My Top 10 Books

Before the Internet I used to read books. It sounds funny to say that because I probably spend a couple of hours a day reading stuff online. I’m pretty certain that is why my list of favorite books have only 2 that were written this century.

  1. Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives by Dan Millman
    I have read this book 5 or 6 times and have given it as a gift once. My brother gave it to me after my girlfriend was killed in a car crash. It was my first experience with death and grief and it really threw me a downward spiral. I honestly believe that Des giving me this book kept me alive. There is so much wisdom in it that I will read it every couple of years to refresh my understanding.
  2. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
    I have read this book three times and given it as a gift twice. It’s another recommendation from my brother and I’m still coming to terms with the significance of the lessons Gladwell offers. It an easy book to read and the real world examples are keenly relevant and very illustrative. It gave me the reasons why I should trust my gut. It is an important book for those of us who still engage people in real-space.
  3. Feeling Good – The New Mood Therapy by David D. Burns, M.D.
    My dad suggested this one to me. Reading it was an awakening for me. I had never considered the act of thinking before I read it. After words, I developed an interest in the science of thinking. It’s just too bad I read it in the last 2 months of university.
  4. A Day In the Live Of Ivan Desinovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
    I have read this book 6 times. During my first year at Ottawa University I took a half year English class to satisfy one of their requirements. We were placed according to some criteria. I am convinced that they placed me in the wrong class because I didn’t know the difference between a noun and an adjective. English literature was what they gave me and it’s what I did. This book and a C- are all I took out of it. I read this book at night when the job I’m doing at the time is getting me down.
  5. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
    I have read this book once, in grade 6. But I’ve probably seen 4 or 5 different movies / TV versions of the it. I loved the story and liked that the kids were doing all these cool things. I guess I wanted to be Tom or Huck because they didn’t let the rules get in the way of their plans.
  6. Speed Trap: Inside the Biggest Scandal in Olympic History by Charlie Francis
    I have read this book 3 times. I bought it because one of my high school teachers coached Larry Cain during those Olympics and his description of the Canadian athletes shock and disbelief after the positive result was released was intense. Charlie Francis tells a compelling tail of what it took to be the fastest man on earth. The chapter titled “The Running” captures the entire 100 meter race with complete clarity. It’s the best chapter of a book I have ever read.
  7. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
    I have read this book once. McCourt seems to write from the perspective of a 5 year old boy. You feel sorry for the life he’s living, but grateful that he’s too young to know just how bad he has it. Tis, the follow-up book was also very good.
  8. The Regulators and
  9. Desperation by Stephen King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
    I have read each of these books once. They tackle the same story from 2 completely different perspectives, one from the suburbs and one from a desert town. I’m sure King could tell it another 10 different ways and all would be best sellers. It’s hard to go wrong when you’re starting with gold.
  10. Getting Things Done by David Allen
    I have read this book once, but some parts of it 2 or 3 times. It’s another one Des recommended. It’s a time management book. The biggest tip I took out of it was about adding the next physical step you need to for each item on your to-do list. Doing so allows your brain to consider the loop closed for now and divert effort over to the task at hand.

“How to Make Easy Exercises More Difficult and More Effective”

In How to Make Easy Exercises More Difficult and More Effective by TC from T-nation he gives us a few ways to save time by making some exercises more difficult. I really liked:

Real-World Squats

Let me ask you a question: how often in your life do you walk up to an object hanging from a tree, carefully place it on your shoulders, and lower it to the ground?

Hunters typically don’t find dead deer hanging in trees. Generally, the thing’s lying on the ground and they have to pick it up.

What I’m trying to get at is the conventional squat is screwed up. It’s not a real-world movement. Our entire motor program, from childhood on, was developed to pick things up from the ground instead of the opposite.

That’s probably why a lot of people have trouble learning how to do the squat.

Well, I’ve adjusted the movement. I’ve made it more “real world,” but in doing so, I’ve also made it harder — and consequently, more effective.

I rarely start my squat from a standing position. Instead, I place the loaded bar onto the safety bars of the power rack and start from the ass-down position.

Guess what I’ll be doing next leg day?

Eliminate Body Fat by Eliminating The Need For It

The human body is remarkable at conserving energy. It will quickly adapt to changes in the external environment to create an internal state that it can maintain. You can increase the amount of daily calories you consume and your body will respond by increasing its metabolic rate to burn off the increase. Talk to any body builder and they will tell you that adding 3 pounds of muscle per month requires that you increase your caloric consumption by more than 350 per day; many lifters find that they need to eat an extra 1000-1500 calories per day to add any weight. If the body did not have the ability to adapt and boost metabolic functioning in response to caloric increases they would need just the 350 per day to add 3 pounds per month.

One of the more effective survival mechanism of the body is the fat storage system because it allows humans to store energy during times of food surplus and utilize that stored energy during food shortages. This system is, for the most part, an all or nothing thing – you will either be storing fat or you will be using fat.

Maintaining stored fat requires energy because body fat needs oxygen and, therefore, a blood supply. The cost is small, but over a long period of time, or if there is a lot of body fat, the cost will be dramatically increased. High blood pressure is one consequence to obesity because of the increased need for blood vessels to service the large amount of fat – the heart has to push blood around miles of extra tubing so it has to work harder.

However, the body does rely on what I can transient fat storage / utilization (TFS/U) to help it get through the periods of time when blood sugar level drops to a critical level and food is not eaten. TFS/U deals with periods of less than 12 hours, the usual maximum time that anyone will go without food as a result of sleep. Even people who eat a calorie balanced diet (equal in the amount of energy that they eat vs. what they burn off) will rely on the TFS/U throughout the day because they are eating three meals a day; this feeding schedule is insufficient at delivering the constant energy needs to fuel their daily activity. As a consequence, the body remains motivated to keep storing fat because it is being utilized fairly consistently.

