The Death of Death to Fitness...

Well, "Big Fitness" has won. I have been beaten. I have been overtaken, toppled, left for dead by the fitness monster. This will be the final post on Death To Fitness...


The good news is, I am way too pissed off to stay dead. So, come check out my new blog that consists of EVERYTHING I HAVE EVER WRITTEN. All of my blog posts plus links to other sites I have written for (working on that... I hate technology).

Anyway, check it out, comment, and let's continue the crusade against all the stupid shit people tell you:


www.hedstrong.wordpress.com

Sprint. Kill. Eat... click on that link and forget this place ever existed.

The Definitive Guide To Not Using a Treadmill Like a Dumbass

When I say I spend a lot of time in gyms/fitness centers I mean every waking, soul stealing moment of my life. Notice I said gyms/fitness centers. Not actual training facilities where goals are met, sweat gets puddled, and work gets down. A common trend among normal gym going health enthusiasts:

99% of them look and weigh exactly the same or worse/heavier than they did when they got their membership.

Ok, I see a little improvement here. When, oh, when will Gamma radiation be available at GNC?



There is no change because they all do exactly the same thing. Get on the treadmill (you know the one with their favorite view of the TV... assuming the TV is not actually attached to the treadmill itself), hit quick start, plug in whatever speed they have been doing for the last 11 months of their gym membership, and plod along for the next 20mins to 6 hours periodically checking heart rate (for some reason?) and calories burned (to justify all of the shit food they plan to cram into their mouth as soon as they get home.

Warning: Just skip this next paragraph to stay on track with the actual point of this thread... I just got really pissed off about something just now:

 

 

Calorie counters... on treadmills/cardio equipment in general. *sigh*. Ok, let's imagine this is actually a helpful piece of information in some magical parallel universe where children ride unicorns to school, everyone is as cool as they sound on the internet, and a calorie is a calorie. You go through an insane 500 calorie burning utter mayhem of a training session (because no one works out in the perfect world, everyone trains). Now you can go right ahead and add in 500 calories of whatever awful mess you've been craving with no ill effects!!!! Wait!!! Since this is the case, you can just never get off the treadmill and eventually you will look like all of those skinny actresses and supermodels that say they jog all the time (google Clenbuterol... Yea... jogging got them skinny). The truth is in this awful nightmare of a real world: the more calories you burn doing slow, long duration, steady state cardio, the more energy you conserve at rest. It has to do with a survival mechanism that kicks in after doing such horrible cardio-related atrocities to your body. Think about 10,000 years ago... hell, think 3,000 years ago, when the majority of humans were hunter gatherers. Burn more calories=get more food or die. Since Super Walmarts and McDonalds were in short supply, access to food usually required a heavy physical effort (chasing and spearing a Mammoth), an even harder physical effort (dragging all 10,000lbs of said dead animal back to the village), and then eating the hell out of the thing. Sprint. Kill. Eat. Conserve? Contrary to popular belief, all forms of exercise cause this conservation phenomenon. So why exercise at all? Because strong muscles=strong bones=strong hands (one of the largest measures of quality of life)=better quality of life. Jogging/cardio eats muscle, burns calories (only to completely stall the calorie burning process once you stop), and causes injuries. Want science? Ok, nerd-ass, keep your lab coat on:

 

Instance of serious injury for competitive weightlifters: .003 out of 100 athletes

Instance of serious injury for high level soccer players: 12 out of 100 athletes (the highest of all team sports).

 

Rant over. I don't even know if I made a point up there. Oh well, I feel better now either way.

 

 

 

So, the treadmill sucks right? Yea pretty much. But, the truth is most people shy away from using the free weights for little more than curls with the little pink dumbbells or bench pressing with horrible technique simply because they don't know what to do or how to use the stuff. Since asking most personal trainers for advice on anything is basically a death sentence, I'll give you some awesomeness that you can do with a treadmill.


1. Sprint Intervals

Warm-up for however long you need to then find a speed on the treadmill that is somewhere around 80% of the fastest you can sprint. Do that for 15 seconds, grab the hand rails, and jump your feet to the sides. Rest for anywhere from 30 seconds to 1 minute, and repeat as many times as feels awesome (start with at least 6-10).

2. You Break It You Buy It

That was my disclaimer for my next suggestion. Find something heavy in the gym and either hold it out in front of you or over your head while you simply walk on the treadmill for a pre-determined amount of time. Shoot for a weight you can hang on to for 10 mins. Sound easy? I thought so too. You get to a point where standing upright and breathing stop being an option. Start light and, for the love of God, don't break the treadmill.

