A new article on MMA Training (this is the first part in a series) is available on Dragondoor.
Learn about the Gazellasaurus Rex and how it applies to your strength and conditioning workouts.
We’re telling you its coming – we’re just not saying when
So if you’ve been paying attention to facebook and some other things that we post on you know that I’m working on a kettlebell training book. We have a working title, but I won’t release it yet. We have significant part of the draft done, but we’re just now working on the editing, but let me share with you some of the things that are in it now. It’s not ready for final editing so this won’t be the entirety of what shows up, but let me just give you a little taste of where we’re headed.
There are 60 mixing the kettlebell with other implement workouts. That means specific workouts on how to train the kettlebell with something like a sledgehammer or how to train with something like a concept 2 rower or how to train it with something like a keg and many other types of useful and incredible tools.
There are about a dozen styles of kettlebell cycling that I have productively used to gain incredible strength, fat loss, etc., as well as keep an incredible amount of muscle as I dropped over 100lbs. It also brought me to the radical swing progress I’ve made: 2,000 reps unbroken, etc., and pushing me towards new heights with other kettlebell exercises. For instance 1100 jerks in one hour with the 24kg, 300 jerks in 10 minutes and so on.
There are nine weekly kettlebell schedules that tell you exactly how I’ve trained as well as ways to put your workout together giving you specifics on intensity, exercises to do, training for whole body strength and endurance, frequency, volume, etc. to build both your total strength as well as incredible levels of kettlebell performance.
That’s just a little bit of what’s coming – make sure you stay tuned, because we’ll be dropping more about that and telling you more as we get closer to the book being ready for release.
Below is a reprinted article from Dr. Mercola on cholesterol that dispels many myths surrounding it. I think it’s well worth a read. And if you’re interested in more great health information I highly recommend you get on Dr. Mercola’s email newsletter here.
By Dr. Mercola
Cholesterol could easily be described as the smoking gun of the last two decades.
It”s been responsible for demonizing entire categories of foods (like eggs and saturated fats) and blamed for just about every case of heart disease in the last 20 years.
Yet when I first opened my medical practice in the mid 80s, cholesterol, and the fear that yours was too high was rarely talked about.
Somewhere along the way however, cholesterol became a household word — something that you must keep as low as possible, or suffer the consequences.
You are probably aware that there are many myths that portray fat and cholesterol as one of the worst foods you can consume. Please understand that these myths are actually harming your health.
Not only is cholesterol most likely not going to destroy your health (as you have been led to believe), but it is also not the cause of heart disease.
And for those of you taking cholesterol-lowering drugs, the information that follows could not have been given to you fast enough. But before I delve into this life-changing information, let”s get some basics down first.
That”s right, you do need cholesterol.
This soft, waxy substance is found not only in your bloodstream, but also in every cell in your body, where it helps to produce cell membranes, hormones, vitamin D and bile acids that help you to digest fat. Cholesterol also helps in the formation of your memories and is vital for neurological function.
Your liver makes about 75 percent of your body”s cholesterol,[i] and according to conventional medicine, there are two types:
Also making up your total cholesterol count are:
Understand this:
Health officials in the United States urge everyone over the age of 20 to have their cholesterol tested once every five years. Part of this test is your total cholesterol, or the sum of your blood”s cholesterol content, including HDL, LDLs, and VLDLs..
The American Heart Association recommends that your total cholesterol is less than 200 mg/dL, but what they do not tell you is that total cholesterol level is just about worthless in determining your risk for heart disease, unless it is above 330.
In addition, the AHA updated their guidelines in 2004, lowering the recommended level of LDL cholesterol from 130 to LDL to less than 100, or even less than 70 for patients at very high risk.
In order to achieve these outrageous and dangerously low targets, you typically need to take multiple cholesterol-lowering drugs. So the guidelines instantly increased the market for these dangerous drugs. Now, with testing children”s cholesterol levels, they”re increasing their market even more.
I have seen a number of people with total cholesterol levels over 250 who actually were at low heart disease risk due to their HDL levels. Conversely, I have seen even more who had cholesterol levels under 200 that were at a very high risk of heart disease based on the following additional tests:
HDL percentage is a very potent heart disease risk factor. Just divide your HDL level by your cholesterol. That percentage should ideally be above 24 percent.
You can also do the same thing with your triglycerides and HDL ratio. That percentage should be below 2.
