Is Your Workout Getting You Results Or Just Making You Tired?

I had to repost this great article from Fitness Spotlight. Scott and Mike have put together an excellent site. Covers Nutrition, Mental and Physical training principals that are solid, no bullshit and very effective. This latest post on Goal setting is really very good.

Have a great weekend.--Jay




If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
- Lewis Carroll

“He who fails to plan, plans to fail”
- Proverb

One of the biggest problems I see with people and their workouts is that they don’t actually have a tangible goal. They want to workout X number of times per week for Y number of minutes. But what does that mean? Does that mean walking on a treadmill? Or doing an hour of various weightlifting exercises (and which ones at what intensity)? Cardio-kickboxing? Beating on a punching bag? Running 15 miles?

Or they have goals like running a half-marathon in under 2 hours or squatting their bodyweight. But they have no plan to get there. Their efforts are haphazard and completely random. Unfortunately, without a set of goals and a plan to reach those goals, you never know where you’re going to end up. You’ll likely float from one thing to the next, never making any major progress because you never planned.

It’s time to set some goals and create a plan to reach them.

Goals Must Be S.M.A.R.T.

So before you sit down and decide just what it is that you want to do, we need to know what makes a good goal. Goals should be:

• Specific - Do you know exactly what it is that you’re trying to do and why?
• Measurable - Is there a set of criteria you can use for measuring progress?
• Attainable - I lump this in with Realistic, but I’m sure there’s some Life Coach out there that can tell us what it really means.
• Realistic - Can you really and truly accomplish this goal? Stretch goals are good. Unrealistic or unmotivating goals are bad.
• Timely - A goal should have a timeframe. “I want to do X by Y.”

Your goals can be anything you want them to be. Below, I list five of my current performance goals. But yours could be “Lose 50 pounds,” “Get under 12% bodyfat,” “Bench press 350 pounds”… You get the point. As long as your goal represents something to you, it’s worthy.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Sorry-Computer crash-back in a few days

Release Your Inner Masochist

Great article from Donnie Kiernan at Elite Fitness, which is an awesome Website, and has a strong On Line Store along with Great Articles, well, it is owned by Dave Tate, enough said. Here is the opening paragraph,

I can’t help but look at the fitness world today and ask myself, “What the hell happened?”

It was not until the early to mid-1900’s that we even NEEDED a “gym” to exercise in. Before then, people were active enough just working in a factory in New York or a corn field in Nebraska. Even since then, we’ve gone from sweaty warehouses with a couple of bars and some rusty weights to huge, air conditioned buildings with treadmills as far as the eye can see. You wouldn’t want to break a sweat while running, so it’s a good thing we have fans built into the treadmills. No scenery to take in? That’s fine – we’ll replace it with a TV or ten.

This is why I train like I do: with “old school” equipment and minimal luxuries. I first got into this style of training about three years back. I was almost off of active duty in the US Army and decided to get out of the “running five miles a day” mindset and back into the “lift heavy-ass weight” frame of mind. Problem was, I enjoyed training in the outdoors and couldn’t just jump back into the confines of four cold walls with air conditioning.

The solution? Unconventional strength and conditioning

Click here to read rest of article.

BTW, the pic's are from place, if you're ever in the area, stop over. Well lift some heavy stuff, eat some great BBQ.

How A Paleo/Primal Eating Plan Improves Your Health; And Why None Of It Matters

This very timely article was published by Scott Kustes, who I had the pleasure of meeting at our MeatFest 2009 last month.

Here is the take away Cliff notes version, you can read the complete article here.

So what’s the real takeaway from all of this? Frankly it’s that if you’re eating real foods, the foods that form the basis of the Paleolithic/WAPF/Primal dietary patterns, you don’t have much need to worry yourself over individual vitamins or really even sit down and count out your grams of carbs, fat, and protein. These things just tend to work themselves out.

In the end, we all just need to go back to the basics. Eat Real Food! Do that and you can forget worrying about the cardiovascular protection of omega-3s or how many egg yolks you should eat to lower your blood pressure.

BTW, The Fitness Spotlight is one of my favorite blogs and I really suggest you bookmark the site and refer to it often.

It cuts through the Bullshit and has spot on articles.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Chipotle Restaurants And The Pigness of The Pig

Well, I snatched another great blog post from The Food Renegade. It featured Joel Salatin and the owners of Chipotle's Restaurants. Click the links to read the complete article and watch the video.

I had a chance to hear Joel speak last month at a local college, great guy.

The Highlights of The Story

• Joel Salatin’s idea that a happy pig is one that gets to fully express its “pigness.” In our culture, Joel says, we don’t ask, “how do we make a pig happy?” We ask, “how do we grow them faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper? That’s not a noble goal.” The concept of the “pigness of the pig” became the Nightline story’s over-arching mantra, the theme that tied it all together. I’ve got a feeling this would make Joel happy, as many other reporters picking and choosing sound bites of Joel’s words have often ignored this key concept.
• When asked why he doesn’t buy pork from factory farms, Steve Ells doesn’t hesitate. “First of all, you can breathe here,” he says, taking in a deep breath of verdant savanna surrounded by wallowing pigs. What a classic moment!
• Steve Ells originally started Chipotle because he wanted to show that just because you were serving food quickly didn’t mean you had to sacrifice quality. “Just because it’s fast doesn’t mean it has to be a typical fast food experience. You can cook great pork, like the pork from Joel’s farm, and you can spend hours braising it to perfection, but then it only takes seconds to serve.”
• Even though Steve’s food costs are slightly more expensive, he’s built a business model that allows for that added expense. In other words, the only reason he’s not serving 100% humanely raised, grass-fed, and pastured meats is because of a supply issue, not a cost issue.

Click here to read the full article

Few more pics

This tired looking guy is my Dive Instructor. He logged over 10 dives during the two days, instructing a group of 5 divers.

If you like to dive and can handle chilly water, you need to consider this site.

It's about 3.5 hours from my place and I hope to visit it at least once a month.

Great Dive Weekend at Gilboa Quarry

Did my Advance Open Water Certification this weekend at the Gilboa Quarry in Findlay Ohio.

Great time as I lived to tell about it.

Pic's speak for themselves, but this is one of the best dive sites in Ohio, if not the best.