Deconstructing Paul Chek by t-nations by Chris Shugart is a bullet point recap of a 4 hour conversation with the therapist / trainer / coach. He has been at it for a very long time and remains in the best shape of his life.

Personally I like the holistic nature of his approach; even though I’m not religious, I can see the value of including all aspects on ones identity into their health and fitness development plan. He draws a distinction between the different religious views that people hold but only in so far as to say that each is a very important aspect of the individual.

• It’s only through a healthy body that you can have a functional, rational mind. Aristotle made his philosophy students workout with the Olympic wresting team. One of the main reasons I train my body is so that my mind works effectively.

• Toxicity means you’re bringing in more toxins from the outside than you can release. You can’t have a functional detoxification system unless you have a functional digestive system. Anyone who’s eating cheap food is likely to have a digestive system that isn’t working.

• If you don’t want to have problems, eat real food. Stop eating all this cheap crap. I’ve had multi-millionaires and world-class professional athletes in my office tell me that organic food is too expensive.I walk them to the window and point to their $140,000 sports car and say, “Eat that fu#ker then! Because when you die they aren’t going to bury that son of a bitch with you!” It’s just a matter of getting your priorities right. The more toxic your body is, the lower your quality of life is.

• We have a tremendous dehydration problem today. The only thing that substitutes for water is water. When you’re drinking water you’re actually drinking nature’s most powerful detoxification agent. The best solution for pollution is dilution. And that means water, not tea, not soda pop, not orange juice… water!

It will probably take a few reads for everything to sink in. Even if you don’t agree with all that he says, try and let his words impact you if for no other reason than he’s 44 and still stronger than everyone you know.

I was tagged by JoLynn from The Fit Shack to participate is a meme and write a post based on the following premise “the blogosphere has come to an end, and you have one last post to write. What would you say?”. She got the idea from Albert of the urbanmonk.net who is going to donate a dollar for every person who trackbacks to him.

The post made by JoLynn is about the addictive power of the sugar, an addiction I have no problem admitting to. My advice is contained in an old article when I posted “eat only enough so that you are hungry in 3 hours and then repeat in the post “If you listen to one thing, listen to his…”. This is the one thing that I have found has made a world of difference in the way I feel and look. It is also the piece of advice that I give out most frequency to anyone who asks me what they can do to improve their energy and the way they look.

But I give out this advice for free so it doesn’t really have any value unless you follow it.

If you are going to the gym or training at all, you should be paying particular attention to what you eat immediately following your workouts because this is the most important time for muscle recovery. After 40 minutes of intense exercise, the body’s initial response to the introduction of sugar is to replenish muscle glycogen and start protein synthesis for muscle repair and not an increase in fat storage which is the non-exercise response. If you can consume the right combination of sugar and protein in water within 30 minutes of ending your workout, you will capitalize on this tendency.

After reading and trying what the author’s online in the following articles I noticed a dramatic increase in my recovery ability in both the gym and on the bike trails. I highly recommend carbohydrate and protein shakes after every workout.

The Window Of Opportunity
The Window of Opportunity—Layman’s Version (Non-Technical)

Reducing Catabolic Hormones

All body builders have a sworn mortal enemy—cortisol. This hormone acts to breakdown muscle tissue, and creates a catabolic environment, contrary to growth.

The most effective way to decrease these catabolic hormones is:

• To consume an easily digested carbohydrate
• Stack it with an easily digested source of protein

Protein Synthesis and Degradation

Skeletal muscle protein synthesis can be defined as the formation of whole muscle proteins, from individual amino acids.

Protein degradation can be defined as the breakdown of proteins, into individual amino acids and peptides.

Muscle growth is ultimately the difference between protein degradation and protein synthesis. Therefore, we want to both minimize protein degradation, and maximize protein synthesis.

Consuming protein is generally responsible for enhancing protein synthesis; while carbohydrates play an intricate role in decreasing protein degradation. The role carbohydrates play in protein synthesis is in debate. However, it appears that when easily digested carbohydrates are accompanied with proteins, the enhanced effect from these nutrients increases muscle growth.

