Straight Off the Eastern Bloc.

Boom. This just in, from Russia with love. A great way to work out your legs, while simultaneously working on your Soviet culture. Introducing: The Bulgarian Split Squat. This is an exercise that can, and will fight you.  If you've ever had any illusions of lower body grandeur, the BSS will soon fix your mind and your body. But mostly your mind, because that's where you're broken.

Just from experience, I can tell you that it is my personal belief that this exercise has taken the form of a dragon and has not only stolen things out of my desk drawer while I wasn't home, but also chopped down a tree in my backyard, burned the ground in the shape of hammer and sickle, and then started a cult.

Here's how to do it, and a few variations of it.
 
Stand about 3 feet in front of a bench, a chair, a table, a couch, or something sturdy that is about knee level or a little higher. Start on one food, and find your balance. With the other foot, go ahead and push it back, and let it rest on the top of the item behind you. I prefer doing it with the top of my foot on the top of the object, but you can do it on your toes if you have great dorsiflexion mobility. (you can pull your foot towards your knee pretty well) Test it out, it varies based on your biomechanics.

From there, go ahead and squat down with the front leg, making sure to drive the back knee back and down, and let it bend. Don't let the front knee go over the front toe. This is bad.

Notice how in the picture, he forms a right angle with his front knee and hip.  That's good form.  Do it like that.

It's not complicated, give it a few tries on each leg. One leg will be weaker than the other. Start with that leg every time. Also, if you've never done this before, it would be prudent to start of with just your body weight. Any more, and you're in danger of feeling like someone took a mallet to your glutes while you were sleeping. But hey, if you're in a dangerous mood, go for it.

A couple notes on what this exercise is:
A great way to work your inner and outer thigh (ladies?)
A great way to work your balance
Simple
A great way to work your abs and obliques
A great way to work you glutes (read: A great way to feel like you started a chemical fire on your backside)
A great way to improve posture/burn calories/look rad at the gym/etc.

A couple notes on what this exercise is not:
A great way to have a light workout
Bench press
Elliptical machine
North American
A great way to pick up chicks (kinda hard to impress anyone with your lungs on the outside of your body)
Fun / mentally easy / hella tight

"But Nate!" you say. "I can squat my bodyweight, I'm no stranger to the gym, and I just consumed a Tyler Ells sized portion of NoExplode and F16 fuel, and my heart is going to explode if I only do bodyweight exercises!"

Great work Skippy, glad to hear it. Try one of these variations.

1) Weighted. Get a weight vest, grab some dumbbells, a kettlebell, your little sister, whatever you have available. Hold it in one hand, both hands, on your back, in front of you, etc. The possibilities are endless.
2) Increase range of motion. Stand on a box or a pile of weights. Feel that stretch in your hams, glutes and groin. Yep. That's fun.
3) Oh, you're the balance master? Probably not. Grab a set of TRX straps and put your back foot in that. Or put your back foot on a Swiss ball. Or close your eyes. n00b.
4) Got all this down? Too easy? Whatever Sven. Time to add some more Slavic influence. Introduce some German Volume Training, and see how you feel tomorrow. I'll bring you a wheelchair. 10 sets of 10 reps.  I didn't say it was smart, just German.
5) Is your cardio game locked down? Can you run for hours on end like a mystical gazelle? Pfft. Do a set, rest for a minute, do another set. Oh, did I say rest? I meant hold a push up position plank.

 

Suck it up and get it done. Talk to you later.

Your Cardio Routine is Laughable.

There was once a day in my life when I was not happy and did not have bountiful amounts of energy. This has only happened one time. Normally I not only have enough energy for myself, I have enough to power a medium sized blow dryer for up to 7 hours. On this particular day though, I was sitting at Big Box Gym Inc. (tm), minding my own business, wallowing in despair, much like a middle aged housewife who has just learned that Oprah's book club was now reading the ''Left Behind'' series.

Yea, it was a rough day.

When out of the corner of my eye, I saw something that caught my attention and piqued my interest. I turned around, and too my great delight I was greeted with a sight that caused me to break first into a chuckle, and then into a full on belly laugh causing people to stare, glass to break, and children to cry first, then rapidly mature into responsible young adults.

What I saw was a a person that I had previously offered assistance in helping to lose weight that had turned me down and insisted that they would be able to do it on their own. But that's not why I was laughing. This person was standing on the elliptical machine, where they had spent their last 45 minutes, talking on the phone at a normal rate of speech, and not sweating.

THIS was how they planned to get their summer beach body? THIS was going to get them off their high cholesterol medication? THIS was going to keep them from being obese?

I laughed and laughed, and when I was through, I went to the bathroom and threw up.

Unfortunately most people look at cardio this way. They go to the gym, find the first piece of open equipment, and spend 30 minutes there. No plan, no goal, just 30 minutes of moving their legs.

That being said, there are ways of utilizing machines effectively, but why bother? There are roughly 1 billion other things you could be doing to burn calories and get the body you want, that are simpler and way more productive.

You'll never going to get toned abs, back hips, or thighs walking on a treadmill. The calories burned walking at 3.0 miles per hour for an hour, are so minimal, that you could burn approximately the same amount by quilting for roughly an hour and 15 minutes. Is that appealing to you? Going to the gym so that you can burn as much fat as your grandmother does when she goes to play bingo and mahjong with the girls?

