WOW: Multiply Excellence and Chutzpah

WOWOW: There!

Philippe Petit, Lego, Fructose, Third-World-Workouts, Chernobyl, and the 10 Skills you don't want to miss teaching your kids.

Inspiration: Philippe Petit, Man on Wire --

In 1968 I was 18 years old and I saw an article about those towers. There was a photo of a model, and the article said that they would be built one day, and they would be the finest in the world. And here I was, a completely new self-taught wire walker, and I thought, "What a fabulous thing to transform the top of those towers to a theater for one morning." And that's how the idea came.
Toys: LEGO Mini Sport City 2008 --

... currently one of the most amazing LEGO productions ever in China. The theme of this city is the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Swimming Cube, Nest Sports Ground and Sport Village were built as a landmark of this LEGO city. 300,000 bricks and 4,500 mini-figures are used to construct a 3m x 8m artistic show.
HFCS: How High Fructose Corn Syrup Makes you Gain Weight --

"The message from this study is powerful because body fat synthesis was measured immediately after the sweet drinks were consumed," Dr. Parks said. "The carbohydrates came into the body as sugars, the liver took the molecules apart like tinker toys, and put them back together to build fats. All this happened within four hours after the fructose drink. As a result, when the next meal was eaten, the lunch fat was more likely to be stored than burned."
Testosterone: The Evils of Fructose --

Unlike glucose, fructose can only be metabolized in the liver, whereas glucose can be passed to other body tissues, like your muscles.
By any means necessary: Third World Workouts --

In my world, the equipment is always there. You just have to teach yourself to recognize it. If you see something you can lift, push, pull, or throw, you can build a workout around it.
Foundations: 10 Skills You Need to Succeed at Almost Anything --

Success, however it's defined, takes action, and taking good and appropriate action takes skills. Some of these skills (not enough, though) are taught in school (not well enough, either), others are taught on the job, and still others we learn from general life experience.

Public Speaking, Writing, Self-Management, Networking, Critical Thinking, Decision-Making, Math, Research, Relaxation, Basic Accounting.
Fungi: Deep in the radioactive bowels of the smashed Chernobyl reactor, a strange new lifeform is blooming --

The exclusion zone is teeming with wildlife of all shapes and sizes, flourishing unhindered by human interference and seemingly unfazed by the ever-present radiation. Most remarkable, however, is not the life buzzing around the site, but what's blooming inside the perilous depths of the reactor.

Let go.

Labels: chutzpah, diet, excellence, exercises, insanity, lego, lifehacks, lifestyle, marketing, personal+development, philippe+petit, productivity, science, success, testosterone, vanity

Multiply Exercise and Nutrition to Look Even Better in 2008

edited by Alexander Becker

It's not rocket science. You know what to do. You know what you should be doing.

Health and fitness is a great foundation for any lifestyle and you can start right now. If you think there is nothing you can improve, your nutrition and your exercise regimen, you can always refine.

It is not about whether or not you exercise and watch your nutrition, of course you do, right?

Executive Summary: Exercise × Nutrition

Pay attention to exercise and nutrition and you will look good and be healthy. There isn't much more to get started and eventually end up leaner and healthier.

Consider -- and follow -- these two very simple recommendations --

Eat as much unprocessed food as possible and cut everything processed or refined. Food is fuel.
Move your body and your mind as much as you can in as many directions possible. Stagnation and inertia mean death.

Fat Loss

With spring coming soon and after just another year and just another month of feasting, the fat loss issue comes up.

Let's start with four rules from Christopher Mohr from T-Nation's 2008 Fat Loss Roundtable, Part I --

Eat a fruit and/or at least one vegetable with every single meal.

Plan ahead. Don't go to work without any food at all, then wonder why you opted for fast food at noon, hit the vending machine at 3 PM, and are famished on the way home so you decided to order a pizza to pick up for dinner.

Define your goals and write them daily. If you don't know what you're working toward, you're going to continue to struggle.

