Best Version Of Yourself - Motivational Video

Morning motivation, some inspiring quotes from world leaders and those role models that always succeed. Whats stopping you and holding you back? 

" Failure is not a bad thing - Quitting is! "

Muscle Soreness and Recovery Tips - Relieve Muscles FAST!

Some basic and simple tips on recovery tips and how to deal with the dreaded muscle DOMS.



What do you do to recover? leave a comment below and let me know.

Insane Taekwondo Skills

Tae Kwon Do was the first martial art that I studied as a child. A family friend took me under his instruction when I was still only 3 years old. If you have ever trained in a martial art, what discipline did you start with and at what age? Leave a comment below. 

HOW TO GET MOTIVATED

When you don't feel like WORKING OUT here is some advice from Tony Horton. 6 Great tips on how to stay focused and motivated. 

Stretching for Super-Stiff People - How to Get into Position

How flexible are you? A great tutorial on stretching and how to work into some of the deeper stretches. 
Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. 

Be Hungry (Fight For It) - Motivational Short Story ᴴᴰ

A little Monday morning motivation for you! If you have a long, hard or busy week ahead. Do not forget to work on yourself. You will never regret working on yourself, be strong I believe in humanity and I believe in you.

Why Sleep Is the No. 1 Most Important Thing for a Better Body

Even with the very best diet and fitness routine, if sleep is off, you're wrecked. 

Here's why!

Imagine two women you know: One is your model of fitness success (She clearly knows how to slim down correctly and has the body to show for it), and the other is what you fear. This friend has her heart in the right place, but no matter how hard she works, she still struggles with the process and doesn’t have the body she wants. The troubling part is that when you talk to both, they share a common approach:

1. They eat meals that focus on lean protein and vegetables.
2. They exercise at least three times per week, focusing on both weights and cardio.
3. They know which foods are truly healthy and which they need to limit—and they do.

And yet one friend—the one who continues to struggle—can’t maintain her focus. She has trouble controlling her hunger, always craves sweets, and, despite her biggest efforts in the gym, she doesn’t seem to achieve the same results as someone else following the same program.

The problem might seem obvious at first. After all, one woman strays from her diet more than the other. And if exercise “isn’t working,” it probably means she just doesn’t really know how to train.

Maybe it’s genetics. Maybe she’s lazy or lacks willpower. Or maybe, diet or exercise isn’t the real problem.

Sleep Controls Your Diet

The debate about the best way to achieve a healthy weight always revolves around eating and movement. If you want to look better, the most common suggestion is “eat less and move more.” But it’s not that simple, or even accurate. Sometimes you want to eat less and move more, but it seems impossible to do so. And there might be a good reason: Between living your life, working, and exercising, you’re forgetting to sleep enough. Or maybe, more importantly, you don’t realise that sleep is the key to being rewarded for your diet and fitness efforts. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 35 percent of people are sleep deprived. And when you consider that the statistic for obesity is nearly identical, it’s easy to connect the dots and discover that the connection is not a coincidence.

Not sleeping enough—less than seven hours of sleep per night—can reduce and undo the benefits of dieting, according to research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. In the study, dieters were put on different sleep schedules. When their bodies received adequate rest, half of the weight they lost was from fat. However when they cut back on sleep, the amount of fat lost was cut in half—even though they were on the same diet. What’s more, they felt significantly hungrier, were less satisfied after meals, and lacked energy to exercise. Overall, those on a sleep-deprived diet experienced a 55 percent reduction in fat loss compared to their well-rested counterparts.

Poor Sleep Changes Your Fat Cells

Think about the last time you had a bad night of sleep. How did you feel when you woke up? Exhausted. Dazed. Confused. Maybe even a little grumpy? It’s not just your brain and body that feel that way—your fat cells do too. When your body is sleep deprived, it suffers from “metabolic grogginess.” The term was coined by University of Chicago researchers who analysed what happened after just four days of poor sleep—something that commonly happens during a busy week. One late night at work leads to two late nights at home, and next thing you know, you’re in sleep debt.

