We all spend so much time working on things other than felxibility. 

While many of you do not need any more flexibility than you already have, many of us (me for sure) need a healthy dose of increased flexibilty to perform movements necessary for optimal performance.

The big trouble areas are typically the hamstrings and the gastrocs.  If you are having trouble squatting properly without having your heels raise up off the ground, you likely have some problems in your hamstrings and your calves.  Not sure if this is you?  Ask one of the Athlon Elite Team to take a look at your squat for you and give you a quick critique!

In the upper extrmities, the flexibility deficits are usually seen with getting the elbows high enough during the front squat or on your cleans.  Again, if you are working these lifts, have one of our Team take a quick peek at your form.

Personally, I have huge hamstring flexibility deficits.  I am working to improve my hamstring flexibility currently through 2 X daily stretchign for 60-90 seconds each leg.  Nothing fancy, just lay down and use a towel to stretch the hamstrings, one at a time.

Guarantee you will have results if you approach stretching right:

Use it or lose it…

60-90 seconds for muscles being stretched…

Stretch at the end of your workout….

If you sit all day at work, for sure stretch your hip flexors…..

Stretch so that you can comfortably get into the PROPER movement positions…

A little pain for maximal gain…..

Hold don’t bounce….

For more up to date information on stretching, ask Ryan about the Dara Torres routine he has received from her coaches!

A Spartan can not only see their feet but can touch them as well!

Do you keep a journal of your daily activity and nutritional intake?  If you are like most, the answer is "NO!"

Apparently one of the best ways to improve your overall health and vitality is to keep a health journal.  Nothing fancy is needed, just a simple composition book will suffice.  Write the start date on the front of the book and then when it is full put the end date to help keep track of things.  Save these books forever as you will be going back to look at them at some point.

What should go in the book?  Whatever you think you want to track:  workout including reps, sets weights etc, food intake (don’t forget to include the vices like BEER and WINE) including quantitites, how you felt, goals…….

Here would be a sample entry

September 8, 2008

Activity

Squat warm-up sets then 3 sets 5 (305, 305, 315 (only got 4 reps)

Press warm-up then 3 X 5 (135, 135, 140) New PR!

Deadllift warm up then 1 X 5 (405)

Back Ext 2 X 50 BW

Hamstring Flex Contract Relax 2 X 60 s each leg.

Chased kids around the beach for 30 minutes!

Nutrition:

B: 2 big cups of coffee

S1: Handful almonds

L: 2 Asada Tacos, Diet Soda

S2: Protein Shake

D: Burgers X 2, bunch grapes, baked fries

Felt pretty good today, knee pain is improved and back is painfree!  Gotta keep up with those kids……

I promise if you start this process you will find it invaluable!

Every Spartan keeps a record!

4 Six-Pack Ab Workout Myths:

Why Hundreds of Crunches and Sit-ups Are the WORST Fat Burning Program to Lose Stomach Fat, Build Your Trunk Muscles, and Give You Six Pack Abs

Few people really understand how the trunk musculature works and, frankly, I don’t blame them for not wanting to know as the trunk muscular system is a very complicated system.  But if you want a flatter stomach… a six-pack that makes people stand up and notice your waisteline, then you need to at least follow an exercise program that does understand the complicated trunk musculature…

Let’s dispel some myths:

Myth #1 - You Have to Do Hundreds of Crunches and Sit ups To Lose Belly Fat and Get Flat Abs

If you rely on boring, back-breaking abdominal crunches and sit-ups to burn belly fat, you’ll never lose the ugly belly fat covering your abs. To get more fat burning results in less workout time, use fat burning interval training like we do at Athlon Elite and total-body abdominal exercises instead.

Myth #2 - In Just Four Easy Payments of $29.99, You Can Buy a Miracle-Working Six Pack Ab Machine From a Late-Night informercial

Ha! I wish one of those abdominal exercise contraptions worked half as good as the so-called "experts" say, but infomercial gadgets don’t burn belly fat or flatten your abs (they only burn your money and flatten your wallet!).

