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I had something of an epiphany over the last 24 hours: the root cause of human pain, suffering, and misery is a lack of consciousness. My challenge in writing this will be to put it in terms that most people can relate to.

Let’s use chronic neck pain as an example. Neck pain can come about for a number of reasons but let’s say in this case it happens to someone who is stressed out by their demanding job. Many people find the neck to be where their stress resides when they have many details to manage and decisions to make.

Stress is fundamentally a perceived threat. Research has found that as people meditate (become more conscious) are less likely to find a given situation threatening. Also, meditation shifts the body from ‘fight or flight’ mode to ‘resting and digesting’ mode. Tissue repair happens when the body is at rest. For neck pain to become chronic there has to be consistently more stress occurring than the body is able to repair itself from. Consciousness is the antithesis to stress.

I’ve now read in several places that it may be better to go longer than 3-4 hours between meals, at least on occasion. This is an obvious and surprising departure from the old concept of 5-6 meals per day. At the heart of this new thinking seems to be a hormone called leptin, which tells your body to lay off the food when you start to get plump. Unfortunately many people start to become leptin resistant over time, not unlike insulin resistance.

I’ve been playing with this concept a bit myself and have been surprised to find that I can go quite a while between meals with no ill effect and it seems to help with fat loss. Try it out and tell me what you think!

I’ve also been fiddling with working out with and without breakfast and have found that without breakfast seems to be better, particularly in terms of performance over the first couple of sets.

Food for thought!

I had something of an epiphany the other day. I’m now sure how many times I’d read about how ‘we dislike in others what we are not at peace with in ourselves’ but it was a lot. Up until the other day this was theoretical knowledge – the stuff you know on an intellectual level. It is of much greater value to know something on an experiential level.

So I was reading about why we dislike certain behaviors in others and it finally clicked why I have no tolerance for people saying they’re tired, whining, negative attitudes, etc. I haven’t been able to deal with these things because I went to war with them within myself. Staring with my cycling career, later as an athletic therapy student, and finally as a personal trainer and a parent I have angrily tried to force these things out of my personality with limited success. It is because of that ongoing battle that I have wanted to run away screaming whenever someone else had the audacity to be another other than invincible with their attitude.

It is amazing how much more tolerable other people become when we are more at peace with ourselves. If we can forgive ourselves it becomes much easier to forgive others. If we allow ourselves to be human and falable (highly falable in my case!) we can allow others to make mistakes as well. Perhaps most importantly if we can stop judging and criticizing ourselves we can stop doing it to others.

The end result of all of this is peace. Peace allows your mind and your body to rest and recover. Peace keeps your blood pressure down and your adrenals from getting fried. Peace reduces the likelihood of emotional eating and other self-destructive behaviors.

I don’t think we’re on this earth to be perfect (thank goodness). I think we’re here to experience life as humans. So let’s allow ourselves and others to be human. We can be perfect when we’re dead!

A recent discussion has made me realize that there is a world of difference between feeling tired and Being Tired.  The difference is subtle but critical.

Feeling tired is a natural occurrence that takes place when some aspect of your being is in need of rest.  You could be physically tired from digging a ditch all day, emotionally tired from helping a friend through a tough time or dealing with grief, or mentally tired from trying to learn a lot of new material.

Conversely, Being Tired is what happens when You cease to exist and Tired takes over in your place.  Tired is an aspect of what Eckhart Tolle describes as your ‘pain-body’.  When you become overly identified with your fatigue you separate from who you really are.  Tired is a state of disconnect.  It robs you of all inspiration, motivation, and power.

Someone who is feeling tired might respond to the standard, “How are you?” question with, “Good! A little tired but things are otherwise going well.” Someone who Is Tired would typically respond with, “Tired.” You can almost feel the energy leave the room when you encounter a person in such a state.

How does one go from Being Tired to feeling tired? The key is to separate yourself from Being Tired and observe it.  Awareness/Consciousness is, as always, the key.  Osho gave excellent guidance when he said that the way to fix something is to shine the light of consciousness on it.

So . . . pay attention to yourself.  If you catch yourself in a state of Being Tired, FIX IT! Both you and those around you will be thankful.

One of the challenges I find that many of the clients I’ve worked with in the past have had is managing progression. In fact, next to teaching proper technique I would say it’s the most important aspect of the service I provide.

So how do you decide when to increase the weight, add another set, or increase the reps? If your answer is ‘when it feels easy’ then I can pretty much guarantee you’re not advancing very quickly. The whole thing about working out is that if it feels easy you’re probably not overloading your body enough to accomplish much. You have to fatigue your muscles in order to get them to become stronger.

When I first moved to Ottawa I worked in a gym that had a number of people who had been doing the same workout in the same order at the same weight for the last 10 years. I have to say I admire that kind of commitment, especially in the absence of any appreciable progress! Even if those people had increased their weights every three months they would have been way ahead of where they were.

I like to have ‘graduation points’ with clients. For example, with the kettlebell I use 20 reps. If you can do 20 reps of a given exercise without damaging yourself then it’s time to try a heavier weight.