But it’s just four nights, so how bad could it be? You might be able to cope just fine. After all, coffee does wonders. But the hormones that control your fat cells don’t feel the same way.

Within just four days of sleep deprivation, your body’s ability to properly use insulin (the master storage hormone) becomes completely disrupted. In fact, the University of Chicago researchers found that insulin sensitivity dropped by more than 30 percent.

Here's why that's bad: When your insulin is functioning well, fat cells remove fatty acids and lipids from your blood stream and prevent storage. When you become more insulin resistant, fats (lipids) circulate in your blood and pump out more insulin. Eventually this excess insulin ends up storing fat in all the wrong places, such as tissues like your liver. And this is exactly how you become fat and suffer from diseases like diabetes.

Lack of Rest Makes You Crave Food

Many people believe that hunger is related to willpower and learning to control the call of your stomach, but that's incorrect. Hunger is controlled by two hormones: leptin and ghrelin.

Leptin is a hormone that is produced in your fat cells. The less leptin you produce, the more your stomach feels empty. The more ghrelin you produce, the more you stimulate hunger while also reducing the amount of calories you burn (your metabolism) and increasing the amount fat you store. In other words, you need to control leptin and ghrelin to successfully lose weight, but sleep deprivation makes that nearly impossible. Research published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinoloy and Metabolism found that sleeping less than six hours triggers the area of your brain that increases your need for food while also depressing leptin and stimulating ghrelin.

If that’s not enough, the scientists discovered exactly how sleep loss creates an internal battle that makes it nearly impossible to lose weight. When you don’t sleep enough, your cortisol levels rise. This is the stress hormone that is frequently associated with fat gain. Cortisol also activates reward centers in your brain that make you want food. At the same time, the loss of sleep causes your body to produce more ghrelin. A combination of high ghrelin and cortisol shut down the areas of your brain that leave you feeling satisfied after a meal, meaning you feel hungry all the time—even if you just ate a big meal.

And it gets worse.

Lack of sleep also pushes you in the direction of the foods you know you shouldn’t eat. A study published in Nature Communications found that just one night of sleep deprivation was enough to impair activity in your frontal lobe, which controls complex decision-making.

Ever had a conversation like this?

“I really shouldn’t have that extra piece of cake… then again, one slice won’t really hurt, right?”

Turns out, sleep deprivation is a little like being drunk. You just don’t have the mental clarity to make good complex decisions, specifically with regards to the foods you eat—or foods you want to avoid. This isn’t helped by the fact that when you’re overtired, you also have increased activity in the amygdala, the reward region of your brain. This is why sleep deprivation destroys all diets; think of the amygdala as mind control—it makes you crave high-calorie foods. Normally you might be able to fight off this desire, but because your insular cortex (another portion of your brain) is weakened due to sleep deprivation, you have trouble fighting the urge and are more likely to indulge in all the wrong foods.

And if all that wasn’t enough, research published in Psychoneuroendocrinology found that sleep deprivation makes you select greater portion sizes of all foods, further increasing the likelihood of weight gain.

The bottom line: Not enough sleep means you’re always hungry, reaching for bigger portions, and desiring every type of food that is bad for you—and you don’t have the proper brain functioning to tell yourself, “No!”

Sleep Sabotages Gym Time

Unfortunately the disastrous impact spreads beyond diet and into your workouts. No matter what your fitness goals are, having some muscle on your body is important. Muscle is the enemy of fat—it helps you burn fat and stay young. But sleep (or lack thereof) is the enemy of muscle. Scientists from Brazil found that sleep debt decreases protein synthesis (your body’s ability to make muscle), causes muscle loss, and can lead to a higher incidence of injuries.

Just as important, lack of sleep makes it harder for your body to recover from exercise by slowing down the production of growth hormone—your natural source of anti ageing and fat burning that also facilitates recovery. This happens in two different ways:

1. Poor sleep means less slow wave sleep, which is when the most growth hormone is released.

2. As previously mentioned, a poor night of rest increases the stress hormone cortisol, which slows down the production of growth hormone. That means that the already reduced production of growth hormone due to lack of slow wave sleep is further reduced by more cortisol in your system. It’s a vicious cycle.

If you're someone who doesn't particularly enjoy exercise, not prioritizing sleep is like getting a physical examine with your father-in-law as the investigating physician: It will make something you don’t particularly enjoy almost unbearable. When you’re suffering from slept debt, everything you do feels more challenging, specifically your workouts.

The Better Health Secret: Prioritise Sleep

The connection between sleep and weight gain is hard to ignore. Research published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that women who are sleep deprived are a third more likely to gain 33 pounds over the next 16 years than those who receive just seven hours of sleep per night. And with all of the connections to obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart failure, and cognitive failure, the need to sleep goes far beyond just looking better and seeing results from your diet and exercise efforts.

While there’s no hard number that applies to all people, a good rule of thumb is to receive between seven and nine hours of sleep per night, and to make sure that one poor night of sleep isn’t followed up with a few more. It might not seem like much, but it could make all the difference and mean more than any other health decision you make.

Adam Bornstein
http://www.shape.com/lifestyle/mind-and-body/why-sleep-no-1-most-important-thing-better-body

3 Tips To Boost Your Testosterone -- For Men Over 40 Only

Some great advice in this video from Mark Mcilyar. Most people don't even realise the connection between low testosterone and a health lifestyle allowing you to manage your weight. 

If you have had problems with low testosterone I would be interested to here how you got this under control? Leave a message in the comments below.

SiMonster - Planche Tutorial

Great progressive explanation tutorial from SiMonster, making this look easy. He is one of my big inspirations, demonstrating so much control and strength in his movements. 

Planche is one of my regular exercise movements, still working toward full Planche though. Leave a comment if you have ever tried this. 

*** The Basics Will Make You Better ***

You're on the floor again, the cold surface under your sweaty body, a reminder that you should be better than you are right now. Your mind annoyed at making no progress for months, the endless plateau preventing you from moving forward. Challenging your self belief, as you think should I quit?

What Are Basics?

Defined as

"Forming an essential foundation or starting point; Fundamental: Certain basic rules must be obeyed"

Basics are often only thought of as the starting point of a discipline and are all too often overlooked when people struggle to progress further. As human beings we hate having to move backwards, most of us struggle forward trying to force our way through. What if we are looking at things wrongly and the only way forward is to move back? To the basics?

"Just because they are basics, Dosen't mean that they are easy"

{ Coach Sommers - Former American Competitive Gymnast Coach } 

In my opinion basics got a bad name. Or possibly its just our connotation of the idea, that makes people feel like they aren't good enough. Whatever your discipline, the basics are always the fundamental foundations that everything is built on. Not just the start but the path to becoming more proficient in all respective disciplines.  

Analogised basics can be compared too when you see a new housing development starting. It might seem that for weeks, months, maybe even years, nothing is happening. You drive past regularly only seeing fences and signs. There is plenty of activity but not much progress, then one week goes by where you haven't driven past. This time though there stands a dozen buildings, not complete yet but they have appeared almost over night. 

The foundations (basics) take time because they are what everything else is built on. The basics of all disciplines will take a long time to install. Get them right and you will become stronger, faster and better than you can imagine.

"Patience is all that separates those who fail and those who succeed"

Without foundations or basics, no good structure or progress can take place. A lot of people never even attempt the basics, they just jump straight in at an intermediate or advanced level. Maybe this is because people don't know where to start? This is something you will see a lot, the more you train the more apparent it becomes. 

"It is not your fault. You don't know, what you don't know and if you haven't been taught how can you possibly know?"

Working with someone like a professional coach or a personal trainer is a great way to have your technique assessed and critiqued. I have been training in martial arts for over 28 years and fitness / movement training daily for 3 years. Yet I still work on the basics every time I train, often with the world's best teachers, that I can get access to on a regular basis. Many people believe that because they have been training a long time they know the basics and no longer need to train them. 

