Functional Fitness – forget the machines and train properly!

When I sat down to write this article, it dawned on me that it will be challenging to put into words how much shifting to this method of training can change your life. I can only suggest you give it a go for yourself and leave all your old ideas at the door. I did! I’ve been heavily into weightlifting and fitness since the age of 14 (I am 29 at the time of writing). I’ve had decent results in strength and muscle development from traditional training utilising a mixture of machine weights, dumbells and bodyweight exercises. Recently I’ve moved into fully functional exercise following the Crossfit (http://www.crossfit.com) methodology/workouts and have comitted to never touching another machine again. The results I have achieved are nothing short of amazing. I should state I’m not affiliated with Crossfit and am not being paid to write this article. My personal improvement and success is my motivation to share this with my readers.

Crossfit training can be summed up as follows:

World-Class Fitness in 100 Words:

Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat. Practice and train major lifts: Deadlift, clean, squat, presses, C&J, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast. Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense. Regularly learn and play new sports.

-CrossFit founder, Greg Glassman

While you will get results from traditional gym exercise, you can get faster, more overall results from a truly functional fitness program. Your typical gym consists of a majority cable machines, perhaps some dumbells, a squat rack, crosstrainers, treadmills, step machines, aerobics classes. A typical crossfit gym will be filled with pull up bars, plyometric boxes, sandbags, olympic bars, kettlebells, ropes, gymnastic rings and the like. Concentrate your training on moving your BODY, rather than a machine, you are doing what comes naturally. If you are jumping, lifting, climbing, throwing and running, these natural movements are compound and multi joint which ensures extensive muscle fibre recuitment overall. There are 10 domains of fitness – cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, agility, balance, coordination and accuracy. Crossfit ensures you are across all of these. The workouts change daily and can be scaled to any fitness level. The variety of training goes a long way to ensuring motivation and there is something exciting (and slightly sadistic) about checking the website each morning to see what torture has been prescribed for the day.

If it’s not working – do something different!

I have watched with interest some of the people training at my local gym over the 2 months since I started. They come in and do the same workouts, day in day out. 4 sets of 10 reps on each machine down the line while chatting to their friend on the next machine. They haven’t had any results. They don’t look like they are having fun and I know from my experience working in gyms, they will join the long list of inactive members before too long. I used to prescribe a mixture of machine and free weights with some separate cardio. Those days are over. You don’t need to do long sessions, or separate cardio and weights sessions. 20 minutes of push ups, un-weighted squats and burpees can do wonders! I’m not talking typical circuit training, it is far more intense, simple and effective than that.

I’ve personally been plagued with injuries over the years such as dodgy knees, a severe lower back problem, arthritic pain in many joints. I’ve been doing Crossfit for about 2 months and I am pain free, have put on a significant amount of lean muscle (which SHOULD be your goal even if you are female!), reduced my bodyfat level and imortantly achieved extreme improvements in cardio fitness, strength, agility and power. I was only able to complete 6 pull ups (chin ups) in a day prior to starting. Last week I did a session that lasted 20 minutes with 3 exercises. I completed 75 unassisted pull ups as part of this session! It doesn’t matter what your goal with training is – this truly is a one size fits all way of training. I have no experience with Olympic lifting, however am learning from the videos and all you need is a broomstick to start practicing. It doesn’t cost you a cent to go to the website and watch the exercise demos and view the workout of the day. If you want instruction you can attend seminars in your area, or join your local crossfit gym to train under the watchful eye of accredited Crossfit trainers. There are scaled versions of the workouts at the Crossfit BrandX forums and some very helpful people there to assist you.

The reason I wanted to share this is simply because it works. I know my body well. I know how long it takes to go up a notch on any typical gym machine, I know how much improvement I get in muscle tone week in week out using the machines. Changing to olympic lifts, bodyweight exercises and kettlebell exercises, with short, highly intense workouts that change on a daily basis has blown away all my previous notions of how much I can improve over a week or a month. Being the mother of an 18 month old toddler means I don’t have a lot of down time to get to the gym. The fact that these workouts average between 10 and 25 minutes make it appealing too. I don’t dread going to the gym, I burst through the door, power through the short workout and get home in under 30 minutes.

I apologise for the way this article promotes so strongly a commercial venture/branch. I don’t know of any other training system that is as functional and effective as this and I feel it is worth sharing. As mentioned, you can access it all for free, there is a great support network online and I am truly passionate about this method of training. The programming is done for you, you never get bored and anyone can do it. Once you Crossfit – you will never go back.