3. Whatever This Is

Or, instead of looking like dumbass like this guy, just don't turn the treadmill on and try to move the tread with your hands for a couple minutes.

4. Variation

Take any of the above and constantly vary the speed, incline, weight used, implement used, hand placement, whatever you can think of. Anytime you change something up it is a new exercise as far as your body is concerned.

No one gets better or looks better with a treadmill because its the same thing over and over and over. Just like your brain learns stuff, so does your body. Imagine starting to read a new book but once you get done with the first page you immediately return to the first sentence and read it all over again. Imagine doing that everyday for an hour for a year straight. Eventually, you'll memorize it, know every word, and just go through the motions of reading that page. Your body does the same thing when you torture it with boredom and slowly kill it through the ill effects of cardio on that moveing death platform of a treadmill.

Variation is the spice of life. Cardio on a treadmill is the burning tire filled with used diapers of life.

Sprint. Kill. Eat. And Nevermind, Break All The Treadmills.

 

The Death To Fitness Super Secret System For Programmed Fat Loss and Target Tonning Sculpter Routine

This is it. I can't stop smashing fitness in the face with a sledgehammer because I will now be joining the ranks of pop-fitness, money hungry, know nothing trainers. I am going to make bank off of peoples insecurities just like the pro's do. I will probably be one of the celebrity trainers on The Biggest Loser next season after I am finished with this one.

I tried to photoshop myself in there next to Bob just so everyone could get an idea of how he and I will look on the show next to each other but there wasn't enough room for my legs, my face looks too fat next to his, and I can't find any shirtless pictures of me. I'll probably need to completely stop lifting weights, being strong, and training everyday in order to not intimidate the little guy. I'll just start doing... whatever it is he is doing here.






So, my program. It is 100% peer-reviewed research based. Actually, it's only based off of one study. That one study, though, showed an average 2.2lb decrease in pure fat over the course of only 48 hours! Amazing. Repeating my protocol twice a week will allow you to SCORCH 4.4 lbs of unsightly pudge every week! This is it, the key, the magic bullet, the x-factor, the body composition game-changer (hopefully I have thrown in enough B.S. jargon to optimize my search engine presence by now... because honestly, I can't think of anything else... oh wait! SHREDDED!!!!!!).

What do you need to (thought of another one, RIPPED, bro. Pecs!!! Abs forever!!!!) have on hand to perform this program is very, very little. The only piece of equipment you need is a bike and a place to ride it. The intensity of the exercise involved is minimal. 48% of V02 max (or a heart rate around 105bpm for most people). The only small, minuscule catch is the duration restraint and distance of the exercise. You need to ride your bike 621 miles in 48 hours. 48 hours! That's a weekend! No big deal. A small sacrifice to make in the epic battle against fat loss. (SWOLE!!!!).


Ok. I'm done. Please don't do this... if you do, feel free to leave your results and ensuing exercise induced medical condition in the comments section below. Some mad scientist somewhere actually made other people do this. Here is a link to the study, the abstract is hilarious:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21722005

Sprint for 1,000 kilometers. Kill yourself. Eat.

Random Thoughts on Stuff That Sucks For You (That Everyone Tells You is Good For You)

It's been a while since I have posted something on here. Sorry about that. Hopefully everyone has not forgot about me and moved on to whatever Dr. Oz is recommending now.

"Now, what you do is, buy 30 pounds of whatever this is a day. You eat 7 pounds of it for breakfast, boil the rest, dump it in a bathtub, and soak in it for 20 hours. Repeat this process everyday for 6 years and, bingo! No more craving sweets!"


What is good for you? Seems like an easy enough question. There are many different answers to this depending on the person being asked but, from a health and wellness... or, hell, even easier, from a survival standpoint, your answers are very simple. Food, water, sleep, and shelter. Mess with not having any of those in your life and your life is going to start to suck really fast. So, why the hell do people limit food in order to lower a number on a scale? Or, why do people pretend to be too busy to sleep enough? Or, why do some people never drink water? Since most of the people reading this, I assume, are not in a third world country or in some situation where death is imminent, we can scratch the whole survival aspect of what you need. Let's get into some things that people tell you that you need but is really holding you back, making you fatter, and slowly killing you.

As opposed to a situation like this... which will quickly kill you.


Whole Grains, They're For Your Health!