Move more! I'm all about complexes, interval training, large body movements like deadlifts, etc. but what about the other 160-plus hours during the week when you're not at the gym? Walk more. Get on a bike and use that as your transportation. Use the stairs instead of the elevator.

... and continue with Mike Roussell's 6 Pillars of Naked Nutrition from The 2008 Fat Loss Roundtable, Part II --

Eat five to six times a day.

Limit your consumption of sugars and processed foods.

Eat fruits and vegetables throughout the day.

Drink more water and cut out calorie-containing beverages (beer, soda, etc.).

Focus on consuming lean proteins throughout the day.

Save starch containing foods until after a workout or for breakfast.

Skinny Fat

Misguided diets or radical diet attempts often lead to a skinny-fat look. Try to eat more and get lean --

Don't you think it's about time to eat in order to get healthy and lean?

Complacency

Do you think it's enough? How do you know? There are at least 5 reasons to get even leaner --

Something that gets infinitely harder, the closer you come to reaching the absolute goal, is the ideal feat to fight for. If it was easy, anybody would do it and succeed. Competition is the ultimate comparison. There is only one first place.

Time

You say you're short on time? Try something like the 4 minute-workout --

The X-minute workout, a running gag among fitness professionals, can still be employed effectively, especially as an addition to a well balanced schedule involving resistance training, intervals, and aerobic work.

Labels: complacency, decisions, diet, exercises, fat+loss, fitness, health, lifehacks, lifestyle, nutrition, success, testosterone

Are Your Goals Mutually Exclusive?

edited by Alexander Becker

What are your training objectives? The question highlights the problem. The next one is harder: What is your training objective?

You want peak performance, beauty, aesthetic body composition with minimal fat and maximum muscle, superior mental sharpness, raw strength and endurance and speed. Overall health and longevity. Me too.

While those objectives aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, by trying to achieve all these goals simultaneously, you will end up achieving nothing more than average, lowest common demoninator results inspired by too broad objectives and lack of priority.

Peak performance in what activity exactly? Minimal fat and maximum muscle mass, an ideal for looks, may not be the best foundation for raw strength; more overall mass and, yes, bodyfat, will yield more strength.

So at the very high end of the scale -- and we're talking about nothing else here -- it is less fat vs. more strength.

Endurance and speed? Choose one. The two are completely different animals. After establishing a foundation training both endurance and speed you must decide which one to pursue even further.

Aesthetic and healthy? Sure it's possible but it quickly becomes a compromise; there are various tricks involving water and salt for example that will make you look even better yet, from the perspective of best health and longevity you'll want to leave the tricks alone and eat in moderation, light and balanced.

Again, the high end decision, even leaner, -- mind you, this is true perfectionism -- is between extreme beauty vs. optimum health.

Set priorities and determine the pros and cons of the goals in the big picture. You can always have it all today and pay later, the question is: Is it worth it?

What about drugs? What exactly do you want and how bad? Certain drugs will make you look better in the short term. Certain other drugs will increase you concentration and decrease your need for sleep while making you more alert -- for a short time. If it's necessary, make a decision.

The more clear your priorities are, the more mutually exclusive the various objectives become. You're not going to be #1 in every game. On the other hand, you can be #1 in any game.

Choose your game, pay the price, and win.

Labels: beauty, business, decisions, doping, elite, exercises, fitness, goals, health, lifehacks, lifestyle, longevity, marketing, personal+branding, strength, success, training

Constrain Yourself, Your Time, and Your Tools

edited by Alexander Becker

Some concepts keep recurring, again and again, less is more, for example.

Of Ririan Project's 33 New Ways To Overclock Your Brain, one is particularly powerful --

Constrain yourself.

You need structure in your life. And by constraining yourself -- say giving yourself deadlines, limiting your time on an idea in some manner, or limiting the tools you are working with -- you can often accomplish more in less time.

Use deadlines and short time frames. What do you do with your time and sharply defined increments?

Let's take a look at relativity -- what do you accomplish within an hour?