How to grow vegetables at home (and why everybody should)

No matter how much or how little space you have, you can enjoy the satisfaction of eating something you have grown organically. Even if you are limited to a small balcony and therefore a container garden, it is still possible to get a good little crop going as long as your space has at least 5 hours sunlight daily. If you are on my site reading these posts, I’m certain you are the type of person who is already aware of the chemicals sprayed on commercially grown crops, and the possible side effects. Washing your fruit and vegies will not completely rid them of the chemicals. If you are serious about your health, maintaining a chemical free home should be of upmost priority. In future posts I will go into reducing other chemicals in your home, which is so easy, I don’t know why everyone isn’t doing it! Growing your own is easy, cheap, and honestly quite exciting, the novelty never seems to wear off.

If you are not the type who is big on vegies, it is about time you got over it and changed to a more natural diet. There are amazing colours, flavours, textures and high levels of nutritents that you are missing out on, and don’t even get me started on how much better it makes you feel and look. Integrating fresh vegies into your meals is easy, even if you start off with basic salad greens that can be just picked and popped straight onto the plate with no preparation. If you have pondered it for a while, today is the day. Do something as a first step to starting your own vegie patch, whether it is purchasing some seeds online, getting outside and looking at what space you can utilise and preparing some edging. Anyone can honestly do this, it is much easier than you think!

Apart from the wholesome feeling it gives you to know you grew the plants yourself, the health benefits are substantial. Food you buy in a supermarket often has been picked some time ago, transported to a distribution centre, re-packed, then re-distributed to your local supermarket. I heard a truck driver here in NSW, Australia say that he often picked up tomatoes from Queensland, drove them to Victoria (thousands of kilometres away!) to a large distribution centre, only to pick the same load up again in the morning and return them to a supermarket distribution centre back in Queensland so they could be then sent on to all the stores. Not only do you end up with far from fresh food, that has been sprayed with chemicals, you are eating food that cost a lot in energy to get to it’s destination.

When getting started out, I strongly recommend you take a look at the main vegetables you eat regularly, or would like to eat regularly and start with those. There is no point growing rhubarb or chives if you don’t eat them often! You will want to experiment as time goes on, but start with a basic collection first.

If you are going to grow in the ground rather than containers, 2 squares of about 1.5 x 1.5 metres will be sufficient to give you a good crop for daily use, you can always add more later if it is working out and you want to grow everything you eat. If you can only use a small rectangle of 1m x 50cm use that, you can still grow a heap of lettuce and herbs there! I’d suggest raised garden beds because they are much easier to work with and can be set up ANYWHERE – on concrete, grass, pavers, clay, rock etc. You can use bricks, UNTREATED hardwood (ie fence palings built into a box), rocks, bales of straw or hay. Be creative, the only things you should avoid are tyres and treated wood because they leach chemicals into the soil and ultimately into your food. A quick google search will bring plenty of suggestions for "No Dig" vegetable gardens. I personally filled my last one with layers of wet newspaper, horse manure, lucerne hay and compost (I bought bags as I hadn’t got my compost bin going at that stage). I only had mine set up about 20cm high off the ground as I was over existing grass.

If you need to go with containers due to lack of space, the bigger the better as they dry out slower. Use anything you can find around, and make sure you drill drainage holes in the bottom if there are none.

There are many seed suppliers online, or you can cheat and buy seedlings to get things started and start your next planting with seeds so they are ready to plant out by the time you have harvested your first round of planting. I start all my seeds inside in little trays so I can just spray with a water bottle when walking past the windowsill. As soon as they are big enough to plant out, I go find some space and pop them in the ground. A packet of seeds will only cost around $2 and that gets you a thousand or two seeds. Once your crop is going, you can also allow some plants to go to seed, then collect and store the seeds, thus creading a free seed store for yourself.

The main vegetables I grow, that I know I will use are:

• Lettuce/Rocket
• Basil
• Oregano
• Tomatoes
• Snow Peas
• Beans
• Broccoli
• Zucchini
• Cucumber
• Asian green vegies (bok choy etc)
• Silverbeet
• Spinach

These are all fast growing, easy ones to start with. The seed packets will give you the planting information on spacing, depth and so on, just follow those, experiment and little and enjoy your fresh food! There is nothing better than getting to lunch or dinner time and having a quick wander around the garden and deciding what to eat depending on what is ready to pick. If you keep planting new seedlings out or seeds out directly as you harvest, you will have a constant, varied supply of food available. If you can only plant in some containers on a balcony, it is still a fantastic way to have truly fresh greens for your salads and perhaps a couple of dwarf fruit trees going too. Container planting is also great for your herbs. If you can only get set up to have a few pots of herbs going, that alone will add some nutrition to your meals rather than using dried herbs. The flavours will keep you motivated to remember to water your plants.

It really is that simple. Go stick your head outside when the sun is out next and have a look where you could start a little garden. Take that first step now and you won’t regret it! The time involved really only hinges on getting the planting space set up, you will spend only a small amount of time per week watering, planting or harvesting once it is set up. It is worth it and so much cheaper than rushing out to the shop for a load of vegies all the time.

If this post has motivated you to give it a go, I’d love to hear from you, so get in touch and send me some photos and a quick story about your little garden.

How To “Snap Out Of It” & Get Motivated Again

There have been plenty of moments in my life where making some drastic changes was necessary for me to move forward in my life and improve my somewhat stagnant situation.  I aim to share some of what I learnt here.  I’m thankful for everything I have experienced as I know now, that it has shaped my behavior, motivation and direction. I’m well aware there are much worse things one can go through than my rough patches, that is the case for everyone, there will always be someone who can top your story. I will use this weeks article to educate you on how you can apply some basic skills and methods to any situation to cause a change in direction and get you out of that rut you are in.

Being “stuck  in a rut” might mean you:

• Are tired when you wake up in the morning
• Don’t get excited about going to training
• Can’t be bothered preparing meals in advance to take to work
• Snap at people because you are just “stressed”
• Don’t have good nutrition
• Cry at the drop of a hat
• Are frustrated with your slow progress
• Can’t prioritise your tasks/work/home organisation/jobs
• Find a negative in just about every situation and can easily ignore or disregard the positives
• You are lacking in motivation

It isn’t always related to health and fitness, even work or your sex life can suffer. It becomes easier to accept things as they are and just shuffle along and go with the flow. It seems like a good option for a little while, then the self doubt starts to set in. You start wondering why you bother at all, then you start making excuses to slacken a little further. Before you know it, you don’t have a reason to get out of bed in the morning at all. You stop making the effort and just go through the motions. I will take you through some steps as a self improvement exercise you can do to snap out of it and get that fire back.

AWARENESS

What you dislike in others, is usually present within YOU.

While this is clearly not a 100% scientific fact in 100% of people, it is often a great way to get you in a space to determine what it is about your way of thinking, your habits, the way you treat others that needs some fine tuning. Your ego will tell you otherwise, often very cunningly! Don’t make excuses or beat around the bush.

• Do you hate laziness?
• Can’t stand it when people don’t give you a wave when you let them into your lane in traffic?
• Think that customer service staff ought to at least smile sometimes?
• Analyse your friends home/office/car and immediately consider the level of order and cleanliness relates to their personality?
• Think the fattie at Maccas in the food court shouldn’t be ordering the chips and should have a water instead?
• Hate being interrupted in a conversation?
• Feel like people aren’t really listening to you when you are talking?
• Want to yell out the window and tell the people walking that they better go faster if they want to lose some weight?

Observe when you form judgements of people in your life through your self talk, or perhaps quiet words to a colleague or friend. Even jot down a point form list. Have an honest look at yourself and see if you can correlate what it is you don’t like about what you are seeing or hearing to something YOU do. You may find more connections than you would like. It is important to do this as a regular little exercise for a few weeks because you will then catch yourself in the act so to speak. Once you are regularly observing it happening you can move on to being aware of how YOU are going about your daily life and start correcting some of your behaviors.

If you can create a sense of constant awareness around how you behave, think and act it will let you see how you got into your rut, and how to modify yourself to take things up a level and achieve some momentum in your life.

CHANGE YOUR ENVIRONMENT

If you are in a negative environment at home, work, the gym, your relationship, your fridge, your computer – you can bet your bottom dollar you have been coaching yourself into being an expert on being negative and it is probably rubbing off on the people you live with. Time for you to jot down what you need to change in your environment. This step is crucial – you MUST make a conscious effort to be physically in a supportive, motivating, positive, excited environment for your mental space to be able to change.

