How do you think Indiana Jones feels when he comes into work Monday? Sad, depressed, lethargic, with a huge dread about the coming work week, or does he feel energized about the coming week and on top of the world from his weekend’s exploits? I’d say that it’s the latter. Here are 3 easy tips to help you go to work Monday feeling like Indiana Jones:
Do Something Real
Yeah, we all know that you need to sit in front of the TV to “unwind”, but it does more harm than good to sit in front of the TV for more than an hour on the weekend (in fact, my own TV isn’t even hooked up and I only use it for videos). The trick to feeling on top of the world is to mix up your routine. Instead of sitting in front of the “box” this weekend, do something memorable like going hiking with your friends or family, going to the beach, or challenging yourself with an especially hard interval training session.
Mark Sisson is one of the most well known people in the fitness community. He qualified for the 1980 U.S. Olympic Trials only to be sidelined by injuries and forced to retire from marathon running. After he retired from marathon running due to injuries, he began running triathlons (since he could still bike and swim), eventually coming in 4th in the Hawaii Ironman. In 1988, he completely retired from competitive sports to pursue a life of finding natural ways of achieving good health and helping people avoid making the same mistakes that he had made in the past in regards to living healthily.
Mark is a huge proponent of “Primal Living”, or living the way we used to live thousands of years ago. He runs an extremely popular blog called “Mark’s Daily Apple” dedicated to showing people how to live like we used to in the modern world. He is also author of “The Primal Blueprint”, a book dedicated to showing people how to get into peak shape and live healthily by living the way our ancestors did. I managed to land an interview with Mark, and here’s what he had to say:
Charlie Gets Pumped For A Half Marathon Race
For the first time in a long time, Charlie was pumped. Despite being in medical school, he had managed to make the time to train for his first half marathon race. He ran three times a week on a set program, and strengthened his body another two days a week. He even made sure to eat well for months, something he hadn’t done in years. But that wasn’t why Charlie was pumped. He was pumped because he made a hundred dollar bet with Jack that Charlie would beat him in the race. Charlie had been competing with Jack since grade school.
[This has nothing to do with the post, but this picture of crocodiles sleeping is nuts! How would you feel if you just randomly stumbled upon a group of sleeping crocodiles?]
Here’s Part II of the interview with Dr. Hauser, a medical pioneer who is raising awareness about a revolutionary treatment for curing soft tissue injuries and chronic pain called prolotherapy. You can find Part I
here or you can checkout
Part III.
[Dr. Hauser isn't just a doctor, he's also an athlete. Maybe that's one of the reasons he understands how hard it is to be sidelined by an injury and the importance of getting healed.]
Rafi: Is platelet rich plasma therapy just another type of prolotherapy, or is it something entirely new?
Tennis star Rafael Nadal and I have more in common than just having an awesome sounding name. We both were afflicted with possibly the most annoying sports injury known to man, Jumpers Knee. Now, you may be wondering why I say Rafael Nadal has Jumpers Knee when the media claims that he has “patellar tendinitis.”
[Notice how he wears tape on both knees to help ease the pressure. I used to do something similar while in the army but quickly realized that it wasn't a good long term solution in healing the injury. Besides, unlike Nadal I have hair on my legs and having to pull off my leg hair every time I took the thing off was not pleasant!]
First, let me give you the excerpt from the A.P. where they quote Nadal as well as a physician who says he has tendinitis:
We’ve been covering a lot of ground when it comes to solid fitness advice the last couple of weeks. Of course, this is pretty awesome and I’ve gotten some really great comments and emails from you, but the sheer amount of information can definitely get a bit overloading at times for both you and me. So to help lighten up the mood a bit, here’s a really funny fitness related video with world class sprinter Ato Boldon.
If you guys really like it, I’ll post a humorous fitness related video or article more often in between the other more informational posts. If you have something funny in particular that’s related to fitness and you’d like me to post it, feel free to email it to me at rafi(at)thefitnessadviser(dot)com. Anyway, here’s the video and we’ll be returning to our regular broadcasting schedule right after this post (I’ve always wanted to say that).