Exercises, for example: 100 bodyweight squats: 3 minutes.; 10 intervals of 15 seconds all out sprinting and 45 seconds recovery jogging: 10 minutes.; Four ridiculous minutes of dumbbell thrusting.; Full body workout using free weights: 30 minutes.
Writing: One such article: 20 minutes.
Food preparation: A big omelette with vegetables and some chicken, all freshly chopped: 15 minutes.

Now, what is it, what single activity takes a full hour? Is there anything taking one full hour? Sure, but cramming those activities within the available 30 minutes makes them even more intense, more dense, and more fun to begin with.

On the other hand, try to limit tools and get your ideas out, with whatever's at hand.

Pencil and a notebook instead of the computer anyone? The medium makes the message. Leave the notebook at home and write your million-dollar-idea down, on the next best surface. Do not let the medium or the brand of your beautiful sketchbook dictate your message.

In other words, do you need a certain, specific, tool to get the job done, a piano made out of glass, for example? One of my favorite quotes from Hugh MacLeod's How to be Creative, is about pillar management, and the props used to hide behind --

There's no correlation between creativity and equipment ownership. None. Zilch. Nada.

There you have it, etc.

Labels: creativity, exercises, lifehacks, personal+development, productivity, training, wow, wow-bits

Eat as Much as You Want: Experiences with the Warrior Diet

edited by Alexander Becker

One of the advantages of the Warrior Diet is the clear and simple distinction between what is allowed and when: Undereat for 20 hours and indulge in overeating the remaining four hours -- each and every day. It is easy to adhere to the principles and to defeat potential attempts to cheat -- refined sugars, for example just aren't allowed.

Certain other diets prescribe exact times for exceptions or specific amounts that basically invite you to eat some more or some stuff that would be off, but... seems to be... with some stretching of the rules... and so on.

After eating according to the rules of the Warrior Diet for more than five weeks now, here are some impressions, in no particular order:

Weight: Although I don't follow the Warrior Diet to actually lose weight, it definitely works to get rid of some bodyfat (Hofmekler calls it "stubborn fat" in the book) if you combine the diet with physical training.
Undereating: Absolute undereating; only water, coffee, and fruit juices seem to work best for me in terms of alertness, energy, and overall well-being throughout the day.
Overeating: I eat as much food as I ate during the first half of the year all in one month and I still lost some weight; in excess of four pounds over the first three weeks. Overeating, and especially the included compensation feels very real and converges with my take on moderation.
Coffee: I stopped drinking coffee, the compulsive, repetitive, hourly coffee, half a year ago. Since then, I only drank a cup or so once a week. Now, on the Warrior Diet, I drink coffee again daily, one small cup in the morning and another one in the afternoon. Drinking that black bitter dervish on an empty stomach feels great, in contrast to what you and I expected. It really supports the undereating phase.
Food groups: I am still eating vegan, no meat, no dairy -- all warrior... My eating vegan is an ongoing experiment and I am happy with the results so far. As of now, I experience no deprivations or deficiencies. (Note: The Warrior Diet is not about eating vegan.)
Diet composition: A week on all veggies and almonds feels great. Extraordinarily great. I ate an average of 200g almonds each day and I even lost weight. (I even felt great after eating more than 400g on one single day -- don't try this on any other diet, you probably don't want to try this at all...)
Exercises: An intense workout on an empty stomach, right after work, in the evening just before preparing the big meal feels amazing and leaves me with even more energy than I brought home. I don't even feel hungry after exercising.
Cravings: The body seems to crave exactly what is nutritionally necessary. It's always amazing to see the vegetative functions working so well.
Instincts: Eating vegan, my instincts aren't too bloody... but I am taking care of the almonds and the fat intake and I believe that all instincts respond and react the way they should.

Conclusion: I still and highly recommend the Warrior Diet for everyone, for physically active people as well as for the 24/7-in-front-of-the-screen crowd.

Labels: books, diet, discipline, eating, exercises, experiences, fasting, fatloss, health, instincts, lists, nutrition, ori+hofmekler, recommendation, vegan, warrior+diet, weightloss, wow, wow-diet

Understand Pain to Train More Efficiently

edited by Alexander Becker

It doesn't have to hurt in order to work, especially not on an everyday basis, but an always and infinitely comfortable workout is no guarantee for success either. There is no reason to run away from the slightest air of pain, as much as you don't need to run away from hunger. Enjoy your pain as long as it lasts.

