Get control over your wrinkles

Strong and supple collagen tissue is the key to having healthy and youthful looking skin. Collagen health is largely dependent on proper hydration, therefore if you are not drinking enough water (not tea or or any other flavored fluid) you are starving your skin. Secondary to staying hydrated is to manage cortisol levels. In times of stress the body produces large amount of cortisol, which drives the body’s metabolic process into what is called gluconeogenesis. In plain English, this is when your body uses protein for energy. This protein can some from ANY protein source in the body. Skeletal muscle, glands and organs including your skin. Research has shown that the collagen in the skin is one of the first to be sacrificed when cortisol levels are high. Any hopes of tightening up that saggy skin, reducing cellulite and looking younger are all dependent on hydration and stress management. #managecortisol

Get Out Of Your Head

Einstein said, “No problem can be solved by the same kind of thinking that created it.”

Real change can only happen with action. Thinking about it is not enough because if you are thinking you are using the same mind that created the problem. It is only through action that new habits and new results will show up. #actionspeaks

 

Body Mechanics in Health, Fitness and Performance

 

The body has a very sensitive survival mechanism any threat to survival creates a stress response. Including poor posture and poor body mechanics. Poor body mechanics can mean training with incorrect technique, sitting in the wrong chair, driving in the wrong car, wearing the wrong shoes or using your body in any way that promotes poor mechanics.

Improving posture and body mechanics can be a very powerful step in reducing your bodies stress response and allowing your body to use energy that would otherwise be used to fight stress. Your body’s energy can instead be used towards more important things such as improving health, energy levels, weight loss and body transformation.

 

Self Balance

“As we learn to balance ourselves from the complexities of everyday society, we begin to understand the reasons for being human and living as happily as possible.” — Michael Thompson

There Are No Sheep In Elite Athletics

 

Everyone is unique and must take the time to discover what works for them, not only for sports performance but for long term health and vitality. What might work for the champion of the day is not necessarily best for someone else. Success does leave clues but there’s nothing that replaces experience. Put any idea to the test; be honest about why and how its working and you’ll set yourself up to be a bona fide bad ass in your sport and activity.

Playing Catch Up With Your Health Is A Bad Idea

Playing Catch Up With Your Health Is A Bad Idea

By Terrence Thomas

 

This goes back to the old saying; an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. As a holistic lifestyle coach, I am often presented with the challenges of helping clients  “play catch up” with their health, and unfortunately, this is one of the primary reasons people hire me.  They are looking for viable solutions to undo years of neglect to their health and vitality.

 

It’s my job to help them cultivate enough life force and energy to regain the quality of life they want. Consider this message a strong admonition to you that it is much easier to put a little bit of effort in over a long period of time rather than trying to play catch up – it just doesn’t work.

 

Things left unto themselves tend to move toward chaos, UNLESS there is energy used to maintain order. Your health, fitness, vitality and just about every aspect of your life is on exception.

Focusing on the foundational principals: water intake, getting enough sleep and eating quality food. These simple actions if done consistently make all the difference. Food for thought… ###

 

Why Eating Clean Sucks

Why “Eating Clean” Sucks

by Terrence Thomas

 

Let’s discuss a mental construct that I believe is one of the major causes of yo-yo dieting. The idea that I’m talking is the “eating clean” and I believe has infected the entire health and fitness industry.  Here are three concepts about eating clean that explain how this mindset can sabotage your health, fitness, weight loss, and physique goals and what you can do to make sure you are not doing this to yourself.

 

1. Stop using the term “eating clean”.

The very idea that you are eating clean means that at some point you are not eating clean.  In other words you’re eating in a way that supports health and performance during a certain time and then the other times you are eating like crap. I don’t know about you but that sounds very much like an eating disorder. The mindset behind eating clean is that you are in some way depriving yourself. When the mind is in a dynamic of deprivation, it is relying on willpower to resist temptation. Eventually you will run out of willpower and the natural tendency is to either quit eating clean or go to the other extreme, which is to eat garbage or binge eat. Having “cheat” days are supposed to help deal with the deprivation aspect of “eating clean” but the mental dynamic of resisting or succumbing to temptation is still in play.

 

If you are constantly bouncing from eating “clean” to not eating clean you are on a yo-yo diet. On average, when you ask someone what eating clean means, they say eating in a way that helps them lose fat or get healthy. Why not eat like this all the time or at least consistent enough that when you do choose not to “eat clean” that it won’t totally derail your efforts.  Follow the 80/20 rule. In other words, if your are eating, living and managing yourself in a way that promotes health, fitness and vitality 80 percent of the time then when you should be able to tolerate the occasional culinary, or recreational vice without irreparable damage to your body.

