Bodyconnect Performance Training

Some highlights from Thailand and Vietnam, and a day in China! It was an awesome trip, with lots of flips, handstands, and fun exploring the other side of the world 🌍!

But 6 weeks was definitely long enough for me… I was definitely missing having real portions of protein, the gym, and good coffee ☕️! And not to mention, I actually was really missing my work coaching as well 💪😅.

Wrapping up 2024 🎉 🎊! Did you actually walk the walk this year, or did you just talk the talk?

Looking back, not just over the past year, but the past 5 years or more:

Have you been improving, getting closer to where you want to be; are you moving in the right direction in your life?

1 month, 3 month, or 6 month changes or transformations are great targets, but the real and most important marker of success is whether or not you can look back at yourself 5 years ago and say “I’m happy with where I am now compared to back then.”

Everyone’s idea of success will look different, but the most important factor is your long-term results. Can you maintain your success?

If you can say yes to the marker above, you are likely going to maintain it—you are the type of person who walks the walk. If not, you should take some time this New Years to really think about the things that keep holding you back, and come up with some strategies to implement in small, incremental steps to help you reduce your non-productive behaviours and add more productive behaviours. The key word here is IMPLEMENT. You can’t just talk the talk.

Like if you’re ready to walk the walk this year 🙌! Happy New Year everyone!

#2024

🎉 Boxing Day Sale for STANDARDS!🎉

Starting Thursday, December 26, 2024, you can save 40 percent off on all STANDARDS memberships and subscriptions. Sale ends at midnight on December 31, 2024.

STANDARDS Monthly: 40% Off
*Only $5.99 per month for your first 3 months, then $9.99 per month afterwards.

STANDARDS Annual: 40% Off
**$59.99 for your first year, then $99.99 per year afterwards.

STANDARDS Lifetime Access: 40% Off
$95.99 one time payment for life.

STANDARDS is a long-term solution for optimizing your health, fitness, and wellness, providing you with:

•Over 1,000 workouts with built-in progression

•Workout programs for all levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced)

•Workout programs for all settings (gym, home equipment, zero equipment)

•Support from certified strength and conditioning coaches

•Support from health and nutrition coaches

•Members forums to post videos or photos of your progress to stay motivated and accountable

•A community of health oriented peers striving to become the best version of themselves

•Monthly health and fitness challenges

•And more! All available through Mobile App & Web Access

This is last time STANDARDS will be on sale for quite a while, so don’t wait! Message me for more info if you have any questions.

SET STANDARDS FOR YOUR HEALTH, NOT GOALS.

Merry Christmas Everyone 🎄🎁!

After 22 months of training with these guys, we only made one big mistake—not taking any before photos from day 1! Since we first met in February 2022, Tsyuoshi and Ryuji have built their thin skin and bone frames into ripped muscular physiques. They look like giants next to me now😂!

and have made so much progress since we started almost two years ago, and it’s insane how strong they are for their ages! Tsyuoshi is 16 and squatting 215lbs, and Ryuji is 15 and already deadlifting 3 plates! I wasn’t hitting numbers like that even in my first 5 years of lifting 🫠.

But it didn’t come easy. Tsuyoshi and Ryuji train hard, train consistently, and eat like there’s no tomorrow. They also play lots of sports, including football, so they need to really pound back the calories to fight for every ounce of muscle gain. But it’s definitely worth the fight 💪.

I can’t wait to see the progress continue in the years to come!

Does Keto work? Does Carnivore work? Does Vegan work? Does Low Fat work? Does fasting work? These are all questions that can’t be answered with a simple yes or no. The real question should be “At what point in time does X diet work?”

Pretty much any diet strategy to lose weight or improve health will do exactly that—at least in the beginning. But if you stick to an extreme imbalance by cutting out a major group of foods (such as fats, carbs, meat, plants, no food, etc.) for long enough, you will start to see the benefits disappear. You may plateau for a while, and then after long enough, you will eventually see an inversion effect, where the diet that once helped you to lose weight or improve your health is now having negative effects on your health.

Pretty much all diets go through 3 phases over time: The Improvement Phase; The Plateau Phase; and The Decline Phase. The exact time frame for each phase will vary from diet to diet and from person to person, but the overall theme is the same: if you stick to an imbalanced protocol for too long, your body’s homeostasis will eventually become imbalanced, and as a result your health will decline.

Examples:
•Only eat meat for too long, you lose commensalism bacteria like bifido, and build up harmful bacteria like fusobacteria.

•Only eat plants for too long, and you starve your body of essential amino acids, nutrients, and vitamins.

•Avoid carbs for too long, and you’ll actually lose insulin sensitivity.

•Avoid fat for too long, and you’ll wreck your cell membranes and hormones.

•Fast too often/long, and your body will slow its metabolism and increase brain circuits that drive hunger.

But all of these things, in the beginning, can do wonders for your health! The body loves to be in balance, but applying imbalances (I.e. restrictive diets) can stimulate adaptations in the body that improve health in the short term. As time goes on, the benefits disappear, and are replaced by negatives.

So what’s the takeaway? Eat a balanced diet that covers all of your body’s different needs most of the time, with occasional periods of different dietary protocols to address specific health goals.

Credit:

1. Skipping Compounds–Compound free weight exercises like presses, squats, deadlifts, rows, etc. take time to learn with proper technique in the beginning, these exercises provide so much benefit for building whole body strength/muscle. Machines are great to supplement your training, but nothing will pack on muscle like getting really strong with compound freeweight movements in your initial years of training. Freeweights also have more strength carryover into real world situations.

