• Multiply Exercise and Nutrition to Look Even Better in 2008

    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 --

    1. Eat as much unprocessed food as possible and cut everything processed or refined. Food is fuel.
    2. 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 --

    1. Eat a fruit and/or at least one vegetable with every single meal.
    2. 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.
    3. Define your goals and write them daily. If you don't know what you're working toward, you're going to continue to struggle.
    4. 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 --

    1. Eat five to six times a day.
    2. Limit your consumption of sugars and processed foods.
    3. Eat fruits and vegetables throughout the day.
    4. Drink more water and cut out calorie-containing beverages (beer, soda, etc.).
    5. Focus on consuming lean proteins throughout the day.
    6. 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.

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  • Are Your Goals Mutually Exclusive?

    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.

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

    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.

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  • Employ Your Instincts Against Overtraining and Burnout

    Plato has Phaedrus say: You will soon break the bow if you keep it always stretched.

    When the initial motivation is extremely high or the external and internal, personal expectations are too demanding, often physical and mental burnout are observable. What is happening in management can be compared to a similar phenomenon in sports: overtraining, plateaus, physical burnout, and fatigue are the results of the triumph of will over sensibility. The cure against burnout and overtraining is very simple: stop immediately and rest.

    Excessive training, trying too hard, or monotonous routines that don't challenge the mind or body lead to overtraining syndrome with symptoms that are hard to recognize and differentiate from mere temporary exhaustion or psychological causes instead of effects.

    Overtraining may lead to training plateaus, the body cannot catch up regenerating itself and gets stuck on a mid-level that is achievable without adequate rest. Overtraining is the result of weeks or months of wrong training, you're not going to burnout after a couple of days or some high intensity training.

    An effective strategy to avoid and to prevent overtraining is to listen to your body's needs and its instincts. It's all too easy to override pain in order to achieve the next promising and potentially rewarding goal. The body as well as the mind need rest. Growth and improvement take place while not training, while at rest, between workouts and after work. Hard work is definitely necessary but the moment it becomes mindless it is a sure sign of becoming insensible and therefore against nature's requirements.

    It is vitally important for eventual success to balance and level the eagerness in the beginning and focus on maintaining the discipline through the initial motivation and the lows and the highs and the plateaus.

    Consciously relax and release all the tension from time to time. Make no exercise a dedicated exercise and count the non-reps, e.g. try to statically hold nothing for the intended duration. This special exercise is the only exercise that let's you grow while still working on it...

    The same holds true for corporate executives: rest consciously without working at all. Schedule an amount of time where you absolutely do not work. Consciously dedicate this time to not working at all. As a side effect, you will notice how, perhaps unexpectedly, your productivity will go up. Your energies will replenish and you will gain new clarity.

    Enjoy every moment of your recovery, as much as you enjoyed, with all your heart, work until crashing.

    Find the best resources on health clubs in your area at SignatureHealthClubs.com.

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  • Understand Pain to Train More Efficiently

    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.

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  • Reality Check: The Implications of Elite Training

    Is it possible to be in top physical and mental condition while at the same time participating in life with all its seductions, influences, and an environment that is, if not negative by definition, at least neutral, neutral as opposed to the maximum goals and achievements that are so not-average and pursued while training for life?

    Coming out of a controlled environment, mind and body, discipline and willpower are finally allowed to show what they are really able to achieve.

    Yet it seems that only in a controlled environment, it is possible to train and prepare yourself for heights formerly unknown. This creates a dual environment problem, where you train for the outside world but not within that world. I'd love to promote training for the real world in the real world but it doesn't work this way.

    You train with amazing results, you eat perfectly healthy, your thinking is positive and untainted, only to emerge from your laboratory immediately starting to effectively de-train your mind and your body. Life is cyclic.

    I'm still striving to attain the heights of the monk, always, and continuously, although I do not recommend living completely ascetic. Life has to be instinctual -- to a certain degree at least -- it encompasses ups and downs, exceptions, successes and failures.

    After a certain point, after accomplishing your goals for yourself, to go even further, to reach for the next impossible, the unreasonable, you have to decide whether to drop everything incompatible or accept satisfaction with what you have within easy reach.

    This is what is meant when the best is being defined as the enemy of mere good.

    WOW! You look like you're not from this world is not an exaggeration but a perfect truth.

    We're talking about the training of elite athletes here, with goals hard to attain, training levels hard to maintain, and rewards hard to believe but why not adopt some of the methods and include them in your everyday mindset.

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  • Maintain Your Beauty

    How do you think are you going to be able to maintain your beauty during the years to come? Your beauty is shining and legendary. What do you think are you doing right now? Why do you think you can do without sleep? You don't eat regularly, you don't eat enough, and what you eat is not worth the mention. Then there is your mood, please watch it, for that you attract exactly what you radiate.

    You play with your life like I used to play with mine...

    You declare your starved look a beauty ideal and others will follow you because you are their idol, you are a role-model. Take responsibility. You work without rest while you postpone your health and your beauty... You expect to get it back after being rewarded. What do you think will be your reward? What do you expect from your reward? What do you plan on doing with your reward?

    What you still mistake for your reward will not satisfy your longing. But you know that. You will receive a thousandfold, yet you will be waiting for happiness. In vain. You will crave even more and try even harder when the only right thing to do is to step back and enjoy the show.

    Don't trade your beauty or your health for something you're not even vaguely able to describe. What you want lies in front of you, within easy reach, day in, day out.

    Let go of everything for the shortest moment of your precious time and feel what is there for you and only for you. Feel what you are missing and what you are neglecting in favor of that fear. Let go and be beautiful. Your reward comes from within.

    Surprised?

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  • Review: The Warrior Diet by Ori Hofmekler

    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.

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  • Questions and Answers from the Editor

    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!

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  • Tracking and Evaluating Progress

    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.

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  • A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body?

    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.

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  • I want you to be Happy, Healthy, and Beautiful

    You are beautiful. I want you to be at your best. Because you rock.

    People keep coming up to you, exclaiming: WOW! You are beautiful!

    The purpose of this site is to help you and inspire you in achieving and maintaining being WOW. It's about your happiness and your health and your beauty. We are talking about fitness and mind and health. About nutrition and about diets. About hard work and about amazing results.

    The difference between WOW and other helping hands is that I will never tell you that you don't have to work for your goals. In fact, you have to work as hard as you can -- by definition -- to achieve as much as you want.

    I want to bring out the best of you. Nothing more. It is a journey and it will be the best there is.

    WOW is a blessing and a gratification, an indicator that you are on the right track.

    You rock. That's it.

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