I had a whole diatribe planned out to just go nuts about all of the inflammatory processes, the havoc that is wreaked on your insulin, and how bread is not a steak but, instead, I think I will just share one of the most awesome articles I have ever read (written by a very apologetic heart surgeon):

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/242516-Heart-Surgeon-Speaks-Out-On-What-Really-Causes-Heart-Disease

To sum up: the diets these medical professionals are recommending are killing you. Literally, killing you. I guess that's a little harsh. I will rephrase, these diets are making it so you need lot's of unnecessary medicines and HEART SURGERIES for the remainder of your sad, medical bill paying life.

Breakfast Is The Most Important Meal of The Day!

Here is how I start everyday:

... this really is not too far off.

A giant breakfast is the ideal way to start your day... if you want to completely destroy your insulin resistance, get fatter, be half-asleep all day, and have hormonal induced mood swings that mimic roid rage:

He just ate a stack of pancakes...

Our bodies have natural biorhythms that have evolved over thousands of years of being awesome hunter gatherer's in order to survive to now never missing an episode of "Real Slut-Wives of Plastic Face County." The biorhythms create a circadian (sleep cycle) rhythm to our hormone releases. Without getting too complicated, insulin (stores what you eat=anabolic hormone) is lowest in the morning and cortisol (breaks stuff down, makes loves handles go away=catabolic hormone) is at its highest right when you wake up. These hormones switch at in the evening (insulin high, cortisol low), around 5pm to 6pm. It would seem that a big breakfast would be a good thing because that storing, anabolic hormone is low. Well, your body doesn't work that way. Instead, a giant breakfast spikes your insulin into the stratosphere and pretty much any and all attempts to lose fat that day are out the window. So, how do you take advantage of your normal biorhythms? Here is an outline:

-Immediately upon waking, do some sort of high intensity interval training
-Nothing but coffee till noon
-No carbs until 5pm-6pm
-Eat the bulk of your calories for the day in the evening

Total opposite of everything anyone has ever said right? That's how you know it's good for you.

For more info on this kind of eating plan, check out: www.dangerouslyhardcore.com.
You're welcome.

Lifting Weights Will Make Me Too Bulky

This is more a complaint from women than men... usually. What people don't seem to understand is that to look like those 'juiced up bodybuilders' that have been training for size and eating perfect diets for most of their lives, you actually have to train for size, eat perfect, and do steroids for most of your life. Gaining some muscle is not some accidental thing. It takes a work ethic that most of our miserable genotype is not capable of. That being said, some people do swell up right when they start resitance training. This is an acute volumizing effect that resistance training (and subsequent muscle damage) causes and it goes away in a few weeks.

Intense training does more than just help you lose fat while not even at the gym (EPOC Theory... google it), over time, smashing weights for months and years actually remodels your skeletal muscle physiology to burn more fat than a normal person. This is a huge reason why Olympic sprinters are jacked and Olympic marathon runners look like, well, pretty much everybody else on Earth. I've already beat this into the ground but let's review:

Jogging uses a lot of fat for energy. When you jog more, your store more fat in order to be able to jog more. Also, as a means of energy conservation, your metabolism slows down when you aren't jogging. Which means you need to jog more to burn more fat... but then you store more when you stop. Eventually, you must never stop jogging ever.

Sprinting and high intensity exercise require being awesome. The more you do these things, the more awesome you get.

Which option sounds more appealing?


Don't believe everything you see, hear, or read... unless I wrote it, of course.

Sprint. Kill. Eat.

Feelin' Crappy? Take a 'Power Shower'

Recovery is often overlooked in, well, pretty much every training program. When you lift hard, run hard, and train hard week after week, month after month, your going to have to start putting an emphasis on recovery. Even after the most intense of workouts, muscle damage only takes about 48 hours to repair. Unless the damage is done during an intense session with the face trainer:



"She SHREDDED 20lbs of that stubborn, hard to lose face weight. Now, those old jeans fit again, she has her long forgotten college-slut confidence back, and walking down the street with he skull exposed scares off would be purse snatchers."

Anyway, muscle damage is easy to fix. Your body is pretty efficient at doing it naturally but things like food, water, supplements, stretching, ice packs, steroids, etc. help get the damage under control faster so that you can train again. Sometimes, the inflammation from the recovery process takes a little bit longer to subside. Also, another big problem is the amount of stress that your nervous system takes during bouts of heavy training. Like I mentioned before, muscle damage is pretty much fixed within 48 hours. Nervous system activity can take up to two weeks to get to levels that don't mimic that of a schizophrenic serial killer.