2. Too Much Too Soon—Going from 0 to training 6 days/week might feel like a great way to kick yourself into shape, but in reality you’re shooting yourself in the foot. It takes time for your body to adapt to training. Think of a tan; if you’re as pale as I am, and you want to get a tan, so you spend hours in the sun every day right away, what will happen? A sunburn, because there was too much stress for your body to adapt. Same is true with strength training. You don’t want to burn yourself and train every day when you start. 2 to 3 days per week in the beginning is plenty, and you should feel better after your workouts than before (the goal is to signal your body to build muscle/get stronger, not to beat it up!).

3. Neglecting Skill—When learning a skill, like a sport, you need to practice lots and focus on technique over all else. However, when people look at exercises in the gym, they seem to forget they are also skills. They focus only on getting a sweat/burn. But if you neglect technique in your initial years of training, you’re setting yourself up to develop poor recruitment patterns and injuries down the road. Your first priority should be to get your form to look beautiful with controlled, full ROM movements. Depending on natural athletic ability, you could spend anywhere from 2-12 months just working on improving your technique before you get really serious about loading crazy heavy weights on the bar. It might feel like the slow path to progress in the beginning, but trust me, nothing will bring your progress to a stop in the future like an injury. In the beginning your goal should be perfect form, not working up a big sweat or feeling your muscles burning like crazy.

🎉 Black Friday Sale for STANDARDS is Coming Early!🎉

Starting Tuesday, November 19, 2024, you can save up to 50 percent off on STANDARDS subscriptions. Sale ends November 30, 2024.

STANDARDS Monthly: 30% Off
*Only $6.99 per month for your first 3 months, then $9.99 per month afterwards.

STANDARDS Annual: 40% Off
**$59.99 for your first year, then $99.99 per year afterwards.

STANDARDS Lifetime Access: 50% Off
$79.99 one time payment for life.

STANDARDS is a long-term solution for optimizing your health, fitness, and wellness, providing you with:

•Over 1,000 workouts with built-in progression

•Workout programs for all levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced)

•Workout programs for all settings (gym, home equipment, zero equipment)

•Support from certified strength and conditioning coaches

•Support from health and nutrition coaches

•Members forums to post videos or photos of your progress to stay motivated and accountable

•A community of health oriented peers striving to become the best version of themselves

•Monthly health and fitness challenges

•And more! All available through Mobile App & Web Access

This is the biggest sale of the year for STANDARDS, so don’t wait! Check out my website (link in bio) or message me for more info!

SET STANDARDS FOR YOUR HEALTH, NOT GOALS.

Carnivore diet review: what I liked, what I disliked, and my overall rating on carnivore.

Likes:
•Simplicity
•Energy levels in the first two weeks
•The food

Dislikes:
•Energy drop and poor gym performance after the first two weeks
•Worse sleep
•Dry skin at the end of the 35 days
•Hormone crash (testosterone decreased by 50% from about 260ng/dl to 120ng/dl)

Overall rating: 7/10

Tired of feeling tired all the time? While it might sound counterintuitive, it takes energy to make energy. What does this mean?

The less effort you put into making time to optimize your sleep, stay active, and eat healthy, the less energy you’ll have, and the more you’ll want to continue doing nothing.

The more effort you put into these things, the the more energy you’ll have to continue living a healthy life and doing the things you love.

Newton’s Laws also apply to energy in the human body in a way. A sedentary person at rest will stay at rest. An active person in motion will stay in motion.

Want to set new standards in your life to keep yourself moving with accountability from a community of active individuals and trained fitness professionals? Check out my membership site STANDARDS. Link in bio or DM me for details 😉

Is poor mobility holding you back from maximizing your lifting and leaving you feeling stiff and rigid with your movements? If you’ve been doing quarter or half reps for all your lifts and find your strength has plateaued, your knees and back are always tight, and you aren’t seeing the muscle growth you’re working so hard for, take a step back and look at your mobility. While you might have to lower the weight initially to practice lifting with a longer ranger of motion (ROM), there’s a lot of research to support the benefits of training with full ROM when it comes to strength and muscle growth—especially when you slow down in the deep stretched positions of your lifts.

If heavy weight and short ROM was the key to better results, you would see bodybuilders quarter repping everything with super heavy loads. But what do they focus on instead? Controlled movement with deep ranges of motion. Why? Because it stimulates greater muscle growth.

So if you’re looking to unlock your mobility to maximize your gains in the gym, here are my top 3 tips:

1. Find and prioritize your weak points. Common areas are ankles, hips, thoracic spine, and shoulders. But YouTube some mobility assessments or tests and find your weakest links, so that you can pick the right exercises to make a difference in your body. If somethings not broken, don’t try to fix it.

2. Practice often. Mobility training is best done with high frequency and low volume/intensity. Instead of doing a full 1 hour mobility workout a couple days per week, try implementing a couple 5-minute mobility sessions into your daily routine. It’s not only more efficient, but also more effective for delivering results.

3. Use your mobility as you unlock it. As you become more mobile and you can lift with longer ROM, it becomes much easier to maintain that mobility as long as you keep lifting with the longer ROM on a regular basis. If you can squat ATG, and you squat a couple times per week with ATG technique, you won’t need to spend much time training your squat mobility separately.

So stop putting it off till tomorrow, start working on your mobility today!