Have you ever trained to accomplish full splits? This hurts and it has to.

You can choose from three different kinds of pain.

First, there is the pain of muscles that are brought to their maximum in a controlled training situation. Your workout is breaking up the muscle fibers which subsequently heal and grow bigger and stronger as a result. You want that pain.

Then there is the pain of injury: it hurts and at the same moment you know that you should stop your workout immediately. You certainly don't want it but you need that pain in order to prevent further serious damage to muscles, joints, or ligaments.

Another form of pain, the most stressful and the most desirable one, while at the same time the hardest, is the pain of endurance, where the mind offers to shut down the muscles long before they are technically due. Your body would thankfully give in. It is an art in itself to signal the mind that you understand that there is still a long way to go -- sometimes literally, think marathon -- and that the body is physically capable of working the load. You convince the mind that its efforts in telling you to stop will be ignored.

The pain stays the same, whether you run the double or the quadruple distance, the trick is to surrender to the continuous pain and to proceed anyway. The reward is a solemn state, which is achieved when this royal pain is conquered with marathons for example, with wall chairs, with willpower plus discipline. Nothing more.

It is this pain that you don't really want nor need, in fact it is -- to a certain extent -- a game that your mind is playing with you. The more you resist and endure, the more your mind will respect you and finally cooperate with you in your effort to excel.

You need willpower to successfully finish heavy, painful workouts, you are even able to overcome the pain of injury with sheer willpower -- take care though -- but in order to conquer the pain of endurance you have to combine willpower and discipline. This is where real training with massive results begins.

Pain is weakness leaving the body. Mental weakness, that is.

Labels: discipline, education, endurance, exercises, fitness, health, how+to, inspiration, lifehacks, marathon, mind, motivation, pain, personal+development, sports, theory, tips, training, willpower, wow

Exceptions Create Variety

edited by Alexander Becker

To make an exception or to deviate from an established discipline, often induces guilt or the feeling of failure.

Yet by deviating from -- not giving up -- self-imposed discipline, the discipline itself is trained in its flexibility, not in its strength.

Exceptions expand situations. Exceptions weaken the impact of resolutions but they also uncover hidden facets of otherwise known circumstances. Exceptions lead to conclusions that would never surface by sticking to all too perfectly executed, robotic routines in any area of life.

It is important to accept that exceptions have to remain exceptions. There is no reason nor sense in declaring any exception the new standard -- that is taking the path of least resistance. It is the continuous tension between discipline and exception that acts as a creative force and reflects what being human is about.

Exceptions are means to creation, they divert attention, and create variety, they are seeds for events yet to unfold. Embrace and live each exception, indulge in it, and honor and appreciate it for what it is: a gift.

One exception... when the goals are clearly set and agreed upon, exceptions are not permitted. Some paths have to be followed without exceptions.

The mind, like any muscle, has to be moved in as many ways and in as many angles possible. Exercises have to take that into account.

Labels: discipline, exceptions, exercises, goals, lifehacks, mind, theory, training, wow

Review: The Warrior Diet by Ori Hofmekler

edited by Alexander Becker

Based on undereating during the day and eating that one big meal at night, the Warrior Diet is appealing in many ways and modeled after the ancient hunter's schedule of hunting and collecting during the day and resting and eating in safety at night.

No calorie counting, no restrictions, the cyclic nature of the program and the sequence of salad, veggies, and carbohydrates at the end over the course of the night time meal is important and makes this diet -- work. Even killing an occasional pizza is allowed.

The starvation vs. compensation cycle is intriguing in that it is obviously triggering something that Ori calls the warrior instinct.

