Formosa Fitness

I hate to talk about diets because I often feel i don't have anything to add. On the one hand, it's a vital subject if you want to make any true progress but on the other hand, it's an even more contentious area than physical training. There are just too many variables for people to get a handle on. And there's research coming out all the time on this or that food and how it's good for you this week and bad for you the next. What to do?

I don't pretend to be a scientist or a nutritionist. I primarily talk about what has worked for me because my own experience is all I've got. Will it work for others? Maybe in a general way and that's how I present it. So what has worked?

Certianly NOT Atkins or any extreme no-carb diet like it. Atkins for me as a gout sufferer was a death sentence. Atkins has you eating pure acid all day -- not what gout suffrers need. But even for normal people, I see Atkins as the most bizarrely extreme diet out there. It just isn't something you can do long term. I think we should be thinking of diet not in terms of short fads that we try just to lose a few quick pounds, but a long-term change of your whole diet -- everything you consume.

Cutting way back on complex carbs like breads, rice, pasta, and simple sugars like table sugar, honey, etc. have made a big difference in my training. I try to eat those things once a day, at most. I make note if i have them twice a day because I know that day will set me back in my training as far as weight loss is concerned.

I also try to eat that one serving at breakfast time or lunch time at the latest. I want them early in the day to fuel workouts.

One of the best pieces of diet advice I know came from Fabio, the romance novel cover model that was popular back in the early 90's. He said NEVER eat carbs after 6 p.m. I think that's solid advice. Dinner and late night snacks should be protein based for recovery. Carbs are for energy and not needed obviously for you to sleep. Eating carbs at night is adding empty calories to your diet.

However I do eat carbs for dinner in the form of vegetables. I have a large salad every night as my main dinner course. I highly recomend this. I now get about 10-12 servings of veggies a day and feel much better for it. And of course it goes against Atkins advice, but there it is. Cutting out healthy carbs like veggies is not something I would recommend.

Replace your rice, bread, and pasta with veggies and your body will thank you for it!

這種是DRAGON DOOR(DD)的壺鈴.

他們很漂亮,對不對? 這種是比較專業的.

Oh boy am I going to be a blowhard now. :)

Seriously though, I passed and wow do I feel good about it. I studied hard for it and got it. Feels great. But like every other newly certified guy out there, I now know how much I don't know. It's like black belt syndrome -- you get and gulp! wonder if you deserved to get it or not.

This isn't as bad as my getting EMT certified. That was terrifying. I passed that cert and then realized that I could literally hold someone's life in my hands. Talk about nervous.

But this cert empowers me and makes me feel more confident. From here, I have lots of room to grow in training clients to get fit and healthy.

So please welcome the newest certified personal trainer on the block and wish me well. I'll have lots more bloviating after this! :)

Cindy

5 pullups

10 push ups

15 bodyweight squats

Today: 18 reps of the circuit in 20 minutes. Three more than last time!

So after I did Cindy the last time, I wanted to know how I did so I searched and saw that my results were not bad. The best I saw was 20 reps of the circuit in 20 minutes. How he did it was to do 1 rep of the circuit every minute for 20 minutes. I wanted to see if i could do that today, and while I didn't reach that, I did much better.

Pullups total: 90

Pushups total: 180

Squats total: 270

Not bad at all for 20 minutes work!

I found this tempo to be even harder because I had to keep the pace. And I did more work this time, obviously. I paid more attention to form but my form started breaking down on the pullups at around the 9th rep. The pushups stayed fairly strong till the end. I took a one minute rest break around the 10 rep and another 30 break near the 14th rep of the circuit.

I found that I did one rep of the circuit in about 45 seconds, leaving 15 seconds for rest. This was nice and allowed me to keep the reps cleaner.

Part of my interest in this is to see how much volume of work I can pack into short workouts. As a trainer, I want to see how much busy people can get done in a short amount of time. More work volume, more calories burned. Personally, I'm very much into efficiency. I work out long and hard sometimes, but I also like to have very intense, short workouts.

I hope that you're learning along with me. This is stuff that you can use to increase your workout intensity, boost your number of pushups, burn more calories, etc.

The factory has informed me that my kettlebells will be done next week and then they will ship them. Won't be long now! Over 100 kettlebells on their way to Taiwan.

