There are so few stories out there about transformed lives, but so many about short term transformed bodies. When we challenge the paradigm, they can be one and the same. Here’s an example. She challenges the standard. She challenges the excuse makers. She challenges me.
This client really challenged me on my under-sharing problem. She was very open about her incredible journey (check out the IG post, swipe left and see her words: https://www.instagram.com/p/By2qgDzDgDh/ ). And it became increasingly evident to me how bad I am about sharing client journeys. I was so averse to marketing for so many years, thinking of it as the type of thing only phonies and bad fitness professionals do, that I avoided it. In my mind, professionals are private and amateurs are showy. I now realize my avoidance of sharing denied the public to learn about what’s possible. Even to this day, I have weeks where 30 clients hit personal records in that week. But I’m lucky if I think to video 2 of them or save the shots or videos they send me. I may or may not remember to share 1 of every 20 I save. So I’m working at it. The same way she opted to alter the paradigm of how she interacted with fitness, I have re-evaluated how public to be. My guess is most people out there have a paradigm that’s holding them back. Challenge it
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You know what I’m talking about: the inauthentic try - where you “try,” but you’re really just using it as a pretext for staying the same, “proving” that it doesn’t work for you, and you’ve already predetermined the conclusion without any genuine interest in developing new nuance.
I see this in worldview and political discussions. You know that someone had no interest in expanding their perspective when, after gathering new insights, they walk away with the exact same conclusions as prior. I find it odd, in fact, when people proudly proclaim being a “lifelong fill-in-the-blank-here.” Lifelong? Oy. Try to grow. I see this with kids “trying” food. Sometimes they “know” they don’t like it before ever tasting it. Sometimes they “know” they don’t like it after barely tasting it. Most things take time. Most things develop. Taste and desires don’t snap into being. They’re molded. I see this with people in their healthy behaviors. There’s so much toe-dipping. There’s so much dogma. There’s so much inauthenticity. An honest try means living a different way than you have, thinking in a different manner than you have. Most people have never authentically tried. It’s evident: same tactics = same outcomes. It’s real simple. Everyone plays the same games; so none of us buy your story. Genuinely try something new. Truly honestly experiment. Consider alternatives. Or save us all the speeches about how open-minded you are. Authentically try, or just keep thinking the same, feeling the same, acting the same, being the same, getting the same outcomes. Right now, the overwhelming trend in exercise is to “push it.” Every little novelty franchise popping up around the world is creating a tagline like “best workout in town.” Sad. Not only is it a lie; but it’s worthless even if it were true.
The underlying mechanisms in chemistry, biochemistry and biology are actually really well understood with regard to muscle gain, weight loss, strength and mobility improvements. If someone wants a comprehensive explanation, message me. To summarize, just use critical thinking: when you get run down, injured, busy, overwhelmed, can you OUTPERFORM last week? The fundamental mechanism for physical progress is to PROgress your output week after week. If the whole exercise method is to “go hard,” you have created an inevitable bottleneck. Yes, you will have survivors who didn’t YET get hurt; and they are called “testimonials.” The fact of the matter is that “go slow” is the truth. It provides the consistent backdrop from which someone can leap forward here and there. And every week they live to fight another day. It’s not sexy. But it’s actually the only thing that works for the broad populace over the long haul. If you run gamma frequency (over 30hertz to 100hz) into the eyes or brains of rats, half of the amyloid plaques evaporate: http://news.mit.edu/…/brain-wave-stimulation-improve-alzhei…
Specifically, when you coax the brain into operating at the “flow state” or “learning” frequency, you teach it to clear the Alzheimers -causing accumulation. After studying the entirety of the USMLE1 neuroanatomy and neurophysiology lecture series in 2012, learning that specific actions occur at specific hertz ranges, I became fascinated with the idea of forcing the brain out of the anxiety, pain, and depression ranges (13-29hz) and into alpha, theta, delta or bursts of gamma (which is what advanced zen meditators already do). I conducted experiments with running current across the brain (tDCS), to find that I could easily solve Rubik’s cubes for the first time in my life and foreign language learning could be done at about 2-5x faster: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/18303984/ It’s among an arsenal of proprietary techniques I use with advanced coaching clients. And these I never in detail share publicly. But I did reference them on the blog in 2013: https://www.elev8wellness.com/wellblog_best_nutrition_tra…/1 In recent posts as well, I cover EEG ranges. And I have included them in client notes going back to 2012, although my iPad search could only find 2016 files with reference to brain stimulation or the Fisher Wallace device. The future is here. The tech has been around for a while. I applaud MIT. But if you’re going to wait around for their next 10 trials, publishings, clinical go-ahead, and for pharma to get out of the way, good luck. Brain stim already had beneficial human outcomes in 2008 research. Eleven years later and MIT is conducting rat trials. The viable officially-approved therapies are not advancing; they’re going backward. I’ve had the great fortune of working tens of thousands of hours in an industry where I’ve regularly observed some of the same thousands of people nearly daily for years. Members, peers, clients, you name it - they’re consistent, for good or for bad. Daily or weekly, monthly or seasonally, I see the same people execute the same patterns regardless.
Changes in circumstance don’t shake it. People who don’t manage money well when poor still go bankrupt when they hit the lottery. People who don’t manage risk well still flounder even after a success. People who don’t manage relationships well still hit drama even when they get support. People who don’t manage self well recede back to self-destruction even after a win. I’m confused by the labels of “inconsistent” or “erratic” or “chaotic” toward humans. There’s always a well-defined pattern. Just like politicians saying absolute nonsense before elections, it’s expected and predictable. So it seems to me the answer lies not in “getting consistent,” so much as honestly acknowledging our patterns and earnestly reinforcing the beneficial ones while getting to the root of our detrimental ones. Everyone’s already consistent. But not everyone’s consistency is moving them in the direction they want. Americans lose 1% of their non-fat (ie - muscle, tendons, ligaments, bones, etc) mass every year. If you don’t do heavy strength training or its equivalent, you cannot buck the trend. You will keep getting softer even if your weight doesn’t change.
