What are you doing to stretch yourself?

A few weeks ago I posted about comfort, and how it needed to avoided at all costs if you want to change for the better.

This post is not relating to health and fitness specifically, but that is included. I am talking about general personal growth and development.

Getting out of your comfort zone is as much of a habit as anything else. Become a ballsy person, you'll be amazed how people respond to you.



STOP

Ask yourself some questions these questions

• When was the last time that you took a big risk?

• When was the last time you made yourself really uncomfortable?

• Have you ever got rid of something that is time/resource consuming and you could do without, just to see how you cope?

• If you set a goal, do you tell the world? Or do you keep it to yourself, just in case you fail?

How do you stack up? Not well? Then I invite you to do the following challenges:

Comfort challenges are designed to take you out of your comfort zone. They are designed to make people look at you, question you and judge you. The empowering part is that you can do these things and in reality most people don't notice; some people smile and the rest just look confused. What were you so worried about? Your comfort zone has just expanded.

1. Wear fancy dress to the gym, when asked say 'I was getting bored of my routine'

2. Ask a 10 strangers in 10 minutes for a hug, when asked say 'I've had a rough day'

3. Drive around your local town, windows down playing stupid music at maximum volume for at least one song. (Day time only!)



Elimination challenges are based on appreciating how much time is wasted on a daily basis, and how much money is then subsequently wasted on convenience. Generally our lives are far too cluttered and require streamlining for clarity of thought and direction. I do not advocate living like a monk, but want simply to demonstrate how much extra stuff there is.

1. Media diet.

• Sell your television
• No news/papers (ask a well informed colleague if you have missed anything)
• No social networking (try talking to your friends)

2. Food crackdown

• Halve or even quarter your food budget, be amazed at what you can live on and how much healthier your diet is when you can't afford to eat processed rubbish. £25 a week is enough to feed me healthily, a 90kg active male, so most will require less than that.

3. Batch your tasks

• Check your email once per day/week or cook once per week (Sunday ritual). It doesn't matter what you choose, but restrict yourself from wasting time and become more productive. Then you can spend the time you have earned doing what you actually want to be doing, living your life! 

Stretching challenges are the most effective challenges to encourage personal growth.

• Set yourself a goal over which you have total control and make it something far beyond anything you have ever done before. Then announce it to the world, tell everyone you know.
• EG. I am going to be fluent in a language this time next year

We are amazing when under pressure, when there is no option but to go forward.

So after lots of preaching, you may be wondering what I'm doing to challenge myself:

1. I've sold my car and resisted the urge to buy a new one, amazingly I'm still alive. I remember a time when my car being serviced for a day was the end of the world, everything stopped. I was dependent.
2. I've committed to exercising less than 60 minutes per week. I am constantly quoting the science that you only need this much if you work hard enough, time to put up or shut up. (This is a hard one)
3. My smart phone broke and I've not replaced it, it's unnecessary and a time waster
4. I'm going to write a book about the fitness mind-set and I'm telling the world now (That's as far as I've got)
5. I'm only allowed to enter a supermarket twice per week for the next 6 months. I used to waste a huge amount of time food shopping and wasted money on impulse purchases.
6. I'm going to dispose of any item that I haven't used in 9 months.
7. I went food shopping in a full cricket outfit (helmet/pads/spikes/whites) and didn't die form weird looks and laughing children.

Sounds like the manifesto of a hippy, but I think it's going to be fun. What have we got to lose?

Metabolic Chaos

Notes

 

Your body takes glucose in via an insulin receptor. Enzymes then alter the chemical structure of the glucose to generate 4 units of energy.

At the end of the process you have an end product called pyruvate. Back at the very beginning of life, that was the extent of our metabolism.

Usain Bolt is a freak, but a master of glycolysis. When you are doing a 15 second interval on the ropes, it’s all glycolysis. When you hit that ‘wall’ is where glycolysis slows down due to an accumulation of lactate.

He’s the fastest man in the world not because he has a faster top speed than anyone else, but because he has better speed endurance than anyone else.

London Olympics he ran the same as everyone else for 50m , then won by a distance simply because he didn’t slow down.