If you're not making an attempt to create new muscle mass to replace your fat, you're not being effective with your time. Get off the recumbent bike and do some push ups and squats. I'll even include a small cardio circuit at the end of this article for you to follow. You're welcome. Bottom line, get off the machine, and do some actual work. If you're not working to the point where you're sweating, you're not working hard enough.  "But Nate!" you say, "I am sweating on the elliptical machine!" Fine. Do what you enjoy, but at least make your time more valuable by doing intervals and hills.

A1) body weight squats
A2) lunges
A3) pushups
A4) Plank

B1) Squat Jumps
B2) Side Lunges
B3) Hands to elbows
B4) Back bridge on hands

Do each for 30 seconds, do both A and B 2 times each, Rest 2 minutes between each set. Should take exactly 14 minutes to finish all of it. If you can do the whole thing, email me, I'll give you a prize.

Throw Your Chairs Away.

Listen up, everyone knows that I'm full of good advice. In fact, I've even heard that I'm full of the best advice. No holds-barred, raw, relentless wisdom that attacks superstitions and wives tales like a pack of ravenous wolves attack a handicapped moose.
Oh, you believe that you're over-trained and have adrenal fatigue? Wrong. Think that carbs are bad? Wrong again. See? Busting up your paradigms is easy, and fun.

That's right, your brain is probably due for another beat down.

Sitting. You probably like it. Whether you're sitting at home, sitting at work, sitting at lunch, or sitting in bed eating flamin' hot cheetos, chances are that you sit a lot. The average Brit spends 14 hours and 39 minutes per day sitting. This is due to a shift in the average work environment, and also due to the fact that widespread depression has been slowly suffocating England ever since they got their asses kicked in the Revolutionary War (no source available).

Adding to that the fact that people sleep an average of 7 hours and 41 minutes per night, that adds up to a grand total of 22 hours and 20 minutes in a sedentary state. This leaves you with another hour and a half of day to spend using the bathroom, and looking in the freezer for ice cream.

Right now, I have a different agenda, so I won't even bother talking about people's horrible lack of activity. That's a topic for another time, and something that I'll only be able to write about after 2 redbulls.

So, back to the sitting issue. Let's say you sit only 12 hours per day, between work and home. Not including weekends, if you stood for the same amount of time, in 1 month, you would burn 14,400 calories, or about 4 extra pounds. this gives you 3600 extra calories of wiggle room. Time you could not be spending on the ellipticle, or burger splurging at '5 guys' once a week. That's big.

In addition to the calories you're not burning, you're also permanently handicapping yourself because sitting for that long and keeping your hamstrings and glutes in a locked position can cause what's called "gluteal amnesia" which is when you're biggest muscles in your body essentially turn off, and forget how they work. So, not only are you not burning calories, you're reducing your muscle's ability to burn calories in the few minutes you do spend standing or walking during the day.

On top of all that business, when you turn your glutes off, you can force your pelvis to anterior-ly rotate (rotate the top forward, making you look much like a new barbie figurine from the side)

ASIDE: Not only does barbie indoctrinate young girls into thinking that they need to have a impossible figure for men to love them, she's also now trying to make girls think that they need to have bad posture, weak glute medius and piriformis, and a rotated pelvis. This is not OK! I'm going to start selling bracelets to raise awareness...

Since you most likely don't have the waist that barbie has, an pelvis that is rotated forward will make your belly stick out, making you look like you have a bigger midsection than you actually do. Not good.

So, what's a person to do?

Stand up more, take more breaks, walk around your building, go get coffee with Ted from accounting, flirt with that girl from the front desk, etc. Find any and all excuses to be standing as much as you possible can. Men's Health says: Make fitness a lifestyle, not just a part of your day that you do when you're not tired from work.

Get a swiss ball and sit on it, it's not the fix, but it's a step in the right direction. Bottom line is, get up out of your seat. Pick your chair up and carry it downstairs. Pick it up. Toss it in your industrial grade trash compactor. Rejoice

FITNESS CHALLENGE

Find a piece of equipment at your gym/health club/house/garage/backyard. Anything will do. A bike, a rock, the leg press machine, a Costco sized bag of lentils, etc.
Now pick an exercise. The more joints involved in your exercise the better (read: DON'T DO CURLS) Whether it's bike around the block, lift rock overhead, lentil squats, it doesn't matter, just make it good.
Now, perform said exercise
a) as many times as you can
b) as many times as you can in 3 minutes
c) as fast as you can for 100 reps.

Once you're finished, take a 45 second break, then do it again. Get more reps, or do it faster.
It's hard, but not impossible. when your muscles are burning, try this trick. Stop thinking about the muscular stimulation as pain. It's not pain. Avoid saying "it hurts, I hate this, this sucks, I'd rather birth an 18 wheeler" etc. Instead, focus on your burn and try to think about and describe exactly what it feels like. Can't quite get it? Assign a color to your pain, don't think too hard, just whatever comes to mind in the moment. Stay there, thinking about that color, and how it relates to what you're feeling right now.
See if it changes.
Finish your reps.
Become strong and powerful
Like a lion
Made out of small robots
On steroids
In a tank.

Try Harder.

NEWSFLASH. You're probably not romantic anymore. You probably used to be, but you lost 'it'when you got rid of all your old pokemon cards (correlation?) and N'SYNC albums.

Here's how to fix that.
Open your browser.
Open this tab
http://www.rainymood.com/
Now open this one.
http://endlessvideo.com/watch?v=HMnrl0tmd3k
Now open this one
http://endlessvideo.com/watch?v=DIx3aMRDUL4
Now open wine.

Boom, transformation complete. As a famous uncle in a kind of old slightly bad superhero movie said; "With great power comes great responsibility". Only use your new powers for good.