Optimize Performance & Life

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Fitness Recovery 2.0

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It accounts for almost 95% of fitness training results, yet most active adults don’t do it.

It’s clear. Athletes get injured or don’t see significant gains because they don’t know how to properly recover.

Whether you’re a CrossFitter, triathlete, and yes, even a weekend warrior – you need a system to incorporate recovery into your training. (And if you want to know how to start seamlessly incorporating recovery into your lifestyle, sign up to my free webinar.)

If you’re starting to feel a level of burnout or fatigue, if the motivation to push yourself is missing, or if you think you get results from working yourself to death in the gym, it’s time to rethink fitness…

Don’t let injury, overtraining or fatigue prevent you from reaching your goals.

Do any of these symptoms sound familiar to you?

  • Persistently “meh” workouts, plateaus or a decrease in performance
  • Difficulty losing fat especially around the midsection
  • Minor, nagging injuries or feeling sore and achy all the time
  • Not feeling 100% — catching minor bugs, feeling run-down
  • Poor sleep, feeling restless on the nights you train or irregular sleep patterns
  • Never feeling well-rested in the morning or low energy throughout the day
  • Loss of sex drive

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Sleep Smarter book review — Is $16 worth radically improved sleep?

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I’ve been listening to Shawn Steveson’s podcast The Model Health Show for a few years now. He puts complex, researched-based health topics into easy to understand common folk lingo. And he keeps you engaged and laughing the entire time.

I just finished my advanced copy of his new book Sleep Smarter and the book reads just like his podcast. Before I knew it, I was half way through and had implemented several of the many sleep tips that he recommends – and feeling the difference!

I wrote a sleep hack post in 2013 in which I offered up various tips I had learned from his podcast. The book includes many of these hacks and much more.

I didn’t realize how bad my sleep quality was until I started implementing some of Shawn’s recommendations.

I literally went from falling asleep at the wheel on my morning commute to mornings being my most productive and energizing time of the day.

In Sleep Smarter, Shawn recommends several power tips at the end of each chapter — simple tactics that can be implemented right away. If you try just a fraction of the many power tips recommended, YOU WILL GET BETTER SLEEP, I promise. It’s an easy read with humor sprinkled throughout.

Shawn covers how important sleep is and everything you need to improve it, and it’s all based on the latest scientific research.

Best and most important of all, Shawn focuses on improving QUALITY, not necessarily increasing the quantity of sleep. Most of us get as much sleep as we can fit in, but it’s the quality of that sleep that counts. Shawn teaches us how to make the most of what sleep we CAN get. It’s a much more realistic approach.

The book even includes a 14-day sleep improvement plan.

Learn how to radically improve your sleep with Sleep Smarter -> SleepSmarterBook.com

Holy sh!t, did I just do that

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Named must your fear be before banish it you can.  – Yoda

This is not about CrossFit but let me start out with a story about it.

Why would anyone do CrossFit you ask…

We start CrossFit to lose weight or build muscle, to seek out an adrenaline rush, to feel stronger or build confidence.

But what we realize once we get into it is that those all just happen to be really great perks.

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Challenge your current reality and discover your best, most authentic self

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 “You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.”  – Bruce Lee

Can you guess what percentage of people are really happy? I’m not talking “life is pretty good”. I talking about people who are thriving. They feel their lives are fulfilling, meaningful and that there’s an abundance of opportunity ahead.

17%. Less than one in five.

According to Christine Carter, author of the book The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work:

Only 17 percent of the adult population is said to be flourishing, fulfilling their potential for happiness, success, and productivity.

There’s more…

Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse, spent years helping patients be as comfortable as possible in the time just before their deaths. Do you know what the most common regret she heard from the dying? I wish I’d had the courage to live the life true to myself, not the life of others expected of me.

Bonnie elaborated “Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realize, until they no longer have it.”

So many people except reality as it is, whether it’s a miserable job, excessive weight or just being unhappy with where they’re at in life. They put up with it every day thinking life is what it is. I expect more from my life…I hope you do too.

Let’s challenge conventional wisdom and your current reality.

If you’re not truly happy with where you’re at in life, change something in your life. Reinvent yourself.

Reinventing yourself means becoming the healthiest, happiest, most confident you. It means embracing your strengths and becoming a better person than you were yesterday – which means you have the opportunity to reinvent yourself EVERY DAY.

Michael Irwin famously said “In life, you’re either moving forward or backwards, towards something, or away from it, growing stronger or becoming weaker.” There is no staying the same. You must choose growth. You must be willing to experiment, be willing to try new things and be willing to adapt

Think about all the things you do throughout the day starting with first thing in the morning. Most of the things are probably habitual — you do it automatically and just move on.

If you want to see change you have to make change.

What do I change? Pick one thing, anything and change it. Report back with results.

I’m overwhelmed. Deep breath. Pick one thing. Change what you are in control of right now.

I challenge you to choose something today that you’re going to change. It can be what you eat for breakfast, how you spend your morning or parking in a different location than where you normally park at work (maybe farther away from the entrance). Just identify something that is not in line with who you want to be and change it today.

 

If you want to know the best way to start your reinvention, get my Reinvention Starter Kit.

Achieve your highest level of athletic performance every time with this routine

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CrossFit’s missing a vital component of fitness, especially if you want to achieve peak athletic performance.

I’ve been doing it for a little over a year and I love it. They have identified exactly what fitness should be for long-term health and functional movement. I’ve even got CrossFit Level 1 Certified.

During Level 1 training, they cover the basic movements, nutrition, and the entire method to their madness — interesting stuff for a fitness nerd like me.

But I was surprised that there was almost no talk about recovery, especially with the intensity of workouts that come with Crossfit.

As I dug into what a great fitness routine should have, I found four essential components. They are:

  1. Visualization
  2. Warm-up
  3. Workout of the Day (WOD)
  4. Recovery (more important than the WOD itself)

If you want to get the most out of your body and your workout while achieving the highest level of athletic performance and reducing the possibility of injury, all four components are crucial.

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