Do you have one of those friends who always seems to have bad things happen to them? No matter what is going on in your life, there is something worse going on in theirs. Any joy you try to share with them is beaten back with another story of their victimization. It’s constant drama about stuff you didn’t even know existed let alone mattered. It isn’t just boring, it’s depressing and it’s a tax on your happiness.

If you said yes there is a good chance that you have a few of them. If you have a few of them, maybe it’s time to start looking at your own behavior to see why these people are flocking to you. It may be tough, but you need to consider the fact that people do what they feel comfortable with and what they can get away with doing. In the case of your drama-prone friends, you are enabling them at best, and at worse, you are one of these people. If you are one of them, you are giving others the permission to do the same thing. It’s an ugly thought that you might be manufacturing the victim role just so you can perpetuate a sense of suffering but you need to consider it because if you are doing it, you are really hurting the self-development of you and those around you..

What are the benefits of viewing oneself as a victim?

• It frees them of responsibility for their place in life. It’s a life preserving fiction that ensures the ego remains intact because they never actually try anything. One never fails because they never try. Never failing is a good thing because only failures fail.
• It frees them of the need to expend effort - since they are a victim, failure is going to be the outcome regardless of their actions. This learned helplessness ensures that they conserve energy because they’re smart enough to know how things are going to go.
• It frees them of having to think up something useful to talk about. Nauseating as it may be, people who view themselves as victims always have something that they can talk passionately about.
• They never get caught up in self improvement project or pursuits. Guess why? Because they know they don’t work. Something is going to come along and ruin their efforts.
• They will never be alone because misery prefers miserable company and perceived victims are execeptional at passing along this characteristic to the people they engage, including their children.
• It is very easy to sustain the victim role because, if you are already playing it, it is a part of who you are. Playing it is effortless, changing it requires effort; first in identifying and accept the fake role you are playing and then in the actions you take to make things better.

Wait a minute you say, these aren’t really benefits at all. Good sign, you may not be a victim so you can use this list to help you identify the drama people in your life. Have you heard any of this defeatist talk coming from any of your friends?

What do you do with drama friends?

You have a couple of options and your course of action will be determined by the quality of friend that they are. For really good friends and family members you have two options:

1. Blank face conversations - just start to withdraw from the conversations about their victimization by blank facing them. Give them nothing in terms of body language or words that they can take as incentive to continue sharing their misery. People will stop talking very quickly when they get no validation from you in a conversation.
2. Try and help them see how they are behaving - this one is a lot tougher because you are not just trying to stop a behavior, you are trying to change one. It’s a lot of work to get someone to see that things are not the way they think they are and they need to be open to change. But, like most interventions, hearing it from a loved one is likely going to have a bigger impact than hearing it from someone else.

For other people, you have three choices, blank face them, try to help them or get rid of them.

1. This blank face can have contempt in it because you probably care less about their feelings and more about getting them to stop being a big downer. You’re not looking for their happiness, you are looking for their silence.
2. You are welcome to try and help them, but be warned, it’s a poor investment of time. The chances of success are very small in relation to your almost certain vilification. If you do try be sincere about it, at least you’ll know you tried to do the right thing when they lash out at you.
3. You can remove them from your life completely so you don’t have to deal with their drama anymore. This can be as simple as just not communicating with them. If you’re lucky it just ends, it can be that simple some of the time. But most of the time, it’s like pulling off a band aid. You are, in essence, breaking up with someone. It’s an interpersonal conflict. It isn’t likely to get ugly but it can be uncomfortable. But just pull fast and get it over with. It’s better for everyone, mainly you, because your life will immediately get better. Again, try to be decent about it because something has happened to make them this way. Just because you don’t care enough about them to try and help shouldn’t mean you deliberately try to hurt them. You have no idea where life will take you so be genuine and fair.

If you are not a drama person, you really have no business hanging out with drama people because they will ruin your happiness, they will chew up your free time and they will add very little to your life. By continuing the friendship you are killing your chances at happiness as well as making sure they don’t get any better. Do the inventory and set free anyone who keeps you bogged down with their drama.

