Category: Makes You Think

This category covers things that relate probably require some reflection and some time to allow your brain to process more completely. It will be the largest category because the aim of this site is to get people to shift their thinking in some way and to create a new “normal” state. It is safe to say that any post that is included in this category will probably present you with a new piece of information, a new way of looking at something, or a different take on what is already considered common sense or common knowledge.

F#@k Moderation – An Interview with Dave Tate

This interview with Dave Tate by T-nation’s Nate Green is amazing! They cover a ton of different topic ranging from how to make some insane cash working as a bouncer at a strip club to what it’s like to stop competing as a power lifter.

Dave is a tank. He’s an extremely large human being who has achieved many feats that 99.9 percent of the population won’t and can’t. He’s genetically gifted from a strength and muscle growth point of view, but he’s also genetically gifted in how he approaches life:

I have two speeds: blast and dust.

It’s just a personality trait. I’ve talked with a lot of entrepreneurs, top CEOs, business people, and athletes that operate in the same mode. You’re 100 percent on for weeks or months, just knocking everything out until nothing is left standing. And then, boom, you’re on the couch for three weeks. Training and business have been that way for me. Fuck moderation. I don’t have time for it.

If I have some Oreos, I’m going to eat the entire bag. I’m not going to have two or three. If I’m going to launch a business, I’m going to do it all the way. If I’m going to train my ass off, then I’m going to do it hardcore. I would rather have no cheat meal for 12 weeks and then eat like a fucking hog for a month, than just have a cookie here and there. I’m going to run on all cylinders and then just disappear.

What I’ve managed to figure out is that I can stagger the roles in my life. So if training is going to be in 100 percent blast, then I know business is going to be in dust. If business is going to be in blast, training is going to fall back in dust. That’s just the way it is.

I admire this all or nothing approach and I seem to be drawn to people who throw it all on the line or throw it out the window. I understand these people a lot better than those who are seeking marginal success and average result. As a coach I love working those athletes bringing intensity and undying passion to their training because these individuals test training method better than anything else – you find out very quickly if the program you set-up is working for them or not because they do everything you tell them to with the intensity that is needed to maximize the outcome.

I’m this way in many areas of my life. I’m 100% on or I’ve buggered off and thrown my passion into something else. It works fairly well with athletic pursuits.

But it can be a pain in the ass for those around you. My friends don’t get to see me as much as they used to when I was trying to be an average sort of person with balance in my life. My family likes that I am happy but sometimes the quality of the time we spend together isn’t the best because I’m thinking about training.

It can also be a pain in the ass for me as well. This all or nothing approach means that I’ll spend weeks or months at something and then go through a period of spending no time doing it. The benefit of this is that it provides the chance for unconscious motor learning to occur so if I return to the task quickly I will be better at it. But I may not return to it for months at which point many of the gains I made are gone and the time away means that no new skills have been learned. Case in point, I dead lifted for the first time in 2 months yesterday and while I pulled 325 lbs, this is 15 lbs LESS than I pulled the last time I did it. If I have pulled once a week for the last 2 months I’m pretty sure I’d but at 350 or 360 by now.

I accept that moderation and balance are not my style and I think I’m in good company with this.

Finding Our Space – New Facility

On Tuesday we started our search for a space for the new SST location in Richmond Hill. This isn’t the same as looking for a new place to live. There are so many things to consider that one doesn’t even have to think about when they are looking for a new apartment or house. For example, my concerns when house hunting are grocery shopping, proximity to riding, proximity to a decent gym, space and safety. These things aren’t of much concern when looking for a place to open a gym.

So far our concerns are focused on a few key areas:

Parking. We need lots of parking. Our needs are somewhat different from a typical commercial or industrial business in that our peak times are going to be early in the morning (6-10) and after school (from 4 PM on). This offers some flexibility but we do need to be sure there is room for all of the people who come to the facility to park regardless of when they come to workout.

Location relative to where the people live, where they are coming from and where they are going to. We need to be easy to get to. While our services are first rate, people won’t show up if it takes them too long to get there or if they have a difficult time getting home. We saw a few locations that were the ideal space – very long for a good running track – but they were well away from the residential areas, which took them out of the running.

Dimensions. We’re looking for a space that is between 3500 – 6000 sq feet but it needs to have a track / turf area. Given that SST focuses on making athletes faster, the track needs to be long enough to allow the athletes to get up to top speed but leave them with enough room to slow down. For this reason, a 60 / 60 space isn’t going to provide us with the length we need. The space we’re looking for needs to be a rectangle and not a square.