Heightened levels of energy and alertness in reminiscence of the old warriors on the hunt for their meal are a reality in the undereating phase and a means to counterbalance our lazy, civilized habits. The body isn't preoccupied with digestion during the waking hours and even more, almost starving -- you are allowed to eat, as long as you chose low glycemic index fruits and veggies in order to keep the insulin output low to regulate the balance of the most important hormones.

The fascinating opposite is the overeating period. The day is divided into 20 hours of undereating and 4 hours of overeating in which you can basically eat what you want -- sans sugar and refined starch of course, but this should be common sense by now.

Try this diet as a lifestyle and you will be amazed by the newly found energy and vigor and the sheer amount of food that you will eat during the hour-long eating sessions at night without gaining weight. In fact, you will even lose the last pounds of fat that are on top of your chiseled six-pack abs.

Wild and raw, instinctive eating, and living... who doesn't want to feel like a predator in an otherwise sterile, domesticated world?

Conclusion: Highly recommended, both the book and the diet.

Labels: books, detox, exercises, fasting, health, instincts, nutrition, ori+hofmekler, recommendation, review, warrior+diet, weightloss, wow

Questions and Answers from the Editor

edited by Alexander Becker

Q: Why WOW?

A: WOW is a blessing and blessings are, in my experience, a subtle, yet very powerful way to change realities.

Q: What is this all about?

A: It's about a healthy diet, fitness, and beauty and the mindset to achieve and maintain these goals.

Q: Why are you doing that?

A: I am experimenting with diets and keep getting great results. I research about nutrition and exercises and I want to share my findings and my inspiration with you. Many people don't know where to start or how to make progress after a certain point; I am here to help.

Q: How do you train?

A: I am doing bodyweight exercises exclusively for half a year now. I never lifted weights and I never went to the gym to pretend lifting weights either. My seven days a week routine consists of 20 - 30 minutes of high repetition calisthenics like hindu squats, hindu pushups and variations, handstand holds, wall walking, and pull ups. I occasionally run and I start my days with breathing exercises and an abdominal workout as assembled by Matt Furey.

Q: Bodyweight means...

A: No iron. Believe me -- your bodyweight is more than enough to lift at various angles and for slow, high intensity repetitions.

Q: What's your workout goal?

A: To be able to handle my bodyweight in any position.

Q: What's your current diet?

A: I am on the warrior diet which is about almost fasting during the day and eating big -- really big -- at night. Make sure to read my review and recommendation of the book The Warrior Diet by Ori Hofmekler. In addition I am eating vegan. I am constantly experimenting and I consider eating fish for a while now.

Q: What else?

A: You are beautiful!

Labels: answers, bodyweight, calisthenics, diet, exercises, health, interview, personal+branding, personal+development, questions, rant, training

Tracking and Evaluating Progress

edited by Alexander Becker

The habit of regularly recording and comparing specific data -- as much diverse, significant data as possible, is an easy to implement measure and the most efficient tool to use while working on your goals.

You want to lose or gain weight? Start by measuring and recording your weight once a day, at a fixed time. As a note, I always suggest not to count calories but you may want to count your calories and are free to write them down too.
Keep your financial goals in front of you and make sure to update and track the progress and evaluate the development over time regularly and often.
Workout: Make sure to log the number of repetitions for each exercise you do. Try to ignore people making fun of your training journal, success is much harder to achieve without clear, measurable, and visible goals and subgoals. Besides, how would you ever be able to improve your marathons without being able to compare your runs over time?

The mere sight of comparable records and the recognition of often obvious trends -- ups or downs -- is a great motivator. You don't want to write down a higher weight than yesterday, or a lower balance on your account for today. Just make sure to be brutally honest with yourself.

Archive your data! You may motivate yourself with past achievements in different, measurable fields by looking at your goals' and eventually your life's statistics. You can archive your files in basic ways or you can go creative with printing out graphical charts, pies, or whatever technique suitable for visualizing your progress.

The medium you use to keep your records is not important, you can use pen and paper, your computer's text editor, a spreadsheet program, or one of the various online tools like Backpack or the convenient Google Spreadsheets which lets you import and export your data in various formats.

