The fit Warrior has a focused mind and realizes a sustainable, healthy lifestyle. Fitness and exercise myths, fitness methodology and goal attainment, and our personal philosophies are shared.
Since all the gyms are closed and we are all stuck working out at home for the foreseeable future, I want to hook you up with a free copy of my WarFit Combat Conditioning program.
This hard-hitting program will build serious functional strength, torch fat like nobody’s business, and prepare you to face anything – including zombies!
“You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”
– Marcus Aurelius
It’s pandemonium out there.
Schools closing,
Businesses closing,
Sporting events and concerts cancelled,
Store shelves empty like it’s the day before the blizzard of the century.
Outside events ARE out of control. But one thing always remains true, no matter what – You and you alone choose how to respond to these events. Everything is within YOUR internal control.
So how do you respond?
Do you feed into the mass panic? Do you feed into the hysteria and FEAR (False Evidence Appearing Real)?
Or do you respond like a Warrior, strong in mind and in body?
We humans have a certain knack for overly complicating simple things. We think that if something is too simple sounding, it can’t possibly work. But often the opposite is true.
Building vitality and creating optimal health are simple provided you follow a certain set of simple sounding, time tested practices.
Top 10 Health Practices for the Pandemic
Drink plenty of water. Add fresh squeezed lemon juice first thing in the morning. (yes, you’ll pee a lot. Get over it)
Eat more fresh vegetables and fruit (Notice that vegetables come first. That’s no accident. As for fruit, eat mostly berries and cherries – oh and some apples)
Eat organic, free range, and/or grass-fed meat.
Eat more healthy fats such as grassfed butter, almonds, avocados, eggs – yolk and all!, coconut oil, wild caught salmon – no farm raised fish ever!, extra virgin olive oil.
The health preserving and sustaining effects of Wuji Standing have been documented in hospitals and medical clinics across China.
The reason this practice has such a profound impact on health and recovery from exercise is that the standing meditation acts like a system-wide reboot for the whole body.
It stimulates the nervous system, increases circulation, and raises energy levels, while providing deep relaxation for both mind and body.
Aches, pains, old injuries, muscular tensions, and imbalances are highlighted and brought to the forefront by this method and then slowly dissolved over time and completely released.
The practice provides a way of completely relaxing and letting go of the muscular tensions in the body, while the correct alignment of the bones delivers support, creating a profound neutral and relaxed, almost buoyant state.
As the whole body and mind are exercised, both relax and stimulate the nervous system, increasing circulation, opening the joints, and raising energy levels for a feeling of overall well-being.
This exercise looks easy from the outside. After all, you’re just standing there and not moving. However, there is a lot going on inside: the breath and qi (energy) are moving.
This exercise is a challenging, sometimes frustrating, yet highly beneficial and rewarding practice. The only way to truly appreciate it is to experience it for yourself.
Wuji Standing Challenge Instructions
Learn More…
Shadow Strength utilizes a proprietary set of exercises drawn from traditional martial arts and trained in a unique combination to skyrocket your internal strength, power, and resistance to injury.
Using breath, posture, and martial mobility, Shadow Strength breaks down the barriers to superhuman strength and an unbreakable body.
Lack of proper nutrition and exercise, processed foods, and environmental toxins are all conspiring to plummet men’s testosterone levels to an all-time low.
Optimal levels of testosterone are absolutely necessary to help us burn fat, build muscle, reduce depression, be successful, and, all other factors aside, it is the very thing that makes us men.
Here are 5 simple, yet powerful steps you can take right now to begin combating this epidemic and bringing back manliness!
1) Limit your exposure to plastics. Plastics contain phytoestrogens that increase the amount of estrogen in the body – not something we want!
2) Strength Training – the proper strength training protocol can boost both testosterone and growth hormone. Testosterone is responsible for both building muscle AND burning fat!
3) Cold Showers – Take a cold shower twice a day. It’s also great for mental toughness!
4) Eat your nuts. – Have a handful of Almonds and 3 Brazil Nuts first thing in the morning and again before bed to increase healthy fats.
5) Vitamins – Take Vitamin D, Fish Oil, and Zinc. All are necessary for testosterone production!
The Top 30 Testosterone Boosting Foods
These foods both directly boost testosterone and help to limit estrogen exposure.
One important thing to note is that low fat, low cholesterol diets have been the worst thing to happen to men in the past 40 years.
Remember – Cholesterol is the building block of all sex hormones, testosterone included – so eat your cholesterol!
Grass fed beef
Bacon
Eggs (free range)
Bison
Brazil Nuts
Macadamia Nuts
Almonds
Butter
Blue Cheese
Oysters & other shell fish
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Cabbage
Brussel Sprouts
Kale
Pomegranate
Avocado
Blackberries
Blueberries
Acai Berries
Olive Oil
Coconut Oil
MCT Oil
Coffee
Onions
Ginger
Parsley
Garlic
Raw Milk
Liver
Bonus Testosterone Boosting Super Food – Pine Pollen
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A 3-Phased Approach to Recover, Build, and Sustain Strength Quickly and Easily as You Get Older!