 

2. Send the idea of Bulking up back to the 1970’s. If you want to gain quality muscle that lasts for a lifetime, eat quality whole food all the time. Eating garbage foods and supplements that only make you look swollen and puffy will give you the illusion that you are BIG.  If you want to have a real, bona fide brick shit house of a body, you must feed your body real whole food, train intelligently and consistently. Training intelligently means knowing when to crank it up and push it to the limit but also knowing when to back off.

 

3. Stop playing Tug Of War with our mind.

If you want achieve your health and fitness goals with zero resistance and a feeling of peace, stop creating extremes in behavior. Think lifestyle instead of dieting. Eat real food all the time and sprinkle in some treats instead of eating pathologically strict and then totally flying off the handle and single handedly keeping a local ice cream shop in business.

 

Disclaimer: With that said, I am fully aware of what it takes to achieve extreme levels of fitness, leanness and muscularity. For example if you are a physique competitor and are in pre contest training, you are asking the body to do something that by nature it does not want to do. This takes some specific training, diet, and supplementation strategies to achieve this and when done with a relative degree in intelligence can be done safely and at a high level. The key here is intelligence.  #BeBeautiful #BeStrong  #BeHealthy

The #1 Secret To Life Long Physical Excellence

Do you remember when you first learned how to drive a car?

The mere act of getting behind the wheel totally consumed you. Driving required so much of your attention and energy that you couldn’t even have the radio on.

But as time went on something magical happened.  Not only were you able to  drive with the radio on but you’ve now added talking on the phone and text messaging to the mix.

What was the variable in having the confidence and faith to safely and effectively navigate a 2 ton machine towards your chosen destination?

It was the Acquisition Of Skill.

When you gained the required skills of driving your car, the energy demand to perform the task was much less than when you first started.

The acquisition of skill  allowed you to divert your energy towards other tasks. It allowed you to drive with less effort. Gaining the skill gave you the confidence and the faith to know that you can succeed at will.

If you have achieved any level of physical excellence (i.e. weight loss, strength, endurance, etc) and are struggling to maintain your gains, then it is time to explore the concept of skill acquisition.

Real physical excellence, once achieved is a non struggle. It will still take effort but your efforts will be more effective because you are doing it with skill. If you have lost weight, acquiring the skill of weight management will help you keep it off. If you have truly acquired the skill of strength, then your training will be ever evolving. Elite physical excellence students rarely hit training “plateaus” because they understand that adjusting their nutrition and training by listening to their body is a skill that helps them continue to make progress despite changes in their energy levels and environment.

The mindset for achieving permanent physical excellence is to turn your goals into a quest for skill.

If you focus on mastering the skill the final result will be all but guaranteed…forever.

Much Chi..

###

How The Body Thinks Part 2: Exercise The New Addiction

Let’s take a trip down memory lane..

It all started way back with the first Mr. Olympia Eugene Sandow. He was considered the world’s most perfectly build man of his time. He was lean, symmetrical, muscular and strong. Eugene was truly the total package. He not only had the “show” muscles but he had the “go” as well. His feats of strength was his original claim to fame but is audiences soon became more enamored with his bulging muscles than what he could lift. From this point on the era of Bodybuilding began.

The concept of bodybuilding has evolved quite a bit since Sandow’s day. During the early days of physical culture, there was a pride and focus on not only looking good on the outside but living a healthy lifestyle and feeling good on the inside.

Within the last 5 to 10 years, there has been a shift from physical culture to the era of extreme fitness. High-tech gyms and super-charged supplements have created the great divide between form, health and function.

Extreme exercise has literally become the new addiction.  At least in the 70-80’s you had somewhat of a clear boundary between physical culture and the party crowd.

Now people are replacing their hard drugs with hard exercise.They are replacing the high of narcotics  with the train till you puke mindset. Think about it. If you’ve ever exercised until you threw up, didn’t it feel the same as a hangover?

At it’s core they are one and the same.  People are trading narcotics for stimulants and extreme exercise in the name of health. It is a step up the evolutionary ladder but I feel that we can and must keep moving up.

Just because an exercise is possible does not mean it is to be done. Not all exercise is for everyone and until we understand this, we are going to have millions of people brainwashed into thinking that they have to kill themselves to get in shape. This is not a good thing if we are trying to inspire millions of overweight and out of shape people to exercise.