"My Fran time is down, my bench press is up but, I am running out of places to hide the bodies."

Damn. She could really use a shower. Actually, she could probably use a Power Shower. Hydrotherapy has been used forever for a wide array of medical and psychological problems... which the women in the above picture has plenty of both. What a Power Shower, or a contrast shower for those who don't like things that sound bad ass, entails is alternating between hot and cold water in certain timed intervals in order to speed up nervous and muscular recovery. Everything from decreased muscle soreness, to increased ROM, to increased levels of Growth Hormone have been found in studies involving Power Showers.

'Well, how do I do it?'

A ratio of 3:1 to 4:1, hot to cold seems to work best. Instead of standing there with a thermometer in one hand and stop watch in the other, just turn the water up as hot as you can stand and count to 45, turn it down as cold as you can stand and count to 15. Do this at least 10 times. Always start with hot water and always end with cold to room temperature water.

You should probably go take a shower now anyway. I can smell you from here.

Sprint. Kill. Eat.

You've Already Lost

So, you want to lose? You want to push yourself hard everyday, eat well, and totally change your lifestyle to completely and totally set yourself up to lose? Of course you do, you want to lose weight. You want to lose fat. Let's look at some synonyms for "lose":

be careless, be impoverished, be reduced, become poorer, bereave, capitulate, consume, default, deplete, disinherit, displace, dispossess, dissipate, divest, drain, drop, exhaust, expend, fail, fail to keep, fall short, forfeit, forget, give up, lavish, misplace, miss, misspend, oust, pass up, relinquish, rob, sacrifice, squander, suffer, suffer loss, surrender, use up, waste, yield.

Holy hell. That doesn't sound like something that is good for you. Think about it. Think about you and your goals. Why the hell would you make a goal based on such a negative connotation?

Well, here is what you have to look forward too:


I'm sure her goal is to lose weight... most people wait until after its actually happened to put the bikini on though.

Turn on the news. Right now. Is it something negative they are discussing? Probably. The world sucks. People suck and do sucky things everyday. Basing your whole training and living regime around a goal that sounds negative and sucky will make you a negative and sucky person. So, how do can you change your goals around to make them sound and seem less sucky and more superhumanly-bear wrestling-kill'em all awesome? Here are a couple tips:

Use Your Scale-... for target practice.



Bathroom weight scales should be illegal. You should need a prescription from your doctor to get one. Unless you have some Biggest Loser-going to die if you don't lose 500lbs-scenario on your hands, you don't need one. Why would you? Are you striving for a healthy Body Mass Index (BMI). Guess what? Insurance companies made this up so they could charge you more money. It has nothing to do with your actual health and well-being. What is more important to you:

-A number on a scale

or

-Having a body that looks like a masterpiece of Roman architecture?

Here is a practical example...



Guess which one weighs more? Neither. They weigh the same.


Replace Your Body weight Goals... with personal record goals in the gym. You'll start to find the harder you work, the better you feel, and the better you look. Keeping track of records on everything you do in the gym accomplishes two goals:

1. You keep track of and have quantifiable data for progress

and

2. You build a mental fortitude that can't be broken.

Stressed at work? Stressed at home? Stressed with life in general? The weight of life's problems seem a whole lot more manageable after you've squatted a 30lb personal record. You carry the weight of other people's problems and your own problems all day long. Take all of those pent up, everyday aggressions out on something constructive for yourself. Like putting yourself through a brutal Hell of a workout at the gym. The world can't touch you if the hardest part of your life you put yourself through... so, train that way.

Stop Eating Like You Don't Know... the crap that is bad for you. Eat veggies. Eat meat. Stop eating meals cooked in a microwave or ordered from a crack-head at a Wendy's drive through. You are short on time? Make time. Your life depends on it.


"Welcome to Wendy's, would you like some straight, un-cut rocks with your Triple Classic?"



Just some stuff to think about. Your scale is not a measure of your health and well-being. If it were, all scales would tell you the same number or the only way you would be able to use one is if you were at a doctors office. Blood lipid profiles, resting heart rate, and blood pressure are much better measures of if you are fat or not. If for no other reason, just because these are tests that only a medical professional can administer. You can't just drive to Bed, Bath, and Beyond and just pick up a blood lipid tester. Well, maybe you can, Hell if I know. I've never been inside a Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

Anyway, stop doing the easy stuff and start doing what's actually good for you. And, for God's sake, don't jog.