Mark Twain once said, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” Not only is his advice right when it comes to getting ahead, it’s also right when it comes to fat loss. The #1 secret to really succeeding at getting rid of fat, is you need to first understand what your major task is, and then break it down.
[If you can look at this picture and not feel a major urge to eat a donut afterwards, then you will have no trouble with fat loss. For the rest of you, think how disgusting eating those donuts can make you look and resist the urge!]
With so many people trying to lose weight, and so much information on fat loss targeted towards those people, the skinny guy (or girl who wants to add a bit of good looking muscle) gets left out in the cold. As someone who has been skinny and had to work to put on weight and muscle, I know how frustrating it is to have trouble putting on weight. You work out, eat a tremendous amount of food, but still aren’t able to put on weight, and sometimes even lose weight.
At a certain point, you throw in the towel, blame your genes and metabolism, and forget about your dream of turning into a ripped guy. Well, it’s time to reawaken your dream of getting ripped, because it wasn’t your metabolism that was holding you back. It was just the way you were going about putting on muscle mass.
You know the saying that to really succeed at something, you have to put your heart into it? It turns out to be more literal than you thought. There’s more and more studies proving that short bursts of intense exercise that really get the heart rate up are superior to longer, less intense cardio. That means that not only do you need less time to get into great shape, but that you’ll be less likely to get overuse injuries since you won’t be putting a lot of pressure on the joints for an extended period of time.
[The first person ever to run a marathon dropped dead after completing it. There are better and safer ways to go about getting into shape.]
Getting The Heart Pumping Helps Get Results
What I’m going to tell you is probably going to go against anything that you’ve ever heard when it comes to fitness. That is that the first step to getting into great shape is not working out. In fact, it has nothing to do with exercise at all. The first step to getting into shape is nutrition. Week one of your fitness program should be 100% dedicated to changing your diet!
[A balanced diet of nuts, vegetables, fruits, lean meat, some whole wheat bread and milk products is not only healthy, but will energize your body. That being said, eating raw flowers is NOT recommended!]
Why Eating “Real Food” Is The Most Important Part Of Your Fitness Plan
The truth is that what you eat is infinitely more important than your workout routine. Your entire day revolves to some extent around eating, but only a small part is dedicated to an intense workout. That’s why what you eat has such a huge impact on your body. Afterall, you are what you eat!
You may be one of the millions of people who have never worked out. Or perhaps you used to be a marathon runner back in high school, but life just got too busy and you haven’t hit the track in 20 years. Either way, between your career and family, you just don’t have the time to keep in shape anymore. That’s just how life goes anyway. You’re not a professional athlete, and can’t expect to have the time to spend hours every day to stay in shape. Right?
Wrong.
Staying in shape doesn’t require you to dedicate hours of time to training every day. It doesn’t even require that you workout daily. All it requires is dedication and consistency. Sure, it’s not a walk in the park, but it’s well worth it and if you’re already motivated enough to be reading this site, then chances are you have what it takes to get fit as well.
Months ago, I read a fascinating article published by a newspaper here in Israel. It was an interview with a woman who was the head of a huge technology company here. She mentioned in the interview that while Israeli’s are excellent at innovation and quick thinking, we have some work to do in the planning department.
[There's an old Chinese proverb, "Do not fear going forward slowly; fear only to stand still." The turtle might be slow, but he's looking up towards the end game and is confident he's going to meet his goals.]
To prove her point, she contrasted Israel, which is well known for innovation but not planning, with China, where they have a plan for everything. She explained that China has plans to lead in industries fifty years from now that it currently hasn’t even started competing in yet. She concludes with saying that because of China’s long term plans, China is now on the verge of being a major competitor in industries that it was not even present in a half century ago. This was so incredible to me, that I immediately began thinking about the importance of long term goals and planning long term.
How do you think Indiana Jones feels when he comes into work Monday? Sad, depressed, lethargic, with a huge dread about the coming work week, or does he feel energized about the coming week and on top of the world from his weekend’s exploits? I’d say that it’s the latter. Here are 3 easy tips to help you go to work Monday feeling like Indiana Jones:
