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Tuesday 24 April 2018

Aiming at failure


By Pete Ryan


I recently noticed that my behaviour has followed a different path. I was actually playing a computer game and I was at a specific point that I could not get past. As my frustration grew I made a realisation. At some point I had started to avoid situations where failure was a high possibility. This week I have decided to move away from that mindset.


Think about yourself as a child, did you walk first go? Did you learn to read and write without struggles? Humans naturally grow through failure, they do not generally grow through success. My simple idea is to try something that involves a high probability of failure regularly. Failure is the hard part of growing, without it we will stagnate and never become the person we were meant to be.  With this in mind I intend to add some things into my life that will push me to fail regularly.  These will then also help me develop as I discover what it means to push through to success, and conversely to learn when I need to realise I just need to give up and move on to another problem that does have a solution I can accomplish.


Don’t get confused, these do not need to be fantastic feats or impossible actions.  Try simple things. I will use myself as an example. Suppose I get some inline skates (I cannot skate). I would have to push past the “Everybody laughing at me wobble along” stage, before I can achieve any sort of skill at the activity. Perhaps you prefer something more forceful, how about arm wrestling.  If you go to a club, even if you are stronger you will probably be destroyed by your skilled opponents. You might even be the least able arm wrestler in the club for a while. This would be both humbling and off-putting. However, if you stick with it you will develop more skills and even if you stay at the bottom, you will achieve a proficiency and learn the art of arm wrestling to the best of your ability.

Whether you maintain these skills or leave them behind afterwards is unimportant. I believe adding activities that involve regular failure and having to master new skills will improve you and also acclimatise you to overcoming regular failure. This will help you a lot into the future as it translates directly into life, business and education.

Let’s quickly look at how you can introduce failure into your life. The first point is not to begin with something that will be critical if you fail. You don’t want to climb a perilous cliff face without a lifeline unless you are fully competent at climbing. Start easy. If you can’t swim, join a class, if you cannot do mathematics do a course. You can also learn a new skill, learn chess or anything you cannot presently do. The 'what' does not matter as much as how you feel about it.  You should be mildly concerned when you think of doing the skill. Does doing Judo give you butterflies in the stomach? Does ballroom dancing make you feel like you have two left feet? If so, then they might be just the activities you should be approaching.  Pick things you know will be hard, but not impossible. Pick something you might want to do, there is no point doing flower arranging if you have zero interest in it.


So, here is the challenge.


  1. Pick a skill or activity that you feel you want to do, but have little or no ability at doing right now.
  2. Find a place to learn that activity.
  3. Learn it and embrace the failures along the way.


If you can learn to aim at failure and begin to realise that failure is actually a positive outcome, it could lead your life onto very different pathways and before you know it you will be accomplishing things that you never thought was possible. 



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Saturday 21 April 2018

Why learning to coach is important for everyone?


By Pete Ryan

There are several stages to learning within the exercise sphere.

  1.      You realise you know nothing
  2.      You learn a little and believe you have the answer
  3.      You learn a lot and most answers are “It depends”

This post will try to explain the reasons you should aim to reach level 3, why being a ‘guru’ with a definitive answer is not the goal (& why people are fooled by them). Also why, even if you only coach yourself, reaching the third level of understanding is desirable.
Firstly, let’s look at someone new to exercise or coaching. They will go and find figures of authorities to follow (magazines, youtube personalities, online coaches, books etc), they will learn a method or methods that prove most enjoyable or effective for themselves. This maybe after failing at several other protocols?

This moves them onto the second phase. They now know a little bit and have often found a protocol that is effective for them (for example HIT training, intermittent fasting, DC training, Paleo, Matrix training or whatever). They now become a zealot about this style or methodology and so tout this as THE method. When asked they have an exact protocol and a method that will fit everyone and suit every goal. People become generic and everyone reacts the same to the same stimuli. This is the realm of the ‘guru’, where they suggest one style of training or diet suits us all and one answer will be beneficial to everyone.
Many people stay at the second level throughout their training/coaching life. They have one system, and it works for a percentage of the population, but if you are lucky you will pass through that level and almost come full circle, you realise that the more you learn, the less you know, there are no definitive answers and experimenting is the best way to discover what works best for an individual. Eventually you will come to the conclusion that making one or 2 small changes and monitoring the effects is the ideal way to find the best working methods. Add to that the concept that often nothing works indefinitely and you get an interesting mix for a coach to digest and utilise.

There are definitely certain truths

  1. You need to progress   
  2. You need to exercise consistently   
  3. You need to work all the relevant muscular systems
  4. You need to avoid injury
  5. You need to be motivated
  6. You need to be able to recover

      These things and many more are proven facets of exercise, but within those foundations there is a world of diet and exercise protocols for you to explore. Most will be dead ends, either not enjoyable, or not as productive as other methodologies, but some will yield amazing results.
This is not to knock cookie-cutter programmes, such programmes can work and be tremendously effective, but ideally, a tailored routine will give you the biggest returns over time. Many people can reach a good level of health and fitness following many of the standard template systems out there, but if you have issues, or wish to reach higher, then moving towards a more tailored exercise, diet & recovery routine will improve results.