Sprint. Kill. Eat.

Losing Weight Will Make You Fat

What in the hell does "weight loss" mean? Think about it. You have a lot of things in your body that contribute to how much you weigh. Water, muscle, hair, skin, eyes, fat, bones, undigested double cheeseburgers, spider eggs, baby aliens, tape worms, and lots of other little icky things that make up your body mass. I would assume most people that partake in some sort of diet and exercise program are looking to lose weight. Well, I have a sure fire plan to lose 20% of your weight in less than 10 minutes. It's going to work 100% of the time. You don't need a gym membership and doesn't require diet OR performing any actual exercises. Here is what you do, go buy a bone saw and cut your left leg off. Next time you get on the scale you'll be shocked and pleased at the amount of body weight you lost. Cut off an arm too to lose even more. That will be $500 dollars. That might seem steep but, once you cut it off all that stubborn unwanted body mass, I'll send you one of those "I did P90X T-Shirts."

Don't actually do that. Unless you are an idiot... then go ahead.

"Weight loss" is a term diet companies use to get you to buy something. Something that is killing you inside when you put it into your body or (in the case of diets) stop putting things in your body. Do you know that when you eat less than 120g of carbohydrates a day it can put your body into a constant state of catabolism. This means, your body starts frantically eating stored fat and protein in order to convert said macronutrients into usable forms of carbohydrates/keep you from starving to death. This is why the low carb diets work. You lose a ton of weight fast when you don't eat any carbs. Some of that weight is stored fat, which is a good thing. Most of the weight is water and stored protein. Pop quiz: Where is protein stored in your body? The answer is your muscles. Your muscles keep you strong and healthy. You don't want them to go away. Then you will be weak, slow, and one of the first people to be eaten during an unexpected lion attack.

The same holds true with low calorie weight loss diets. Anything less than 800 calories a day is killing you. Plain and simple. 800 is the magic number for things like thinking, walking around, being productive, not crapping your pants unexpectedly, and just general survival. 800 is also assuming you aren't exercising. If you are just barely eating enough to survive and exercising at the same time, you are going to die. Ok, maybe not die but, you sure aren't going to feel too good or be very productive. Low calorie is the same as low carb. The only difference is instead of tricking your body into thinking its starving, you are actually starving.

So, why would anyone ever recommend these types of weight loss diets? Because the number on the scale goes down. WEIGHT goes down. Yes, that means fat. That also means water, stored carbs that your body uses for energy, muscles mass, which has a direct correlation to, bone mass all go down or are eliminated from the body.

At this point you are probably wondering how losing all of this weight is making you fat. You can't stay on these diets forever because you will incur the wraith of biology and become and extremely inefficient organism. One of the mechanisms of your body that is thrown out of whack from doing these awful things to yourself is your insulin sensitivity. Basically, the lack of carbs and calories causes your insulin to react as if you just at a 10 pound Hershey bar covered in high fructose corn syrup with a side of pure cane sugar for dipping the first time you take a bite of a piece of bread. Your body will go into freak out mode as soon as you go back toward any kind of normalcy with your diet, storing absolutely everything you eat in worry that you are going to try to starve it again. This will make you gain all that weight back and then some. There are even studies out there that suggest restrictive diets + cardio will cause NEW fat cells to form once normal foods are re-introduced. Not only will you get fat, you'll get fat(ter).

Hopefully now you realize your weight is not a problem. Your fat is the problem. How do you lose the fat? Build as much muscle as you can, eat a ton of protein and veggies, drink a ton of water, and kick ass every time you step into the gym. Don't go through the motions, don't half ass your diet and make a bunch of compromises with yourself every time you binge on an entire bag of oreos or eat so much crap you can't sleep because your stomach hurts and have to cram a bunch of pills down your throat to help all these stupid made up problems people have because they eat a 100% crap diet. You won't have to make these compromises if you don't eat it in the first place. See how that works.

Sorry no pictures or videos in this post, I didn't write it on my computer and didn't want to save a bunch of novelty cheeseburger pictures and Scott Herman fitness debacles on here.

Make good choices, eat real food, and train your body in the gym like a juiced out maniac.

Sorry if there are any grammatical errors in this one, I didn't proof read it at all. The Walking Dead is coming on in a few minutes and watching that takes precedent over making sure all my writin' words look good.

Sprint. Kill. Eat.