Myth #3 - You Have to do Ab Workouts Everyday to Get Six Pack Abs

Not true! In fact, one of the secrets of top fat loss trainers is to drop boring, repetitive ab exercises and replace them with total-body abdominal exercises you only need to do for a few minutes three times per week.

Myth #4 - You Have to Do Cardio in the Fat Burning Zone Everyday to Burn Belly Fat

Long, slow boring cardio in the fat burning "Zone" is not the best way to lose ugly belly fat. In fact, in a recent study, subjects did 40 minutes of slow cardio three times per week for 15 weeks but didn’t lose a single inch of stomach fat. However, only 20 minutes of interval training helped subjects reduce their belly fat.

Check back tomorrow for three very effective "total-body ab exercises" that will get you started toward a high-performance six-pack mid-section.

You hear it all the time - from your mom, from dietitians, from doctors, from coaches, heck, even from your uncle Jimmy.

Just eat a “balanced diet” and you should be fine.

Of course, the fact that no one ever mentions what actually constitutes a “balanced diet” only adds to the mystique and allure of this mythical creature.

To your mom, a balanced diet pretty much means whatever she puts on your plate. To your dietitian and doctor, it pretty much means to eat less saturated fat and cholesterol. To your coach, it means whatever keeps you from getting fatter. And to your uncle Jimmy, it means skipping breakfast, having fries and a burger for lunch, and having a 6-pack of beer after work.

For most people, a balanced diet is simply a buzz word for “eating whatever I want to eat.” The phrase is beautifully vague enough to be able to justify their own personal choices with amazing vehemence and rationalization. It’s vague enough to convince folks that no changes are necessary in their daily intake. It’s vague enough for dietitians to suggest that no supplements are required to meet our daily needs.

Yet it’s also vague enough to be utterly useless and void of all utility or meaning. And it’s vague enough to ensure that the rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity consistently increase.

Let’s look at some interesting research on a “balanced” diet…

Here’s the reference if you want to look it up yourself:

J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2006; 3(1): 51–55.
Food Alone May Not Provide Sufficient Micronutrients for Preventing Deficiency
Bill Misner

Before we look at the study though, the ADA, (American Dietetic Association), establishes nutrition standards for the population at large, (I guess trying to outline what a “balanced” diet is):

Assuming a 2000kcal diet, the average person should be getting the following macronutrients each day:

Total Fat 65 g
Saturated fatty acids 20 g
Cholesterol 300 mg
Sodium 2400 mg
Potassium 4700 mg
Total carbohydrate 300 g
Fiber 25 g
Protein 50 g

And in terms of micronutrients:

Vitamin A 5000 IU
Vitamin C 60 mg
Calcium 1000 mg
Iron 18 mg
Vitamin D 400 IU
Vitamin E 30 IU
Vitamin K 80 μg
Thiamin 1.5 mg
Riboflavin 1.7 mg
Niacin 20 mg
Vitamin B6 2 mg
Folate 400 μg
Vitamin B12 6 μg
Biotin 300 μg
Pantothenic acid 10 mg
Phosphorus 1000 mg
Iodine 150 μg
Magnesium 400 mg
Zinc 15 mg
Selenium 70 μg
Copper 2 mg
Manganese 2 mg
Chromium 120 μg
Molybdenum 75 μg
Chloride 3400 mg

Again, these numbers are very conservative. They’ve been established by the ADA as rock-bottom minimums required to prevent us from contracting diseases, they say nothing about optimization of your body, or metabolism.

So, to the study…

The researchers analyzed 70 diets of exercisers and non-exercisers who were “trying” to improve their nutritional intake… (hence eat a “balanced” diet as best they could).

They found that not a single one met all of the “minimum micronutrient levels suggested by the ADA!”

