Man of Steel Fitness

My main source of motivation is Scooby’s Home Workouts on his You Tube Channel. Scooby is a home fitness and bodybuilding guru and an engineer like myself. He is also a big enemy of the supplement industry and I agree with him totally. I can’t even begin to count the amount of money I spent on supplements over the past 10 years and the majority of them were bunk. Scooby’s advice is simple, you don’t need to spend money to get into shape. A little hard work, good nutrition and setting your expectations are all you need.

The only thing I don’t completely agree with Scooby on is his philosophy of home bodybuilding. I have tried to workout at home before and there are just too many distractions to pull me away from a good workout. At the gym, that is all there is for me to do so I workout hard, I get out of the house and I don’t spend a huge amount of money to do this. It is a tiny fraction of even what I spend on groceries in a month. I will say this. If you follow Scooby’s advice, you will spend more on your grocery bill. Healthier whole foods tend to cost more than your average foods but in the end you’ll feel better, you won’t be hungry and you’ll get off all those dirty supplements. The only supplements I recommend are a good protein shake and maybe creatine if you are an advanced bodybuilder. I do recommend BSN Syntha 6 protein because it is the best protein I have tried so far. It is a blend of different types of slow and fast burn proteins to sustain me longer. That being said, if I were to find a better protein that met my needs at a cheaper price, I’d toss Syntha 6 right out the window.

Scooby has moved his Blog and Web site over to WordPress and it looks fantastic. His Web site is full of calculators, embedded videos that are related to the content and a lot of great advice. I really enjoy his Wall of Shame where he rates these infomercial products that “guarantee” to give you six-pack abs and help you lose weight.

Everytime I need motivation to workout, I watch one of Scooby’s videos.

Visit Scooby’s new Web site today….

Over the weekend, I installed the Gym Buddy app from the iTunes store onto my iPhone 4S. I needed a way to track my progress for weights over the next few months as I need to hone in the workouts. I need to make them shorter, more intense and I need to make some strength gains. The Gym Buddy isn’t the most perfect app for this sort of thing but it was the best out of the 5 I downloaded. If you want to check it out on iTunes here is the link.

Here are a list of the features. I warn you though. It is a time investment to setup everything in the app to fit your workout and learning the screens can be difficult. It is not intuitive but it is robust app.

Key features include:

- Allows you to edit your sets after you input them. Change the time, note, weight & reps anytime and anywhere they appear. You can move them from workout to workout, or even change the associated exercise.

- Has three countdown timers to monitor your rest periods. They beep and buzz independently at any duration and can even be set to start automatically when you enter a set.

- You can define an unlimited number of Plans for each workout where you can store your goals for that day. Each plan can contain a unique subset of the exercises in a workout and may also be sorted independently.

- Workouts can be sorted into different Groups of Workouts.

- You view your results in a concise, compact format that is definable by workout, time frame, and exercise. With the Calendar view you can view an entire month of workouts in one glance, seeing the date, name of the workout, and your workout volume — then flip from month to month. Select a day in the calendar and you see all the sets you performed on that day.

- Allows you to email your history — also by workout, exercise, and time — for backup and input to a spreadsheet.

- With a wifi connection to a computer, you can backup and restore the database — so you don’t have to worry about the security of your data.

- Shows your previous workout results right on the input screen, so you know what your goal is — no searching, no tabbing, its just there.

- Calculates your One Rep Max for each set and tracks your all-time best, which it celebrates by flipping the screen and yelling, “YES!”

- Draws a graph of your One Rep Max history for each exercise, breaking down each workout by set number (up to five sets) and also by your best set. Also graphs your Workouts by volume.

- Tracks and graphs your weight, body fat, BMI, and lean body mass, or anything else that can be expressed as a number including body measurements and supplement intake, and also includes an interval timer. No need to buy separate apps.

- Includes a detail screen for each workout and exercise showing an extensive summary of your performance.

- Compatible with Kilograms and allows for decimal weights.

- Allows for supersets, bodyweight, and assisted weight exercises. Cardio exercises can have up to four user-defined data fields.

I see posts every day from folks on Facebook about fighting bullying lately, like it is some new thing that has of a sudden sprang out of nowhere. Some of the very folks I see posting against it are some of the very people who bullied others in school. Having children I guess has changed the perspective for some of them. No one wants their child to be bullied. I know if I had children, I’d probably take a pretty hardline stance on anywhere bullying them.