During my last year of University I was introduced to a book that dramatically changed the way I view and engage the world. It’s too bad it wasn’t one of the assigned readings. Feeling Good - The New Mood Therapy by David D. Burns, M.D. was an eye opener for a couple of reasons. The content of the book is first rate. When you read it you are hit with that “of course this is how it is” feeling that makes it very easy to understand. But the gem of Dr. Burns’ book is the practical exercises he presents for you to do to try and help you see the truth of what he is saying as it is manifested within your behavior. It would be a good book without the exercises, it is a life changing book because of them. Reading the book cover to cover and doing the exercises will improve your life, even if you are feeling good already.

As I worked my way through the book a strange feeling gripped me for the first time. I became aware that I had never learned how to think or how my brain works with information. As a psychology student I was exposed to a lot of scientific evidence that documented the outcome of thought processes. But we didn’t touch very much on our conscious experience as it comes to how we create an understanding of the world. I realized that we are born and as we mature we are schooled in language, math, science, history, etc…. all things that will increase the likelihood that we’ll be come productive members of society; the goal is to produce tax payers who will find their role, procreate and raise more tax payers. Very little of our socialization this has anything to do with the individuals themselves, it is gear towards creating the functioning parts that make up the whole.

Burns take on the task of illuminating the thought process as it deals with the individuals. What I think is the best part of the book are the sections devoted to cognitive distortions because I found myself making a lot of these perceptual errors.

First off realize that what we think about the world is NOT necessarily what is actually going on in the world. Our interpretation of events is based on our past experience with the world. If we make the right interpretation we will be fine, our world view will be in line with reality. But if we make the wrong interpretation, we can run into trouble. Take the actions of a young child who see fire for the first time. They have no behavioral event inventory with fire, they have no world view of it, and may decide that it is bright and warm like the sun but not damaging to touch and choose to grab it. They end up getting burned. It’s a valuable lesson for them because fire does burn you more quickly than the sun does.

The child making the decision that the fire is just like the sun is a cognitive distortion. It is an assumption they make that they believe is true, but which isn’t. In the case of the fire, the outcome is fairly obvious, a lesson that hurts. But with higher level things, the outcome can be more insidious and damaging. If the child who sees his father lighting the fire that eventually burned them creates a connection between the fire and his father, he has made a damaging cognitive distortion because it *may* impact the way the child views their father. They could end up thinking that there father is capable of burning them directly and withdraw from this parent in a protective reflex.

This example is fairly simplistic, but it is how the brain works. It’s an effect pattern matching engine that looks for patterns that will improve chances of survival.

Dr. Burns has a list of 10 cognitive distortions that he has observed people making:

1. All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2. Over generalization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

3. Mental filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.

4. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. You maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.

• Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and don’t bother to check it out.

• The Fortune Teller Error: You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

6. Magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.”

7. Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”

8. Should statements: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

9. Labeling and mislabeling: This is an extreme form of over generalization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him, “He’s a damn louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

10. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.

10 easy to implement tips for growing old slowly and gracefully by Brad Bahr

1. Keep away from smoking. The most important general tip. We have all heard the many reasons not to smoke and to stay away from others’ smoke.

Other than getting rid of the withdrawal symptoms, smoking doesn’t see to be good for anything else.

5. Get a pet. Pet owners tend to visit the doctor less, survive longer even after a heart attack, and suffer less from depression and high blood pressure.

I wonder if that holds true for cats? I can see it with dogs because of their unconditional love and kittens because of their cuteness, but adults cats can be pretty stressful as pets, particularly a female in heat.

Tony Gentilcore’s article 4 Things Your Girlfriend Should Know on T-nation.com has ruffled a few feathers. He makes the statement that “Yoga Mostly Sucks” at improving the body composition. He trashes steady state cardio (low intensity long distance) in favor of high intensity interval style training for fat loss. He suggests that women train more like men and that they should be using low reps and heavy weights. He’s even got his girlfriend deadlifting.