Keep in mind, however, that these are still simply guidelines, and there”s a lot more that goes into your risk of heart disease than any one of these numbers. In fact, it was only after word got out that total cholesterol is a poor predictor of heart disease that HDL and LDL cholesterol were brought into the picture.
They give you a closer idea of what”s going on, but they still do not show you everything.
Now that we”ve defined good and bad cholesterol, it has to be said that there is actually only one type of cholesterol. Ron Rosedale, MD, who is widely considered to be one of the leading anti-aging doctor in the United States, does an excellent job of explaining this concept:[ii]
“Notice please that LDL and HDL are lipoproteins — fats combined with proteins. There is only one cholesterol. There is no such thing as “good” or “bad” cholesterol.
Cholesterol is just cholesterol.
It combines with other fats and proteins to be carried through the bloodstream, since fat and our watery blood do not mix very well.
Fatty substances therefore must be shuttled to and from our tissues and cells using proteins. LDL and HDL are forms of proteins and are far from being just cholesterol.
In fact we now know there are many types of these fat and protein particles. LDL particles come in many sizes and large LDL particles are not a problem. Only the so-called small dense LDL particles can potentially be a problem, because they can squeeze through the lining of the arteries and if they oxidize, otherwise known as turning rancid, they can cause damage and inflammation.
Thus, you might say that there is “good LDL” and “bad LDL.”
Also, some HDL particles are better than others. Knowing just your total cholesterol tells you very little. Even knowing your LDL and HDL levels will not tell you very much.”
Before we continue, I really would like you to get your mind around this concept.
In the United States, the idea that cholesterol is evil is very much engrained in most people”s minds. But this is a very harmful myth that needs to be put to rest right now.
“First and foremost,” Dr. Rosedale points out, “cholesterol is a vital component of every cell membrane on Earth. In other words, there is no life on Earth that can live without cholesterol.
That will automatically tell you that, in and of itself, it cannot be evil. In fact, it is one of our best friends.
We would not be here without it. No wonder lowering cholesterol too much increases one”s risk of dying. Cholesterol is also a precursor to all of the steroid hormones. You cannot make estrogen, testosterone, cortisone, and a host of other vital hormones without cholesterol.”
You probably are aware of the incredible influence of vitamin D on your health. If you aren”t, or need a refresher, you can visit my vitamin D page.
What most people do not realize is that the best way to obtain your vitamin D is from safe exposure to sun on your skin. The UVB rays in sunlight interact with the cholesterol on your skin and convert it to vitamin D.
Bottom line?
If your cholesterol level is too low you will not be able to use the sun to generate sufficient levels of vitamin D.
Additionally, it provides some intuitive feedback that if cholesterol were so dangerous, why would your body use it as precursor for vitamin D and virtually all of the steroid hormones in your body?
Other “evidence” that cholesterol is good for you?
Consider the role of “good” HDL cholesterol. Essentially, HDL takes cholesterol from your body”s tissues and arteries, and brings it back to your liver, where most of your cholesterol is produced. If the purpose of this was to eliminate cholesterol from your body, it would make sense that the cholesterol would be shuttled back to your kidneys or intestines so your body could remove it.
Instead, it goes back to your liver. Why?
Because your liver is going to reuse it.
“It is taking it back to your liver so that your liver can recycle it; put it back into other particles to be taken to tissues and cells that need it,” Dr. Rosedale explains. “Your body is trying to make and conserve the cholesterol for the precise reason that it is so important, indeed vital, for health.”
Inflammation has become a bit of a buzzword in the medical field because it has been linked to so many different diseases. And one of those diseases is heart disease … the same heart disease that cholesterol is often blamed for.
What am I getting at?
Well, first consider the role of inflammation in your body. In many respects, it”s a good thing as it”s your body”s natural response to invaders it perceives as threats. If you get a cut for instance, the process of inflammation is what allows you to heal.
Specifically during inflammation:
Ultimately, the cut is healed and a protective scar may form over the area.
If your arteries are damaged, a very similar process occurs inside of your body, except that a “scar” in your artery is known as plaque.
This plaque, along with the thickening of your blood and constricting of your blood vessels that normally occur during the inflammatory process, can indeed increase your risk of high blood pressure and heart attacks.
Notice that cholesterol has yet to even enter the picture.