Somewhere along the way, protobacteria got into the cell and began to metabolise pyruvate, developing a symbiotic relationship with the cell. A parasite became an organelle. They used the krebs cycle to create 32 ATP in the presence of oxygen which was beginning to form in our atmosphere.

Although mitochondria are more efficient they are much slower, glycolysis is fast. When glycolysis is turning over at 100% it is producing far more pyruvate than the mitochondria can handle. So an enzyme called LDH converts pyruvate into lactate.

When you are in a situation where carbohydrates are plentiful, your body needs to clear those glucose molecules because they can’t stay in the blood.

This increases the amount of activity down the chain. As store of energy increase the rate of conversion decreases. Eventually the Kreb’s cycle stops accepting pyruvate at the same rate as it did before meaning that glucose has nowhere to go.

The process is contained.

But there is still too much glucose in the blood so where can it go?

It gets converted into glycogen by glycogen synthase and is stored in the liver (70g stabilising blood glucose brain maintenance), and the muscles (emergency on site usage 200g).

So then that gets filled, because chances are you didn’t have an empty tank to start with

Where next?

The accumulation of fat is a result of excessive energy availability, and occurs as a protective method against damage. Fortunately the production of TGs is not unregulated an can only happen at a certain rate.

This results in many more glucose molecules sitting in the blood. In an effort to reduce this, your pancreas secretes more insulin.

Then your cells become more insulin resistant, because they still don’t want any glycation damage.

The liver converts excess glucose into triglycerides and inserts them into the blood stream in the form of VLDL ad LDL’s. The are quickly taken up by Adipose tissue. The rest of the sugar sits in the blood stream as more and more insulin is pumped out to counteract it. This is why we don’t recommend a controlled carbohydrate diet to those who have been used to eating a carb based diet and are overweight.

So why do people who eat a lot report low energy levels?

It’s a common complaint which makes no sense, why would someone who is clearly consuming an excessive amount of energy not be able to us it?

They cannot access their food. The constant drip feed of carbohydrates into their body keeps insulin constantly high and keeps the metabolism shifting their food to fat rather than it being useful.

They cannot access the fat to use because HSL is sensitive to insulin and so it cannot release any of the energy.

They also become dependent on exogenous fuel for the maintenance of blood glucose. If you can’t release it from your liver or your fat, then your blood sugar drops.

Katie Baines Pregnancy Blog!

So I found out I was pregnant with our first little one a couple of months ago - a moment of mixed emotions as it was the happiest moment of my entire life but one also tinged with apprehension as I did not know what to expect! I then did what most people would do, and turned to my trusty friend Mr Google, to search for answers to my torrent of questions and find out how it would affect my current lifestyle! As a committed member of RWL gym, my main concerns were around the amount of exercise I could do from early to late pregnancy; most specifically weight training. For the past two years, weight training has been an integral part of my tailored training programme which has seen me go from a size 16 to a current size 8. Having researched this specific query on the internet, I was hugely surprised to find that my apprehensions were not diffused at a click of a button with one concise answer of yes/no as there is still very little research out there on weight lifting in pregnancy. So numerous questions such as 'Am I allowed to lift heavy weights above my head?' to 'Am I allowed to exercise lying on my back?' continued to flood my mind as I was worried that any exertion will harm me and my baby's chances at this very early stage.


Armed with my concerns, I arranged a consultation with my gym coach Joe Hanney to seek advise on my next step as a member at RWL gym. His confidence and expertise put my mind at ease immediately as he reassured me with the plan to create a new exercise programme specifically tailored for pregnant women.
 

In the meantime, Joe has advised me that it is perfectly safe for me to continue with my current exercise programme until the new exercise programme is devised in time for the beginning of my 2nd trimester; I’ll be starting this very soon.

In terms of nutrition, again, there are so many questions – what can and can’t I eat? What does “eat for two” REALLY mean?  Am  I going to be able to carry on eating as I have done since joining RWL?  Am I going to end up putting on loads of weight and going back to square one?   Again, there is so much written on the internet but I found the chat with Joe really put me at ease and actually, aside from the foods that you’re medically definitely not allowed to eat, much of the rest of the stuff out there is pure myth. I definitely don’t want to add on unnecessary weight but I do want to be healthy and make sure I’m eating the right amount (and the right things) for my baby.   I’m noticeably more hungry and it’s a real challenge learning how to deal with that.  So far, I’m finding that by increasing the (healthy) snacks, it’s been fine and it’s helping to alleviate the hunger –I think that’s mostly because I continue to eat every three hours, just as RWL advise you to.

