Formosa Fitness

Yep, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. Ok, so I've mentioned it before. But I think the movie's various messages are what a lot of people need to hear.

The main thing that I took away from the movie was Socrates' idea of athletics from an internal motivation. Remember the scene where he took Dan out in back of the garage and showed him a set of gymnastic rings and told him to do the rings just for the sake of doing the rings?

That kind of motivation is what is missing in both sports and the fitness industry at large. Sports is all about winning and external motivations like medals, trophies, etc. Fitness is usually about how you look or some other shallow motivation. But internally driven fitness satisfies a deep human need to move and enjoy skilled movement for its own sake. It become about expressing and enjoying your body at a more efficient level. 

Yes, the movie is cheesy but how could it not appear so? The message runs so completely counter to modern thought that it must appear silly. But if you look past the cheese, there are some important messages in the film and book.

Check it out.

The answer is simple: don't be ordinary.

I see this a lot -- a fitness guru does something that seems unusual and the peanut gallery snickers behind their hands. Yeah, look at that silly stuff he/she says works. Now ask yourself why the guru gets the results they get and the peanut gallery remains the peanut gallery every year. Who's laughing now?

If you want to be high level at anything, then you MUST stop doing what everyone else is doing. You have to be willing to have friends or family say, "What the hell are you doing?" In fact, if they don't then you're probably not doing things right.

The masses are mediocre and tend to act like crabs in a barrel. Try to crawl out and they pull you back down.

If everyone around you is extremely overweight and you really try to lose your weight, expect a backlash. You'll be told, "Who do you think you are? Do you think you're better than everyone else?" Your answer should be, "You bet I do. And I'm going to prove." Then do it.

I don't much care for being elite, so don't misunderstand. I'm not a world champion at anything, but I can make a pretty mean tub of popcorn. But I also feel exactly ZERO inclination to do what others around me are doing. In fact, a pretty good formula for success is to look around at what everyone else is doing (notice how seldom they get results?) and do the EXACT OPPOSITE.

It's harsh and it's cruel and it's not politically correct. So what? But the fact of the matter is that successful people are willing to do the things unsuccessful people are not. The sooner you realize that this applies to fitness and dieting as much as anything else in life, the sooner you'll start making progress.

I'll step down from the podium now. :)

And no, I'm not advocating spouse abuse. :) For new readers, I'm referring to the Crossfit Cindy workout: 5 pullups, 10 pushups, 15 bodyweight squats done circuit style, as many as you can in 20 minutes. I do this periodically as a fitness test.

Today: 19 reps and almost finished 20.

Totals: 98 pullups, 200 pushups, 293 squats. Overall total: 591, just 9 short of a 600.

Needless to say, I'm a happy camper today. :) That's the best ever for me.

So I'm not putting these numbers up to impress anyone. Some of you studs and studettes can do this in your sleep. Instead, I want to make two points.

1. Having a fitness test every now and then let's you know where you are and where you need to go.

2. working escalating density style (EDT) is a great way to stay motivated.

Expounding on point two, what makes Cindy tick is that it's an EDT style workout: you want to do more volume by even the smallest amount each time you do the workout. And an increase of just 1 in any exercise shows that you're making progress.

Do you realize how inspiring that is?

Instead of dreading going to the gym, each workout becomes a part of an overall competition in which you're competing with yourself. Do one single more rep than last time on the test and you win. That's progress. No, I don't make every workout a competition as that would put way too much pressure on me and I'd burn out. This is where point one comes into play. I make the fitness test my competition with myself. I pick a single day (and not too often) and go for it. That's what I did today and it was great.

Have a great day. :)

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. It got a little crazy around Thanksgiving. We're getting back on track now.

I just ordered this DVD and the book from Bodytribe Fitness. Out of all the small gyms in the links to your lower right down there, the one that impresses me most is Bodytribe Fitness. It's just everything about them. I love the blend of weightlifting, kettlebells, Indian clubs, sandbags, flow yoga, etc. And their place is beautiful. NOT your typical gym, is it?

There's a difference between someone that makes the call to a fitness professional and someone that doesn't: motivation. Let's not hem and haw around it. People that don't try or that won't even call aren't motivated enough to do so. And for many, not deciding to act is deciding to not act at all.

Fact is, neither I nor any other fitness professional can give someone the motivation to call or otherwise take that first step. It has to begin with the client.But the old cliche applies: the client has to WANT to change.

And it really, really saddens me to see the people that just will not do that until something catastrophic in terms of health has taken place.

But that's what has to happen for most people to get motivated. The idea of "an ounce of prevention..." simply doesn't exist in America or a lot of other places any more and it won't again for a very long time. With no crisis, there's apparently no motivation.

Thing is, many of these people wait until it's just too late. You can manage some health issues, you can make things slightly better. But at a certain point, it's really too late to change things around. Decisions have been made even if people don't want to face those facts and consequences will have to lived with.

I BEG you, don't wait until it's too late. Act now and take control of your health while you can still turn things around. 

One of the most persistent myths I see is the idea that someone doesn't have the energy to workout. When I hear this I think to myself, "Does anyone ever have the energy to work out at first?" Does anyone really expect that at the end of the day, they might one day just have this abundance of energy that they just have to get out? When does that ever happen?

Never.

Most people's idea about exercise and energy is completely reversed. Here's the real deal: you work out first and THEN you get the energy.