You should always find new ways to train the same basics. Don't fear trying new things, especially if it challenges you, your beliefs or you struggle with it. You're struggling because you are not strong enough in that area. Be open minded to exploring new and difficult tasks. To get better you can take advice or guidance from someone that can spot you. Like a weightlifter often has someone to catch the weight, that is often far too heavy in the first place.

In the beginning it might be difficult to self critic yourself. As you start to pay attention to your areas of weakness, it should slowly become apparent. Indicators of weakness will identify areas that need work.

Common Faults 

• Bad structure - Your body is not in a healthy or strong position, unable to generate consistent force where you intend to. You are moving with a one sided dominance, often seen due to left or right handed preference. This should be worked on to create a balance.   
• Bad Form - Without starting world war 3 in the gym, CrossFit is a prime example. Swinging for momentum, bending at the waist to lift those bicep curls and going as fast as possible to compensate form for numbers. A few examples and of course not just CrossFit related. 
• Bad Movement - Ever seen some one training in the gym and thought to yourself, that looks so awkward? If it isn't a natural movement or flow then A. it probably isn't achieving anything and B. is likely to result in injuries, which can put people in the best case scenario out of training for weeks. 

Basics are always discipline specific but fundamentally the same rules apply. What rules should we be looking to apply to our training? Here are 5 rules I think would be useful, implemented as a base for working on any exercise you want to get better at.

Do it slow - All too often you'll see people thrashing it out. A desperate attempt to get it over and done as quick as possible. Enjoy the process and remember 5 good slow, full range of motion movements will yield better results than 20 poor, fast and incomplete ones. "If you can't do it slow and controlled, then you need to work on it". It will be harder and often I see people getting frustrated because they cant do 20 any more. 

"Remember Quality Beats Quantity"

Use a mirror - In most movement arts, for example dance, the studio walls are clad with mirrors. This is because form and attention to detail can be the difference between 1st and 2nd place. Similarly in most training facilities, those selfie taking areas that you might have to fight to get in front of can be put to good use! Look at your position, observe the way you move. Imbalance will be obvious, work on creating clean fluid movement. (If there are no mirrors, you can set up your phone to record your movement. Something I do personally, great if you're doing movement exercises!)

Full range of motion - You see many people pulsing through their workouts, the worlds slightest movement pushups and squats etc rather than full repping. Maybe they think or have been told that is the correct way? To make real progress you have to be able to move through the entire movement whether it is a bicep curl, squat or benchpress. Don't shorten the movement because it is hard, get low and get slow. All the way down and all the way back up. As you get better you'll be able to increase speed, also add + and - factors to your movements, creating an even greater and more impressive, range of motion.  

Drop the weight - Every gym goer does this at some point, completely stacks the machine to maximum or picks up the heaviest dumbbells. When I talk to weight lifters about this they look at me with contempt, "But I can dead lift 180 Bro". Remember if you are compromising your structure or form and can't move well with flow, then you're not only getting very little benefit from the exercise, but you are also running a high risk of causing injury. Learn to be strict with yourself, using the basics you can significantly increase your maximum lift. Only when you get the basics right!

Watch the experts - If you are completely lost and aren't sure what to do, seek professional advice, that isn't your average YouTube channel. If they are doing it wrong, then you most certainly will. Then anyone watching you will also do it wrong (see the self perpetuating problem in the fitness world?). Lost in translation can be a giant game of Chinese whispers, the further it gets from a credible source instructor, the less likely it is to be any good. My advice in choosing an instructor is, do your homework on them. An instructor is only as good as their instructor and the information available to them. This is why I look to train with elite coaches themselves when possible or 2nd generations, the elite coaches top students (Stay close to the source).  

Remember the basics are intrinsically connected to everything that you do. I would even go as far to say there is only basics because without them you will never progress. Keep striving, keep studying and keep moving. 

