My Daily Wellness Tip

Les Brown Made Me Skydive

Les Brown is one of the world's best motivational speakers.  He helps people beleive it is possible.

I hate heights.  I hate climbing ladders.  I hate looking down off of high condo buildings.  I hate the rides at the theme parks.  

I started listening to Les Brown years ago and he pumped me up so much that I jumped alone out of a plane at 3000 feet !  Wow, I actually blacked out from the adrenaline and woke up when the chute opened .. luckily the pull cord was tied to the plane and the instructor cut it loose.  It was the most thrilling and envigorating feeling in my life.

I hated those things I mentioned above... now I welcome them !!!   Greatest feeling in my life !  I applied Les Brown's principles to my life and it is possible.  So, beleive in yourself and checkout Les Brown's video

What do I want from you?

1. Think of a fear that you want to overcome. Can be in business or your personal life or really any aspect.

2. Put it below as a comment. By doing yourself, you are making a commitment to yourself as you have announced it to over 100k people

3. Instead of thinking about how you can overcome your fear, just do it. Seriously. Don’t think about it too much, but must do it.

(Disclaimer: nothing illegal or dangerous please :O )

4. Come and make another comment about how you overcame it and what that meant to you.

5. When you next come up against a fear or approach a situation outside of a comfort zone, think about how you felt just before you attempted and then how not an issue it was to actually overcome.

Have a great weekend and please be in touch.

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Pushing through the burn!

Hey everyone!

No matter what fitness level we are at in our lives, we technically all have the same physical goals. We all want to be healthier, lose body fat and gain muscle.

In the battle for lean muscle nutrition plays a very big role but what is equally as important is working out at high intensity and pushing until failure. That means pushing until your muscle cannot physically execute the motion.

When we begin our workout we generally tend to have a positive attitude and high amounts of energy. As reps and sets start to add up the pain start to kick in more and more and it's a natural reaction to want to stop. Just like if you touch a hot stove you will pull your hand away ASAP. Well it's time to re-wire our brain and feel the pain. Working out could very well be the only time where pain equals gain.

To help you push until complete exhaustion and maximize every set you need to do a few things.

• try to have a pre-workout meal about 1 hour before you get started.
• Get yourself mentally prepared, get pumped. Say to yourself or friends that this is going to be a awesome workout and that you are going to give it your all.
• know your strengthth and set very aggressive goals, and have the mentality that "quiting is not an option"
• breathing deeply on every rep will give your muscles the oxygen they need and it will help you stay relaxed.

As you start push through the burn more often your pain threshold will increase. This will help you endure more intense workouts in the future helping to prevent your body to plato.

During sets, I personally motivate myself by thinking about some very difficult situations or times that i have faces in the military. I say to myself "this isn't so bad!" "It doesn't hurt that bad".

The last reps and sets give you the most results so make sure you are ready for the battle when it's time to get the most bang for your buck.

Push it to the limits like beast that you are!

Jean-Michel Sauve.
Thx!

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Similar Individuals

Every human that has ever existed has been an individual.  Different aesthetics, different biochemistry and different biomechanics.  This means each person needs a different regime in order to feed, exercise and correct their body and mind as efficiently as possible.  With the number of combinations being infinite, you can see how much fun exercise coaches and healers can have attempting to unlock each client's unique code.

Despite the vast number of differences seen amongst people there remain some commonalities that will ultimately dictate whether a client succeeds or falls short of their goals, let's take a look.

Knowledge - Ever find yourself observing someone's form at the gym and catch yourself thinking, "Man, that cannot be good for his back" and "I bet his shoulders will hurt when he gets older".  Well, you're right, it is only a matter of time before your subject gets injured.  Your first piece of advice to him/her should not be how to correct the exercise but to go home and pick up a book or read an article on how to do things right, because they are either misinformed or uneducated. This applies to any aspect of health and wellness.  Having a base of knowledge means calculated success.

Dedication - This doesn't just mean working hard when you exercise, it means looking for ways to improve a little each day. Assess your nutritional quality, posture, sleep patterns, injuries, personality traits and quality of life and physically write them on paper in order of importance.  Re-assess them frequently and strive to improve the ever-changing top priority.  This ensures that your habits will continuously become better and more efficient.

Love - Love contributes greatly to most decisions in life.  I'm not talking about the sappy, hallmark kind of love.  I'm talking about the love you have for yourself, your family, your values..etc. Usually, if you make the decision to begin training it means you want to reverse or change something that has happened to your body. You do this because you love your body.  You most likely got this way overindulging in a certain luxury. You loved that luxury too much.  If you want to make the journey easier and more enjoyable, learn to love exercise and clean nutrition.  Eat for function rather than flavor and appreciate what healthy living does for you every day.