Cholesterol comes in because, in order to replace your damaged cells, it is necessary.
Remember that no cell can form without it.
So if you have damaged cells that need to be replaced, your liver will be notified to make more cholesterol and release it into your bloodstream. This is a deliberate process that takes place in order for your body to produce new, healthy cells.
It”s also possible, and quite common, for damage to occur in your body on a regular basis. In this case, you will be in a dangerous state of chronic inflammation.
The test usually used to determine if you have chronic inflammation is a C-reactive protein (CRP) blood test. CRP level is used as a marker of inflammation in your arteries.
Generally speaking:
Even conventional medicine is warming up to the idea that chronic inflammation can trigger heart attacks. But they stop short of seeing the big picture.
In the eyes of conventional medicine, when they see increased cholesterol circulating in your bloodstream, they conclude that it — not the underlying damage to your arteries — is the cause of heart attacks.
Which brings me to my next point.
Sally Fallon, the president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, and Mary Enig, Ph.D, an expert in lipid biochemistry, have gone so far as to call high cholesterol “an invented disease, a “problem” that emerged when health professionals learned how to measure cholesterol levels in the blood.”[iii]
And this explanation is spot on.
If you have increased levels of cholesterol, it is at least in part because of increased inflammation in your body. The cholesterol is there to do a job: help your body to heal and repair.
Conventional medicine misses the boat entirely when they dangerously recommend that lowering cholesterol with drugs is the way to reduce your risk of heart attacks, because what is actually needed is to address whatever is causing your body damage — and leading to increased inflammation and then increased cholesterol.
As Dr. Rosedale so rightly points out:2
“If excessive damage is occurring such that it is necessary to distribute extra cholesterol through the bloodstream, it would not seem very wise to merely lower the cholesterol and forget about why it is there in the first place.
It would seem much smarter to reduce the extra need for the cholesterol — the excessive damage that is occurring, the reason for the chronic inflammation.”
I”ll discuss how to do this later in the report, but first let”s take a look at the dangers of low cholesterol — and how it came to be that cholesterol levels needed to be so low in the first place.
All kinds of nasty things can happen to your body. Remember, every single one of your cells needs cholesterol to thrive — including those in your brain. Perhaps this is why low cholesterol wreaks havoc on your psyche.
One large study conducted by Dutch researchers found that men with chronically low cholesterol levels showed a consistently higher risk of having depressive symptoms.[iv]
This may be because cholesterol affects the metabolism of serotonin, a substance involved in the regulation of your mood. On a similar note, Canadian researchers found that those in the lowest quarter of total cholesterol concentration had more than six times the risk of committing suicide as did those in the highest quarter.[v]
Dozens of studies also support a connection between low or lowered cholesterol levels and violent behavior, through this same pathway: lowered cholesterol levels may lead to lowered brain serotonin activity, which may, in turn, lead to increased violence and aggression.[vi]
And one meta-analysis of over 41,000 patient records found that people who take statin drugs to lower their cholesterol as much as possible may have a higher risk of cancer,[vii] while other studies have linked low cholesterol to Parkinson”s disease.
What cholesterol level is too low? Brace yourself.
Probably any level much under 150 — an optimum would be more like 200.
Now I know what you are thinking: “But my doctor tells me my cholesterol needs to be under 200 to be healthy.” Well let me enlighten you about how these cholesterol recommendations came to be. And I warn you, it is not a pretty story.
This is a significant issue. I have seen large numbers of people who have their cholesterol lowered below 150, and there is little question in my mind that it is causing far more harm than any benefit they are receiving by lowering their cholesterol this low.
In 2004, the U.S. government”s National Cholesterol Education Program panel advised those at risk for heart disease to attempt to reduce their LDL cholesterol to specific, very low, levels.
Before 2004, a 130-milligram LDL cholesterol level was considered healthy. The updated guidelines, however, recommended levels of less than 100, or even less than 70 for patients at very high risk.
Keep in mind that these extremely low targets often require multiple cholesterol-lowering drugs to achieve.
Fortunately, in 2006 a review in the Annals of Internal Medicine[viii] found that there is insufficient evidence to support the target numbers outlined by the panel. The authors of the review were unable to find research providing evidence that achieving a specific LDL target level was important in and of itself, and found that the studies attempting to do so suffered from major flaws.