So what next? Well, I’m looking forward to beginning a new chapter with RWL by undertaking my new programme and seeing what impact that has.  Until now, I’ve still been doing my old programme but I have found my body can’t handle it like it used to. I quickly get out of breath, I soon get very hot, and lifting weights I've been used to lifting for ages has become much harder.  I’m still finding my feet in terms of what I can cope with, and obviously I don’t want to do any strenuous moves or lie on my back which might cause harm, so let’s see what my new programme looks like and I’ll report back on how Im getting on in a few weeks time with pictures of my growing bump

The worst food you can eat

Ever need a pick-me-up?

Try knocking back 4 cups of coffee, each with 3-4 sugars!

After the sugary whiplash, euphoria and headache you'll feel much better. But to really add a kick, down a bunch of synthetic chemicals along side it to really make the most of the situation. 

That's what is happening every time you drink a large red bull.

Here's their take on the experience:

Personally I love Red Bull, but only as a company. Their marketing is outstanding, they've picked a great looking product / logo, and have gone hard on the sponsorship of great people and brands.

The only problem is their product is horrendous. It looks like.... (well the less said about that the better), it smells like a chemical factory and it tastes like sugary petrol.

And before you say you think it tastes nice, would you drink decaffeinated sugar-free red bull? No you wouldn't. You like the caffeine and the sugar rush.

Why would you need more energy anyway? The only time you need more energy is if you don't sleep enough, don't eat well or are constantly bouncing your blood sugar levels. The unfortunate truth is that that describes most of the population.

Red Bull is only narrowly the worst offender. Soft drinks of all kinds are pumped full of sugar. Here are some facts:

(The numbers on the left are calories and on the right are grams of sugar per serving. 1 teaspoon is about 4 grams)

Lucozade Energy - Orange 500ml, 500 ml	310					63
Coca-Cola Company - Coke 500 Ml, 500 ml	210					54
Copella - Apple Juice, 500 ml	230					52
Sainsbury's - Pineapple Juice, 500 ml	230					55
Relentless - Original Flavor Energy Drink, 500 ml	215					52

Do you drink sugary drinks often, drink tea with sugar or have soft drinks while you're out and about? Over time all of these habits will make it very difficult for you to lose fat. This is because constantly pushing simple sugars into your blood stream makes it very difficult for your body to control the amount circulating. This is what leads to the need for a 'sugar hit' and perpetuates the vicious cycle. The result is your body not accepting the sugar and it staying in the blood. Next stop - diabetes. 

The really sticky situation is with fruit juices. I can't understand why it is a general conception that fruit juice is healthy. All fruit juice, cranberry to pineapple, is just a bomb waiting to strike. Fresh fruit is stripped of fiber, which is what makes fruit healthy, and all your left with is the sugar. It is true, they do contain more nutrients than soft drinks, but then so does concrete.

If you like oranges, eat oranges. They come ready made, with no need to process!

Avoid drinks with calories in as a matter of urgency. Drink water and lots of it. Drink between 3-4 litres a day, or until your urine is pale. This behaviour is paramount if you would like to improve your body composition because it will allow your body to use your fat as a fuel. After all that is the goal, if you cut the sugar, your body has to run on something.

Keep your eyes on the prize

There may be no heroic connotation to the word "persistence", but the quality is to the character of man what carbon is to steel.

Napoleon Hill 


Improving your health and physique, generally, involves; organisation, definite goals with definite plans, creativity, consistency, desire and focus, and although these principles may be understood, they must be applied with PERSISTENCE.

By definition a lack of persistence is the only cause for failure, as this failure can only appear when persistence ceases. The good news is that the only the only trait necessary to maintain persistence and therefore eliminate failure is DESIRE.



Every success in human history has been bred from a keen desire to achieve. Remember this fact: apathy breeds mediocrity and when it comes to being the best, moderation is a vice.

Announce to yourself what you really want, and be specific, as only people who have a burning desire to change ever do. If you are honest with yourself and discover that you would only 'like' something, then appreciate that if your desire is moderate then your results will follow suit.

