The Vlog

Stretching, soft-tissue work, proprioceptive work (stability/balance training), joint mobilizations, appropriate exercises, and proper exercise form are the key to injury prevention. Chances are that if you’ve neglected any of these in the past, you have this surrounding your injured area: tightness, poor tissue quality, imbalanced or insufficient joint mobility, proprioceptive (or reaction) deficit and poor exercise form if you use that area. This is the exact opposite of the qualities listed in the first sentence! Believe me, prehab work is a hell of a lot easier than rehab work. Rehabbing sucks! Some people think they can cure a minor injury by focusing on just one of those things. Maybe, but why not improve the rate of your recovery by using all of the modalities mentioned in the first sentence and keep yourself injury free as well? My clients hit all of these things which keeps them injury free and their training consistent.

Von

If you are a male and above 15% body fat, your body is primed for creating more fat than building muslce. Imagine you weigh 200 pounds with 20% body fat. If you gain 30 pounds, 20 could be fat and 10 pounds would be muscle. You’ve just gained HALF of your already existing fat and only 10 pounds of muscle to boot. Your body fat percentage is now 26%. What if however you were at 12% and you gained 30 pounds. Now, your body actually could gain 20 pounds of muscle and 10 pounds of fat. Where would you be? 14.7%. Do you see the difference of starting out at a lower body fat percentage. It really does make the long-term difference. Lose the weight, then start building the larger muscles.

Von

Life is good. I don’t know what it is but everything seems to be working right now – relationships, my website, my work with a diabetes prevention program, my clients success, etc. This isn’t one of those – life sucks stories, my life is great and I can’t complain. But it wasn’t always like this – my life basically sucked. The thing that changed: my will and my thinking. With the help of my mother, great friends, and awesome resources in my industry, I’ve managed to love my life.

Von

My Goals for this year are:

1. Get my weight between 215-225 pounds.

2. Drop fat percentage down to 10%. I’m hanging probably around 13-15 percent which I realize is high, but I am trying to put on mass.

3. Squat 400 pounds, Bench Press 315 pounds, Deadlift 425 pounds.

4. Train consistently and do warm-up and conditioning workouts.

If you have any goals (or all of them) you would like to share, please do.

Von

The research is crystal clear – if you diet (or heat a hypo-caloric diet), you will lose weight. But what kind of weight do you want to lose: fat or muscle? If you do primarily cardio, you will lose more muscle and less fat. However, if you do more strength training, you’ll lose €exclusively fat. Some people worry that if they do strength training, they’ll gain a lot of muscle. I’ll admit that some people can get a little “bulky” in a some areas, but if your one of the few, you do have alternatives for the type of strength training you do so you don’t get bulky. Just make sure you are doing strength training while dieting.

Von

I used to be a philosophy major and one philosopher who I still value is Ludwig Wittgenstein. He showed how difficult language is to study philosophically considering humor, tone, purpose, specific languages. They all influence the actual meaning of words and henceforth the meaning of life. The cool thing is he didn’t have any real theories about language, he was just very creative. I learned to appreciate the beauty of language and it’s constant creative nature. This is how I feel about training – the feeling of it is creative for me and that’s why I love it.

Von

With my clients, we have mini-goals set every 1-2 months. For my fat loss clients, they have so many pounds of fat they will lose. Unfortunately, it is impossible to predict when that will exactly happen although I know it will happen with our time frame. I’ll give you an example: “David” was a one of my clients who took off with training and his nutrition. After his first week, he lost 8 pounds of fat – awesome. For his second week, he lost two – not bad. For his third week, he lost nothing. This happens and I’ve seen pretty much the reverse happen with different clients. The point is that you can never predict when your fat will be lost, but you must be consistent with your training and your nutriton.

Von

There are really only two things which really work for weight loss and even better, fat loss. These “secrets” are: diet and exercise. They are the most powerful tools that you can ever use for your body. If Tim has all of best supplements in the world (and trust me, I’ve seen most of them) and Jennifer does nothing but exercise and diet without supplements, who will have the greater fat loss in a year? While Tim could lose about a maximum of 5 pounds in a year with supplements, Jennifer could possibly lose more than 50 pounds in a year with just diet and exercise – they are that powerful! How much can supplements help? Not much if you don’t have an optimized diet and exercise plan.

Von

The same client from the previous post actually called me to get weighed in. I usually don’t get this kind of call. When time came to, my client had his shirt off and he looked noticeably different. I don’t say this if I don’t actually see it, but he was. We weighed him and the scale read 164.4. We looked at the previous week’s which was 164.8. It wasn’t looking good. For this phase, his goal is fat loss, but I told him that we really can’t decide anything until we see the body fat percentage. The previous week gave 18.3%. This week? 15.0%. My client actually showed a 5 pound decrease in body fat and about a 4.5 pound increase in muscle. Remember that two days ago, he was eating a slimfast with a slimjim. But do you know what he ate the rest of the week? 100% what he was supposed to eat. He also trained exactly as prescribed.

Von

One of my clients called me yesterday because he went to work, but had left all of his food for the day at home. Consider that he works in a large corporate building with no lunch room, but plenty of vending machines. I told him that he should just consume the mixed nuts without any candies in it every couple of hours. If he could score any beef jerky or any other protein source, “bonus” I told him. What did he eat? Slim Jim with SlimFast. Not a bad combo in my opinion given his choices. He could have panicked and eaten nothing but M&M’s and chips, but he chose the better alternatives. Because of that type of thinking, he will succeed. In fact, in the past two weeks, he has lost his planned 4 pounds averaging two pounds per week. Although that doesn’t sound like a lot, he will continue to lose an average of two pounds per week. In two months, that equals 16 pounds of fat dropped. He will also gain some muscle too.

Von