Several of the scientists who helped develop the guidelines even admitted that the scientific evidence supporting the less-than-70 recommendation was not very strong.
So how did these excessively low cholesterol guidelines come about?
Eight of the nine doctors on the panel that developed the new cholesterol guidelines had been making money from the drug companies that manufacture statin cholesterol-lowering drugs.[ix]
The same drugs that the new guidelines suddenly created a huge new market for in the United States.
Coincidence? I think not.
Now, despite the finding that there is absolutely NO evidence to show that lowering your LDL cholesterol to 100 or below is good for you, what do you think the American Heart Association STILL recommends?
Lowering your LDL cholesterol levels to less than 100.[x]
And to make matters worse, the standard recommendation to get to that level almost always includes one or more cholesterol-lowering drugs.
If you are concerned about your cholesterol levels, taking a drug should be your absolute last resort. And when I say last resort, I”m saying the odds are very high, greater than 100 to 1, that you don”t need drugs to lower your cholesterol.
To put it another way, among the more than 20,000 patients who have come to my clinic, only four or five of them truly needed these drugs, as they had genetic challenges of familial hypercholesterolemia that required it..
Contrast this to what is going on in the general population. According to data from Medco Health Solutions Inc., more than half of insured Americans are taking drugs for chronic health conditions. And cholesterol-lowering medications are the second most common variety among this group, with nearly 15 percent of chronic medication users taking them (high blood pressure medications — another vastly over-prescribed category — were first).[xi]
Disturbingly, as written in BusinessWeek early in 2008, “Some researchers have even suggested — half-jokingly — that the medications should be put in the water supply.”[xii]
Count yourself lucky that you probably do NOT need to take cholesterol-lowering medications, because these are some nasty little pills.
Statin drugs work by inhibiting an enzyme in your liver that”s needed to manufacture cholesterol. What is so concerning about this is that when you go tinkering around with the delicate workings of the human body, you risk throwing everything off kilter.
Case in point, “statin drugs inhibit not just the production of cholesterol, but a whole family of intermediary substances, many if not all of which have important biochemical functions in their own right,” say Enig and Fallon.3
For starters, statin drugs deplete your body of Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), which is beneficial to heart health and muscle function. Because doctors rarely inform people of this risk and advise them to take a CoQ10 supplement, this depletion leads to fatigue, muscle weakness, soreness, and eventually heart failure.
Muscle pain and weakness, a condition called rhabdomyolysis, is actually the most common side effect of statin drugs, which is thought to occur because statins activate the atrogin-1 gene, which plays a key role in muscle atrophy.[xiii]
By the way, muscle pain and weakness may be an indication that your body tissues are actually breaking down — a condition that can cause kidney damage.
Statin drugs have also been linked to:
And recently a possible association was found between statins and an increased risk of Lou Gehrig”s disease.[xvii]
Other cholesterol-lowering drugs besides statins also have side effects, most notably muscle pain and weakness.
IMPORTANT NOTE
If, for whatever reason, you or someone you know or love does not believe the information in this report and chooses to stay on statin drugs, then please make sure they at least take one to two Ubiquinols per day.
This will help prevent all the side effects mentioned above.
Ubiquinol is the reduced version of Coenzyme Q-10 and is far more effective if you are over 35-40 years old. It is the form of the supplement that actually works, and if you take CoQ-10 and your body can”t reduce it to uniquinol you are just fooling yourself and wasting your money.
You can visit our ubiquinol information page for more details.
With all of these risks, the drugs had better be effective, right? Well, even this is questionable. At least, it depends on how you look at it.
Most cholesterol lowering drugs can effectively lower your cholesterol numbers, but are they actually making you any healthier, and do they help prevent heart disease?
Have you ever heard of the statistic known as NNT, or number needed to treat?
I didn”t think so. In fact, most doctors haven”t either. And herein lies the problem.
NNT answers the question: How many people have to take a particular drug to avoid one incidence of a medical issue (such as a heart attack)?
For example, if a drug had an NNT of 50 for heart attacks, then 50 people have to take the drug in order to prevent one heart attack.
Easy enough, right?
Well, drug companies would rather that you not focus on NNT, because when you do, you get an entirely different picture of their “miracle” drugs. Take, for instance, Pfizer”s Lipitor, which is the most prescribed cholesterol medication in the world and has been prescribed to more than 26 million Americans.[xviii]
According to Lipitor”s own Web site, Lipitor is clinically proven to lower bad cholesterol 39-60 percent, depending on the dose. Sounds fairly effective, right?