These extreme workouts is not training. They are events. It is the equivalent to  running the full 26 miles at every session if you are training for a marathon.

Elite Strength Coaches,(I’m talking about the Real Elite Coaches) know that the extreme fitness programs are just fads.

The definition of a training program is being able to duplicate an executed session.

If you cannot duplicate the session without injury or burnout, then it was not a training session, it was a maximal event.

If I did a maximal event 3 times a week, I’d need a Red Bull or Red line or Nitro something to get by as well. Here’s a novel concept..

Train to tolerance and then rest.  Gradually and systematically  progress your way to higher levels of intensity. This way your results “stick” and you build long lasting results.

Give it a shot..

Much Chi##

How The Body Thinks Part 1: Death By Gym

What you are about to learn could save your life.

To truly understand how exercise affects the body, there must be an understanding of human biology, physiology, and psychology.

All of these factors are affected by an exercise program.

Stay with me please…This is going to get a little deep.

Evolutionary biology tells us that ANY threat to the organism will create a stress response in the body.

Let’s define what threat means in a bit more detail.

A threat is anything that compromises human survival. ANYTHING..

We are hardwired to detect any and all stressors that can kill us. This  can be at the conscious level (i.e. what we are aware of) or at the subconscious level (i.e. what we are not aware of.)

Ok.. let’s now define both conscious and unconscious stressors.

First the conscious..

* being trapped in a burning car.
* falling off a motorcycle
*getting mauled by a hungry grizzly bear.
*being diagnosed with a terminal illness
etc…

Now here are some of the possible subconscious stressors

* poor breathing pattern; if your breathing is compromised in any way.. your body thinks you are going to die.. And there are 8 ways to Sunday that breathing can be disrupted, so this threat is real and quite prevalent.

*poor posture: if your physical frame is out of alignment, your body thinks it will not be able to effectively run from predators or hunt effectively and therefore thinks it will die. Consider that 90+% of society has some type of postural disorder.

*suboptimal food choices: if you are eating a food that your DNA sees as incompatible with life… your body thinks it will die. In other words any time you eat a meal that is not according to your metabolic type, your body thinks it a poison and goes into a state of stress.

I don’t think I need to give you a statistic for this one. Just look around.. Has anyone close to you to been diagnosed with cancer? How about heart dis-ease? diabetes? anybody obese? how about just a little overweight? How about can get pregnant? Etc….

It is the subconscious forms of stress that eventually produce conscious forms of stress (i.e. sickness and dis-ease).

Finally here lies the lesson..

Many people have a desire to improve their health, fitness and body image.

They are willing to put in the time and effort to exercise and “diet”.

A fundamental principle of Physical Excellence is that any exercise program will serve to do three things:

1. Improve the structure of the body: This goes beyond biceps, triceps and abs and emphasizes the development of the physical qualities needed to develop, restore and maintain a healthy, functional and vital human frame. If this happens, the fitness, fat loss and the aesthetic results will be all but guaranteed.

2. Improve movement skills. Your exercise program will promote the ideal expression of human movement. In other words, your body will move and function the way it was designed to.

The best way to describe this principle is with the following analogy:

What if you took your car to a mechanic to get a full service on it (i.e. brakes, tire rotation, alignment, tune up etc.). And the mechanic also threw in a free car wash and wax.

Now imagine as you drove the car home that it drove and performed worse than it did before you took it in to get fixed? Would you focus on the fact that your car is shinny or would you have a problem with the fact that the car is running like crap?

Yet I have consulted with THOUSANDS of people over the last 20 years that have been “working out” and they come to me with poor posture, dysfunctional movement patterns, and are “fit but sick”.

This phenomenon was unheard of 30 years ago.

It is only since the advent of diet pills, cheap garbage supplements that we now have people with six pack abs like a world class athlete and toxic livers and polluted intestines.  I digress for a moment but I think you get the point.

In summary: If your exercise and nutrition program is not in line with your specific needs, and are not accomplishing the above, then your body thinks it will die and produce a stress response.

Prolonged stress responses are detrimental to your health and that is not Physical Excellence.

Listen.. with the new changes in “health care (i.e. disease management)” in the United States, more of the onus will be on us to take personal responsibility for our health and well being, as it ought to be in my opinion.

We have more people getting terminal illnesses at younger ages than ever.

We as a society must approach our health and vitality from a different perspective.

A perspective that will serve to promote Physical Excellence to the next generation.

Will you help me do it?

Your tip for today,

Much.. Chi..

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