Lighting. A location that has poor lighting inside is not going to help motivate people to work hard. If there are no windows people may feel closed in and not like coming to workout. If the lighting outside is bad, people won’t feel safe coming to the center when it is dark.

Feeling we get from the space. Can we see a functioning gym existing in the space and one that we are happy to work in? Once we sign the lease and open the center we are there for years. If the space cannot be made into a comfortable location, there’s no point in setting-up shop. The center’s success will be determined by the attitudes of the people who work there so we need to make sure that we can be upbeat all of the time. The space itself needs to motivate people to push past their perceived limitations and achieve what they believe is impossible.

Vision for the final product. We need to be able to visualize the finished facility from a layout perspective. There needs to be a logical layout for the offices, track and workout areas where nothing presently exists and this layout needs to make the most of the available space.

The process of finding the perfect space is a challenge but one that I’m enjoying and learning from. It’s a challenge that almost every business goes through so I know we’re going to open in a great location that meets the needs of our athletes and our team!

The Dreamer of Ridiculous Dreams

I haven’t written on newstasis in a while because I have had very little inspiration. I left my management job at SST in August and found a job as an IT recruiter. I figured I would try it out and see what it was like and for 7 weeks I was a recruiter. When I took the job I thought that I had found something that I was going to love and make a career out of. I didn’t. I do not have what it takes to be a successful IT recruiter; mainly because I do like it and can’t see myself doing it for much longer than a couple of months.

But there was a lesson in the whole process and now that I am back with SST I’m able to see things more clearly.

I am a pathological optimist. Rachel would say that I have a tendency to dream and I would agree with her. Often times my dreams taint my judgement and I make decisions that are based on the happy-blissful feeling I get when I’m thinking about all the things that are possible vs. the slightly muted or dull feeling that is associated with the acceptance of how things actually are. The end result is that I agree to things that are, in hindsight, not suited for me. IT recruiting is another example of this tendency.

I knew even before I started doing it that the fit was wrong – Rachel knew, my friends knew, my family knew – but such was my decision to leave SST and try something new. They all supported me because that’s what you do with someone who dreams the ridiculous dream.

At 35 I’m not sure I should even attempt to change this aspect of my personality because I don’t see it to be a flaw. In fact, I think people could benefit from being a little more optimistic about the future. I would say that being hopeful for the possibility for change is a requirement for things to get better; at the very least, it’s a requirement for seeing things in a different and better way. This seeing things as better and believing that they can be this way is the first step in make your world the way you want it to be. Even if this means taking on jobs that you don’t like after 7 week.

Hey, I could have been right and found my happiness as an IT recruiter.

What If I Was Right When I Was Young…

Rachel got me thinking the other day. She said that “young people KNOW what makes them happy”. We were having a conversation about what my next move should be and she implied that maybe I was on the right track when I was at university right before Natalie got died. In the 13 years that have past I hadn’t really considered that the younger me did know what he wanted out of life and instead felt that I could think my way onto the path. Her words really resonated with me.

At my new job as an IT recruiter I work with a lot of younger people. I’m the oldest person the team and while I bring a lot to the table in terms of life experience, maturity and a keen ability to connect with and engage others, I lack something that the younger recruiters have – mindless drive and ambition. I am all too aware of everything about my job and have a very difficult time looking past the next 2 years of extremely hard work to build my network and create enough relationships with people to see my way into higher earnings. I work hard and give it my all, but my all seems to be missing something that the younger people all possess; I know what two years of hard work feels like and I know what I’m going to have to sacrifice to be successful as a recruiter. At 35, it’s very hard to overlook these things if I’m not able to get lost in whatever it is I’m doing. Young people don’t seem to have this issue.

The recruiters who are in their early to mid-20’s have no difficulty with the hours, the time on the phone and all the paperwork. They seems to just exist in the role doing whatever is needed to be successful. They are highly driven and attack their jobs without so much as a thought about what they are going without by working so hard. The truth is that I am kind of jealous that they are able to function at work this way because they attack work the same way I attack my training and my passions. I think one of two things is happening – either they have found their passion in their job or they can’t tell the difference between work and passion so they approach them as the same thing.