A new colour on the bedroom walls or doona might freshen that space up a little. Moving house (biggie but can be life changing!) to a nice neighborhood, city or town. Buying some new training gear for the gym. Go through your computer files and clean them up! Wash the car. Stop procrastinating and get around to doing those little odd jobs you have been putting off. Some other more detailed suggestions you could consider:

Stop watching or listening to the news. If you don’t believe me that bad news is in the majority, do a little tally over a week. Does hearing about another murder, suicide, plane crash, bombing, drug bust, politician bickering, child left locked up in a daycare centre do anything whatsoever to improve the quality of your life? Will you be any worse off if you didn’t know? It is so very refreshing to take this step, you will feel a lot lighter not carrying around those thoughts in your head every day. If anything “that” bad was going on in the world and it is crucial to your survival to know, I guarantee someone will make it their business to tell you personally.

Purge! If you can’t see your desk for all the paper, or the car doesn’t fit in the garage, it is time. Your stuff is not you, it isn’t even a representation of you, it is just stuff. It is easy to do one room per day over a week or two and completely purge your home. Stop holding on to things you haven’t used for years, haven’t worn for years. If something has sentimental value, give it the respect it deserves and display or use it. Find a way to integrate it into your life. Everything should have it’s place and the more things you can put away in a box in a cupboard the better. Be methodical and organised about it. Keep like with like. Label all boxes. If you can look around objectively you will probably find plenty of things that don’t need to be out, or even in the house at all. Have an ebay day or a garage sale, or donate some things. If worst comes to worse and you really did need that 9th screwdriver or the extra car mats, or the spare computer screen – just go out and get it when you need it secondhand or new. I personally got rid of a LOT of items when I moved last time. Haven’t missed a single one yet. Don’t hold on to things just in case you need it, we have internet shopping and express postage these days, you will get by!

Ditch friends who drag you down! If you are serious about changing your situation, you simply cannot allow yourself to be surrounded with people who are detrimental to your goals. If you have friends who smoke, and you want to quit – tell them, request they don’t smoke when you are around. If you have friends who tell you often they don’t get why you bother dragging yourself to the gym at 6am, or why you go to the effort or preparing your meals ahead for work – tell them outright that these things that seem a waste of time to them, are important to you, that you find it offensive when they make fun of your efforts purely because they are embarrassed that they can’t be bothered. If your mates are constant whingers or attention seekers, point it out to them, sometimes people really don’t realise they are doing it! It takes guts to do this but if you are serious about making a change in your life, you will find a tactful way to do it. Seek out people who are already doing what you want to do, working in a field you’d like to get into, exercising regularly.  Motivated, excited passionate people infect everyone around them. Use the internet to connect with people who are a few steps ahead of you in the chain and learn from them. The more positive people  you can have in your life or online networks, the more ideas and motivation you will get for free. You shouldn’t have to expend energy trying to bring other people up to your level, to understand what you are trying to do.

Be the instigator. If you are stuck in a relationship rut with your partner, friend, colleague, child or relative – suck it up and make an effort to improve it. Do something tangible. If you make a conscious, genuine effort to be encouraging, compassionate, a good listener, loyal, motivating and perhaps exciting with the people in your life, they WILL return the favour. You don’t have to do anything big – simply giving your partner a longer than 2 second kiss before you scoot out the door to work could be enough to keep them smiling all day.

Fridge and Pantry Overhaul. I am going to get pop my trainer hat on here and get a little nasty. I could easily write a book on this topic so will try keep this brief. If you have food in your house that is lacking in nutrition such as chips, lollies, biscuits, soda/fizzy drinks and so on, you WILL eat them! If your health is important to you, you need to do this and to educate and support other people in your household about it so they can cope too. I plan to write more detailed articles on nutrition, but here is a list of things I want you go go put in the bin right now. If you don’t think they affect your weight, your mood, your behavior, your fitness, your relationships,  be sure to check back for my other articles soon outlining this.

