Goals Are VERY Important Part 1

Introduction

Every person in the world devotes countless hours to thinking of their future and their present situation in life. Almost everyone wishes that there was something that they could change in their life.

Whether it is their family life; their friendships; relationships or finances, everyone wants to change something. The first step to doing that is to set goals.

However, many of us are great at trying to set goals; most of us are practically incapable of following through with them. Think about it. How many times have you decided on a course of action and simply didn’t follow through with it?

That is pretty much the norm for most people.

Sometimes even setting goals at all is the harder part of accomplishing any. The easiest way of looking at this is to think of each and every New Year. The largest part of New Year’s celebrations are not the parties and the get-togethers; it is actually in the resolutions.

As much as we all like to attend and talk about New Years Eve parties, the most common source of conversation is the resolutions for the New Year. Read more

KISS Nutrition For Normal People

Think proper nutrition is complicated? It doesn’t have to be.

Follow these simple principles and you’ll never go wrong.

I would bet that without even thinking, you could name 4 or 5 diets or eating plans that are in the popular media…Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem, Atkins, South Beach, etc. Every time you turn around, there’s a fantastic “new” approach to eating. It’s enough to make your head spin!

But it doesn’t have to be that complicated. I’ve got some easy-to-follow nutritional principles that will help keep you on the right track. Beginner or advanced, these will work for you!

1. Focus your eating on natural, unprocessed foods as much as possible.

While I know it’s not always possible to get fresh fruit and veggies and other unprocessed foods everywhere you go, your body will always respond best when you feed it foods that are not altered through processing. Your body has evolved over thousands and thousands of years to process foods in their natural state - it’s only relatively recently that processed foods have appeared on the scene. Read more

Abdominal Development

This is a page that will continue to grow over time as I get the full information on abdominal development up. For right now..let’s just get the ball rolling!

About Those Lower Abdominals

There are two basic areas of confusion when it comes to abdominal training. The first of these is that of the much sought after lower abdominals. Many folks (including my new personal training clients) say that their upper abdominals are starting to really show, but the lower abdominals are not coming in at all regardless of how much training they do. These are also usually the same folks that are always on the lookout for the miracle lower abdominal exercise.

But if you look at this anatomical picture of the abdominals, you can clearly see that the rectus abdominus is a single muscle running from sternum to pelvis. The lower abdominals do not exist.

The reason that the lower abdominal area seems to take forever to show is not because of your abdominal training but because mother nature has chosen the lower abdominal region as one of here favorite fat storage areas. I know, it sucks.

So long story short, the lower abdominals ARE getting trained from all that time in the gym it’s just that you can’t see them under the fat! Just to prove a point, try this: lie on the floor and get ready to do some crunches. Take one of your hands and put it on your lower abdominal area and the other on your upper abs. Now slowly do a proper crunch and curl up vertebrae by vertebrae so that your sternum and pelvis are closing towards each other. You will feel both areas contract at the same time as you curl up.

What I want you to take away from this above information is that seeing your lower abs or definition in any muscle for that matter is a matter of reducing body fat and not finding that one wonder exercise that will make your muscles show.

The second thing about abdominal development comes from the idea that spurred the first problem. It’s exercise selection based on the idea that the upper and lower abs are worked independently.

There are a ton of trainees that are still doing hanging leg raises, knee ups and other exercises like these trying to target the lower abdominals. Now these are GREAT ab exercises, but doing them with the intent of bringing in only the lower abs is misguided.

We can clear up this confusion by understanding that there is a difference between hip-flexion and trunk-flexion. First, flexion is just the long way of saying “to flex a muscle” or squeeze it into a contracted position. So hip-flexion is contracting the hip muscles and truck-flexion is to contact the trunk muscles (to put it simply). Lets call hip-flexion HF and trunk-flexion TF to make things easier as we go.

HF happens when you lift your knee so that the angle between your upper leg and your torso becomes smaller, kind of like when you sprint. An exercise version of HF would be the hanging leg raise if you didn’t pull your pelvis up.

Now what usually happens is that people do something like the hanging leg raise and feel the burn in the lower abs and this makes them believe that they are working the lower abs. But what is really happening is that the psoas is working hard and burning. The psoas is a really deep muscle and you will never get lean enough to see it. Now if you take the hanging leg raise and modify it to another exercise where you actually bring your knees all the way up to touch your elbows, you are getting an effective ab exercise. Still not isolating the lower abs, but it’s a fantastic ab exercise for all round development. Which we now know is the only development that can happen.

An excellent example of TF is the basic crunch. So simple and always attacked by the latest Abdominal guru out there. Say what you want though, the basic crunch is true trunk flexion at it’s finest. When done in such a way that the pelvis and sternum approach each other during the movement, it’s all abs.

Once the pelvis and sternum are in a maximal state of flexion, if you continue to roll up any further, like you do in a sit-up, you will be using hip-flexion to complete this movement. The abdominals will contract statically to stabilize but the actual movement will be from the contraction of the hip flexors.

Training any muscle group is really simple and yet people try to fancy it up. If you want to train your biceps, you curl your arm. You can make the movement as crazy as you want and then sell the article to a muscle magazine but a curl is still going to be a curl. It’s the same with abdominal training. When you train them, you need to flex your trunk and that, my friends is as complicated as it gets.

If you can’t see your abs at this point then more body fat needs to come off.

****stay tuned, more to come!****

How To Warm Up

Join in on the discussion or ask questions about the topic of getting a proper warmup in. I have given my advice in the forum here:
http://fasterleanerstronger.com/FLSchat/viewtopic.php?t=52

Squat Form Update

I have added a video to the proper squat form article to show some stretches as well as other methods to correct a rounding lower back or Lumbar Curve. Here is the updated article:

Proper Squat Form Article

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