listen to any of our episodes that have to do with nutrition and weight loss, because that’s where the ‘6 pack’ magic happens. But if you want a strong core, one that keeps your back stable and gives you power to do the things you love, like pick your kids up and down off the ground, swing a golf club or carry heavy boxes from your car to the garage you need to listen to this episode because you’re going to learn something new about training your core.
There's this type of martial arts training called Iron Vest Training. Iron Vest Training is this training where you get beaten with a small stick or piece of wicker until your body starts to become bruised and bloodied. Then you let your body heal and once you’re healed you get beaten with a slightly larger stick until you become bruised and bloody. Then you let your body heal again and you go back and you get beaten with an even bigger stick until your bruised and bloody. You keep doing this over and over again until your body starts to adapt and eventually the smaller sticks no longer leave you bruised and bloodied, but you continue to get hit with bigger and bigger sticks. Over time you build up such a big tolerance that even the big sticks no longer leave bruises or make you bloodied and it is at this point you obtain iron vest status where your body can actually withstand huge amounts of pressure and force without becoming injured and hardly feeling pain. The purpose of exercise is to do the exact same thing to your body, to break it down a little bit and let it heal back up and then break it down little bit more and then let it heal back up and then eventually your body becomes a machine that is incredibly difficult to break down, where you can now do workouts that used to make you vomit, without much effort at all, this is an episode about the exact opposite of that.
Today’s episode is a short one about the powerful and underrated benefits of walking and how one of my client’s is noticing the impact of not doing it anymore, but she doesn’t realize it. The lead character in this story is Roberta and of course this isn’t her real name.
Everyone wants to be one of the cool kids, a sexy protein that gets all of the attention, an energetic carbohydrate that bounces of the walls and the once shunned kid fat is finally coming into his own, now that he’s better understood. But what about fiber? Fiber is that nerd at the high school party no one pays attention to, but ends up making millions of dollars after they graduate. So you should listen to him, when fiber grows up you want him on your side, because at the end of the day he’s writing some pretty big cheques.
Today's question is in from Sid: How well do push-ups carry over to bench press? Sid this is a great question because sometimes we want to improve our bench press, but we don't always have access to one. In this episode we're going to talk about how well your push-ups carry over as well how you can improve your bench press without actually doing it and by doing push ups instead. This will be a really good episode especially if you find regular push-ups are getting too easy and you don’t necessarily have weights to move up to.
On The heels of the injury show I thought it would be a good idea to talk about balance, since one of the biggest reasons people injure themselves is through some form of falling, whether it's slipping on a wet surface, tripping over an uneven walkway or falling off a stool, all of these things can be prevented or at the very least the seriousness of them can be significantly reduced with proper balance and strength training. When most people think of balance they think of standing on 1 foot, which you can do and it will improve your balance, except there's more to it than that, because very rarely are you just standing on 1 foot when you fall. I mean when was the last time you said to yourself, ‘hmmmm, I’m going to do this activity on one foot because that will make it easier.’ The short answer is never, so standing on one foot can’t be the only way you practice your balance. Usually you're moving or reaching which puts you in a precarious or awkward position that ultimately leads to a fall. Luckily you can train for that moment.
Injuries suck, they make it hard for you to move, they make it painful to do things you love and they can impair your life like you wouldn't believe. When you're in pain it makes it hard to do anything, let alone exercise. Today we're going to talk about what you can do when you're injured and how you can continue to exercise to avoid becoming injured again. If you've ever had an injury or you're trying to get through an injury right now you need to listen to this episode.
Warming-up is really important and in Episode 19 we talked about how to do it effectively for your exercise program, but we didn’t talk about sports and recreational activities. It’s probably more important to warm-up for recreational activities, because they are so multi dimensional, often you go from doing nothing to sprinting, jumping and changing direction quickly in short periods of time. Which is the best and easiest way to injure yourself, and since I know for a fact no one like’s to get injured, we’re going to go through how to decrease your chances of becoming injured in whatever recreational sport you like to do.
There are 100’s, if not thousands of ways you can workout and be active, but what makes a great workout, a great workout? Even the most fit and most active people can find themselves a little unmotivated form time to time, stick around so you can find out what floats your boat when you exercise, so you not only have a great workout but also a workout you will do.
A quick google search will tell you depending on your activity and whether or not you’re trying to build or just maintain muscle you need to eat between .5 g of protein per kg of bodyweight (for regular inactive people) and 2g per kg of body weight, if you’re a body builder or elite athlete that trains all the time. If you eat a standard North American or Western European diet it is basically impossible for you to be protein deficient, you’re getting enough protein, what we’re going to talk about in this episode is where your sources of protein should come from to make sure you’re eating as healthily as possible.
Have you ever sat back and taken stock of why you do what you do? Why you get up at the time you do? Why you eat the foods you eat? Why you exercise or don’t exercise the way you do? You’re beliefs come from your experiences, your memories and most importantly your perception of how they happened, basically you form multiple stories that you tell yourself and they inform the decisions you make and how you live your life, today we’re going to go through some examples of stories I personally tell myself and stories we have found that clients sometimes tell themselves and how it informs the decisions they make, if you feel like you’re stuck or in a box you need to break out of this is an episode you need to listen to, even if you feel like you’re healthy enough, you can apply these principles to any aspect of your life.
Being Fit and healthy has lots of great benefits, you reduce your chance of many diseases, you become more attractive and you burn more calories in less time, which means you can spend less time actually exercising. I know that’s not what you expect to hear, but it’s true and it’s what we’re going to talk about in this episode, so stay tuned so you can become an exercise machine.
Today I’m going to use myself as an example and go through how I’m re-evaluating my fitness and training situation to make it work for me and I really hope you can pull some lessons out and apply them to apply them to your life. This is probably more personal than I usually like to get, but it’s important and I know many of you struggle with the same things.
You need recovery days to allow your body to heal and recover after very intense workouts. There are several different ways to recover but you're usually trying to do one of the 3 things.
Heat stroke happens when your internal body temperature gets above 40 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, this is usually caused by a combination of physical exertion and heat, of course this gets much worse when the sun beats down on you and it’s really humid. Fortunately it’s actually really hard to get heat stroke because our body has this sort of natural regulating system that forces us to slow down.
Although it’s called My Fitness Pal this is definitely a food tracking app, the extent to which you can track your exercise is very general, you can only put in the type of exercise and for how long you did it, that’s it.
Depression is a serious mood disorder, some peoplemay even call it an invisible disease, it can happen on a spectrumfrom ‘hey, I feel kind of down today’ all the way to heavy suicidalthoughts and it’s much harder to diagnose than a broken bone orheart disease, where you can look at an x-ray or scan anddefinitively say ‘yes, this person has broken a bone or yes, thisperson has heart disease where there are very clear procedures andtreatment patterns to follow.
Today we’re going to talk about how you can useexercise and physical activity to help deal with depression and thesymptoms of depression,
As some of you know last week an article about this really ripped woman got shared around on social media, saying that the scale she uses told her she had 33% body fat, when she clearly has a much lower body fat than that because you can see the veins in her abdomen, so is this scale accurate, the short answer is no, so you might ask yourself, do they have any legitimate use? The answer to that question is sure under the right circumstances, in today’s episode we’re going to dig into why this happened and how you can avoid a misreading like this.