1. Sleep. Nothing matters more than sleep. 8 hours is the minimum. No excuses. Blackout dark. No TV in the bedroom.
2. Eat like you care about your health. Cook your own food with good quality meat and seafood, veggies, root veggies, some nuts, seeds and fruit. Earn your carbs in the gym, which leads us to…

3. Train for a goal or sport. Squats, Deadlifts, Presses, Pullups, Olympic Lifting and Gymnastics  should be the base of your program. Then throw in some KB’s, Sprints, Sandbags and Calisthenics in short bursts. Get a program from a Coach with experience who looks the part. They know what they are doing. Writing program is the hardest part of their job, you need their help.

4. Play a sport or activity at least once a week that has competition. Preferably one that is outside and gets you a tan.

5. Do mobility work and yoga stretches everyday for 10min

6. Kiss your partner like you’re a horny teenager every day.(if you follow the first 5, you will be a horny teenager)

7. Supplements should be the last thing you think about. Don’t guess on them and don’t bother if you aren’t eating well. Spend that money on good food first. The basics should be some Fermented Cod Liver Oil, a good Probiotic and 8 hours of sleep.

8. Life is too short to eat shitty bacon or drink bad tequila. Make your indulgences fewer and spend a bit more on them.

9. Keep a community of like minded friends, or find one or start one. It’s awesome to be surrounded by those who have your back.

10. Don’t listen to anybody on the Interwebs.

Ensure you get a Boost of Sugar and Lies

Our population in Canada is aging. It’s a fact. 45% of our population is between the ages of 45-89 (not that 45 is old). We had a baby boom post WW2 and now they are retiring. Companies know this demographic is huge and they are targeting them aggressively for life insurance, retirement plans and FOOD.

Data from Health Canada shows the rate of overweight or obese people from age 45-65 and over ranges from 59.6-69%, with numbers averaging shockingly higher in men than women. It’s a scary picture being painted by these statistics. Our healthcare system (while free and wonderfully open to every citizen, thank you Tommy Douglas!) is under duress already. When these boomers start having more serious health problems, as the stats would indicate is coming quickly, we are looking at some seriously long wait times for treatments.

One need only turn on the television to be bombarded with ads targeting seniors (and children). They are being told to forgo eating real food and switch to read to drink “Nutritional Drinks”. The commercials show healthy looking seniors with well intentioned sons and daughters who are “worried about Mom and Dad getting everything they need to be healthy.” One even goes as far to have the daughter be a nutritionist who smilingly declares “That’s why I recommended Ensure”. (More on that later.) The products being peddled are as the saviors of the terrifying senior malnutrition problem. I would say the stats indicate most of these people are getting PLENTY of food and not nearly enough exercise.

The two big products are Ensure and Boost. They are owned by Abbot Laboratories and Nestle respectively. Both companies manufacture a variety of “nutritional supplements” and both manufacture baby formula (which is an entirely similar story).

Both have similar ingredients in their products. Here is the nutritional information and ingredient list for Boost High Protein Drink:

Pretty damning evidence. The second ingredient is sugar, the third is corn syrup which is sugar again. The “high protein” is soy isolate which is cheap, junk protein with a poor BCAA profile. The next block is fillers and emulsifiers like vegetable oil, soy lecithin and carrageenan.  It contains 23 grams of sugar in an 8oz carton. Nothing about this justifies the healthy tag being placed on it. It’s criminal and dangerous to present this carton of poison as the building block of a healthy lifestyle.

But wait, they have nutritionists that say it’s healthy!! Yes they do. Abbott Laboratories has an army of them. You can even ask them questions through the website right here. Good luck getting them to address the sugar and oil content.

Here is an Ensure commercial. Note how the bottle of Ensure banishes the Mayo.Here is the ingredients and info for Helman’s Light Mayo

Notice some overlap in ingredients? Shady marketing at play. Outright lies is another way to put it. Both of these products are horrible for you.  I realize I’m using the Ensure commerical and showing the Boost ingredients. I literally couldn’t find a pic online of Ensure’s ingredient list. They hide it well. Here is the text, it’s almost identical to Boost.
Vanilla Ready to Drink:Water, Corn Maltodextrin, Sugar, Milk Protein Concentrate, Canola Oil, Corn Oil, Soy Protein Isolate. Less
than 0.5% of the Following: Whey Protein Concentrate, Natural & Artificial Flavor, Magnesium Phosphate, Potassium Citrate, Sodium Citrate, Soy Lecithin, Calcium Phosphate, Potassium Chloride,
Choline Chloride, Ascorbic Acid, Salt, Carrageenan, Ferrous Sulfate, dl-Alpha-Tocopheryl Acetate, Zinc Sulfate, Niacinamide, Manganese Sulfate, Calcium Pantothenate, Cupric Sulfate, Vitamin A Palmitate, Thiamine Chloride Hydrochloride, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Riboflavin, Folic Acid, Chromium Chloride, Biotin, Sodium Molybdate, Sodium Selenate, Potassium Iodide, Phylloquinone, Vitamin D3, and Cyanocobalamin.
Allergens: Contains milk and soy ingredients.

Again, it’s criminal to lie to people like this. Using the cheapest way to make a product and then throwing some vitamins in it and calling it healthy. A number of the ingredients are known gut irritants which causes poor absorption of the vitamins you were looking for when you ingested the product.

The same rules apply to the Carnation Instant Breakfast Drinks, Baby Formula and the new one: Similac Mom. Not bad enough to fill your baby full of sugar and corn syrup solids. Have Mom drink it too! Seriously folks, how dumb do they think we are? Pretty dumb judging by their sales numbers.