• Any foods with preservatives, added colours, flavours. I literally mean check every packet, jar, bag, box and read the ingredients. If there are any on there, throw it in the bin. This request will cover any nasty food in your home as that is one thing they all have in common. By only eating unprocessed, fresh foods you have solved the problem in one go!
• Out of date food

You can and will survive quite easily on preparing food with the following as a basic stock:

• Fruit/vegies
• Bread (home baked in breadmaker is easy and preservative free)
• water
• dark chocolate
• chicken
• fish
• small amount of red meat
• tofu
• nuts
• herbs (fresh/dried)
• coconut milk
• rice pasta/pasta
• brown rice
• fresh peanut butter (health food shops can usually make it for you while you wait)
• skim/low fat milk
• low fat yoghurt
• canned beans/chickpeas/lentils
• cheese

It is SO easy to make your own biscuits, dips, bread, muffins etc. They taste better and  you know what went into them! I only spend $90 to $120 a week on food and our household of 4 adults and 1 toddler eat a lot. Fresh food is cheaper!

EXERCISE:

Get a display folder – fill it with recipes you try and like for a couple of types of biscuit, dip, muffins and meals. Any you like as you go along should be copied or typed up and put in here for easy access so you are not flicking through a stack of books when trying to find a recipe. Try at least one new recipe per week in case it deserves to be in your folder!
Take a photo of your bag of food you are purging. I want evidence!

It can take a little while to get comfortable and organised enough to cook with fresh food all the time, but once you do, it is well worth it and can be just as quick as cheating! You will never go back once you start feeling the effects of being additive and preservative free!

CREATING NEW HABITS

So by now you should be at a point where you can identify aspects of your behavior and thinking that contribute to your lack of forward momentum. You have made the effort to live, and interact with people and spaces that contribute to a better sense of calmness, organisation, motivation and achievement. Now it is time to cement in some new habits to ensure you don’t start edging your way back to the dark side and taking the easy option all the time.

Put everything away – right away. Don’t be tempted to leave something on the kitchen bench and take it to your room with you later. Don’t leave the rubbish till the morning. Be strict with pushing this new habit for a couple of weeks. You will soon convince yourself quickly every time you see something that needs to go away, to do it immediately. Knowing you just have to do it later should be motivation enough. Also remember that if you can keep your environment clear, clean, unobstructed and organised, that attitude will flow through to all areas of your life. Respect the space you live in.

Say Thankyou! If someone gives you a compliment, thank them! Being comfortable accepting compliments will go a long way to helping you notice and be thankful for your little improvements you are making and build on them.

Educate yourself. It is easier to sustain new habits in your life if you know why it is worth creating them. If you want to eat better – jump online and go read up on what antioxidants are, or what protein does, or what foods contain essential fatty acids. The more knowledge you have the better equipped you are to combat the aspects of your behavior that got you into that rut in the first place. If it is depression that is making life not worth living, get online, even if you have to be in your bed, and seek out people who have recovered from depression and talk to them. There are plenty of blogs and forums out there on this topic, with plenty of people only too happy to give you advice. Whatever it is that you are driven towards or wish you could do, have or become – go learn about it. Connect with people doing it. Information truly is power, so make the effort to learn all you can so you can move forward in your life instead of staying stagnant and void of any motivation.

Stay aware. If you catch yourself engaging in negative self talk, or looking for excuses, taking easy options, nip it in the bud early. Take each day as it comes and stay on top of your thought processes. Relapses are not an option. Don’t let one slip up take you all the way back to the beginning. Just get up and pick up where you left off. Some things in life are 2 steps forward, one step back. You can’t control everything so be accepting of whatever gets thrown your way. Look at what you can learn from it, and move on. If you find it hard to stop something that you know is contributing to a build up of negativity, ask a person close to you to make you aware when you are doing it. They will find it much easier to notice than you doing it yourself.

Take baby steps. In the beginning,you will be fired up. Your motivation levels will dip and rise after the novelty of your new idea, direction, plan, diet, program wears off. Be reasonable about your goals, give yourself time to create new habits. Don’t expect or try to be bouncing off the walls with passion every second of the day. Accept that you won’t always be excited about slotting papers into their new folder or cooking that new stir fry recipe, or going for the early morning walk. As long as what you are doing, saying, learning or trying is contributing to your overall wellbeing, it is worth doing.

You officially have no excuses anymore. If you have made it to the end of this article, you now possess enough information to start the process. There is no such thing as tomorrow, you only have the present moment in your control. If you are already thinking to yourself, I might start next week on Monday,  or I will quit smoking after my birthday, you are just cementing yourself into that hole. Start TODAY, make some changes that can secure you a better future. You CAN change your ways, it is never too late! Every day you wait, adds another 24 hours to how long it will take to achieve your goals.