Counterintuitive I know but there it is.

It works like this. If you don't exercise then your body seeks equilibrium. You aren't going to have a massive amount of energy one day to start a fitness program. Why would you? Where would it come from? Your body has gotten used to its current state. To get more energy, you have to break out of that equilibrium.

When you start exercising, your body becomes more efficient with energy. That means you will feel more energy as that efficiency increases.

You'll also find that movement stimulates your mind. We all have a human need to MOVE but many people don't fulfill it. Moving improves your mood and gets you on a positive feedback loop. You start feeling better. Combine this with diet and you start getting synergistic effects -- the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Then you start looking better and feeling better and...

So don't wait for an energy blast that will never come. If you want to feel more energetic in your life, start moving! 

I see this a lot in relation to fitness and nutrition systems, I saw iT when I got my master's in international relations, and I saw it a lot in martial arts: something isn't perfect so it gets seen as useless. Great example here. We love to toss those babies with the bathwater.

Why?

NO system that any human has developed is perfect. If there was a perfect piece of software, a perfect fitness routine, a perfect anything, then we'd all have it or be doing it. But they don't exist. Humans are imperfect and imperfectable beings. Everything has benefits and costs. It's simply a matter of weighing the costs vs. benefits.

By that measure, some systems are clearly better than others considering what we are aiming for. If you have a goal, find the path that will get you there safely and efficiently.

When those conditions are satisfied, I quit picking at it. If it's getting you what you want, they why keep looking around? Why keep being skeptical? Because it can't be proven mathmatically every time or isn't quantifiable 100%?

Who cares?

Sometimes we need to turn the nerd inside off and go to work. If it's working, leave it the alone. :)

Sometimes we stare so hard at the trees, that we get disappointed with the forest.

For example, weight loss clients are usually initially delighted with the weight loss they see on the scales. But eventually the weight stabilizes and gains need to be looked for beyond numbers. If lean muscle mass is replacing fat, then fat is still declining even if the weight isn't changing. This is excellent news, but not for people used to seeing progress only in numbers. Quality must eventually replace quantity as a measure.

Another example happened yesterday. I did 17 pullups last week -- the most I've done in a very long time. Not bad for someone about to turn 39. Last month I also did 100 burpees, a personal goal for the first time. So I did the Cindy workout (5 pullups, 10 pushups, 15 body weight squats in a circuit for 20:00) yesterday with high hopes. But I hadn't done it for two months prior.

I crashed at 12:00 with ten reps of the circuit. And my form wasn't very good. What the heck happened? When I did it last, I went a full 20:00 and managed 18 reps with good form.

If I only looked at this result, I would be very depressed. But in terms of my overall performance, I've reached a lot of highs recently. Staring at this particular tree from yesterday would make me depressed. But looking at the forest of overall health and performance, I'm feeling fairly happy.

So don't depress yourself if the numbers don't show what you want. Quality is not always quantifiable.

Here we go again. Read the mass media and be even more misinformed than if you didn't.

So here we have another New York Times article that gets almost everything wrong. As usual. You couldn't stack this one with more nonsense if you tried. It's all here: exercise doesn't help weight loss, the fat burning zone exists, etc., etc. The research talked about in the piece looks set up purposely not to burn fat and then....surprise, surprise.....the participants didn't lose much weight. Therefore extra post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC), otherwise known as afterburn, supposedly doesn't exist. Brilliant. The researchers quoted even said they deliberately made the exercise easy -- cycling at 55% capacity. Yes, 55%!!! No wonder the exercisers didn't lose weight. How could they?

If any friends or relatives read this garbage then you'e going to have to spend a lot of your time showing them the fallacies of the piece. Every time this happens we get taken back a notch in fighting obesity. As if it wasn't hard enough already.

Sorry for the negativity. Hopefully the next post will be more positive.

Got a bad, bad case of 'em. Some have commented that they're happy seeing me write more IMA-related posts and I appreciate the feedback. Unfortunately, that isn't likely to last -- the posts, that is. I haven't been very happy with my IMA practice for some time and that doesn't look to change much. A small wave of nostalgia hit a few weeks ago but I was surprised at how quickly it disappeared. I'm just past that point in my life.

My personal evolution towards martial fitness is, however, progressing without a hitch. I'm starting to see more and more that I can teach in this new framework and be a much happier teacher than I was with trying to teach IMA. Teaching IMA was ....umm...."less than fair" shall we say. I'm SOOOOO much happier using martial fitness to get people in shape and fix their bodies. And you have to do what makes you happy.

Truth be told, most of the IMA crowd still wants to "party like it's 1899" and that's how it will always be. Nothing will ever change for them. On the other hand, people who want fitness are very happy to learn an approach that values their joints and teaches an Asian, balanced way to health and harmony. Of the two communities, there's no room at all in one and a vast, open space in the other. Hmmm....Go West, young man. :)

I'm about to order powerclubs for the school and this will likely accelerate these tendencies even further. I see practically endless possibilities for using the clubs from a martial fitness perspective. Circular and spiral strength add a lot of comlexity to the usual strength training paradigm. And IMA people are always looking for heavy weapons that they can never find, when this similar tool is readily available. Finally, shoulder rehab should be a real possibility with the clubs -- something I'm very interested in.

Hmmm....strength building, finesse adding, rehabing capability, no traditional baggage -- starting to see the benefits of this approach?