For fitness-related data, I use a pen and paper solution with custom forms printed out and neatly kept in a binder. This way, the records are always accessible without the need for a computer or internet connection. I do transfer some data into a spreadsheet on the computer to have progress automatically calculated but the initial recording is tree-based.

If you can measure it, you can improve it.

Labels: accounting, diet, discipline, evaluating, exercises, google, health, log, measurement, personal+development, progress, tracking, training, wow

A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body?

edited by Alexander Becker

I am still not convinced that a healthy body is a prerequisite for a healthy mind or even vice versa. There are too many examples of extremely healthy minds in sick bodies; on the other hand, we all know perfect bodies which don't seem to care too much about their minds. The same goes for beauty; we have beauty without health -- some even explicitely sick -- all around us.

Sometimes it's about priorities, in order to overwhelmingly succeed in one field, the mind for example, you'd have to neglect the body somewhat along the way. It's just not the most important thing to pursue while heading for that mind-related goal.

It's not easy nor is it particularly sane to sustain such an imbalance for longer periods of time. On the other hand, it seems to yield more extreme results, neglecting one, mind or body, in favor of the other.

To conclude, a healthy mind could transform its body into a healthy vehicle but it is not required to do so, as much as a healthy body has no apparent reason to do anything to boost its mind -- except for a steady supply of challenging input, that is.

Don't get me wrong, I am a renaissance man. I do think that by alternating and escalating between mental and physical activity, we are destined to reach our personal best for a prolonged time, as opposed to short-term heights in either field at the cost of the respective other.

Mens sana in corpore sano: An ideal to strive for.

Labels: beauty, body, diet, exercises, health, mind, personal+branding, wow

Diets and Exceptions: One Day Off?

edited by Alexander Becker

While I definitely get pleasure and satisfaction from cycling between extremes, I do think that the weekly binge eating excess is a worthwile target to knock down and leave behind for good.

Many people say they need that regular day off and that it would be impossible for them to completely avoid their sweets, candy, and pastries.

Could you tell when you'd arrived at your naturally healthy lifestyle? Would you know when you were really there?

The day you don't crave those sweets anymore will be the first day of that conscious, healthy, beautiful life.

One more thing. Exceptions are just that: exceptions. They are surely permitted, even desired occasionally to maintain that sense of freedom, while regular, weekly, scheduled exceptions are nothing more than excuses.

Let's try to get over excuses.

Labels: binge+eating, diet, discipline, exercises, health, personal+development, wow

The Wall Chair: Mental Toughness vs. Physical Endurance

edited by Alexander Becker

A simple, yet effective exercise: The wall chair.

Stand with your back against a wall and feet shoulder-width apart. Slide down into a crouch with knees bent to about 90 degrees. Hold as long as you can.

On the first day, try to hold the position as long as you think you can endure. On the second day, increase the time by five seconds, on the third day, increase by another five seconds. Do this for about a week.

Now, what do you think do you work on during that week? You surely train your quadriceps, but most of the exercising is improving mental toughness. Would you expect to double your physical endurance in such a short time?

It’s the double benefit of training body and mind through continuously pushing beyond the limits that makes endurance exercises so valuable.

Labels: endurance, exercises, fitness, how+to, mind, strength, training, wow

WOW: Multiply Excellence and Chutzpah

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Handpicked Quote (more)

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WOWOW: There!

Multiply Exercise and Nutrition to Look Even Better in 2008

Executive Summary: Exercise × Nutrition

Fat Loss

Skinny Fat

Complacency

Time

Are Your Goals Mutually Exclusive?

Constrain Yourself, Your Time, and Your Tools

Eat as Much as You Want: Experiences with the Warrior Diet

Understand Pain to Train More Efficiently

Exceptions Create Variety

Review: The Warrior Diet by Ori Hofmekler

Questions and Answers from the Editor

Tracking and Evaluating Progress

A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body?

Diets and Exceptions: One Day Off?

The Wall Chair: Mental Toughness vs. Physical Endurance

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Executive Summary: Exercise × Nutrition

Fat Loss

Skinny Fat

Complacency

Time

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