With more conventional weights I’ll use a number like 12 or 15 as the graduation point depending on the person’s goals.

My thinking is that if you’re going to put the time and energy into working out, you might as well accomplish something!

I am frustrated with myself this morning! Thursday night I stayed up late mucking around with my computer trying to get Linux to work.  As a result I ended up having to cancel my Friday morning workout and this morning’s workout felt like I’d taken a significant step back.  My nutritional choices have been less than stellar over the last few days which hasn’t helped either.

The lesson here is that it is absolutely critical to your athletic/fitness success that you manage your lifestyle.  You need to get plenty of sleep, eat right, and manage your stress.  Failure to do these things leaves you feeling how I feel right now.  If anyone should know better it’s me.  I guess we just need to re-teach ourselves certain lessons until we get it.

Observing my clients I’ve always felt that, in my daunting presence, they usually gave it everything they had when they worked out.  The thing that separated significant progress from not was how they were living over the few days leading up to their workout.  I used to find this particularly frustrating with my Ultimate Frisbee clients who were surprised that their workouts suffered when their main hobby was drinking beer and eating pub food.

Oh well, a good lesson I suppose.  Hopefully it will stick this time!

I think we can all universally agree that stress is a killer at this point.  It can come in many forms but the net effect is that it can degrade the body and mind and greatly impede performance on many levels.  Interestingly, the stresses in your life summate.  What that means is that all the different types of stress your mind and body are under all collect into a big heap.  The nature of your stress and your genetics determines what will fail first under the load.  For some people it’s their heart, for others it’s cancer, for others still it’s a mental breakdown.

When it comes to managing stress in your life I suggest a two-pronged attack: prevention and coping mechanisms.

It’s important to remember that a lot of stress is about perception.  How you perceive and interpret the events happening in your life goes a long way to determining the effect those events have on you.  A big part of preventing stress is learning to view events that aren’t necessarily to your liking with acceptance and as challenges rather than as threats.  Really the only thing you have control over is your response to the events that take place in your life.  Another key way to prevent stress in your life is to pause whenever making a choice and ask yourself whether it will contribute to the stress in your life or help reduce it.  For example, let’s say you’re going to buy a car and you have to choose between one you can easily afford and one that will extend your finances.  Will owning the more expensive car really be worth the extra stress of having to come up with the money to pay for it?

Coping mechanisms are the other side of the equation.  These are the things you do to deal with the stress you’re under.  You can choose healthy coping mechanisms or unhealthy ones.  Examples of healthy coping mechanisms are talking to someone supportive, exercise, journaling, and meditation to name a few.  Unhealthy coping mechanisms are things like drinking, drugs, junk food, and withdrawal into various other potentially addictive and damaging behaviors.  Consistently choosing healthier coping mechanisms will make a huge difference in your life as they reduce stress rather than creating more of it.

To summarize, a combined approach of minimizing the stress you put yourself under and choosing healthy ways to cope with what’s left are the best ways to live a long and happy life.

As life continues to unfold for me I’m constantly struck by the importance of mindset to anything you want to accomplish. Fitness and wellness are certainly no exception to this.

Something Paul Chek said has always stuck in my mind. I’m paraphrasing here but his point was essentially that no one is going to look after themselves unless they feel like they have something important to do.

This is an important point in that it would probably be helpful when trying to motivate yourself to workout and eat right to think of all the things you could do better if you were healthy.

If you’re the type of person who’s never going to fully embrace exercise and do it on your own, at least find ways to make sure you keep doing it. For a lot of my clients just having the appoint every week is what keeps them on track. I’m not that different in that my bi-weekly meeting with my workout buddy keeps me consistent.

Another key aspect of staying motivated is seeing results. Success breeds success. Track your workouts and make sure you understand progression. Also make sure you build in the right amount of change. Too much change and you won’t see progress because everything is always new. Not enough change leads to plateaus and staleness.

Finally, make sure you set intelligent goals. I highly recommend setting functional goals as they tend to focus attention in a more motivating place. An example would be to do 50 swings with a 53lb kettlebell or run a 10k in under 50 minutes. Aesthetic goals tend to be vague and subject to distortion. Weight-based goals don’t always capture improvements in health and function.

Today is zero. What do I mean by that? I mean that it doesn’t matter what’s happened in the past – today is a new day. I find this applies particularly in an exercise sense as it is easy to fall into the trap of, “When I was 20 I could do it, why not now?” As a former elite cyclist who devoted his teenage years in their entirety to training and racing, I find it easy to fall into this trap. It is easy to forget the fact that back then I lived at home, my parents were amazing about supporting my efforts, I didn’t have anywhere near the responsibilities I do now, and I weighed 140lbs.
More important by far is what you’re doing today to move yourself forward. You are where you are – you can’t help that. Now what are you going to do with that?
Today you have a choice between eating healthily and providing your body with the fuel it needs to perform well or not. You have a choice between getting up off the couch and doing a workout or not. You have a choice between putting yourself through a lot of stress that will mess up your ability to workout or not. The choice is yours – choose wisely.