I was bullied from about the 6th grade up until about the 10th or 11th grade. In middle school, I was a fat kid who didn’t have the nice clothes that some of the kids wore. I had no self confidence and my parents didn’t exactly help matters in this area. My Dad just wasn’t a Dad at this time in my life and my mother was indifferent on everything. I think the first time I was bullied was by three guys who bullied everyone back then. It wasn’t regular but what it did was put blood in the water and soon others were doing the same. The only thing that saved me a few times were a couple of girls who took up for me. I know that did wonders for my self esteem too. Although it may explain why I prefer women over men for friends.

I changed schools in the middle of 8th grade because my parents wanted to move. My new school was no different than the last. The hazing and bullying started pretty early. I made friends with a couple of guys in my class but even they bullied me from time to time. One of them always distanced himself from me in public for fear of guilt by association I guess and the other continued to prank and bully me up until even the 11th grade. I know… some friends right?

My first year in high school was plagued by bullies. There were way too many of them and from my perspective, they were pretty big dudes. I can see how a weaker willed person would have just given up and committed suicide. Don’t think that I didn’t think about it a few times.

Well right between the 10th and 11th grade, things changed a bit. I realized that part of my problem was that I was nice and accommodating to most people. Young kids see this as a weakness normally. I started to read books about martial arts and practice. I started to exercise and lose a little weight. My voice got deeper and in some ways I got a little more intimidating due to my size and height. This kept off a lot of the bullies for the rest of my high school years, although many people still continued to make fun of me and distance themselves from me.

The girls were often just as bad as the guys too back in high school. Girl bully in a different way than guys do. They don’t get physical very often but they poke fun at the way you dress in front of their “click” or ignore you completely for fear of not looking cool. The girls in high school weren’t as protective as the girls in my middle school. In fact, they weren’t protective of anyone but themselves most of the time. I sure was glad I wasn’t female though… I saw how mean some girls could be to others and I’m not sure I could have taken that kind of punishment.

Of all my years in school, my senior year was probably my best. It was the year that I was bullied the least, partly because I had gained the self confidence and I had learned to fight back and fight back hard. I learned that when you are bullied, going to an adult is never the answer. It doesn’t work because it just labels you are weaker than you already are. This is the same principle as beating up the baddest dude in prison on the first day to get respect. I learned you need to intimidate and threaten back when you are threatened but that it not only has to match the intensity, but you have to top it. If someone thumbs your year, you smack him in the head. If someone smacks you in the head, you break their nose. Escalation is the only way to get it to stop and to achieve your own self respect. Besting a bully is the best feeling in the world.

After high school, I went on to join the Marines, I worked out in college and I got a career in programming. I’ve been in and out of shape over the years but one thing remains the same. I still don’t tolerate a bully even though it has been many years since anyone dared to challenge me. Picking on the weak is not a strength, it doesn’t make you tough. It just makes you a bully. As my brothers were growing up, I tried to provide for them some protection by making sure they were seen with me so that their peers would know that I am around to protect them. Ultimately, they both had to fend for themselves and they both found their self confidence like I did.

At the heart of a bully, you’ll find a coward. This is just a plain fact. The bully often has a hard home like or is insecure about something so they lash out at weaker folks to make themselves feel better. Lifting someone up, protecting someone else or just being kind to someone is a far greater reward and will do much more for your self esteem. Remember the old saying, it is easier to destroy than create. Bullies take the easy route. Another thing is also true, a person who is good inside and is bulled all their lives tends to respect power when it is given to them because they know what it is like to be without it.

Look back on your life… Were you the bully or the person who was bullied? I can imagine that if you were the bully, then you have far greater regret in life than the people you bullied.

I know you’re thinking what does all this have to do with bodybuilding and fitness. It has a world to do with it. Without the training and confidence I gained by getting into shape that first time, I would have never got myself out of the situation I was in. I remember one guy in high school who I thought was a pretty decent dude and I wanted to be like him told me one day as we were discussing working out and biceps, “If you can feel it, it’s there.” It was a nice way of encouraging me to continue what I was doing because at that point, I could feel a muscle in my arm. I had seen this guy take up for others in the past and I never once saw him bully a person so he became my role model.

Over the years I just picked on role model after the next as a goal. I tried to mold my personality and my physical presence to those I admired from school and in movies. I still do this to this day. Not only do I admire fictional characters like Superman, Captain America, The Hulk and Green Lantern but I also admire living people Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Henry Cavil and other actors that I strive to achieve their level of fitness.

In a lot of ways, I wouldn’t be me without the bullying and I wouldn’t trade it now for anything, but it sure would have been nice to look back on the years before my senior year with some happy memories but unfortunately, thanks to bullies, I have none. About 5 years of bullying and that is 5 years of my life those people wasted. Don’t let this happen today. Teach your kids that bullying is not acceptable, teach them to defend the weaker and different and not try to have a join the crowd mentality. They will thank you for it and you will be a proud parent in the long run.