To replace apathy with desire, draw on the support of people in a similar situation to yourself. Choose friends or colleagues who also want to banish the possibility of failure, and use them to fuel your desire and maintain your persistence by committing to each other's success. Spend as much time with them as possible.

Remember, spontaneous or occasional effort is of no value to you or anyone else in your social group, all it does is bring everyone down. In order to persist you must apply all of the rules until they become habitual, this is the only way to develop the mind of the person you would like to become.


Thankfully persistence is a state of mind, and therefore can be consciously cultivated. To do this follow these principles:

• Intense desire - Knowing what you want is the first and most important step towards the development of your desire. Focus on your goal and prepare to make this a priority in your life.

• Self-reliance - The belief that you have the ability to succeed irrespective of what happens is invaluable. When you have accepted this you embrace total responsibility for your success or failure and you can eliminate the validity of all excuses.

• Habit - When you implement positive habits, it becomes more inconvenient to change your lifestyle back to how it was, than it is to keep going and succeed.

• Confidence in a plan - Even a weak plan encourages persistence, but a plan which you trust and understand will strengthen your resolve to keep you going when failure looms. Developed confidence in a plan means knowing what you are doing and why you are doing it. Making time to develop your knowledge of health and fitness will help you to understand the impact of your actions on your overall achievement and will allow you to make educated decisions for yourself.

Confidence in your own plan makes you commit to the habits, allows you to rely on yourself to succeed and therefore intensifies you desire to persist.

This weekend there is just such an opportunity:

RWL are giving a seminar at Leicester College this Saturday at 9:30am.

You will learn our proven principles of nutrition from a fundamental point of view. Explaining exactly why it is that what we recommend is so effective for so many people.

Are you so confident in your success that you can afford to miss this?

Metabolic Chaos: A fundamental approach to restoring internal harmony

We'll see you there

info@rwlgym.co.uk

Should you give up wheat?

Simply put, wheat is everywhere. It is without a doubt the most abundant component of the modern diet. It's in bread, beer and breakfast cereals. It also goes in sauces, coats fast food and is included in almost every conceivable kind of processed food.

Wheat has been around for thousands of years, but all of a sudden people have started to question its righteousness. Think about it, since the dawn of time bread has been a symbol of wealth, comfort, charity and wholesomeness; why has this all changed?

The wheat myth begins with the popular notion of 'healthy whole grains'.



90% of the grains eaten are wheat. The truth is that there is no good reason to eat it at all, now this may seem provocative and polarising, but grains are really quite nutritionally sparse. (Yes, even the types with added vitamins. But that's a story for a different post)

It can be taken a step further; grains of all sorts are not only nutritionally sparse, but they also contain substances which will alter your brain chemistry, cause inflammation, upset your stomach lining and make your overweight. 

They are very destructive.

The point at which grains went from being an essential part of every day life, to one of the major contributors to the biggest epidemic in the history of civilisation, was when we began to tinker with the wheat of old, to make it more productive. 

In order to produce enough food for the ever expanding population, governments began to fund agricultural research. They wanted their daily bread to be cheaper and more abundant then ever before. So as a result geneticists were called in to produce a new strain of wheat, fit for the modern world. 

The result was a wheat strain which was completely different to the plant from which it originated, but yielded 10 times more usable produce. 

It goes further, current techniques involve the exposing wheat plants to sodium azide to induce chemical mutagenisis or exposing them to radiation. .

 





Here are three compelling reasons to give up wheat:







1. Wheat proteins
  Wheat contains gluten, which when broken down in the stomach produces a protein called gliadin. It has been known for decades that gliadin is a very bad protein for humans.

Researchers in the 70's found that gliadin binds to opiate receptors in the brain.  Unlike other opiates like heroine and morphine, it doesn't make you high or reduce pain, wheat protein stimulates appetite. 

So when other researchers gave people naloxone (an opiate blocking drug) to counteract the effects of the wheat

they ate approximately 400kcals less over the period of a day. 





2. Blood sugar control

Bread also plays havoc with your blood sugar, take this example: 

Whole wheat bread is healthier than white bread, because it has more fiber and will therefore have a slower rate of digestion. This results in less insulin, less fat gain and generally better health. The GI rating of whole wheat bread is 69 compared to white bread which is 70. 

