The Fitness Adviser

Vic Magary is a star in the fitness community. He has served in the military, is a black belt martial artist and personal fitness trainer, and for a time was even a lawyer before he quit to pursue his love of martial arts and fitness.

He is also the owner of Gymjunkies.com, an amazing website devoted to hardcore fitness training. If you haven’t been there, check it out. I was lucky enough to score an interview with Vic and ask him a few questions about nutrition, fitness, and his personal training programs. Here’s what he had to say:

It’s pretty well known that you’re a fitness nut. Was there anything in your childhood that motivated you to get seriously into fitness, or is it something that you got interested in later on?

For better or for worse, the world is becoming computerized. That means that more and more people now have full time jobs that require typing on a keyboard. It also means that more than ever, people are complaining about chronic wrist pain. The good news is that most of the time, wrist pain is completely curable.

[The lure of success in your profession may tempt you to ignore your wrist pain. Remember that true success is doing great with your career while keeping your body strong and pain free to enjoy life. That's what this blog is all about.]

The bad news is that your doctor might not properly understand wrist pain and how to cure it, and will then target the symptoms of your pain rather than the underlying problem. Fortunately, by virtue of reading this article, you’ll be one step closer to understanding wrist pain and getting your pain cured.

The Causes of Wrist Pain

The other day, I got into a conversation with one of my friend’s older brothers. This guy is a machine when it comes to working out. He gets up at five in the morning, says his prayers, goes to the gym, from the gym he goes to work, then after work he goes to the gym again or goes for a 12-mile run! And to make it clear, this guy is ripped, weighing 190 pounds with almost no body fat.

Now, why am I bringing this up? Because while we were talking, he mentioned that he knows very little when it comes to working out. That’s right, this ridiculously fit guy who works out twice a day knows very little about working out!

When I was injured with a severe case of Jumpers Knee in both legs, I told the orthopedist that my injury was not healing or improving at all. His answer was that it just needed more time. Later on, when talking to a friend of mine about my problem, he suggested that I get a blood test to make sure I’m not missing something in my blood.

I took the blood test and low and behold, I was low on iron! Should it have been obvious to the doctor to check my blood, like it was to my friend? Yes. Did he do it? No, and in not doing the blood test he missed a valuable piece of information as to why I wasn’t healing properly. To prevent the same thing from happening to you, here’s list of 3 things that can stunt your injury recovery that your doctor might miss.

Your Body Lacks Important Vitamins and Nutrients Vital To Healing

If you read How To Get Through a Bad Injury Part I, you know about the need to be motivated and mentally determined to get through a bad injury. So now you’re motivated, you’re doing the physical therapy you need to be doing, maybe you tried some prolotherapy and you’re slowly but surely getting better. But what about the interim? Your injury is healing, but it will take months, and in the meantime your body is falling a part and overall you feel weaker than ever. Luckily, you have come to the right place. Here are 3 easy ways to stay strong while your injury heals.

[I've never been into snowboarding, but I love hiking and sailing and my desire to do them again helps motivate me to keep doing physical therapy and stay in shape. What motivates you?]

Use the Bicycle

Note: As not to cause any confusion, this post is directed towards otherwise healthy people who have no underlying metabolic disorders such as diabetes or people who are post gastric bypass surgery. It does not apply to you if you have been instructed by a physician or other health professional to eat multiple small meals a day.

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Today I had planned on writing “How to Get Through a Bad Injury Part II”, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not until I got something off of my chest (and it’s not a barbell). That something is this complete and total myth that eating 6 meals a day is somehow better for your metabolism. Everywhere I go online, I see countless people, including people I like, praising the idea of eating 6 meals a day and it’s great effect on your metabolism.

Let me start off by saying that I wish that squatting had been a part of my integral workout routine before I joined the military. Why? Because I sincerely believe that squatting is the single most important exercise in preventing knee injuries, and that I would never have been injured in training had I been doing squats beforehand.

That’s right.

Squats are the single most important exercise in preventing knee injuries.

The fitness community has improved a great deal when it comes to understanding how great the squat exercise really is. We’ve come a long way since the days that the U.S. Army thought that squats were bad for the knees and banned it from training in certain units. In fact, today, the National Strength and Conditioning Association states “Squats, when performed correctly and with appropriate supervision, are not only safe, but may be a significant deterrent to knee injuries.”  (http://www.exrx.net/ExInfo/Squats.html)

Maimonides once wrote that he who sleeps for 8 hours in the night will accomplish more due to his higher energy level than one who had only slept for 4. This was true in the 11th century, and it is true now in the 21st century.

Why is Sleep So Important?

Sleep helps to improve concentration, organize your memory, deeply set into your mind what you learned during the day, and much, much more. It also releases growth hormones that are key to restoring and repairing your physical body.

How Sleep Works.

There is a huge amount of misinformation out there when it comes to weight loss, building up, and staying nutritionally healthy. Today, I’m going to set the record straight. Here’s the lowdown on what it really takes to lose weight, gain muscle, and stay healthy…

1) If you take in more calories than you expend, you’ll gain weight. If you take in less calories than you expend, you’ll lose weight. (Here’s a calculator to see how calories you need to maintain your weight. Eat 500 calories less a day, and you’ll lose a pound a week. Eat 500 calories more a day, and you’ll gain a pound a week.)

Make sure the calories you do eat have a positive effect on the body. To do this, avoid eating “empty calories.” Things like candy bars, popcorn, and essentially all processed foods. Try to eat a diverse collection of foods, meaning meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and some bread. Once you do that, you should notice an immediate and positive change in the way your body feels, and your energy level.

The following information comes after hours upon hours of research, personal experience, and discussions with various medical professionals. If you’ve ever had or have a bad injury, or want to heal a small pain before it gets worse, then I’d say that this post is worth its weight in silver gold.

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With the advent of biotechnology, surgery is on its way to becoming history.  For years, biotechnology has been at the forefront of saving lives and increasing quality of life by virtue of its huge advancements in the agriculture industry. These advancements have helped feed hundreds of millions of people around the world. Now the field of biotech is moving not just towards saving lives, but improving them!

[Once you've read this, you can check out Part II here]

For those of you who know me or have read the about section of this blog, you are aware that both my knees were badly injured while training in a special unit in the IDF as a combat medic. Interestingly, the hardest thing for me was not my temporary inability to walk, but my fear that I would never in the future be able to walk pain-free. For the first time, I knew that sheer motivation and willpower would not alone be enough to pull me through. I had hit a brick wall, and I was in a depression.

While some of you may be fitness instructors yourself, I’m sure there are those of you just getting into working out for the first time. So for you, let’s go over the basics. How to do pushups, pullups, situps or planks properly. Once you have that down, you’ll be able to do a basic but excellent body-weight workout routine that is advised by the Navy Seals to do before training. I also did the workout routine that I’m going to show you before I was accepted into a special forces unit in the IDF.

Before we continue: A set is a series of repetitions. A repetition is the act of performing the exercise. So for push ups, one repetition would be do go all the way down, and then back up again. The amount of repetitions you do before stopping to rest, is a set. So 3 sets of 10 push ups means that you do 10 push ups, rest, and repeat 2 more times. Okay, now you’re ready to continue.