I do recall a time when I was younger and working for Ranger Online. I approached the job with the same intensity and passion that I now direct towards cycling. While it did start to consume me, I can see the parallel between my behaviour during this time and the behaviour I see in the younger recruiters I now work with. It was easy to work extremely hard and lose myself in the job and I did so without thinking about it; something that I haven’t been able to do for more than a few months at a time since then. In fact, the length of time that I am able to stay committed to something that I don’t fully enjoy is getting shorter and shorter as time go on. It seems that my threshold is getting lower with each new experience.

So on Thursday when Rachel mentioned to me that maybe I was on the right path before and have been struggling to find my way back over the last decade, I was able to hear it. I’ll admit that I don’t find my professional life all that satisfying. Sure I do a good job and my bosses are happy with my performance but it’s a constant struggle to forget what I’m doing, forget that I don’t like what I’m doing or to stop thinking about what I’d rather be doing. I have no sense of surety or certainty with my professional actions – I know that I’ll advance my career if I do them, but I rarely feel like I’m on the right track. As such, I don’t work mindlessly and my ambition sorely lacking.

What if I was right when I was younger? What if I had yet to be impacted by life experiences and was simply doing what I was passionate about and enjoyed? Wouldn’t that mean that I had already found my path and that the way back to it was a matter of forgetting what I have learned since Natalie died and simply return to doing what I was doing before? Could it be that easy?

Hamstring Weaknesses

Most of the time we do not use our hamstrings very much. The action of these muscles is hip extension and knee flexion. To facilitate significant recruitment of these muscles in normal life you either need to pick-up fairly heavy things (for hip extension) or run forward or climb something (for knee flexion). These are things that we do not do very often in modern live and in all likelihood the most work you do for your hamstrings is getting into and out of the car followed by getting in and out of bed. Compared to the rest of the lower body the hamstrings get almost no work. This leads to the potential for problems.

The two main issues that come out of this are muscle strength imbalances and muscle recruitment deficiencies.

When you have muscles that are imbalanced, the antagonist muscle group is able to contract faster and with more force; in this case the quads for knee extension. If the force is too great the hamstrings can get pulled or torn. The knee and hip joints may also suffer alignment or tracking problems; given that antagonist muscle pairings do offer structural support to the joints making them more stable.

When you have recruitment deficiencies you lack complete control over a muscle. Consciously you may not be able to contract it at will, or with very little force. Unconsciously when you move, the fibers will not contract is efficiently as they could. For example, 50% of the fibers may fire when 35% are needed or 80% fire when 95% of them are needed.

Unless you live with knee or hip pain caused by weak hamstrings you are not likely to notice anything until that rare occasion that you have a very sudden movement that is well outside the realm of normal. For example a car crash were you need to undo your seat belt and crawl you way out of a flipped vehicle or when you suddenly run very fast and your hamstrings are too weak to slow knee extension. New repetitive movements may aggravate patella tracking issues that are caused by hamstring weakness.

Considerations when training hamstrings muscles:

They are primarily fast twitch fibers so they need to be trained quickly on the concentric phase of a movement and the rep ranges should be no more than 10.

You recruit more fibers when you put a muscle on length. A great example of this is allowing your hips to drift back before you start to go down with squatting or when you start to lower the weight with dead lifting. Doing is effectively tilts your hips forward relative to the legs which stretches the hamstrings.

Hamstring muscles adapt very quickly so you need to perform a variety of different movements to train them effectively. Lying, standing, one leg, and Swiss ball curls for knee flexion. Romanian dead lifts, dead lifts, glut/ham raises, reverse hyper extension for hip extension.

Recruit these muscles when you are training your quads by deliberately trying to contract them – by driving the force through the heels with leg press, you transfer some of the effort onto the hamstrings.

If your hamstrings are weak, or if you believe they are, take the time to give them extra attention on leg day. They will catch up quickly if you focus on it and this will improve performance and decrease the risk of injury.

You Feel How You Think, Not How You Are

“It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.” – Viktor Frankl

I love this quote because it shows us the simplest path to happiness. It explains why the daydreaming fools is usually happier than the focused CEO of a successful corporation.

It also goes a long way in explain much of my behavior and mood. I am a dreamer who suffers when others inhibit my dreams. I believe that I can do almost anything and when I day dream or allow my mind to float I do great things. Most often these thoughts of greatness boost my mood and charge my focus creating a mindset that allows me to actually make some progress towards doing the things I dream.