This article tackles some of the misconceptions about culprits of age, menopause, male and female weight management: https://www-washingtonpost-com.cdn.ampproject.org/…/ccb0673… Essentially, it always comes back to muscle mass. If you have little, fat loss is tough. As you have less, it’s tougher. As you avoid strengthening, it gets to a point which seems impossible. Rather than tackle the real culprit, we place the blame solely on age or sex or genetics. Those can be contributors. But the choice to avoid strengthening is predominantly the problem. Many times people have come to me wanting to lose fat while wanting to remain weak af. I’ve tried to explain, at length, that incredibly weak people have no business trying to lose weight first. It never NETS a beneficial outcome. They’re already losing weight. It just happens to consist of healthy tissue. Call it RoundUp, glyphosate, or any of the related herbicides. Monsanto and their shills would have you believe it poses zero human threat. Though they have billions to lose at stake in their opinion, they do have a few genuine reasons to take it. After all, glyphosate was specifically formulated to attack vegetation, not human biology. And to be fair, in chemistry, the dose makes the poison. No agent is inherently at all levels of exposure carcinogenic or deadly. But the subject is murky, given various attempts to show its safety have failed abysmally.
Namely, in animal studies, the first low-dose-exposed generation and offspring may show little symptoms, while the next generations have markedly increased risk of health concerns: https://news.wsu.edu/…/wsu-researchers-see-health-effects-…/ Again, the pushback can come in the form of “well, those are rats, not humans.” I get it. The World Health Organization currently understates the threat at “probably causes cancer.” And the EPA’s current stance is “unlikely to pose a cancer risk to humans.” At the same time, findings suggest pretty strong links between these classes of herbicides and non-Hodgkins Lymphoma: https://www.sciencedirect.com/…/artic…/pii/S1383574218300887 Do people need not toss and turn at night over the debate and whether a picogram is going to give you cancer? There isn’t a good consensus. Statistically, it’s hard to pin down, because there are many contributing factors leading to the explosion in unhealthiness worldwide since the adoption of these herbicides. But like I said, it’s murky. Like with any other subject, I don’t care to get bogged down in battles of opinions. What’s the mechanism? Glyphosate itself doesn’t have any obvious mechanisms applicable to humans. Its action is indeed regarding plant enzymes. HOWEVER, the “inert” ingredients may be what we really need to pay attention to: https://www.scientificamerican.com/…/weed-whacking-herbici…/ This is an incredibly recent part of the debate. And it’s been changing a lot just this calendar year. It’ll be interesting to keep notes as greater and greater specificity is utilized in the discussion. And I can’t help but wonder, as more damning evidence is forthcoming with the solvents and additives in pesticides, if your next trip to the hardware store involves inquiries for “pure glyphosate.” I’m imagining an evolution in the sophistication of the consumer, wherein you ask the clerk at the store, “may I have the POEA-free RoundUp?” And she’ll say, “aisle 6 is all of the additive-free glyphosates.” If they take a single week off of training, they lose strength. In fact, in several studies, young fit people who had only two weeks of downtime lost so much strength that it was “equivalent to aging by 40 or 50 years”: https://www.google.com/…/muscle-strength-fades-after-just-…/
We all have this totally unfounded belief that children and young adults can blithely be super fit. But they respond to the training effect all the same, and they respond to the lack of training effect even more dramatically. That is, when you take away the strength stimulus, capability is subtracted from a youth far more rapidly than in an adult. American childhood obesity is on the rise. Kids are not naturally lean, fit, or healthy. They do have the advantage of having accumulated LESS absolute damage (ie - total aging), although they might’ve had even more relative damage (ie - accelerated aging). Ask primary school coaches who work with kids who take the offseason off versus kids who continue training and practicing in the offseason. Night and day. There are two youth athletes I saw worsen dramatically by simply reducing their training. No injuries. No sickness. One kid had attained a ridiculous level of effortless 100 strict clean push-ups, only to lose his motivation at the ripe old age of 13 or 14. Prior to hitting the brakes, he showed incredible promise (as in potentially THE best athlete in a few different sports). I met with him a year or so later to find he couldn’t rattle off a clean 15 reps without floundering and bellyaching. He’d peaked before puberty. Another promising athlete could perform a gorgeous 100lb deadlift at even younger than the prior example. Likewise, he lost the fire and took only a 4 month hiatus from training. He wasn’t inactive during this period. He played sports, played a lot, grew another 10lbs heavier and became a lot more coordinated. Returning to the gym, we found he couldn’t begin to break the warmup weight (55lbs) from the ground. He was as confused as I. I knew that kids lost strength like adults by adapting to lack of stimulus; but even I, with 15 years of professional experience, was a little dumbfounded. He’d lost half of his pulling strength on arguably the most critical structural lift which informs all other athletic movements, from running, to jumping, to throwing, to kicking, to swinging, and so forth. Though improvements may be more rapid in young people, maintenance is harder, and degeneration is more rapid. This flies in the face of most common beliefs, I realize. But it’s a studied phenomenon. And I’ve seen firsthand the reality. The takeaway is simple: you will adapt to lack of strength stimulus by becoming lacking in strength; and it hasn’t anything AT ALL to do with “getting older”. Youths lose strength faster. So you can stop with the old wives tales. It is a very straight forward equation of input to outcome. Remove the input, and there is zero surprise in loss of outcome. The surprise, if any, is that young people degenerate in fitness more rapidly than adults. |
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