“But I don’t want to get big and bulky.”

Newsflash, ladies: You will not get “big and bulky” just because you’re doing squats and deadlifts. That statement is akin to me saying, “Eh, I don’t want to do any sprints today because I don’t want to win the 100m gold medal next week.” Getting big and bulky isn’t easy, just like winning the 100m gold medal isn’t easy.

If anything, it’s an insult to all those people who’ve spent years in the gym to look the way they do. It didn’t happen overnight, which is what you’re assuming by saying something so absurd.

And let’s be honest, most people (men and women) won’t work hard enough to get “big and bulky” in the first place. It’s hard enough for a man to put on any significant amount of muscle, let alone a woman. Women are physiologically at a disadvantage for putting on muscle due to the fact that they have ten times less free Testosterone in their bodies compared to men.

That being said, you still need to get the most bang out of your training buck, and that includes ditching the glute-buster machine and focusing more on the compound movements. Joe Dowdell, owner of Peak Performance in NYC, trains many of the top female models in the city and their programming includes squats, deadlifts, chin-ups, bench variations, sled dragging, and tons of energy system work.

Yes, Victoria’s Secret models are doing squats and deadlifts. And yes, that’s completely hot. Guess what they’re not doing? Watching Oprah every day while walking on the treadmill for 60 minutes.

It isn’t a rant on the evils of yoga, just on the lies that some yoga teachers attempt to pass off as fact and the impact that these notions have on how women work towards their fitness goals.

What I take out of it is that people will believe anything an “expert” tells them without so much as thinking about it. Anyone who suggests that deadlifting is not as good at building back strength as yoga has NEVER performed a single deadlift with their body weight.

If you want to look a particular way, do what people who look that way do. If you desire to be lean and have toned muscles, you’re going to need to work out intensely and lift a lot of weight.

Karma is the consequence of an action. It is neither good nor bad. However, since you have very little impact on what the consequences are you are best to try and limit the amount of karma that you create or allow to be created because there is always the potential that the outcome will be negative.

The concept of karma is misunderstood because people want to believe that the world is a fair and just place so that those who create suffering in others will get what’s coming to them – you get what you give. It’s an understandable desire because we do seem to be exposed to extreme cruelty and uncaring, but the world doesn’t work like that.

If you act according to your nature, you will create the least amount of karma. If your nature is positive, as most people’s true nature is, you and others will enjoy the consequence to your actions. If you act in a way that is different from your true nature, for example looking at the world with yourself as the center of everything, others may suffer as a result of your actions. Also, in the long run, any enjoyments you experience may dissipate and fade away completely. Very often these actions will create a feeling of cognitive dissonance within you that will be immediately experienced as a negative feeling such as anxiety, tension or sadness. If your nature is not positive, all of your actions will come from a place were you are the center of them and others will not enjoy the consequences of these actions.

Karma is minimized when someone is fulfilling their life purpose because they will be taking fewer actions that deviated from their natural tendencies; you will create only intended consequences.

One goal should be to create as little karma as possible through living the life that reflects your nature. This is why it is important to figure out what your nature and your life purpose are. Steve Pavlina outlines how to uncover your life purpose with his simple and effect method - it worked very well for me and I found the experience to be very powerful.

An example here may be useful. My life purpose has something to do with trying to empower people to achieve their goals and potential. While this has always been my purpose, I haven’t always known it and in fact it only became evident to me after a training seminar early in February of 2007. Before it was uncovered, when I would try to fill this guide role for others I would either feel shame for trying to change them, incomplete because I felt I needed others to change in order for me to be useful or just completely creepy for talking to people about what I saw in their essence. Try and tell a complete stranger at the gym that you see that they could be an excellent personal trainer because of the way they engage the front desk staff or that the person who pumped my gas should be a motivational speaker because of the clarity of their observations about whatever. People aren’t used to this kind of honesty or insight and they tend to be very suspicious of anyone who brings it to them. So before it was clear to me why I do what I do, I would suffer from the dissonant feeling that I was acting weirdly. Worse was the often-hurt feeling I would get when people would respond poorly through lashing out or just ignore what I had said. I have alienated a number of people through voicing my observations in a genuine attempt to help them.

