6 days of the week - I eat healthy. What does that mean? Well, right now for me it means no carbs, no sweets etc. Some of those days, I work in an office. What do people in offices like to do? Well, when they’re not on facebook, they’re eating a cake for any number of reasons: birthday, new baby, new kidney stone etc. If its not cake, its pizza. Why? because its Friday, or because certain company goals were reached or because there is a pepperoni surplus and we’re doing our job to help the economy. The bottom line is, in many offices, your peers will find any excuse they can to shove crap down their gullets.

The first thing this directly relates to is will power. If you don’t have the will power to avoid these foods in your place of work - you probably shouldn’t be on the diet to begin with, as everytime you “cheat” its like taking a step backwards.

I understand that will power isn’t easy, so let me try to make an analogy that you can think about to make things easier for yourself next time:

When you’re driving a car, everytime you step on the gas - you make a purchasing decision. Equally so, everytime you step on the brake you’re also making a purchasing decision. With both motions you’re essentially spending money. Just like with your diet, when you eat healthy food you’re consciously making an exercise & body image decision - which says the same for eating unhealthy food. So its something to consider everytime you’re going have that cookie, slice of cake, etc.

I know what you’re probably thinking now. “Its just not that easy, if I don’t eat the cake or pizza like everyone else - they give me shit. Why aren’t you eating this cake? What you don’t eat cake? Who doesn’t eat cake? What are you a health nut? etc. etc.” Its really easy to fall into these traps and just give in to the shit food. The bottom line is this - nobody feels good about eating the cake if they’re concerned about their health or how its going to help them - but they certainly don’t want to be the only ones doing it. Could you imagine being the only one to eat cake if you were surrounded by health nuts? Of course not! If you and one other person decided to eat the cake, it would seem much more acceptable however.

From my experience, the best thing to do in these situations is just say you don’t like cake, or you’re allergic to something in it, or you can see you’re working towards a fitness goal. You might get some pokes here or there, but if you can’t stomach that level of commitment, maybe you shouldn’t be working out anyway.

One of my common theories about working out & diet is, if you’re going to do it - do it all the way. Half-assing anything doesn’t have the same effect. Do an exercise till failure, don’t cheat more than one day on your diet, and most importantly - don’t be a damn baby.

-Nash

So, this is part 2 - the workout. It’s been about two and half months since I started this madness and I’ll say this: I love it. I’m in the best shape of my life, and I don’t have any plans to stop anytime soon.

Let me reiterate, the diet is the most important part.

Firstly, I exercise 7 days a week. It’s easy after the first few weeks and you start to notice results. For me, the best part of my day is the end of my workout - when I can really just feel great about what I’m doing for myself. That is a really intrinsic motivator.

read on for the details… Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I went through a lot of big changes - moved, new job, etc. etc. I decided with all of these things going on, why not change my workout routine and goals?

That being said, I always used to tell myself and others - that I had a 6 pack at one time, and that if I really wanted to - I could get one again. Well, the more I thought about it, the more I questioned myself, “could I really commit to that kind of diet and exercise regiment again??” I remember hating it, and never wanting to do it again. And I thought about how much I loved crap food.

Well - as you can guess, I decided to go for it. If you’ve read any of my articles about abs, than you know I had to start with the diet. I know I’ve said it 1000 times already, but you’ll never see abs without a proper diet.

FUEL FOR YOUR BODY

As I worked on my diet, I consulted Team Scivation (which is made up of professional bodybuilders). They put me on a diet which essentially eliminates carbs. One thing I really took away from the diet plan, was they said carbs could be considered “cheap gasoline” while the proper fats could be considered “rocket fuel.”

That one analogy put everything into perspective for me. I cut out the grains and all other obvious carbs.

To get a better idea of my diet:

I eat a lot of chicken, tuna, almonds, avacado, shrimp, (some steak), apples, vegetables, and protein shakes.

And one day I week I eat a lot of disgusting food, and drink a lot of alcohol - i refer to this as my “cheat day.”

As I’ve followed this diet for about a month and half, I’ve gotten down to a four pack, but I’m still slowly trimming away.

After finding an appropriate diet which is working for you - I can’t stress enough, be strict.

In part 2, I’ll discuss my current workout regiment.

Get ready to have your mind blown. There are about 3500 calories in one pound of fat. When it comes to losing weight, that is THE key factor in my opinion.

Whenever someone asks me, what can they do to lose weight, I always tell them the same thing, “sure, you can do cardio - but the only way you’re going to see a change is through changing your diet.” Not to say its impossible to lose weight with cardio (its certainly not) - its just a lot more work, and I know a lot of lazy people.

For someone who is just starting to try and get healthy, running 10 minutes a day would seem like a good start. But if that person is only burning around 100 calories, they’re going to lose about 1 pound per month. Which I have a feeling is less than most people will aim for when trying to lose weight.

This is why eating healthy is so important. But for it to be really effective, you can’t just eat as much healthy food as you’d like, you need to eat proper portions (think the size of your palm).

Our parent/sister/relative site Excycle, recently launch an entire section devoted to health food recipes, which you can find here.

Whats really great about the way excycle, is the way they’re going about displaying the recipes. You can browse by food (chicken, beef etc.), by category (high protein, low carb etc.), by goal (fat loss, muscle gain etc.) and even by course type (dinner, lunch, protein shakes etc.)! This can help anyone trying to find exact foods to fit their diet!