Excel at the 3 components and you will see positive changes in yourself.

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5 Key Points to Improving Performance

There are many speakers that can talk all day and there are many thick and thin books on this subject however, today I'm going to simply point out my 5 keys to Improving performance.

1. Make a decision, act and use the momentum

e.g: Make a decision to plan your meals the night before, and start looking for your food containers, pull out your foods that you need to prepare and keep going...

2. Change your limiting beliefs

e.g: Beliefs are a choice. Believing in them is what makes them true to you.  Create new beliefs and replace your old ones with new ones. Give it time, it won't happen overnight, but with anything, the more effort you put in, the more results you get.

3. Model the strategies that work

e.g: Sometimes, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Find someone that has already been there and accomplished those specific goals successfully and learn what they have to offer. 

4. Shift your state and take a different action

e.g: If your feeling bad, you set off a vibration that resonance to all around you. It can become a vicious circle, because you won't receive from others what you desire. To quote Abraham Hicks, "To evoke the best from others, you must find a vibration that is a match to the best in others."  Once you can shift your state, which essentially means shifting your emotions from bad to good, then you can recognize the actions associated with that bad state and it's easier to stop the same action that invoked the bad feelings to happen again.

5. Be 1% better tomorrow than you were today.

e.g: The truth is that you don't have to be 100% better than someone else at something. You just have to be 1% better. It all starts with one.  As a competitive bodybuilder, I always strive to be that 1 degree better. It separates 1st place from second place, outstanding from normal and rich from poor, not only in money but in life. Mike Litman reinforced this statement of being 1% better than the next person and it's been working for me for a long time.

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Do You Have Good Glutes?

A fitness professional's attention to detail can be their best asset or their achilles heel.  The efficiency with which our clients perform movements is totally reliant on the cues and corrections we implement. It is our duty to identify any improper patterns and compensations being performed.

A commonly seen problem in just about any fitness facility is poor glute activation.  For those unaware of what activation is; it is a muscle's potential for recruitment and activity. In other words, can you contract a given muscle and if so how efficiently?  From the biomechanics standpoint, glute inactivity is a large contributor to low back pain, postural misalignment and poor performance during exercise just to name a few.  From the aesthetics standpoint, you cannot change a muscle if you do not stimulate the fibers that makeup its composition.  So if you're one of the many sufferers of pancake butt and you're wondering why your glutes haven't firmed up after trying every type of squat and/or lunge in the book, there is your answer. 

You simply have to learn to use your glutes.

You see, your brain controls all muscular function.  It sends a signal via the spinal cord to one or many muscles based on the given task and tells them to lengthen or shorten. This is referred to as a contraction. When a muscle is inactive, the pathway from the brain to that muscle(s) is either non-existent or cloudy and the signal is not received as easily.  In order to restore the connection, there needs to be a forced mental effort on behalf of the exerciser to think and feel that muscle working in isolation.  Once the isolated function is regained, you can then reintegrate it into a more compound movement.

Now I'm sure you're all waiting in anticipation for the solution to this problem, so here it is.  Activation issues can be solved by performing some simple pre-exercise movements to increase blood flow and neural response. Here is a simple one!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARvJ-o0enoM

Cues: 1- Lying on your back with your heels close to your butt, toes off the ground.

         2- Hands gently resting on glutes (to ensure the amount of activity occurring).

         3- Focus on squeezing you butt as you push your heels into the ground and raise your hips up              toward the ceiling. Hold for 1-5 seconds with a controlled return.

Repeat this movement for 1-2 sets of 6-10 repetitions. It takes less than a minute and makes a world of difference.

No Butts about it!!

 

 

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The Importance of Stretching

To prevent injury and repetitive muscle strain, whether it's from sitting at a desk all day, or from doing a strenuous workout, stretching keeps the blood circulating to your stressed muscles and connective tissue. 

I learned the hard way the importance of stretching your muscles after a workout.  Stretching, to many of us, tends to become that "homework assignment" that we end up skipping. 

Having suffered from a rotator cuff injury, going on 1.5 years, I am now (finally) getting the proper treatment from a professional who has diagnosed my injury as chronic. 

To avoid chronic pain, and to keep the doctor at bay (along with the expense involved in professional treatment), I highly encourage everyone to take 10 minutes after a workout to stretch.  Work with your personal trainer who can provide you with a series of stretches to perform on your own after your workout session. 

I'll keep you posted on recovery - ART (Active Release Therapy) is not working, so more vigorous measures such as Graston  (www.grastontechnique.com), have to be applied - I'll provide more information on these types of therapy on my next blog.

Keep working hard - and keep stretching!

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