The notion I am putting forward is that, in a caloric equilibrium state, the body will rid itself of excess body fat if we eliminate the need for transient fat storage. The rational is that the body will do what it can to conserve energy. Since body fat requires energy to maintain, energy can be conserved by getting rid of it. However, the only way to eliminate the need for TFS/U is to maintain a constant blood sugar level through frequent feeding and eating food that cause slow and steady increases in blood sugar.

Blunt Force Drama – When Friends Get You Down

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.

10 Keys to the Lean & Sexy Look

In this first post from new T-Nation author Jen Heath 10 Keys to the Lean & Sexy Look, Part I we get keys 1 to 5. The article is geared towards women.

What most people call “toning” is actually a muscle getting a little big bigger (yes, that does mean it increases in “bulk”) and the fat cells covering a muscle getting smaller. You put those two things together and you get “tone.”

Most women I talk to would like more muscle in their arms yet don’t necessarily want behemoth guns. Whenever a woman tells me she just wants to “tone” her body with light weights, I usually end up having a conversation similar to this:

Jen: “Okay, so if I understand you right, your arms now measure 9 inches, but you wouldn’t mind getting them up to a firm and solid 12 inches. At the same time, you don’t want to get 16 inch monster arms, right?”

Client: “Yes, that’s exactly right!”

Jen: “Well, let me ask you this: Would you rather take a month or two to build that 12-inch arm or would you rather it take you forever?”

Client: “I want it now!”

Jen: “The reason I ask is because the same thing that builds the 16 inch arm the fastest will also build the 12 inch arm the fastest — lifting intensely with progressively heavier weights. Once you achieve the amount of muscle you desire you can always reduce the volume to maintain.”

Client: “Ah, I see!”

I think most trainers have a similar conversation with 90% of their new female clients. Jen’s approach just nails it.

Great article, check out the original and part two.

The Next Generation Gap

Say Everything By Emily Nussbaum of the New York Magazine

This article shook me awake. I had only thought the techno-kiddies were enjoying their toys and not being socialized by them. It’s a frightening realization just how powerful new technology is at shaping the direction and development of the younger generation. Generation X’s Pac Man pales in comparison to this generations unfathomable access to information in its ability to shape how we become who we are. They aren’t techno-kiddies, they are individuals and the first generation who have been raised with the Internet as something that is and not something that will be.

This is Jakob’s vision: a place where topless photos are no big deal-but also where everyone can be known, simply by making him- or herself a bit vulnerable. Still, even for someone like me who is struggling to embrace the online world, Lodwick’s vision can seem so utopian it tilts into the impossible. “I think we’re gradually moving away from the age of investing in something negative,” he muses about the crueler side of online culture. “For me, a fundamental principle is that if you like something, you should show your love for it; if you don’t like it, ignore it, don’t waste your time.” Before that great transition, some Susies will get crushed in the gears of change. But soon, he predicts, online worlds will become more like real life: Reputation will be the rule of law. People will be ashamed if they act badly, because they’ll be doing so in front of all 3,000 of their friends. “If it works in real life, why wouldn’t it work online?”

If you are over the age of 25 I recommend you read this article and take whatever steps are needed to get yourself back in the game.

10 Tips for Growing Old Slowly and Gracefully

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.

Feeling Good and Cognitive Distortions

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.
  1. 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.”
  2. Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.

What You Actually See When You Are Part Of The Other Crowd

Today I turn 34. I am happy about this because last St. Patrick’s day I realized that I was part of the other crowd. I think my exact phrasing was “I’m no longer one of the people who matters, I’m just an old guy.”

I had gone to the bar with some of the people I worked with. One of them was a girl I had been on a couple of dates with and I had hoped having a few drinks together would be enough to loosen us up and spark some sort of chemistry. She’s a really smart girl but the conversation always seemed laboured. Anyway, my brother was in town visiting his friend Clif and they had ended up at the same bar. Des and clif are older than me and all of us felt the same “we don’t belong here” feeling. We left fairly quickly after we realized that everyone there was a lot younger than us. It was a very difficult moment for me because I had been sensing that I was becoming an old guy for a while – I hadn’t sent a single text message, I didn’t have a myspace page and I didn’t enjoy getting drunk at a bar any more.

On the way home they asked me what was going on and I told them that today, I was old.

I didn’t get the girl either, there was no chemistry.

But what I did get was better. I got my peace of mind about who I was. I was forced to accepted that my looks were fading fast and that my youth was gone. It was tough that night and the next day, I was pretty depressed – it wasn’t a “turning 30″ depression because it lingered through the next day until I stopped by my brother and sister in law’s place. When I talked to Des about how I was feeling and about the lack of chemistry with the girl he let me know that I am a reflector, that I tend to go into conversations as a blank slate and take on the mood of the other person. If they are engaging or open, I will follow suit, if they are closed and withdrawn, that’s how I will be. The end result is that how I feel during a conversation is basically how the other person feels during the conversation. I hadn’t noticed this until he brought it up, but once he said it out loud, it was obvious that it had been that way all along.

That was a year ago yesterday and I regard that day as the start of the best year of my life so far because once I realized that my youth was gone I became free to just be whatever I am instead of trying to be what I thought others wanted me to be. There are much lower expectations of immediate success when you aren’t counting on your looks to help you close any deals. I had a new appreciate of hard work because what I do became more important than what I am.

At least, as I look back on the last year, that’s how I see it.