Join us on December 11 at the Westshore Warehouse in Victoria for our annual Holiday Pentathlon Challenge! 5 disciplines will be performed in a set order as follows:
More details including points and scoring can be found at the IKMF website linked here: https://www.ikmf-world.com/disciplines/ikmf-pentathlon/ See you there! Check out these video's for a further breakdown on the pentathlon movements and guidelines:
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An interesting concept of sport psychology (this applies to weight training as well), is "State of Flow". Flow occurs when we are totally immersed in the activity: we lose sense of time, and are neither bored nor anxious. Concentration becomes automatic, and this feeling of flow is so pleasing that it is intrinsically rewarding. In many cases, we may engage in activity for no other reason than to experience flow. We talk alot about the objective and quantitative aspects of optimizing training:
However, it is equally important to optimize flow:
It is not unreasonable to assume that lack of motivation to engage in an activity could be directly or indirectly influenced by your perception or expectation of flow. If you tend to think that every session is, or needs to be, so difficult as to cause anxiety, that anxiety or frustration is a good indicator that the challenge is too high. Similarly, if you are avoiding activity because you think that your session will be boring, then you want to find a way to introduce more or diverse challenge. Ways to increase challenge:
At the end of the day, people are motivated to fulfill their needs. The two most important needs of athletes are to:
Having fun includes the right amount of stimulation and excitement. Feeling worthy includes the need to feel confident and successful. To the first point, this is why I stress the importance of choosing your own path by making your own decisions as to your goals and preferred exercises or activities. Some people feel pressured to do the things they think they are supposed to do, rather than what they want to do. Do the things you want to do, and just make sure they coincide with your goals. If going to the gym isn't something you want to do, how can you make it so? Examples might include:
Feeling worthy, confident, and successful is all part of the training (and learning) process. You receive input, make a decision, execute that decision, and your outcome feeds back as new input to inform your next decision. In training, your input may be that you are influenced to be stronger, fitter, or try a new activity. You make a decision on how you want to achieve that (e.g. get a plan/program, join a gym, join a running group, set a training schedule, etc.). You go and follow through on those decisions, and then here is where I think many people (particularly beginners) tend to make mistakes.
However, when you value and achieve flow - you feel in complete control, and this feeling is enough to keep you coming back, which corresponds with a greater likelihood of reaching your goals. Did you achieve flow this week?
Having trouble pulling the trigger on a program or diet? Maybe I can help. DM me for coaching! This was one of the first planned out, daily programs I did for the specific goal of leaning out. Things I learned while doing it:
Things I learned AFTER:
Are you looking for a program to follow? I offer personalized coaching, catered to your goals and needs.
Lamar Gant is an example of an athlete with severe scoliosis - not mild scoliosis - severe scoliosis, who overcame his limitations to become one of the most revered lifters in the annals of powerlifting. We can safely say that neither his form or technique was "textbook" (due to his morphology), and thus not what you might presume to be "safe lifting", but even so he was driven, set goals for himself, applied himself in his training, and was brave enough to stand on stage with "normal" athletes and show them what stuff he was made of.
He is not alone though, as you will find throughout the lifter forums that focus on scoliosis that many people have found that exercise - but more specifically heavy weight training - has played a complimentary role to the regression or elimination of many people's conditions. Some common themes that have turned up in this T-Nation thread are: - There seems to be no clear research done on athletes who repeatedly lift heavy weights with scoliosis and whether or not this can cause or worsen the condition. - Lift. You’ll see what happens when it happens. - Do what works for you. If it hurts(like spine damaging hurt), stop. - If you were born with it, you can prehab/rehab to keep it from getting worse, and continue lifting. If you have developed scoliosis, you can correct and reverse it with some thought and a little work. - you may develop scoliosis through bad posture, exercise selection, imbalances - unilateral work is key for addressing imbalances - lifting is good for you! Just use a little thought and consideration when you pick your lifts - An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure! - It wasn’t the weights that messed me up, it was the way I used the weights that caused me problems One last note: It has been said by many that "there is no correlation with bad form and injury risk in weightlifting". This is not a surprising observation as we do indeed see many examples of horrendous form performed without subsequent acute injury. Moreover, we also see (and may have experienced) instances of "perfect" form during squats, deadlifts, bench presses, etc. that incur back strains, bicep tears, or pec tears. Indeed, seldom do we see obvious positive, linear correlations of bad form and acute injury in the experimental resistance training literature. Common and well-established injury risks are actually poor sleep, high training frequency, higher training loads, exercise selection (joint specific injuries), higher rep ranges, and age is actually inversely related to injury in powerlifters, because "Despite the logical assumption that coordination and conditioning decrease with higher age, the higher experience in training and competition of older athletes led to a lower rate of injuries" (Reichel et al. 2019) So on that last note, what I'd like to leave you with is, if you are experiencing challenges with your activity - pain, discomfort, restriction, unreasonable difficulty) - give it time. There is learning in the doing, and your motor development (how your brain learns a skill and instructs your muscles) is time dependent. Be patient, trust in the process, and you will get stronger and more confident! Learn more about Lamar HERE. Research Article: Incidence and characteristics of acute and overuse injuries in elite powerlifterswww.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2331205X.2019.1588192 Your diet may get you results, but does it give you the power to control them? Any diet that hyper-focuses on a singular concept such as ketosis, plant based, or paleo ultimately ends up facing the same challenges: What do people do when they stop losing weight? - Do they Keto/vegan/paleo harder? (to borrow from L. Norton) This is where energy content and calories become a necessary metric for understanding and taking control of bodyweight. Many people don't realize that any structure that limits dietary choice results in weight loss, and most people overeat on easily accessible, shelf-stable, carb dominant, convenience type foods that wouldn't normally fit into a keto type diet plan. So we eliminated the foods you overeat on, and you lost weight.....go figure! Of course, if the goal is just being healthy, then that is cool, but we can't then make the leap and say that it is mechanistically unique - that is to say, it is not biologically or chemically more effective than any other diet, this just happens to be one of the ones that limits their trigger foods. What does your weight-loss represent? Someone who has never actually formally followed a diet plan, but who's always been insecure about their weight, will get excited about losing 1-2lb, while others need to lose 5-10lb to get excited. In reality, your weight could fluctuate by that much in a day just due to changes in hydration. This is why I, and other experienced diet coaches, do not fuss about daily weight changes. We much prefer to get a weekly average, and then compare weekly averages to see the bigger trend. Take that to the next level, someone who is 350lbs who loses 40-50lbs may be ecstatic, but really it's just a drop in the pond relative to their total body fat mass. Don't get me wrong, the evidence is pretty clear that you only need to lose 5-10% of your bodyweight to see immediate health improvements (e.g. glucose tolerance, insulin sensitivity, blood lipids, etc.).
Just for example I lost 60 total lifetime pounds from 228 to 168, and I look completely different - total body re-composition, not just fat loss. As I've said before, losing fat isn't hard in an absolute sense, because of it's simplicity. Eat less than you were before and you will start losing fat right away. But gaining muscle is a process that takes years of hard labour - voluntarily mind you. People fail to grasp this on the whole, and they conflate a successful diet with one that
Just as a workout should give you more than it takes from you, I truly believe people would be happier, more motivated, and more fulfilled if they treated their diet the same way. Taking an overly or unnecessarily restrictive approach is unlikely to check those boxes, and as I've said before, diets are not effective due to what makes them different, but by what makes them similar - a caloric deficit. By the way, have you downloaded my FREE COOKBOOK yet!???? |
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