Specifically, the deficiencies were:

Iodine - 100% of the diets were deficient in iodine
Vitamin D - 95% of the diets were deficient in vitamin D
Zinc - 80% of the diets were deficient in zinc
Vitamin E - 65% of the diets were deficient in vitamin E
Calories - 50% of the diets were deficient in calories
Calcium - 50% of the diets were deficient in calcium

So what does this mean?  Well, exactly what you already know… a “balanced diet” is not so easy to do in this society.  You need a little help!!!  Therefore, you should be:

one, taking a multivitamin like the one Athlon Elite provides its members as a part of their membership (free) everyday,

two, you should be considering other supplementation that is shown in the literature to have a significant effect on your metabolism, and various diseases like cardiovascular disease (like EFA’s, Green Tea Extract, Quercitin and Vitamin C, etc… products recommended in many of Athlon Elite’s programs),

and three, consult a professional and have your diet analyzed (or do it yourself at www.CalorieKing.com).

For a little help analyzing your diet, or any other fitness issue, call today for a free consult with one of Athlon Elite’s lead trainers.  You might be surprised at what you’ll learn!

As discussed earlier this week, there are many different diets out there and many different people telling you what to do when it comes to "eating right" to obtain the body that you want (be it healthy, lean, fast, efficient, muscular, etc.).  There are good reasons that they tell you these things but it really does get confusing.  So "KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID" and do the one thing that we know works… EAT OFTEN, about every 3 to 3 1/2 hours, or you’ll look like this at work and in your workouts…

Travis’s Dog, Laila, after going too long without food!

(Have you ever felt like this???)

Try to include in each meal a mix of natural complex carbohydrates, fiber, protein, and essential fats.  This means a starchy complex carbohydrate (like rice or fruit), a fibrous carbohydrate (vegetable), and a lean protein (fish, chicken, Turkey, Tofu).  Frequent fueling maintains a high metabolism and it decreases the amount of food you actually eat during a day or week or month.  Give it a try!

Now for some strategy:

Frequent fueling is a simple and effective way to be lean and healthy, but you’ll have to do a little planning ahead, that’s all…

First, be sure you have fresh food available at all times.

• Stock the fridge at home and/or work with chopped veggies (that you chop fresh every Sunday and put into baggies) and some humus for a dip (you can buy good humus at Trader Joe’s)
• Keep a jar of unsalted almonds and dried fruit beneath your desk
• Every week stock a desk drawer with a couple bananas, apples and/or seedless grapes
• And, though it’s not fresh, a good whey protein powder from Athlon Elite mixes in well with a piece of fruit as an excellent and very simple mid-afternoon meal

Use your Sundays to do a little food prepping (it will ultimately save a ton of time during the week, and it’s fun to do a little fresh cooking on Sunday’s with the family):

• Barbeque a bunch of chicken and/or turkey breasts, lean steak or pork fillets and bag-up  into multiple zip-loc baggies
• Make a big pot of soup or chili (you can use left over meat from the barbeque) and pour into multiple Tupperware dishes
• Make a big pot of brown rice and scoop some into your chili bowls or store separately in Tupperware containers
• Boil a dozen eggs and store them in a bowl in your fridge to pick at all week long (they make great mid-afternoon snacks with a piece of fruit)

When you do cook in the evenings during the week make a little extra and prep yourself lunches and mid-afternoon meals with that food:

• Buy some Tupperware containers that have separate compartments so you can keep your "entrees" separate
• When you clean-up after making dinner divide the left-overs up into these Tupperware lunch containers and stack in the fridge ready to use

 Finally, there are many "fairly healthy" frozen foods that you can buy and use for meals, take a trip to Costco or your local Supermarket and buy:

• Frozen teriyaki chicken bowls
• Lean Cuisine dinners
• Frozen "healthy" burritos (try to get ones that are not stuffed with cheese and refried beans)
• (Costco is great for this, they have pretty good frozen foods and you can buy a box of 12 or more!)

