Mind Exercise

Consider isometric exercise. First, place your left hand flat across your right chest and shoulder. Take your right hand and extend it to the side. Make a fist and imagine that you are pulling a beautiful new Mercedes in front of you. The car is heavy, imagine the brakes on, but pull with all your might—if you can pull that monster 5-series hard enough, it will be yours.

In reality, there is no car, no handle, and no brakes. But if you put your mind into that visualization, your pecs were rippling under your left hand and if you were in front of a mirror you saw the pump.

But you never touched a weight.

That was your mind working the muscle. And that’s the only way a muscle works to achieve the anaerobic effect that builds strength and size.

Mind Exercises

Mind Muscle Control

This is nothing new to weight lifters. The mirrors in gyms are not for the benefit of looking at beautiful bodies, the mirrors are there so lifters can better focus on the muscle they are working. The mind, not the weight, creates the catalyst for a chain reaction that is anaerobic (without oxygen) and creates ultimate strength. It only lasts a minute or so, which is why boxing rounds are so short.

My brother used these techniques to break handcuffs, pop tennis balls in his hands, bend quarters and even survive hanging. Crazy? No, there’s plenty of evidence, in first hand witnesses, video and print.

Exercise with No Results

If you’ve been working out on a regular basis with no results, then you are not truly making the mind-muscle connection. Sometimes I call this ugly face exercise: it’s the point when you are exercising where you grit your teeth, your eyes are not really focused and you may not for the moment know where you are or what you’re doing, other than giving it 110%. That is when you’ve your anaerobic range. That is when you’ve told your body to deliver more nutrients for muscle tone and strength and for bone density. Your body is devouring carbs and you’ve also sparked your metabolism to stay on the ready for the next 24 hours, thereby burning more calories.

So, want to exercise brainless or do you want to incorporate some mental muscle?

By Laura Dayton

Eye Health Tips

If there was a way to improve your eye sight, that didn’t cost thousands of dollars in expensive surgery, would you do it? I know what you’re thinking, and no, it’s not a drug. Simply put, the body’s ability to recognize the need for “growth”, by recognizing patterns in the movements themselves (muscle memory), and in the commands given for those movements (sensory memory), can be used to establish muscle growth patterns to support the new need for better sight.

The human eye, for instance, oscillates and zooms with the help of the extra-ocular muscles and ciliary muscles. These two groups of muscles work together to make adjustments so that still or moving objects can be brought into focus with relative ease. This happens automatically in most cases.

Exercises for your Eye

Recently, I was staring at a picture…well, an ultrasound photo on my friends iphone. There was my son, a little peanut, with not much more detail than a blurry image of nebula and billions of little stars. I must have been staring at this picture for over an hour, when I realized that my eyes had adjusted to the small detail of the photo, and I was now able to pick out finite detail in my son’s body, that even the ultrasound technician couldn’t see. That’s when I looked up and was astounded by what I saw. A friend who was sitting across the table from me (about three feet) was eating a slice of pizza. The interesting thing, however, was that I could see the smallest detail in his face! His pores were wide open to me! I discovered that my eyes had adjusted to focus on the smallest detail in a fuzzy photo, and once I looked up, they were still set on “zoom”. I’ve since developed some exercises that have improved my eye sight in an amazing way. Get the picture?

My next article will include an exercise program for your eyes!

By Jarreau James

I’m making progress like crazy! It is awesome! I’m not benching what I benched when I was juicing yet but it is getting closer and closer all the time. (quite close now actually) I have no doubt my strength will continue to increase and my body fat will continue to decrease as I keep following my workouts. By the spring of 2010 I should be stronger than ever. I’m already healthier.

Here are the things that work for me. If you want to build muscles, this is what I believe:

1. To build big muscles you have to stress them in a big way. This means you must force them to work against heavy resistance. That means a weight you can’t lift more than 6 times (give or take a few) without failing.

Benefit from lifting heavy weights

2. To build big muscles you have to do exercises that stress groups of muscles together – like deadlifts, squats, benches, dips, pullups (or pulldowns with enough weight). Avoid cable or isolation exercises unless you are adding them in for some spice… Make sure the meat of your workouts are the bigger movements with barbells and dumbbells.