To draw this back to karma, I was actualizing my life purpose through these interactions. The consequences to these actions were, for the most part, non-existent because very few people are receptive to what I said such that my talking to them created very little karma – any karma that results from their continuing down the same path is their creation. However, in the odd case where someone buys into what I tell them, they take some strength from it and begin to move towards their potential, a lot of karma is eliminated – their path through life has been changed or reset to a path that more closely represents their true nature. My actions were the result of my nature and they serve only to decrease the amount of karma that is created. In fact, if I had kept my mouth shut and said nothing I am, in essence, knowingly creating karma through willfully allowing others to continue down the wrong path.

The moment of enlightenment when I uncovered my purpose was very liberating because it allowed me for the first time to see my actions as appropriate and independent of the outcome. I am following my nature by TRYING to help others find empowerment to grow and not by GETTING them to find the empowerment to grow. The result is not as important as the effort. The result is only important for me. I MUST become empowered and TRY to help others but others actions are not even a consideration in the karmic equations that defines me. When it comes right down to it, I create more karma when I do not take an action that I feel I should. If my pure actions are inhibited it is because I am putting myself as the center of everything because I want to avoid shame. This is the recipe for Karma so I work to avoid it.

I’m recommending that people take the time to figure out who they are and what they need to do on the planet to have a meaningful life. Then go out and do it. Stop living a life that doesn’t complete you because you are creating a lot of needless Karma.

25 Years, 25 Mistakes by Mike Boyle from T-nation

Most of the mistakes deal with weight lifting and physical training, but there are a few very good general life lessons in the list:

Mistake #14: Confusing disagree with dislike
I think it’s great to disagree. The field would be boring if we all agreed. What I realize now is that I’ve met very few people in this field I don’t like and many I disagree with. I probably enjoy life more now that I don’t feel compelled to ignore those who don’t agree with me.

Mistake #15: Confusing reading with believing
This concept came to me by way of strength coach Martin Rooney. It’s great to read. We just need to remember that in spite of the best efforts of editors, what we read may not always be true.

If the book is more than two years old, there’s a good chance even the author no longer agrees with all the information in it. Read often, but read analytically.

Mistake #16: Listening to paid experts
Early on, many of us were duped by the people from companies like Cybex or Nautilus. Their experts proclaimed their systems to be the future, but now the cam and isokinetics are the past. Just as in any other field, people will say things for money.

You don’t think his post applies to you? Read mistake 25.

Christian Thibaudeau from T-nation talks about 6 Dumb Training Mistakes

Dumb Thing #5: Misunderstanding “Overtraining”

If you ask me, “overtraining” is the most abused and misunderstood concept in the entire strength training community! Perform more than twelve sets for a muscle during a workout and you’ll undoubtedly be accused of overtraining. Train a muscle group more often than two times per week? Overtraining! Relying on set extending methods such as drop sets, pre or post-fatigue, or rest-pause? What are you doing? Don’t you know that’s overtraining and you’ll shrink faster than your masculine pride on a snowy Canadian winter night?!

Yes, overtraining can eventually become a problem when it comes to your training performance, injury risks, and growth. However, it’s far from being as common as most people would have you believe.

The problem stems from the term itself, which is composed of “over” and “training.” Because of that term, individuals are quick to equate it to “training too much.” So every time someone thinks that a routine has too much volume, frequency, or advanced methods, they’re quick to pull the “overtraining” trigger. When someone is tired and has a few bad workouts he’ll also automatically assume that he’s “overtraining.” In both cases this shows a misunderstanding of what overtraining really is.

In the post, he has a full description of the states of physiological fatigue associated with training too much and it includes an image outlining the type and amount of recovery time needed to return to a normal state. For this one item alone it is a fantastic article, but there are a few other mind opening ideas that make it a must read.