Once you’ve prepped using some of the strategies from above all you have to do now is… EAT!

Eat regularly every 3 to 3 1/2 hours.  Set an alarm if you have to, JUST EAT!

As mentioned above, try to include in each meal a mix of natural complex carbohydrates, fiber, protein, and essential fats, avoid or minimize simple sugars and hydrogenated fats, and get your meals from a variety of sources all found in the perimeter of the supermarket (not down the isles).

I have one thing that you can do to make your diet healthier,  turn up your metabolism and torch more body fat.  And it’s not controversial…

You see, I was thinking this weekend about nutrition and what "eating better" means.  I hear the two word phrase all the time… Athlon Elite members are always asking me about "eating better," nutritionists are always telling me about "eating better,"  my girlfriend says I should "eat better."  But when I do some research into "eating better" I get many, many different ideas of what "eating better" really is.  Some "experts" say we should eat more protein and less carbs, some "experts" say saturated fat should be cut out of our diet, then another "expert" says saturated fat is good in our diet as it is the building block of many of our hormones, then I see all kinds of books written on how different bodies should eat different diets… what kind of body do I have… I thought mine was human???

The Typical Food Pyramid

(our government recommends this one)

A Different Pyramid

(many physicians recommend this one)

The Paleolithic Diet

(Becoming popular with "Wellness" Advocates)

I continually here from people about how hard it is for them to "eat better" because they don’t exactly know "what is better."  And if you’re anything like me, you’ll try so hard to figure out what’s "exactly right" that you’ll get lost in the details and ultimately give up in failure ("analysis paralysis").

The fact is, there is no "exactly right" to "eating better."  My friend and trainer Dave Brown, who has spent the last 8 years of his life studying this stuff with a bachelors and masters degree in nutrition, sums it up perfectly when he says there is "no perfect nutrition," there is only "best-guess nutrition."  After years of his own research he’s realized that human physiology is such a complex subject it is pretty much impossible to "perfectly" isolate and research, thus any nutrition recommendations that come out of research are "best-guess" recommendations at best.

So does this mean we should give up… throw in the towel and drink more sodas and eat McDonald’s for lunch everyday? No. There is one very definite "best-guess" nutrition practice that will make you healthier, more energetic and burn more body fat…  eat more frequent meals.

"Frequently fueling" your machine will keep it running smoothly throughout the day and through the week.  By Fueling your body frequently, ideally every 3 - 3 1/2 hours, you send a continuous supply of vital nutrients into your body.  Metabolism, by definition, simply means "the speed with which your body burns through food."  To boost metabolism, to become one of those people who can eat anything and not get fat, it’s essential that you put lots of food through the "food burning machine" with consistent regularity.

This strategy is the second step in our six-step Burn program, a program designed to turn-up your internal furnace and "torch" body fat.  If you fuel the machine more frequently you’ll do two things: one, you’ll keep a higher metabolism as you’ll balance hormones and burn a ton of energy digesting it, and two, you’ll eat less.  Yes!  You will eat less.  One of the biggest reasons for over-eating is going too long since your last "fueling" (food intake).

So, if you want what most people do, (a toned/chissled, energetic, fat burning machine), start eating more meals throughout the day.  It really works!

Check back later this week for tips and strategies on how to effectively do this simple, one-step nutritional plan and start feeling better and "torching body fat" right away.

For those of you who haven’t removed my email address from your spam list and hence did not receive my email about Dara here’s a repeat of some of her information as well as a good discussion on it:

– She’s 41 years old - a generation older than most of her competitors. She broke her first of 3 world records in 1982 and was medaling in her first Olympics in 1984…before many of her competitors this year were even born.

–She’s a mother - and still has maybe the most impressive abs I’ve ever seen on a women.

–She will go to the Beijing Olympics as the oldest ever member of the U.S. swim team.

–She’s medaled in four Olympic competitions… and Beijing will be the fifth because she’s favored to at least medal, and possibly win the 50-meter freestyle.