3. Heavy lifting stresses your muscles and nerves heavily, so you need to provide your body with plenty of rest and nutrition. 99% of what the magazines say is total bullshit. You do not need a bunch of supplements. Protein powder, a multi-vitamin, plenty of sleep, and a healthy diet is more than enough to help your body recover. You tend to hear these things over and over again – because they are time tested and honest.

Sleep and Eat Healthy

4. To combat boredom and also keep your muscles adapting (this is KEY, the idea of making your muscles ADAPT) you should keep changing your routine around.

5. Eat enough calories (I like protein shakes for convenience) to support what you are doing in the gym

6. Don’t worry too much about fat loss in the beginning – just don’t pig out if you are overweight. Try and direct your diet toward food that helps you instead of empty calories. Lean meat, lowfat/skim milk, complex carbs (whole grains if you can eat them, grapefruit, cantaloupe, green vegetables) and healthy fats/proteins (peanut butter, salmon, tuna, olive oil). Remember that your muscles are the ENGINE that burns the GAS (fat) in your body. So the more muscle tissue you have, the more fuel your body will use. All day, every day. Even when you aren’t lifting.

7. Cardio (bike/elliptical/treadmill/stairmaster) is good for your heart – but doing too much is counterproductive to gaining muscle mass. Keep cardio sessions short and intense (I like 15-20 minutes a few times/wk). Weight training can actually be a better fat burner – especially if you keep your rest periods down to a minimum or combine sets (bench and row as one super set for example).

Short Sharp Cardio Sessions

8. Now a contradiction: don’t use too much weight! How much weight should you use? It should vary – I can go in and do a whole pile of plates on the leg press. The sets are slow and grueling. That’s one kind of workout, but I always use good form and keep the weight under control both lifting it and putting it down. The other kind of workout I like to take half that weight, put it onto the hack squat machine, and do ten reps of hack squats followed by ten reps on the leg press. I love this combination because it adds intensity. I’m not lifting as much weight, but I’m putting my body under a huge oxygen demand to pull off these two sets in a row with no rest. It forces my body to adapt.

9. When you are first doing a new movement, use an empty bar or very low weight. You need to learn the mechanics of the movement and how it feels. A lat pulldown has a certain feel to it. If you don’t do it right, it becomes a forearm and bicep exercise, not a lat exercise! So take the weight of and learn how to focus on the muscle you want to develop. You have to learn how it is supposed to feel and how to target the muscle you want to train. This usually means using *less* weight than you think you should.

Workout Tips and Results

10. Vary the order of exercises. Right now I can only get in the gym three times a week. I split my body into upper and lower. So I get to hit everything twice a week no matter what. My favorite lower body exercises are deadlifts, squats, leg presses, and hack squats on the machine. Some days I start with heavy deadlifts – doing 3 to 8 reps and pyramiding up and own. Some days I start with stiff-leg deadlifts standing on a platform with much less weight and do 10 reps minimum. Some days I superset both kinds of deadlift together. For a really brutal workout I might superset deadlifts and squats. I try and keep changing it around so I have to adapt to something new. For upper body, I like benching and rowing, upright rows, presses, lat pulldowns, arm curls and extensions… again I try to vary and combine them to keep it interesting for my brain and my muscles.

I hope this helps you get the muscles you’re after!

By: Charley Socci

http://www.socci.com

http://www.charlessocci.com

I tried steroids once, many years back now. I couldn’t resist. I wanted to know what it was all about. So I got some syringes, and some vials of testosterone and some other drugs and combined them in a way that was suggested to me by some people I had met online. I did everything I was supposed to do and put as much research into it as made sense to me at the time.

Cosby Steroids

What I found out was that at first I felt sick. I got bloated and moody like a woman having her period. Then after while, my lifts started going up really fast from week to week in the gym.

That was the good part.

I also turned into Bill Cosby’s asshole because my temper started getting really short. I’d pick arguments with people in the street. I’d drive like a dick. I started walking around with a chip on my shoulder all the time.