In other news, Cindy and tons of kettlebell work tore me up this week. I had three heavy kettlebell workouts this week plus doing Cindy on Tuesday. Hard week for sure. But I'm growing, boy am I growing. I'm also trying to add a second session of cardio in the morning, every morning. Haven't set that up fully yet.

The problem is SAID -- specific adaptation to implied demands. In other words, no matter what you throw at your body, you'll adapt to it eventually. I hit a small plateau with my training and had to kick start with by tweaking my program, both in terms of exercise and nutrition. But I'm back on track now.

Here's another acronym that is important to the discussion -- EPOC, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. The idea is a bit complex but it basically means burning extra calories AFTER you finish exercise. According the NASM protocols I'm getting certified in, the best way to take advantage of EPOC is working out twice a day. Hence the extra cardio. Plus it's easier for me to do two shorter one-hour sessions and maintain energy levels rather than one two-hour session. Try it out if you want to maximize calorie burn.

http://www.shihan.com/The-Complete-Guide-to-Kettlebell-lifting-Book-and-DVD/

Mine came in the mail today so here's a review.

First, it's the best book for kettlebell techniques I've ever seen. It's leaps and bounds better in that department than anything else out there. Just nothing else compares IMO. The pictures are all in color, there are a lot of them, and the tips naturally cover things people should look out for. The addition of "bad form" pics will help steer people away from common errors, but these errors will be common sense to a lot of people that have used kettlebells for a while.

The content closely mirrors Steve's Encyclopedia of Kettlebell Lifting DVDs, especially volume 1. I say that because volume 2 had the BOSU, etc. in it and this book doesn't have any of that stuff.

There are a couple of techniques I don't remember seeing before in the encyclopedias -- like Push and Pull, seated pressing, and a few others. But most everything here was in the DVDs.

The only negative about the book was that there was nothing about programming. Anyone who's looking for that won't find it here and that's a big drawback for some people who are confused about programming (like me). If a long chapter on that had been included, this would have been THE one-stop shop for KB anything and everything. But without it, I feel there's a gap because people won't know how to put all the various techniques into a workout.

The accompanying DVD has short clips of everything in the book. Steve doesn't say anything in the clips, meaning that this book and DVD combo doesn't make the encyclopedia DVDs obsolete. There was a lot on those DVDs that isn't in this book/DVD, especially the second set.

As an aid to learning the KB techniques, this is the resource I've been looking for. I've been wanting something to show people without having to refer to the DVDs or actually pick up a KB and start swinging. I've also been looking for something to use as a reference in my training space and this is it.

I highly recommend the book.

P.S. Shihan is now running a $20 off promotion on the book. Get the savings while you can!

Don't tell my wife. Haha. Actually, her English name is Cindy so she wouldn't mind. But I'm referring to the Crossfit workout by the name of Cindy:

5 pullups

10 pushups

15 bodyweight squats

As many reps of this circuit as you can do in 20 minutes.

Yesterday was the first time I did this workout and I'm proud to say that I made it the whole time with no rest breaks. I did 15 reps of the circuit: 75 pullups, 150 pushups, and 225 squats. My form was pretty good except I started losing the form on the pullups at around 11-12th round, pushups I lost it near 14, and squats were consistent. From now on, I'll work on making form better and going faster.

BTW, the video shows kipping pullups but I recommend that you keep strict form. I don't care for Crossfit "slop" as it's called. Don't just focus on sloppy reps done at speed. Get all you can out of the reps!

I fell in love with this workout for many reasons.

First, I love bodyweight training and circuits in general so i was predisposed to like this one.

Second, I've never in my life done so many pullups in one workout and this one got me to do 75 in 20 minutes!! I've been wanting to improve my pullups but I've been stagnating with sets. Cindy got me to do much more with better form than ever before.

Third, it breathed new life in pushups and squats, which I rarely do any more because I find them boring. When I can do high reps of an exercise, I move on to something else because doing long sets of squats, for example, is boring. But I never really felt that I had mastered the pushup and squat in the ways that I wanted to. I think Cindy can get me where I want to be.

Fourth, that's a tremendous volume of work in a very short aqmount of time.

I think Cindy's a keeper for my Tuesday and Thursday workout. Try it out and let me know what you think!

Mike Mahler's tukish get up.