The rating of sucrose (pure table sugar) is 65.
 
2 slices of whole wheat bread raises blood sugar more than 6 teaspoons of sugar. This is because the type of carbohydrate within wheat is extremely digestible, and hits our blood stream fast. 

GI is not the be all and end all of blood sugar management but it does help to demonstrate that the 'complex carbohydrates' in bread are not as healthy as they are said to be, especially if you are overweight and want to lose fat.

3. Wheat Germ Agglutinin

The wheat plant uses a compound called Wheat Germ Agglutinin to protect itself from attacks by fungi and bacteria. Gliadin breaks down intestinal tissue, much like someone who suffers from coeliac disease,  allowing WGA to make its way into your blood stream. For a great explanation of why this is a bad idea then follow this link. 

A standard wheat based diet:

• Makes you more resistant to insulin
• Disrupts the intestinal lining
• Allows foreign bodies into the blood
• Increases the incidence of hundreds of diseases
• Makes you hungrier

So what do you think?

Bibliography
  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wheat-Belly-Weight-Health-ebook/dp/B00571F26Y/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376995492&sr=8-1&keywords=wheat+belly

Hugh Jackman's 'Wolverine' Workout

Mr Jackman, in preparation for his role as wolverine in X-Men, performed a programme which had him working out at for 3 hours a day 6 times a week and eating 6000kcal per day.

How does that sound to you? Pretty extreme? Yeah me too. But when you break it down it isn't as crazy as you might think



Training
He says his training consisted of 2 hours in the morning and 45 minutes in the afternoon. My guess is that the morning sessions consisted of some pretty muscle specific, high volume, bodybuilding workouts. In the afternoon he will have done a metabolic conditioning session for three quarters of an hour.

Those sessions would have been spilt depending on his rate of recovery. Given that he's eating so many calories that should be pretty quick. So maybe he'd get each body part worked and recovered twice a week.



Food
He says he called up Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, and asked him for advice. The answer was to eat big and clean. A typical meal would consist of two chicken breasts, some broccoli "and maybe some carbs".

The key to getting the calories in was in eating every couple of hours. Realistically it is impossible to fit in that much food any other way.

6000kcals may seem like a lot, but when you are training as hard as he is, and don't forget he isn't a small guy, it isn't as much as it sounds. In order to appropriately recover from that volume of exercise and grow it is necessary.

The question is, could he have got the same benefits from eating and training less? Maybe, but you can't argue with the results.

Get comfortable being uncomfortable

Imagine your ultimate fitness goal...

One of the main facts that you have to come to terms with in life is that your health is a direct result of your behaviour. Your behaviour is governed by your thoughts and your thoughts are moulded by your values and beliefs.

As far as I can see, the difference between people who achieve all of their fitness goals and people who don't is simple:

The people who achieve them have a set of beliefs which force them to make the necessary sacrifices in their life, and the people who fail are comfortable how they are.

If someone gave you that perfect body, would you be able to maintain it? Would be willing to just do the necessary maintenance in diet, nutrition and recovery to keep it that way? Or would you head out to Spain, flaunt it and then lose it in a couple of weeks?

What I imagine is that most people would struggle to keep it. They don't have the burning desire within them to commit to such a responsibility.

Imagine the situation the other way around, if someone were to put 30kgs of fat on your body. How would that make you feel? I'm pretty sure you'd make priority number one to get rid of it. None of your clothes would fit, you would struggle to exercise like you used to and you wouldn't look as good as before. You would be so uncomfortable that you'd have to make it work, no matter what.

You would never miss a gym session, you would never skip a meal. MacDonald's? Are you joking...?

In short, you have the body you're comfortable with, nothing more and nothing less.

How to change your comfort levels

In order to change your baseline level of comfort you need to change the way you think and what you believe.

Throughout our lives our beliefs have been subconsciously conditioned by our friends, family and the media that being extremely healthy is bad. Don't think so?

Have you ever heard of any of these?

Gym Rat
Health Freak
Meathead
Gym Monkey

Has this ever happened?

What happens if you go on a night out and don't drink?

