Similar Posts
How Intuitive is your eating?
This assessment is the Intuitive Eating Scale-2 designed by Tylka TL and Kroon Van Diest AM.
The Importance of Warming Up
I think we all understand the importance of the warm up before working out. Most of us have learned it the hard way: that one day when rushed we naively said to ourselves: “the first round will be my warm up”. And that first round sucked, heart rate was through the roof fast, and for the next four rounds you were just trying to survive. Yes, we all know warming up is important, but somehow we all still neglect it. In my experience, this happens because we don’t have any other reason to do it than that we are “supposed to” and anyhow, it often feels harder than the actual workout. The problem with thinking of it this way, is that it makes it a lot easier to say “fuck it, 20 squats will warm me up.”
My Two Main Principles in Fitness and Nutrition
The Strong Story Hypothesis states that the mechanism that enables us to tell, understand, and recombine stories is what separates us, humans, from primates. In other words that storytelling is what makes our thinking brainz special. The exciting thing is that Patrick Winston, its author, was an engineer and a professor at MIT, not an anthropologist or a social sciences guy. For many years he was the head of the Artificial Intelligence Lab. So when he says that storytelling gives us an evolutionary advantage over primates, that is meaningful. He gets to this conclusion by asking the right question. You see, the AI field was always trying to answer the question: can computers reason like humans? Winston made another question, more elegant, more interesting. What makes humans different than primates? Why are we capable of more?
Touché!
Nothing like a good question asked at the right time. In the video below, I present to you the principles that guide my practice in fitness and nutrition. I show them in the form of questions too. I believe this is the most effective way to approach such a complex problem. When you feel sluggish and unproductive today, instead of heading to Facebook, get this video a watch and let me know what you think.
Don't be lazy, have higher standards
I bet you are thinking I mean you should go out workout more and workout harder. Memories of all those times you said you would wake up and work out and you didn’t will run through your head. You might remember those workouts during which you were tired and you did not push as hard as you feel you should have, But nope, that is not what I mean. That is just your guilt. Your consistency on a given program is often not a laziness problem as much as an organizational problem. How hard you can push on a given workout is very seldom a willpower problem, as it is a self-regulation problem. I am not here to guilt trip you. Let me tell you what I DO mean.
Henrick's Rower and Results Oriented Mindsets
The first time I explained to one of my male athletes that the Concept2 rower was made with a specific body type in mind it totally backfired. Henrick was complaining to me about the size of his arms, telling me it made doing pull ups harder. He was using this narrative to explain why he...