One thing I learned over the past year is that stress is the worst thing for losing fat. I could parrot back a scientific explanation about how stress increases cortisol in the body which makes the body hold onto fat but I won’t go there right now. The least amount of stress will sabotage all efforts you are making to lose weight without question, so if your work is cramping your style and you are aware of it, then you need to do something now.

My philosophy about stress has become quite simple. I DO NOT tolerate it. If a job is giving me stress and doesn’t let up, I find a new job. If someone I know is stressing me, I just remedy the situation or I do not interact with that person. I keep my home life very stress free by not allowing things to get out of hand like finances or my relationship with my wife or other family members. I have learned the hard way that the more I stress, the more I want to eat, the less I feel like working out and the more fat my body retains. It is a trifecta of problems.

You might be thinking that you have to tolerate these situations to survive or putting up with it makes you stronger… The funny thing about stress is that it builds up inside you and it just piles and piles on until it affects not only your fitness and weight but your health. It will kill you eventually. So if you ask me whether you should quit your job because it stresses you, I would say that you give a try to control the situation and assert yourself and if that doesn’t work, you find another job or quit. Your health and your life isn’t worth the money in someone else’s pocket. The majority of us out there work to survive and not to make us rich, so in all likelihood, you will die from stress at an early age while some fatcat gets rich.

Exercise

In case you are unaware, exercise relieves stress. 30-45 minutes of exercise a day can do miracles for your stress levels. This is probably the #1 thing you can do to control your stress.

Here are some more things that will help you take control

Sleep

Make sure you get enough sleep. around 7 hours of “quality” sleep each night is crucial. If you are not sleeping well due to Apnea or Insomnia, I recommend you check with your doctor. I sleep with a CPAP machine because reduces negative sleeping events to 0 and it increases my blood oxygen saturation at night which helps me heal and reduce stress. I normally have around 5 sleep events an hour without my CPAP, but when I was overweight, it was 10-15. Over 10 is in the mild category. Some overweight folks score much higher. Really bad cases can have over 50 an hour. If you can’t afford the doctor or have no insurance, I recommend getting a friend who uses one to teach you how it works, then try to find one on Craigslist and then start using it by starting at a good round pressure number of 4-6 and increase if you still feel bad after a couple weeks. It is amazing how good you will feel after you get accustomed to it. Doctors have quite the racket going with these diagnosis and machines. You can’t buy one at a supply store without prescription and the prescription is just your airway pressure. It’s like having to have a prescription to buy underwear in your size. The sleep diagnostic industry is making money hand over fist but the solution to Apnea is as simple and as low tech as having some air blowing down your nose at night to provide positive pressure to keep your airway open. Go to bed at the same time every night, don’t stay up late and the only two things you should be doing in your bedroom are sex and sleep. If you have any other form of entertainment in there like a TV, iPad or pogo stick, get them out now. The body will associate activities, if you always watch TV for two hours in the bedroom, your body will expect this. The body should be trained that when your head lays down in that bedroom, you are going to sleep.

Your stress level just went down a couple notches.

Meditate, relax or take a vacation

Give yourself some quality therapeutic time to unwind. Sit up straight right now, close your eyes and take 3 enormous deep breaths in and out very slowly and then see how you feel. Take a week off and hit the beach of the mountains. Another few stress notches down.

Take a break from children and family

I’m glad I don’t have children. Children are one of the highest factors you should consider when you are dealing with stress. Figure out how to get some you time by getting away from them periodically.

Have a hot tea

Chamomile or other “caffeine-free” bedtime teas are great to calm you. Whole Foods and even Wal-Mart have some good ones. Just don’t put sugar in it or cream.

Nutrition

Eat small meals every 3 hours starting with when you first wake and get 6-7 meals but don’t eat 3 hours before bedtime. Try it, it works wonders. Also increase your green veggie intake. Studies have shown that green leafys do wonders for stress and fat loss. Don’t overdo the caffeine, make sure you don’t eat Saturated fats or transfats and keep the carbs to a minimum, but don’t cut them out and make sure you get fish or flax oil daily. Wanna feel like crap fast cut out all your carbs… Also, remember this… If man made it, don’t eat it. Eat your foods as close to raw as possible.

Change your life

Try to change your life in a way that you think would be beneficial to you. If you have a bitchy girlfriend or a pain in the butt boyfriend always stressing you, then you need to change that situation fast. Your partner should not add any stress to your life. Also, I’ll say it again, if your work is stressing you, then quit. It’s not worth the cost of your life.

Now, do you already feel like the stress has eased???