The inverse is always true – when I am brought back to someone else’s reality and am reminded of all the limitations, hurdles and potential setbacks that exist in my quest towards greatness and soon I feel like garbage. I make the decision to come to their reality and allow my mood to nose dive – in fulfilling my part of the social contract and engaging those who engage me, my ability to actualize my purpose is hindered by the constraints of what the other person has created as their reality. Beauty cannot be created when one is dealing with the thoughts of what is wrong/bad/negative in the world.

Viktor Frankl should have been suffering when he came to the conclusion he wrote above as he was in a concentration camp. However, he wasn’t. He was working with the other prisoners trying to help their mental health as they were worked to the bone. As their therapist, he was their guide towards a more enlightened way to thinking that would produce hope and lead to happiness. He believed that ones experience of life in the camp was determined by their thoughts about their experience vs. what the experience is actually like. He realized that what one believes reality to be very quickly becomes reality.

My first experiences with Frankl’s approach came in the time immediately following Natalie dying. I had been suffering pretty badly and had started to wonder if she had ever really known just how much she meant to me. My counsellor at the time mentioned that the type of sadness I felt now was the inverse of the joy I felt before so it was unlikely that Natalie hadn’t been able to pick up on the positive feelings I had. As I let this statement float over me I started to feel better because I knew it was true. She did know how much I cared for her and how much joy that she brought to my life. While this realization did not remove the grief, it did change my thoughts so that I no longer doubted that she knew how I had felt about her. This eliminated the negative consequence to the thoughts of doubt and freed me from some of the darkness.

Recently I have reconnected with Frankl’s lesson. I spend more time thinking about the world as I want it to be vs. how I believe it to be. I consume the news less because I am powerless to change much of what I see on the television or read on the Internet. I spend less time engaged in political discussions or talking to people about things they don’t like but have no interest in changing. I try to spend time around the people who radiate happiness and optimism and try to avoid those who are dark or conflict prone because their reality will infect mine. All in all these choices have allowed me to accomplish more of what I need to get done while helping me maintain a bright outlook. I am feeling how I want to feel.

What I Learned At SST – Part 2

Here is part two of the What I Learned At SST article – you can read part one here.

  1. GVT, GBC, and rest-pause. Taught well by Charles Poliquin, Larry passed along a few program pointers to me that made a world of difference in my body composition. German Volume Training, German Body Composition and rest-pause are a few of the methods that I was able to incorporate quickly. Basic GVT is 10 sets of 10 reps (or 10 sets of 8 or 6 reps with the same weight) super setted with antagonistic opposite movements. 10 sets of 10 is mentally draining because after 6 or 7 reps your mind is screaming “that’s about enough work for now”. GBC is lactate inducing workouts which are more metabolic and help to boost growth hormone – great for making you feel very sick. Rest pause is a 3 part set with 15 seconds of rest separating each of the 3 parts. The goal is to give your body enough recovery to allow for a few more reps. While not as mentally tough as 10 sets of 10, it is a fantastic method for boosting performance in the later sections of a climbing attack on the trail.
  2. How to dead-lift and squat. Probably the most important things I learned while at SST to be completely honest. My body grew once I started doing these movements consistently – not surprising given that they recruit more muscle than any other movements. There’s something special about driving from a deep squat to lock-out on rep 6 of what should have been a 5 rep set or pulling twice your body weight from the floor. These movements have given me a huge increase in strength for my standing attacks or climbing on the bike. Plus, it’s pretty sweet to actually know how to do them.
  3. Training should be cycled with the athlete increasing focus in one area of training while maintaining fitness in all other areas. Basically, if you train for strength from September to February spend some time maintaining your cardiovascular fitness and lactate tolerance.
  4. The enthusiasm of younger athletes is contagious. Most young people are not bitter and have not yet learned to be cynical towards the world. In fact, most of them haven’t realized that you can be anything but passionate towards the things you do. When you observe someone engage their work-out or their life with passion you cannot help yourself from adopting some of this passion. Any time my management role would start to get me down I would leave my desk and hit the floor to coach some of the athletes. Almost immediately my stress would be gone and I would be reminded why I took the job in the first place – because I want to see people achieve their potential. Without fail this would lift me up and allow me to focus on the important stuff.
  5. I am happier when I get evenings and the weekend off. I really do enjoy sleeping in, but it’s tough to get up and get your day going when you don’t have to start work until 11:30. I don’t sleep in until noon on weekend and seem to have accomplish more each day waking at 5:30 am vs. 10:30 am.
  6. Great people can make bad first impressions. Given that it was a great place to work, a lot of people applied to work there. I got to look at a lot of resumes and interview a number of different people. The best hire I made was Sean and, for one reason or another, his resume had spelling mistakes on it. I passed on it initially because it figured the spelling mistakes were an indication of how he would pay attention to detail. However, I ended up calling him, bringing him in for an interview and we hired him immediately. Sean turned out to be the best hire I made while I was there and he is a truly remarkable individual who pays special attention to needs of the athletes. How he is in real life is nothing like how I thought he would be, but given that his first impression was made with a resume with spelling mistakes I made the same call that most other people would. Looking back I’m really glad I didn’t hold onto this judgement too strongly.
  7. Hamstring and rotator cuff muscles are primarily fast twitch fibers and should be trained accordingly. For these muscles I rarely take the reps above 10 and usually keep the sets around 8 reps. My cycling pedal stroke changed when I learned that hamstrings are fast twitch. When I stand-up and ride, I try to use my quads, glutes and hip flexors to push and pull and I move between 60 and 80 RPMs. When I am sitting on the saddle the pedal rate is faster – around 75 – 100 –  and I focus on tightening my core to stabilize my hips. The end result is that I really feel the hamstrings working when the RPMs go above 80 and this takes some of the focus off of my quads. Since I didn’t train rotator cuff muscles before I started working at SST, learning that they are fast twitch didn’t have any practical impact on the way I trained them; I just started training them.