Everyone looks at you like you've been brainwashed and buys your drinks for you so that you're not being boring.

What happens if you go to a restaurant and you order a healthy main and no desert?

The person you're with either tries to convince you to give in, or will not have any themselves and try to make you feel guilty.

What do you think about people who look like you want to look?

You can either regard them with distain, or you can idolise them. Neither is sensible, they are humans with good habits that's it.



The final state of mind is a difficult one to understand, but once you get there it all makes sense.

• Choose to have high self esteem. Be proud of how you look, you put in the effort so reap the rewards.
• Be consciously uncomfortable, understand your flaws, we all have them. But appreciate that in the grand context of things they are minor. Use them as a tool for motivation not a tool for low self esteem.
• Envisage where you want to be short term, then the long term goal will sort itself out.

The idea of self criticism is the exact opposite of what most people will tell you. But when taken in healthy doses, humility is invaluable. Neither narcissism nor self loathing are positive traits, but as with everything in life, a good balance is the most healthy.

How do I build muscle?

Today I realised that most of my recent posts have been pretty abstract in nature, and that they have lacked any definitive action points to take away. They have addressed the finer points of health as opposed to the more mainstream general questions. So in order to restore the balance I'm going to go back to fitness basics: how to build muscle.

Tip

First and foremost, stick this on your wall...

Food

• You need to be eating lean protein, healthy fats, and a combination of fibrous and starchy carbohydrates. Go Paleo, it works. 
• NO ALCOHOL
• Eat a lot of these things, don't kid yourself that you can eat pizza because you're 'bulking'. You aren't bulking, you should get leaner as you build muscle. 
• Aim for between 6-8 meals per day as you should be eating between 30 and 40 kcal per kg of bodyweight per day. That will be necessary if you're eating nutritionally dense food. (I assume you you don't do much exercise other than resistance training in appropriate amounts and you are reasonably lean; around 15%)
• Protein, good fat and carbs at each meal
• Vegetables at each meal
• Drink lots of water

Tip

When people inevitably question your change in lifestyle and chastise you for being boring remember this.

 

Training

• Train each muscle group to failure in each session, I don't care how many reps, or what weight as it doesn't really matter. Anecdotal evidence suggests more sets to failure means a greater training response, but as far as I know no-one has ever proven it in a controlled setting so it could be bro-science. 
• Splitting body parts works, but is only really necessary if you are very advanced. Also it means more time in the gym, which could be spent doing something else. 
• DO NOT OVER-TRAIN, if you are following a body builder's regime and you don't have a body builder's steroid load you will just burn out. Allow enough time to recover.

Tip

When you fall off the wagon, remember '

'You have to be prepared to change who you are to make way for what you want to become'

'You are a direct manifestation of your thoughts and actions'

Then watch this video 

Recovery

• Remember this important truth, when you are in the gym you are stressing out your body to induce a training stimulus. When you are out of the gym your body is healing itself and getting stronger. 
• If you train before you have fully recovered you will not get stronger/bigger as you're breaking down the muscle before it has had a chance to grow back. 
• Eat
• Eat starchy carbohydrates after you work out in a 2:1 carbohydrate to protein.
• Go to bed early and sleep a lot
• Don't drink caffeine the same day after working out
• Supplement correctly 

Tip

Be accountable to someone other than yourself. You may think that you can keep yourself disciplined, but if that was the case I don't think you'd be reading this. Get a coach, get a trainer or maybe just get a friend. Make them the kind of person who won't let it go if you fail. Then you can only succeed, you'll see. 

But don't take it from me, take it from Tony: (31:33)

Supplements

• Make sure you are doing everything above, then consider supplements. They are listed in my order of priority purely for muscle growth.
• Protein (Contains BCCA's plus calories and protein substrate for growth)
• BCAA's (anabolic and anti-catabolic, recovery, performance)
• Zinc (anabolic effect, testosterone and recovery)
• Magnesium (anabolic effect, xenoestrogen clearance and recovery)
• Fish Oils (anabolic effect, anti-inflammatory, fat burning  and recovery)
• Vitamin D (strength and growth)
• Glutamine (recovery)
• Glycine (recovery)
• Goodness Greens (recovery, oestrogen clearance)
• There are many more but that will do you for now

Good luck