Check it out and feel free to add your own health food recipe!

Well, it’s live. Excycle.com We’ve launched excycle to revolutionize the supplement industry.

I know, I know, thats a tall order. But - we’re going to do it through a community, and a new approach to reviewing and buying supplements.

What does excycle do?: I’m glad you asked, excycle focuses on the person taking the supplement. They post a before review, and an after review. They can then view their results from taking the supplement. The data from all reviews are then aggregated for each supplement and shown to display how effective a supplement is, based upon the people taking them.

What’s the point?: The point is, most supplement reviews suck because you don’t know enough about the reviewer. If they have a totally different body type, goal, regiment, and diet, they’re also going to get totally different results. Thats where excycle is different!

We have A TON in store, and are rolling out new features every day! (We’ll try to keep you posted here as well)

We’re still in beta right now, so we’d love to hear any comments/thoughts/or suggestions!

Excycle.com | The most innovative supplement store online

I wanted to reach out and apologize for my lack of updates in particular, but I wanted to assure everyone that I’m still around. I’ve just been in the process of finishing up an HST cycle which I’ll be posting about soon, as well as some more gym related rants.

In other news, the main reason behind my lack of posts has been my current occupation: entrepreneur. I’ve been in the process of building a fitness company, which will be featured on yogymbo in the upcoming weeks! Until then, hold tight!

P.S. The other day my gym’s radio wasn’t turned on, and my friend and I who were working out together, seemed to be the only two people who knew each other in the entire gym. I never realized how awkward it can be when it feels like everyone in the building is listening to you. Well, awkward for them at least, I talk about some pretty weird shit in the gym.

Today I’m going to discuss a very important secret in gym culture. Only people who are serious athletes, or are jacked out of their minds know it, so you should feel very privelidged to even be reading this.

Loud noises. 

Thats right, loud noises. “What kind?” you ask?, well, all kinds, but mostly dropping heavy weights, so it makes a really loud “CLANGBANG!!!!1!!” type noise. This practice of dropping weights after a set is to show people how jacked you are. The louder the noise, the heavier the weight, and the more respect you ultimately gain from your subordinates. 

Whenever I hear the “CLANGBANG!!!!1!!” I always say to myself, “wow, that guy must be jacked, because that was really loud… I really respect him - what a cool guy.” Then if I know the guy, I’ll walkover and give him a congratualatory high five. Right on his fucking face with my fist. 

Don’t be a moron, if you drop the weights, you look like a fucking retard, no matter how heavy they are (unless its clearly an accident).

After reading Jimbo’s post, I was refueled to start making posts of my own. A little update as to my life in general - I just moved, and had to join a new gym. This was really an interesting experience, which I will be discussing over a series of posts where I complain about the process. 

I’ve also been working full time on starting a fitness company which I’ll talk more about later (and which has been keeping me from being more active on here). 

The first area of gym etiquette I’d like to discuss is short and simple.

“Racking Weights.” 

After you use an exercise with free weights (such as bench press for example), one should generally put the weights back in their appropriate pegs on the weight tree (as pictured - mind you, the weights are not put back correctly). This is helpful for the next person, who will be using those weights, as well as the next person to use the exercise you were just on.

Continue reading for scientific theories about racking weights. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever been told a physical activity is all mental? For example, baseball, golf… other sports where you swing objects at other objects. Well even though you may not be swinging anything around while lifting weights, its still a mentally intensive activity.

“How so?” you ask, well, its pretty simple. A person who is mentally pumped up, and excited will have a faster heart rate then someone who is just bumming around. The person with the faster heart rate will lift more (assuming all things are equal).

I remember a few years ago, reading one of Arnold’s books, and he said that for him, his mental motivation was essentially competition. He would go to the gym with friends, who would in turn be able to motivate him. To this day, many of my personal friends are the same way, always lifting more when they go with someone (often trying to out lift the other person).

For some people, that doesn’t work, mental motivation must be created from something else. For me, I like to think about all the things which have made me livid, in the past day, week, month, year, etc. Anything I can recall that can make me angry. The biggest problem I find with this, is that after awhile, I have nothing to be angry about, because I’ve just “taken it all out” on the last set.

When thats no longer working for me, I’ll try to just flex all the muscles I’m about to exercise repeatedly, and sometimes even muscles I’m not about to exercise. I always feels like this helps warm me up before a set, and gets me going. One of my friends who I lift with very consistently, always makes explosive noises to pump himself up. I make fun of him for it, but hey, whatever works right?

One night at the gym (think around 11PM - 12AM, 24 hour Golds Gym), I was lifting with some friends, and a guy came over to us to suggest some new exercises (some people are offended when this happens, but as long as the person is bigger then me, I’m all for learning new things. And if it doesn’t work out for me, who cares.) anyway, while showing us some chest exercise, he started talking about what he used to motivate him. He said, “I’ll look at a guy who I dont know, and I’ll pretend he just raped my girlfriend.” I know, I know, pretty intense. While my friends and I found the whole thing rediculous and funny (especially that late at night), it demonstrated how important mental motivation is when lifting weights.

Bottom line, figure out what works for you, and keep it up!

Today’s exercise of the day is the single arm cable extension, which is an excellent shoulder exercise. I especially like it because it replaces the dumb bell shoulder extensions, which never seem to get any easier.

Single arm cable extension shoulder exercise in HD from Nash on Vimeo.