–She owns nine Olympic medals

–Last year in Germany, she swam the 50-meter freestyle in 23.82 seconds, breaking the American record and making her one of only five women to swim it faster than 24 seconds!

–She’s considered to have the purest most efficient swimming stroke… of any woman in the world.

–Shes absolutely, positively, incredibly, amazingly fit!…

And this is what I’d like to talk about…

You might be surprised by some of the successful strategies she’s now using in her training for elite competition (now that she’s mature)!!  For one, when she swam competitively in college she used to swim about 65,000 yards a week.  She now swims around 25,000.  So, she’s decreased her training time in the water by 62% and yet is faster and more efficient.  How could that be… train less and perform better?

Well, "Torres’s innovations for keeping her body in top shape, (as she advances deeper into middle age), are almost entirely out of the pool,"  states Elizabeth Weil of the New York Times.  In addition to the two hours per day of massage and "resistance stretching" with two separate trainers, the weekly chiropractic visits and a host of other nutritionists and chefs ensuring that she’s performing at her absolute best, she performs weight training 60 to 90 minutes, four days per week, with a personal trainer.  The focus of that training is on balanced, dynamic lifting movements that stimulate the nervous system.  Her trainer, Andy O’brien explains, “the idea is not to isolate muscle groups but to get muscles contracting together in the right sequences.”  (sound familiar?… like Athlon Elite’s motto of "Train Movements, Not Muscles" ??)

Athletes like Torres are starting to bring into mainstream attention the fact that "training smarter, not harder" is a better recipe for success.  Whether you want to lose 12 pounds of bodyfat like Craig Stewart demonstrated here last week or win the Olympics in Beijing, a short focused workout plan for 3-4 days per week with built in recovery strategies is far better than killing yourself in the gym (or pool in Torres’s case) twice per day everyday.  It’s about getting the body’s systems to work together to achieve optimum adaptations, and then creating a strategy to achieve optimum recovery.  If you haven’t experienced how we do this at Athlon Elite get a free training consultation and sample workout today to see if you’re exercise program is smart or just hard. (click here)

More on Dara…

After her personal training sessions and a quick recovery meal (hopefully someday to include Fluid Recovery), she heads off to a two-hour long stretching and body working session where two separate "stretching trainers" work on her body.  Torres puts as much time - and money - into her recovery as she does her training (and in fact she doesn’t separate the two… her recovery is her training).  This "recovery concept" is key and starts with nutrition.  This is something that we at Athlon Elite have subscribed to from the beginning.  Often, the reason an athlete doesn’t perform well is not because they didn’t train enough… but because they trained too much and didn’t recover.  The nutrition part starts immediately in the 30 minutes after your workout.  The body is craving sugar with the right amount of protein to kick-start the recovery process.  Get it right… and you’ll perform at 100% the next day.  Get it wrong… and well you know what it’s like to have a bad day!

Recovery also includes sound stretching, massage, days-off of training and of course a good night’s sleep (7-9 hours).  You can bet Torres focuses hard on all of these as well.  Get your free consult today at Athlon Elite and have a trainer put together a smart recovery plan for you. (Click here to learn how)

Just a reminder that there is still particulate matter and "Carcinogenic" compounds lurking due to the fires.  Without being glib, it is not the best idea to exercise excessively in the smoke so pay attention and get inside when it is real bad.  Think about how it must feel to be fighting these fires (THANKS to the Brave teams fighting these massive fires):

From Brushfire CRC:

Finally, in a smoke filled environment such as under some bushfire conditions, exposure to carbon monoxide and other smoke compounds may also compromise fire fighter work output. For instance, previous research has shown that exposure to carbon monoxide may lead to dizziness, nausea and impaired judgement, whilst other smoke compounds may reduce lung function, reducing the value of air that can be inhaled and exhaled.

Stay healthy, hydrated and particulate free!  Spartans train hard and smart!