I promised to look at gurus and why you don’t want to fall into the trap of ‘one size fits all’. If you ask an actual expert, the answer “It depends” will often be their answer, often it will sound like they do not know anything, but the truth is they know enough to know that the answer is not simple. A guru however will sound immensely confident, “The answer is to do A, B & C!” this answer will be the same for everyone. Often a guru and an expert will offer similar starting points, but from there a guru continues to offer fixed methodologies whereas an expert will begin the tailoring process, so it is not always simple to weed the guru out from the experts. Your aim is to be able to start 2 people on the same programme and then work with them until those routines are tailored towards their goals and their preferences. So, you could start 2 people off with a routine based on 3 sets of 10, but after some time, one is doing 1 set of 20 reps, while the other is doing 5 sets of 5 reps, they may also be working out different amounts each week for different duration and be eating very different diets.
This should be your goal (even if you only train yourself). Learn to try small changes, monitor these changes and either discard that change or move on to the next small change. In time you will find a selection of protocols that work for yourself and others and you will understand why the term “It depends” is so common within the training world.

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Monday 2 April 2018

Health and fitness misconceptions

By Pete Ryan 
 


Listen to any advert or guru and health and fitness is easy and fast. 4 weeks to a 6-pack, eat what you like and get thin, just 5 minutes a day…these are just a few of the myths that surround the health and fitness industry.  In truth health and fitness are a long, slow, on going process that you can begin at any age, but need to be continued throughout your life to be effective.
I will look at just a few of the common myths and walk you through why they are wrong and what the reality truly is.
Let’s look at one that specifically affects the vegan or plant based arena. It is the ex-vegan. The story usually goes like this:

I went vegan, I became very ill. I usually had a lot of soul searching, then I ate meat.   In most cases that first bite was amazing and suddenly they felt well and full of vigour.

So, that is the scenario. Think about that story for a moment. I am a clinical nutritionist, but you do not need to have any formal training to see the flaw in this argument. You are arguing you developed a serious deficiency due to a diet, then you cured a major deficiency with one bite of meat, immediately. This is not a deficiency, look up the treatment of scurvy or any other deficiency based disease and see that not only does recovery take a long time, but you also suffer lasting issues.  What they are describing is a psychological issue, not a nutritional condition. For some reason they have convinced themselves that they need meat and so exhibit symptoms. I am not saying you cannot suffer deficiencies on a vegan diet, that is possible eating any diet, but if you get immediate relief then the issue was not a nutritional issue, it was a psychological one.  I have worked with people who suffer from many eating disorders; binge eating, inappropriate food choices, and many other food -centred issues.  I always insist these people also work with the relevant mental health care worker as the issue is very deeply joined to early life trauma and other issues as it is to simply poor food choices. Let me reemphasise, you can suffer real dietary issues on any diet, including a vegan diet, but immediate relief of symptoms after a bite is a red flag that there are deeper issues involved.
What I would finally say about this is that anyone who has a concern, whatever their diet, should go and seek some form of help. Firstly consult a nutritional expert with some experience and if necessary seek counselling from a trained professional as these can really help you understand the condition.



Let’s move on from there to the “Reach your goal in X weeks”. We are talking diet challenges, mass gaining contests etc etc. These are all not ways to achieve long term success.  I haven’t got the exact percentages to hand, but it is over 90% failure rates for diet success over time, muscle building cannot even be done that quickly without heavy usage of “supplements” (steroids, HGH, insulin, SARMS or whatever the new flavour of the month is). Your actual goal is to build a new lifestyle, one where you are naturally leaner &/or one that adds to your muscle mass over time. You can diet hard and lose weight (and lose a lot of muscle along with the fat), but this will not stay off unless you adopt a new way of eating and living. You will not build muscle without spending years in the gym. Look at the extreme, Mr Olympia is usually a guy in his mid-30s, they have trained hard for decades and taken heavy doses of drugs. So, they are the genetic elite (in terms of muscle building potential) and they still took decades WITH drugs! Many people see this as a bad thing, but really it is actually a good thing, it means that we can continue to build our bodies, slowly for decades, so in 20 years time you can look better than you do now! Imagine I promised you a pill that would slowly improve you every month for the next 20 years…how much would you pay for that?  Well, I am offering you the “iron pill”, lift for the next 20 years, in a safe, progressive manner and you will look better in 20 years than you do right now!

Let’s briefly touch on the 5 minutes a day gadgets. Do not waste your time.  You can get fit and toned up using weights, using bodyweight exercises, using kettlebells or even odd objects.  The only rules are that the exercises are progressive over time.  So, they get heavier, you use a harder or novel variations, plus you need avoid anything that causes injury or injury type pain (you want the lactic acid burn feeling and the feeling you are working hard, but not injury type pain, these are very different).  Follow that and you will succeed in improving over decades, not just months and years.
If you need help getting started pop over to https://payhip.com/veganbodybuilding and download “An introduction to vegan fitness and health” (it is by donation, so give anything you like to help us build the site) and feel free to use the resources below.


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Here are a few money off codes you might want to explore:

(Proteins and supplements)
35% off using code VEGANBODY2018
orders by post, online or phone

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(Supplements)
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(Superfoods)
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(Proteins and supplements)
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