Want me to work with you one-on-one to create a specifically designed program for you to burn fat, build muscle, increase energy, and optimize your testosterone levels?
Go HERE now to apply for a spot in my distance coaching program!
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle
Lately I have been thinking about the virtue of excellence. This wasn’t always an important virtue to me. When I was younger (and dumber) I believed that I could get by on just being adequate at things and sort of drift my way through life. The only problem with drifting is that things only can drift one way, downstream.
No one has ever drifted to the top of the mountain.
Now I am convinced that we must all live the virtue of excellence in order to have full, complete, productive, and happy lives. And to be of service to others.
The most often talked about value in Greek culture is areté. Translated as “virtue,” the word actually means something closer to “being the best you can be,” or “reaching your highest human potential.”
This is our daily struggle and goal as warriors – to reach our highest human potential. You see the funny thing about excellence is that you can never achieve it, one and done. You must constantly strive to be in a state of excellence every day pushing higher and higher.
The man or woman of areté is a person of the highest effectiveness; they use all their faculties: strength, bravery, wit, and deceptiveness, to achieve real results.
In that spirit, here is the Strength Training Workout I just completed:
1A) Kettlebell Swings 4 x 25
1B) Barbell Back Squats 4 x 10, 6, 4, 2
2A) Pull-ups 4 x SM
2B) Kettlbell Military Press 4 x 6/6
2C) Split Stance DB Rows 4 x 6/6
3) Heavy Partial Squats 4 x 2
4A) DB Hammer Curls 3 x 6-8
4B) Lying KB Triceps Extensions 3 x 12
4C) Warrior Sit-ups 3 x 20
Phew…
Pursue excellence!
I am opening up a few spots in my Warrior Online Coaching Program. If you are someone who is interested in pursuing excellence in your life, you can apply HERE directly.
Don’t just think about how you can become excellent “some day”… Learn how to begin creating habits that will make you excellent NOW!
The other day a student said to me during training: “This is hard.”
My reply was, “Well of course it’s hard. You don’t come to me to learn how to do things you’re already good at, do you?”
But why is this difficult?
In my experience,training is hard for approximately 3.5 main reasons…
1. You are learning new skills. It’s hard to be good at movements, exercises, and concepts that are new to you. Your nervous system must adapt to the new and different stimulus and create, or sharpen pathways to build competence and skill.
2. You must work on your weak points. Working on things you are already good at is fun, but the only way to truly become all-around strong is to eliminate your weak points.
3. Your ego. No one wants to look inept or silly. But the only way to become better means that we must put ego aside in order to learn.
3.5. Superficial Expert Status. The amount of information available today gives people immediate access to any body of knowledge out there, no matter how obscure, in a matter of seconds. We have all become SMEs – “Superficial Matter Experts”. We think that just because we know “about” something we actually understand it. No one wants to spend the time and effort required to learn something deeply.
But these reasons are exactly why we need to train. And why we need to train with people who have greater, or more specialized knowledge, higher levels of experience, and greater levels of skill than we do.
This is why I still train with my martial arts teachers. This is why I still have a strength coach. This is why I participate in masterminds and have business coaches.
Because I know that I need to be pushed and challenged in order to grow, just like I must push and challenge my students and clients in order for them to grow.
If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing every day.
Musashi instinctively knew this. He became the greatest swordsman Japan ever produced by practicing what he preached.
The concept of forging oneself through the rigors of daily training was so important to him that he made it a rule for those who would follow his way of martial strategy.
But this article isn’t about Musashi, it’s about you and tapping into your own innate greatness.
Forge Yourself in the Way
Forging must be done daily. There is no way to forge body, mind, and spirit into a finely honed blade without constant hammering and firing through the steel tempering process of training.
Half-assed training won’t cut it.
Training only when you feel like it won’t get you there.
Training without a properly focused strategy will not work.
Training the same way over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.
So What Works?
The only answer to the question of how does one become a great martial artist (and I’m assuming you want to be great otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this blog…) is this – TRAIN MORE.
But, like anything else, there’s a caveat.
Train smarter AND Train Harder.
As I always say, there are no secret techniques but there ARE secret (or less well known) training strategies that will improve all aspects of martial performance in much less time.
Training more and training harder are NOT the only variables. Anyone who thinks this way is an amateur.
High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is one of the best ways to train for endurance. It will enhance all 3 energy systems in the body, as well as prime the nervous system to recover automatically during lulls in activity.
Simply put, HIIT alternates periods of high intensity exercise with periods of rest and recovery. It can be performed with almost any exercise and can be utilized both with and without equipment.
The variety and adaptability of this style of training is second to none in results.
How else does improving your endurance through this type of conditioning aid your martial arts training?
I’m glad you asked!
