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Posts Tagged ‘Fitness’

No, I’m not going to throw your names out there…LOL  But we had good results last week. I’ll post the results at class tomorrow! But here is the tale of the tape…

• A total of 5+ inches lost

• A total of 12+ pounds lost

• An average of 5 push up improvements
  

• An average of 7 sit up improvements

• An average of 4 squat improvements

Do YOU need to lose weight? Do you want to be stronger, leaner and more healthy? Come check out Killeen’s Best Fitness Boot Camp! Call Jim at 254-247-3668.

I would like to welcome two new athletes to our fitness family:

Tatiana Behrmann

Sarah Prosser

Welcome John and Jennifer Nightingale to our Fitness Family!

NE Womens Sectional Competition

Check this out. If it doesn’t make you wanna hit the gym, I don’t know what will!

Welcome a new fighter! Philip LeBoeuf joined our fighting family tonight. Welcome him on the mat!

An Ex-Marine, Coming Back From Severe Injuries, Follows an Intense Regime He Calls a ‘Livelihood’

By JAMES WAGNER, Wall Street Journal. Please visit WSJ for full accounting of the article.

In April 2003, corporal Hector Delgado lay in an induced coma on a Navy ship in the Persian Gulf. His pelvis had been crushed into six pieces and his legs and nerves were mangled after a fuel tank fell on him while he was with the Marines in Iraq.

The accident kept him in a hospital for a year. His right foot was paralyzed and his left foot was partially damaged. Mr. Delgado, who often has to use a wheelchair, fell into what he calls a three-year “funk.” His weight ballooned to 230 pounds, his cholesterol shot up, and he was smoking and going to bars every night.

“When I got out of the hospital, I could care less,” says Mr. Delgado, 30. The accident left him three inches shorter than what he was before deployment.

But in 2008, a friend mentioned a vigorous cross-training routine, CrossFit, often used by military special forces. Mr. Delgado was enticed by the workout’s intensity and variety, and liked the camaraderie of the exercisers.

He now works out five times a week and keeps a strict eating regime. His 5-foot-6 frame is down to 149 pounds, and he now has the strength to walk short distances unassisted.

At this point, [working out] is more of a livelihood than anything,” says Mr. Delgado, who lives in North Patchogue, N.Y.

Mr. Delgado is an outreach worker at the Queens Vet Center in New York, where he educates other veteran organizations and service members about military benefits and support programs. He is also earning his Bachelor’s degree in education and psychology at St. Joseph’s College.

Want to read the rest of the article? Go to the WSJ.

Write to James Wagner at james.wagner@wsj.com

Everybody should invest in a notebook and write in it everyday. There are many, many reasons to keep a journal. It is a great tool in the organization of thoughts and ideas. It is an invaluable tool in charting your progress in life. For the athlete, a journal is a necessity and should be in your gym bag along with your shoes, towel and other workout gear. I have long neglected the religious journaling of my training, my workouts and other important details of my life and now kick my self for it.

I have forgotten so much of what I have learned over the years in my Martial Arts and Fitness travels. Furthermore, I have many achievements and accomplishments that have gone unjournaled and have thus faded into distant memories. It is unfortunate, but it is not too late.

I encourage you to keep track of  your workouts or fit test results, but that simply isn’t enough. You need to keep a copy with you. You should record what you did during your whole workout: warmup, workout, cool down, scores, times and weights. You should record your impressions of your workout. If you felt good or bad or injured or energized. You should record strategies that worked and did not work.

Thoughts and ideas on how to improve your performance between workouts or to improve on your performance on a specific workout. If you learned some great detail that improved your form or time, you should write that down so you do not forget.

There is no limit to what you can write about in your journal. The important thing is that you write in it consistently and refer back to it to see your progress. If you are working on a goal (and you all should have a goal) like weight loss for example, then you should state your goal in your journal. Outline your plan and then record the steps you are taking to fulfill your goal.

Perhaps you read a good article on improving your eating habits and are trying to follow the program. You can cut it out and tape it into your journal or write down the details in your journal and then see if day by day, week by week, you are following the program. Not all programs are one-size-fits-all and so if you are not finding success you can analyze where it might be going wrong and thus make some adjustments.

Remember it is your journal and you should feel free to write in it, personalize it, make it as interesting and enjoyable and user friendly as possible. Many people tape inspiring pictures in their journals of six-pack abs that they want to have or inspiring athletes that they idolize. Here is one tip that I find works really well. Use two pages that face each other and track your workouts in columns going across so that you can fit several weeks of workouts on those two pages.

Having several weeks worth of work staring you in the face makes it easy to look at your recent progress. This is especially true if you are working a progressive goal like those pullups. You can see from left to right how many pullups and other assistance exercises you did for those weeks and quickly see if you are progressing.

If you are doing a fitness and body composition test every Friday, then you might have 4 weeks of tests on those pages staring at you and thus you can see if the program was working that month.

There are no limits. I haven’t even touched on food journaling. If you are following the Paleo plan and zoning, it is a must that your write down everything you eat. Charting your fuel and performance will allow you to really see how everything works together. Getting really personal is also good because you can see how your emotions effect your diet and exercise. If you are a good journaler, you might notice patterns that help or hinder your performance.

You might notice that every time your boss gives you a new assignment, you eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and you don’t workout for 3 or 4 days. You might notice that every time burpees are posted on the WOD board, you come down with a cold, a sore back or some other reason not to give it your all.

Hmmm…interesting.

I was training my son in Standing Grappling and Ground fighting just a few days ago and my youngest said, “It’s too hard, can you show me something else that is easier?” Of course, I gave him a hard time about it and continued to drill and drill. Later on, I sat him down and shared some of my life experiences where having a “Don’t give up” mental attitude literally saved my life. So, I thought that this thread might make a good blog post. Let me know what you think. I look forward to your comments and tweets.

Here it is:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.  – Aristotle

How many times do we tell students “don’t give up”, but do we practice this mindset ourselves?  When a challenge comes along and we don’t get it the first time, we should keep trying for at least one hundred times.

I have not failed 700 times, I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work
~ Thomas Edison

Think how successful we would be if we always did things one hundred times before we even thought about giving up.  If this was put into our life at work, home and in martial arts, think of the things we could achieve.  we might not even get there after one hundred times but think how much better we would be than just giving it one chance and then saying “l can’t do it”.

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
Lewis Carroll

The human quality of perseverance is very important. Often people with physical talent fail because they lack perseverance and motivation, they should instead be like the proverbial boulder and just know we can achieve whatever we want, as long as we keep taking action and learning we can only go forwards and progress.

Repetition is the mother of all skills.  To do a technique once and expect it to work for us is not true in the slightest.  To really understand the technique and its concepts we have to do it until the line of familiarity and the root movement is in our subconscious.  It can be done anytime anywhere without even thinking about it.

You may train for a long time, but if you merely move your hands and feet and jump up and down like a puppet, learning Karate is not very different from learning a dance. you will never have reached the heart of the matter; you will have failed to grasp the quintessence of karate-do – Gichin Funakoshi

Think how many times we do a jab in our training more than say a difficult kick, the jab is repeated far more times as the difficult kick will work in a real situation.  It’s repeated time after time so that it will work for us in situations and we become very comfortable throwing it.

Given enough time, any man may master the physical. With enough knowledge, any man may become wise. It is the true warrior who can master both….and surpass the result.
~ Tien T’ai

When we have developed all of our combative skill sets ensuring that we adhere to the six attributes then our techniques will become technically sound and we will develop our tactical or strategic skills to become an excellent martial artist.

The obstacle is the path
~ Zen Proverb

Until next time, Let’s Get Training!

jim

Effective Clothing Layers

Everyone is different. Especially when it comes to their bodies’ response to working out. Sometimes we do not even know until the weather changes. With all this cold weather blowing through, a common problem may be keeping you inside and out of the gym. Sometimes all you need are a few helpful hints to get over the cold.

During Boot camp we have an wide variety of workouts. Sometimes these include both indoor and outdoor exercises. It is never a bad idea to bring your cold weather arsenal to each work out. To get the heart pumping, we might warm up with a quick 200-400 meter run. Some people struggle with the cold air.

I have heard people use terms like “cold weather asthma”, “burning”, etc. to describe the pain that comes from the cold air. Although, eventually, the body will acclimate itself and all will be well. If you are not moving to Minnesota, why not find an interim solution. The problem stems from the temperature difference between the cold air and our normal body temperature. It is like putting ice in boiling water.

Thin, warm gloves

At first, the ice will crack and melt. Eventually, the ice will cool down the water and the melting would occur at a more natural pace. Between these two happenings is a median that we can apply to cold air intake. It is something that impedes the direct hot on cold interaction like a buffer.

A couple of great ideas to put between your mouth and the cold air are scarves, bandannas, & face masks. Scarves and bandannas are pretty self-explanatory. Put them over your mouth. In the face mask department there is a huge selection. If you are looking to stay on the lower side of the monetary scale, a simple dust mask will do a pretty decent job. I don’t recommend this for people that wear glasses because there is not a good seal and the glasses will fog.

However, if you are an avid outdoor exerciser and want to squash this problem for good, I would recommend a runners face mask. They range in price from $5 (probably comparable in function to the aforementioned dust mask) to $85 (top of the line, fog free, too much for a southern state dweller).

Another problem that plagues the outdoor exerciser are cold extremities. Hands, feet, legs, & arms all get cold. Of course, the hands are usually the first to feel the affects of the cold weather. Get some gloves. Gloves that you don’t mind getting dirty and have a grip to them. I would check out the hardware stores or gardening departments before I looked in the winter section of the department store. Dress in layers. We all know, everyone that works out sweats.

Proof Of Work!

If you are sweating you are probably hot. Wear something underneath the long sleeves so you can be comfortable throughout your workout. Also, if you are going to be indoor and outdoor or just outdoors remember that when you sweat you will soon be colder. Sweat is liquid and reacts to the cold as such (i.e. it could freeze given the chance). The layers are good to put back on when you get cold. It is also a good idea to wear thicker socks. This will keep the cold out and away from the toes.

Get up and put your cold weather gear together. You need a buffer for the cold air, utilitarian gloves, layers, and thick socks. Sounds pretty simple, but it makes for a better work out.

Now you’re ready, so get over to the gym and let’s get training!