My blood pressure, triglycerides, and LDL cholesterol (that’s the bad one) all went up as well.

These things are not healthy! And the risk to benefit ration of what I was doing to my body made absolutely ZERO sense.

Here’s another reason why using steroids didn’t make sense: My body hadn’t reached it’s own NATURAL potential yet!

The Sillyness of Steroids

There might be an argument to be made for an athlete that has trained to the extent of his potential (how many people fall into that category really? honestly?) without the use of hormones. If they use hormones it lets them break past their body’s own limits. Or maybe they are old and can add a few years to their career while competing against younger players… Or maybe they have a multi-million dollar contract and need to hit a certain percentage of baseballs outside the park…

But me? No.

By: Charley Socci

http://www.socci.com

http://www.charlessocci.com

Not Charley but still...

Did you know that the most commonly used steroid is testosterone? Did you know testosterone is a steroid? It is. It is produced in the bodies of both men and women. Men just produce a whole lot more of it.

In the most simple sense, testosterone is the hormone that is responsible for “maleness”. Bigger muscles, deeper voice, hairy bodies, physical aggression, sex drive – all are directly controlled by testosterone.

Steroid Injecting Needles

Testosterone is considered the gold standard among abused anabolic steroids. All other anabolic drugs are compared to it. The difference between the other anabolic steroids and testosterone is that the other drugs are designed to maximize or minimize particular effects.

That’s it. That’s all steroids are. They are hormones. If you are a man and you take them, your body goes into a kind of “artificial puberty” and your muscles grow, you get acne, and your brain does weird things, and your body hair gets denser. If you are woman, your clitoris starts to grow, your voice deepens, and your body begins to get leaner and become more male. If you have genes for losing your hair (male pattern baldness) you count on accelerating that process too… whether you are a man or woman with latent baldness genes.

These are the drugs they give to women who want to become men prior to the surgery that reshapes their breasts and vagina. That’s what steroids are.

Crazy Steroid Man

I can remember back in the 70’s and 80’s when cocaine was so glamorized in the movies. There was a mystery and an intrigue. They made it sexy. If you’ve ever had a coke problem, or cared about anyone who did – you know there is nothing sexy about cocaine. The same can be said about steroids.

Does it seem logical that pumping more male chemical into the body of an athletic reject would make him more of an athlete? That’s crazy right?

I remember Bill Cosby talking about cocaine – he asked someone, “Why do you use cocaine…?”

Their answer, “It enhances your personality…”

Bill Cosby’s response, “Yes, I see… But what if you’re an asshole?”

Its kind of the same thing with steroids…But that will have to wait…

How did Charley’s story start?

By: Charley Socci

http://www.socci.com

http://www.charlessocci.com

Getting Back to the Gym

There were a few things that motivated me – not the least among them a rather tactless physician who exclaimed my “BMI” put me in the “morbidly obese” category – a category that measures height to weight with no regard for anything else.

I always wondered how many other morbidly obese folks can say they are able to press their body weight. I also suppose much of the NFL probably fall into this category. Its a bullshit statistic – can you imagine if I went to butcher shop (yes I’m old enough to remember butcher shops) and came home with a big bag exclaiming, “HONEY! I bought ten pounds for $5!” – wouldn’t she ask “Ten pounds of WHAT… bones? suet? ham hocks? pig’s ears? steak? stew beef?” BMI is a bit like that ten pounds of “stuff”.

Not Charley btw...resemblance though?

I’ve always been muscular – but I have to admit I’ve just gotten fat. There, I admit it. But morbidly fat? I think not.

So anyway… I like lifting weights. I started doing it in my twenties and found out my body adapts really well to it. Its one of the few athletic activities I’d ever say I was good at. People who know me well think its funny. Most of them aren’t athletic, and they know I’m not either – I fit the stereotype of a 98 pound nerd, but in the body of a large man who lifts weights. I don’t talk about things like my bench press or my rotator cuff… or grams of protein per pound of body weight… or the benefits of squats vs leg presses with most of the people around me… Its a solitary pursuit…

Read more of Charley’s story…coming soon!

By: Charley Socci

http://www.socci.com

http://www.charlessocci.com