Please feel free to leave your thoughts and comments and I'll be sure to get back to you shortly. 

By Craig W. 

The Real Fitness Ninja

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NO EXCUSES!

A bit of  Inspiration and Motivation for you this morning

"The Only thing that separates people is their mindset! If another human being can achieve something, there is no reason why you can't do better."

Johnny's Recovery - NO KNIFE

The Power of the right type of training system. Not only will it make you stronger but also rehabilitate any injury. In this case Johnny's injury, if asking a doctor would or resorted to immediate surgery to fix it! 

Let me know your thoughts and feelings on this video, it really inspires me to be better! 

51 Shocking Gym Fails Compilation that'll leave you in a World of Hurt

Some morning Inspiration. I see some interesting things happening in the gym and dojo. 

Often makes me wonder what they are doing. A lot of people trying to train above their ability, I hope no one got injured. 

You do have to give them credit for creativity and effort!!!!

7 STYLES OF FITNESS | Gym Stereotypes Comedy

A little fitness humour for you this morning! I hope you are all having a great weekend. 


If there is anything you would like my help with please give me a shout. 

TONY ROBBINS - NEW YEAR, NEW YOU (2017 MOTIVATION)

Touching on every aspect of life, this guy is the worlds leading self help guru for so many reasons. Make the changes in you, be proud and take control of your life.

If there is one thing you do today, Watch This Video. Start this year right and keep achieving to have the best year of your life.

Leave a comment below and tell us what you new year challenge is and what you want!

🎉🎊🎉HAPPY NEW YEAR 2017🎉🎊🎉

The Real Fitness Ninja Would like to wish you all a very Happy New Year! 

As you move from 2016 weather it be a good or a bad year it is now behind you, the choices you made no longer apply. It is time for you decide what kind of a year 2017 will be for yourself. It can and will be anything that you want it to be.

You just have to go out and get it. Don't settle for mediocre or just okay, strive for the best of your abilities and then a little more. The only thing standing in your way is your own mind. 

If your unsure what to do this year, then don't be afraid to ask. There are many great people, coaches and teachers out there that are able to help guide you, to reach your potential. Stay in touch with the Blog and I look forward to growing into this year together. 

TheRealFitnessNinja.Blogspot.Com

Have an amazing start to the year.

Stay Healthy 

Craig W. 

The Real Fitness Ninja

Why some people find exercise harder than others | Emily Balcetis

Ted Talks always get me thinking outside of my usual channels, tell me what you think leave a comment below.

Vahva Fitness - Conor McGregor Inspired Workout Routine

Some great movement drills that are good to play with, don't worry if its not pretty. Practice, Play and Perform. When you was a child you didn't fall while learning to walk and decide "Nope, this walking lark isn't for me". 

Keep falling, keep getting back up and trying again. If it was easy then everyone would be doing it and it would be boring. If you want to lose weight and gain insane muscle and be ahead of the pack. Adopt functional movement patterns into your training immediately, I hear people telling me "When I get to a certain point of fitness" this is an unmeasurable gauge. 



"Do not fear change embrace it, own it and become a legend"

Simonster: Train like a MONSTER!

Simon takes things to a whole new wow factor. Coupling B-Boy dance with Gymnastic Strength Training / calisthenic to create ultimate Strengths that leave you with your mouth open.

You have to put in the time and practice, no one ever climbed the mountain in one stride. You have to stay patient with yourself and take small steps consistently, every day to be the best you that you can be. 

Every fitness and weight loss journey will challenge you, but never be disheartened by looking on social media and seeing those that are leaner, slimmer, stronger, faster etc just remember that any frustration your having they have experienced in the past. Keep striding, find a strong mentality, if you want it, the only one standing in your way is you. They never gave up...... Will you?

"If you believe that you can or you can't. You are Right"

Hacking yourself: Dave Asprey at TEDxConstitutionDrive

Some very interesting ideas and concepts. What do you think? leave a comment below.