There's an interesting link up over at IGX on the Turkish Getup. The Turkish get up (TGU) is an exercise that got blended into the kettlebell mix by Pavel of RKC/dragon door fame. It was taught to him by Steve Maxwell. Thing is, it used to be just a move among a small set of kettlebell movements, but in the DVD talked about in the thread, the hype has now made it into THE ONLY MOVE YOU EVER NEED.

Additionally, the level of detail that IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY OR YOU WILL HURT YOURSELF has sky rocketed. BTW, the caps here are on purpose. This is how this stuff is marketed in the kettlebell world. Everything is the latest MUST HAVE! Or THE ONLY WAY TO DO IT!

I understand marketing to an extent and people are trying to get other people's attention. That's actualy REALLY hard to do (haha, see my use of caps?). People are inundated with media so no one pays attention to anything. You have to scream your head of to be heard. So the claims have to be more and more outrageous to get people's attention.

But something else is going on here and that's taking something that is useful at a certain level of detail and making it overly complicated.

As a taichi teacher,  I could write an entire book and produce a DVD just on the first move of the taiji form. I could say, "It's all the taiji anybody would ever need" or some such garbage. And that might be true to an extent. I could certainly provide a depth of detail and knowledge about it that very few people have.

But of what use is that level of detail to people?

Taichi beginners don't need anywhere near that amount of complexity. They wouldn't understand it anyway. It would bore most people to death. The only people that would want it are kooks like me that do this stuff all day every day.

Same goes for the kettlebell techniques. There's certain details you want so that you don't hurt yourself. Everyone needs these because using the kettlebell relies on technique. But the problem is that you can get consumed by the deeper levels of technique if you aren't careful.

As the thread at IGX says, the kettlebell used to be seen as the "AK-47 of fitness" that the "working man" could use to get fit. Then it became a hyper-detailed geekfest where you needed a PhD. just to figure out what people were talking about.

Bottom line for me is that a certain level of detail is desired but beyond that I tend to reject endless debates about technique because I've been down that road before. Endless BS debates about techniques WILL KILL your spirit and desire to do these exercises.

And that's the whole point in the first place: exercising. Getting out there and just doing it.

So don't get hurt but also don't let technical talk get in your way of exercising. Just because some level of detail is good doesn't mean that a lot is great.

Everyone has their version of the 300 workout but I guess it's more of a concept and an inspiration than anything else. The workouts revolve around hard training as inspired by the movie. So here's a "Spartan workout" that I did yesterday for kettlebells:

100 swings

100 snatches

100 cleans

Total: 300 reps

I did these in long sets and took one minute rest in between the three sets. I used the 16kg kettlbell and hope to work up to the 20kg next. It was a hell of a workout and there was a puddle of sweat around me.

These long sets are an important piece of kettlebell training. They increase work volume -- your ability to move weight repeatedly over longer time -- and that's the whole point of kettlebell training in the first place. These ARE NOT just dummbbells in disguise. How you use them is quite different.

These longs sets are also absolutely necessary for discovering the "groove" for the techniques. I say that becasue it was only yesterday during this workout that I felt I truly understood the swing for the first time. There's a groove that the kettlebell must travel in and you need long sets to find it. They improve your technique as you struggle with the bell. You get more and more tired so you have to find more and more efficient ways of moving the bell. Only long sets will show you that.

I also do most everything with the 16kg kettlebell these days. I rarely use the others except an 8kg and a 12kg to warmup. I'm stressing technique and mastery of the bell, but I do throw in some heavy bell work on other days. More on that later.

So if you've been training kettlebells for a little while and your hands are conditioned, try out the 300 workout above and let me know how you did!

This is a clip of the RKC certification and just looking at it, you can see why these guys have the reputation for the hardest cert in kettlebell training. It's three days long and the emphasis is on running the gauntlet of various lifts including the snatch test and the football field length walking set of presses. Hard stuff for hard men! Um...yeah.

This is another look at the cert with the Russian Anthem playing in the background. Be sure to have vodka handy while you watch. Looks like I'd need some after completing that kind of training.

This second features Steve Cotter about halfway through. Be sure to catch him doing pistols up on a table repeatedly. Wow. And the clip ends with Steve Maxwell (with the farmer tan) leading the group through a final challenge. Good stuff.