If the benefits discussed above weren’t enough, consider that having a high level of conditioning also aids in learning new skills.
How’s that possible?
To put it simply, when the central nervous system (CNS) is fatigued, the body cannot effectively process new skills, especially technically advanced skills. So, in essence your lack of a general level of fitness and conditioning will actually impede your learning process as you will tire more readily and not have the ability to recover quickly enough during training.
Want to train more, at a higher level, for a longer period of time?
Want to get more out of your training time both at home and in the dojo?
Want to build new skills and enhance your technical arsenal?
When I began this journey back in 2008 my only students were martial artists. My first book, Warrior Fitness: Conditioning for Martial Arts, was written for martial artists. But since then I have radically expanded my own training (to be discussed later) and my student base. My clients come from all walks of life, age range, gender, and level of physical activity.
My vision has expanded way beyond just the martial one with which I started. My mission has changed.
So with all these changes going on, I began to rethink my original plan for Warrior Fitness and decided that maybe it was time to take a different path and dissolve Warrior Fitness in favor of something more suited to those changes…
Was This The End?
NOPE.
I couldn’t do it. 🙂
As you are all well aware, we currently live in extremely trying and more dangerous times. As a friend recently reminded me in an email conversation, we need MORE warriors going forward, not less.
Therefore 2016 will not be the end of Warrior Fitness, but a new beginning…
A start to something much broader in scope, more comprehensive, and much, much more life changing and affirming – Warrior Fitness Reborn “Training for the Total Human”
As I mentioned above, my mission has changed. Back in 2008 when all this first started my only goal was to improve the functional ability and performance of myself as a martial artist and that of my students through specific physical preparedness training, IE – Warrior Fitness. This I accomplished for martial artists all across the world through my programs such as Martial Power, Ninja Missions, and many others. I began to integrate my internal power training practices with strength training in 2015 through my Integrated Strength Program. By all accounts I had accomplished what I set out to do, very successfully I might add, but to me there was still something missing.
I alluded to it this past summer when I opened up and talked about why I got started down the road as a fitness professional. You can watch it below in my origin story.
My Origin Story
My mission has become broader, and yet more clearly defined. My current work has taken on a more important, more meaningful quality – not that teaching someone how to be a bad-ass, powerhouse of a martial artist isn’t meaningful anymore, it most definitely is!! 🙂
I will layout the new mission of Warrior Fitness Reborn in full detail in future articles, but for now some of it can be inferred from the short piece below on Physical Confidence.
Physical Confidence
There is a certain kind of confidence that comes from being strong. I call it physical confidence.
It’s different than the confidence one feels by being smart, or being good at a job, or being in a secure, loving relationship.
With physical confidence you stand straighter and walk taller. Your head is up and scanning the horizon rather than being bowed and staring at the floor. You look people in the eye and with a nod, acknowledge them and let them know you respect them.
There’s a certain presence, a kind of knowing awareness, about a person with physical confidence. People somehow know that if the proverbial sh*t ever hit the fan while you were there, you would take care of it.
Strength holds us together. Strength is a quiet preparedness wielded by those who watch over and protect others. Strength and capability together create physical confidence. One does not come without the other.
And, how do we instill that Physical Confidence, you ask… ?
Warrior Fitness Coaching Programs
Men, if you picked up your FREE copy of my book, Dad Strength, you know that men, in general, are getting weaker. We can counteract that. I can fix it. YOU can become the strong, Alpha-Male warrior you were always meant to be. You CAN get stronger every day. Find out if you are a good fit for my NEW Warrior Fitness Coaching Program for Men <<===
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You are already strong enough to lift a car. Did you know that? It’s true.
So why can’t you access that strength all the time?
The reason is that your nervous system limits the amount of strength you can use in every day life. If you were truly able to access 100% of the muscular strength you are capable of your muscles would literally tear themselves from attachment points and break bones. Having a limit in this case is a good thing!
However, the limits are set startlingly low. Most people only have access to about 20-30% of their full potential, even when trying their hardest.
So how do you access more strength?
Well, there are many different methods to do it. Today, we will cover just one – getting over FEAR.
F.E.A.R can be rewritten as an acronym – False Evidence Appearing Real.
This was the case for one of my clients whenever he went for a max effort lift on his bench press. He was only able to bench 125 lbs even though I knew he was much, much stronger and more capable!
After discussing it with him, he told me that even though he knew I was standing right behind him spotting him every rep, he was still afraid of getting stuck under the bar. This False Evidence Appearing Real was limiting his strength. Because he was afraid, his nervous system was literally slamming on the breaks and cutting his strength potential way back.
So how did we fix it?
I set up the bench in the squat rack and set the pins right over his chest. Now there was absolutely no possibility of him getting stuck under the bar.
So what happened?
With the FEAR gone, he was able to access much more of his strength potential and hit 165 lbs for 2 reps – a 40 lbs increase!!!
Oh, and by the way, he is in his early 70’s!! So again, what is YOUR excuse?
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