SST is a fantastic place to work and those who put in the time to learn while they are there DO learn a lot. It’s a tough job but the environment is conducive to self-improvement if you’re willing and able to invest in yourself. I was lucky to have had the opportunity to work with so many dedicated athletes and hard working strength coaches, and of course Larry, Laura, Jermane and Grant.

What I Learned At SST – Part 1

Inspired by Chris Brown’s What I Learned At SST, here is part 1 of my list of the top things that I took out of my time there:

  1. Talent is obvious but training is necessary. You can tell an athlete by watching them move and you can predict performance based on how a person performs certain tasks. While their gift may be sufficient to help them get pretty far in sport, they need training to achieve the highest level. If a person does not have talent, they are fighting an uphill battle to make their mark; drive can make up for the talent gap, it just doesn’t happen very often.
  2. Drive is a shared characteristic among high performance athletes. Regardless of talent, all athletes who want to perform at a high level are incredibly driven. Most of the athletes at SST had exceptionally high drive and this made working with them a breeze. They did everything they were told, they applied the coaching suggestions whenever they could and they pushed themselves to improve. There were a few that required more motivation and it was fairly obvious to the coaching team that these individuals would not enjoy the same level of success as most of the others. Watching elite athletes train made me feel more comfortable with my own training style as I enjoy working-out with a lot of intensity.
  3. A trained body adapts to changes in training very quickly. Larry, the owner, would say that an athlete should never do the same hamstring workout more than once every 4 weeks. His mentor Charles Poliquin says that the body adapts to a particular workout after 6 times. Both of these points of view come from working with elite level athlete so one should keep their training and skill level in mind when they are designing their own program; but the essence of what they are saying applies to everyone. No matter what you do, the body will adapt to it in an attempt to make it very easy and cost effective. This is why people need to change their programs frequently in terms of reps, sets, movement speeds and movement patterns. The more trained you are, the more frequently you need to change things up.
  4. A good base of structural balance should be achieved before proceeding to loaded resistance training. Seems obvious but most people including myself don’t go about it this way. Instead we work on building muscle and only start to fix the imbalances once the injuries start. The fact of the matter is that someone who is well balanced will have much better movement patterns which will result in fewer injuries than someone who isn’t balanced.
  5. People make working at a job either fun or work. Work is what we do to make money that frees us from having to make and grow everything we consume. It’s a necessary evil in life. However, how we engage work and the level of satisfaction we get out if it is impacted a lot by other people. This is not to say that we don’t choose our own attitude. I’m just saying that it is easier to say happy when those around us are happy. The dark cloud will bring down the moral of a successful organization faster than anything while a failing company that has happy workers will be a fun place to work.

Part 2 will be coming in a few days so stop back and check it out.

The Truth About Nutrition

The Truth About Nutrition, An Interview with Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S. by T-nations Chris Shugart reveals some interesting facts about nutrition that go against the traditional view of how human physiology works. Much of what he says isn’t new to the body building or peak performance group but it does challenge some of the more pervasive views of our food consciousness. For example, whole grain cereals as being a healthy choice for breakfast; as if they are not the well marketed equivalent to an extra large cup of triple sugar coffee and a doughnut.

A few things to consider that I took out of the article:

  • The food you eat should rot fairly quickly – notice the shelf-life difference between boxed cereal and blue berries.
  • Food is only as good as the environment that it was produced / raised in. Cows that don’t have the chance to walk around and have to eat grain (cereal) that isn’t part of their naturally evolved diet tend to suffer a lot of ailments that lower the quality of their meat.
  • When alcohol is in our blood stream our body stops processing fat for energy – beer and a few slices of pizza WILL boost fat storage more than eating too much pizza alone.
  • Carbohydrates are non-essential. The body will make whatever glucose it needs from protein. This doesn’t mean that you will achieve peak performance if you don’t eat carbs, you just won’t die as you would if you didn’t eat either fat or protein.

There is a lot more in the article and I recommend you give it a good read.

CanFitPro Toronto 2008 – Some Lessons/Observations

I attended the CanFitPro conference in Toronto this weekend. Rachel volunteers at it every year and brought me along so she could share the experience with me. I had a really good time and learned a lot. I took the Spinning orientation course on Thursday because I want to start creating my own indoor cycling classes and didn’t have the credentials to do it; now I do and will write more about that in a later post. Below are some of the things that I took out of attending the conference that didn’t relate to indoor cycling:

  • Whey protein is both anabolic and anti-catabolic. People who have normal kidney function will not run into difficulties by taking it. In fact, the positive effects of taking it are so great that almost everyone should be taking it.
  • When someone has an allergy, their body’s cannot handle a certain protein that a food contains. People who have difficulty with lactose are intolerant and NOT allergic to it. For these people, they may be able to consume whey isolate because it contains almost no lactose.
  • Elderly people, children and some athletes do not get enough protein. The protein requirements for endurance athletes are greater than all other athletes because once the stored glycogen is used up, the body starts to use protein to create glucose to keep movement going.
  • The absorption rate of creatine is almost 50% when taken with 90 grams of carbs or with 45 grams of whey and 45 grams of carbs. Therefore, if you are taking creatine, you should be taking it in your post workout shake and never by itself.
  • Free range or wild meat is better for you than commercial meat because it contains less chemicals and it grew-up eating what it evolved to eat; not relying on humans to create a diet. It’s important to realize that commercial farmers are going to feed their livestock to maximize profit vs. boosting nutrient density.
  • I have developed a sort of immunity to beautiful sales people. I’m more likely going to listen to what an average person has to say about a product vs. a beautiful person. When I talk to beautiful people about what they are selling I get that feeling in my gut that someone is trying to control me. I credit “Blink” for this sense and it is still most important book that I have ever read.
  • The fitness industry is loaded with trends and distracting products and marketing. Is it any wonder why many outsiders don’t want anything to do with fitness professionals given the line of crap that many of us spew? I don’t believe that standing on a vibration plate for 10 minutes is the same workout as running on a treadmill for 60 minutes; but many people are convinced to believe this and are out thousands of dollars because of it. Oh, and gym sticks are so hot right now.
  • Almost anything works for as long as it takes the body to adjust to it. Time under tension is one variable to control, but you’ll get good results not caring about it for a while so feel free to switch things up every now and then.
  • Power endurance is built by eliminating the rest time between the strength move and the power move during the super set – do your heavy front squats and move immediately to your jump squats instead of waiting 45 to 60 seconds between them.
  • It’s a bad idea to schedule a pre-season NFL game the same weekend as a fitness conference. Buffalo and Pittsburgh played at the Rogers center on Thursday. When I walked out of the convention center and happened upon 1000’s of NFL fans I couldn’t help but notice the difference between these two groups of people. On one side is a group of people who care about their health and fitness and on the other side are a group of people who care about football and tailgating. It took me a few minutes to figure out what was going because I had been inside most of the day where the fitness people were looking like fitness people being lean and eating fruit and healthier food. Outside the people had a different type of mass, there was lots of beer and the smell of sausages filled the air. Both groups got along in so far as the fitness people could feel superior about their lifestyle choices and the football fans knew they could kick some ass.

I had a lot of fun and look forward to going back to it next year! If you have never gone you may want to consider it.