If you have parents in this age group (or children or infants.) Please do not let them consume these products. Encourage your family to read the labels, do some research and make the choice to eat real food. If you must (and you don’t really need to) drink a shake for convenience sake, get some high quality whey from grass fed cows or a high end New Zealand whey. Make your own shakes, control what goes in to your body. Talk to your parents and help them control their health.

The Need for Progression

The world of fitness has changed greatly in the last 5 years. With the internet, people are exposed to many more ideas than ever before. Both trainers and trainees have more resources than ever. The once obscure is now in the limelight and everyone from grandmothers to pro athletes are swinging kettlebells and doing handstands. While this rapid expansion of methods is boon to all of us, it is impossible to ignore the faults it has created.  Some coaches or trainers are deciding to include some of the most complex exercises with people who have no business undertaking such a task. In some cases the coaches themselves shouldn’t be teaching these, as they have little to no experience other than they saw it online and “it looked cool” These include the Olympic lifts, novice or intermediate gymnastics, plyometrics, and even the slow lifts like pressing and squatting. As we leave the machine laden, bodybuilding era and get back on our feet, we are doing more complicated things to get fit. These things require a modicum of self restraint and series of progressions, rather than just light loads and banging out reps.

Imagine this; It’s your first day on the job as a  18 Wheel Truck Driver. You have never driven anything bigger than a cube van and you have limited experience with manual transmission. You arrive at the company’s office, fill out some basic paperwork, answer a few arbitrary questions and they toss you the keys and send you off cross country with a load of flammable materials. Sounds pretty far fetched right? Why would anyone put someone in a situation where they have little to no experience, no instruction and could end up seriously injured?

Sadly, this sort of thing is occurring on a daily basis across the country. No, people are not putting on a trucker hat and taking off with 100,000 liters of gas down the highway. What is happening is that people are deciding to take on a journey of health and fitness by walking into a gym or studio in their town or city. Most have very limited knowledge beyond what they have read in magazines or learned in Phys Ed. class in high school. They want to better themselves for a number of reasons, all which are valid and worthwhile. Some want to lose weight, others want to pack it on. Some just want to get stronger and fix their achy back and knees. Whatever the case may be, they all have one thing in common. They are all different. They have different abilities, body composition, injury histories and learn in different ways. Another thing they have in common is that most of them will quit within 6 months. Their reason for quitting are various; time and money, lack of motivation, injury, lack of success, laziness, failure to plan. On of the biggest factors will be that they either had no guidance or the guidance they had was flawed. The human body is  very complex thing, more so than a car. Very few of us would even change our own oil, let alone attempt a brake job (BTW, doing your own brake pads is pretty easy, try it). However, this doesn’t deter people from trying to undertake complex movements and activities without professional assistance. I’m not stating that exercise has to be complex and difficult to be effective. I’m actually of the belief that the basics, when executed and applied with the correct progression are the most effective way to optimize your health and fitness. However simple the mechanisms of the human body may be, the impediments to the basics of exercises are many. They may include inexperience, misinformation, previous injuries and lack of mobility and flexibility. Within in the last two lay the biggest pitfalls in my experience. Certain movements require you to learn the basics first. You should be ramping up slowly to some of them and possibly showing patience on others until you lay down the foundation of the movements.

Take for example; the Clean and Jerk. On the surface it seems rather simple. You take a bar from the floor, pull it to hip height, drop under and squat it up, then drive it overhead while splitting your feet apart. I could take most people off the street and have them do this movement with a broomstick a few times and it would be recongnized for what it was. Take the same person and have them do it with an empty Olympic bar that weighs 45lbs and things would go drastically different. What changed? I simply increased the weight or “scaled up.” Herein lies the issue with scaling. It fails to address the underlying issues as to why you cannot perform a given task with sound mechanics. Merely using less weight does not solve the problem. It hides it. Was the problem that your wrists were so tight that you couldn’t maintain a good position? Or was is something further down the kinetic chain like tight ankles or poor external rotation in the hips?  Now if you gave me an hour to break down the movement into say, 3 movements and I drilled that person on those 3 movements then asked them to put it together with an empty bar, I’m sure it would be a better result.I would be able to determine at each position through the movement where the mobility problems were, where they had a lack of coordination and apply corrective exercises or cues. But that doesn’t mean they are ready to put it together. Most likely, they would forget the 1 or 2 cues or details about the 3 movements and they would get tunnel vision and bash through to the finished product. Granted it would look somewhat better than the 1st time, but it wouldn’t be nearly good enough to warrant an increase in load or intensity.

This example can work for KB Swings, Box Jumps, rowing, pushups, even sprinting. Things need to broken down, progressed  and pieced together before you can use a heavy load, do them at higher reps or while partially fatigued.

When progression is neglected several things can happen. The trainee may create a pattern of poor movement. When using a light weight, the risk is lower. But if your default movement or position is bad with an empty bar, what will happen when you load 100lbs on it?  This sloppy pattern creation can result in injury(either chronically or acutely). It will most likely cause a stall in progress, for without proper technique it is damn near impossible to reach your potential. This can lead to frustration and the trainee may give up. Even worse they won’t give up and a serious injury will force them to. If you never progress and break things down, you miss the opportunity to properly triage and correct the underlying issues that are preventing a sound movement.

While drilling and progressing can be monotonous and time consuming. The foundation laid during this period will serve you better down the road and you will be lifting, running and jumping much more efficiently  than if you continued to bang out reps with sloppy mechanics.

Everyone needs to read this book!

A Notice to Warrior1 Athletes

Hello all! As of Monday, November 5th, 2012, we will no longer programming a workout, or making our programming available on the website. If you are interested in one of our programs, please contact us!