Well, BusinessWeek actually did an excellent story on this very topic earlier this year,[xix] and they found the REAL numbers right on Pfizer”s own newspaper ad for Lipitor.
Upon first glance, the ad boasts that Lipitor reduces heart attacks by 36 percent. But there is an asterisk. And when you follow the asterisk, you find the following in much smaller type:
“That means in a large clinical study, 3% of patients taking a sugar pill or placebo had a heart attack compared to 2% of patients taking Lipitor.”<
What this means is that for every 100 people who took the drug over 3.3 years, three people on placebos, and two people on Lipitor, had heart attacks. That means that taking Lipitor resulted in just one fewer heart attack per 100 people.
The NNT, in this case, is 100. One hundred people have to take Lipitor for more than three years to prevent one heart attack. And the other 99 people, well, they"ve just dished out hundreds of dollars and increased their risk of a multitude of side effects for nothing.
So you can see how the true effectiveness of cholesterol drugs like Lipitor is hidden behind a smokescreen.
Or in some cases, not hidden at all.
Early in 2008, it came out that Zetia, which works by inhibiting absorption of cholesterol from your intestines, and Vytorin, which is a combination of Zetia and Zocor (a statin drug), do not work.
This was discovered AFTER the drugs acquired close to 20 percent of the U.S. market for cholesterol-lowering drugs. And also after close to 1 million prescriptions for the drugs were being written each week in the United States, bringing in close to $4 billion in 2007.[xx]
It was only after the results of a trial by the drugs” makers, Merck and Schering-Plough, were released that this was found out. Never mind that the trial was completed in April 2006, and results were not released until January 2008.
And it”s no wonder the drug companies wanted to hide these results.
While Zetia does lower cholesterol by 15 percent to 20 percent, trials did not show that it reduces heart attacks or strokes, or that it reduces plaques in arteries that can lead to heart problems.
The trial by the drugs” makers, which studied whether Zetia could reduce the growth of plaques, found that plaques grew nearly twice as fast in patients taking Zetia along with Zocor (Vytorin) than in those taking Zocor alone.[xxi]
Of course, the answer is not to turn back to typical statin drugs to lower your cholesterol, as many of the so-called experts would have you believe.
You see, statins are thought to have a beneficial effect on inflammation in your body, thereby lowering your risk of heart attack and stroke.
But you can lower inflammation in your body naturally, without risking any of the numerous side effects of statin drugs. This should also explain why my guidelines for lowering cholesterol are identical to those to lower inflammation.
For more in-depth information about cholesterol-lowering drugs, please see my recently updated statin drug index page.
There is a major misconception that you must avoid foods like eggs and saturated fat to protect your heart. While it”s true that fats from animal sources contain cholesterol, I”ve explained earlier in this article why this should not scare you — but I”ll explain even further here.
This misguided principle is based on the “lipid hypothesis” — developed in the 1950s by nutrition pioneer Ancel Keys — that linked dietary fat to coronary heart disease.
The nutrition community of that time completely accepted the hypothesis, and encouraged the public to cut out butter, red meat, animal fats, eggs, dairy and other “artery clogging” fats from their diets — a radical change at that time.
What you may not know is that when Keys published his analysis that claimed to prove the link between dietary fats and coronary heart disease, he selectively analyzed information from only six countries to prove his correlation, rather than comparing all the data available at the time — from 22 countries.
As a result of this “cherry-picked” data, government health organizations began bombarding the public with advice that has contributed to the diabetes and obesity epidemics going on today: eat a low-fat diet.
Not surprisingly, numerous studies have actually shown that Keys” theory was wrong and saturated fats are healthy, including these studies from Fallon and Enig”s classic article The Skinny on Fats:[xxii]
Of course, as Americans cut out nutritious animal fats from their diets, they were left hungry. So they began eating more processed grains, more vegetable oils, and more high-fructose corn syrup, all of which are nutritional disasters.
It is this latter type of diet that will eventually lead to increased inflammation, and therefore cholesterol, in your body. So don”t let anyone scare you away from saturated fat anymore.
Chronic inflammation is actually caused by a laundry list of items such as:
So to sum it all up, in order to lower your inflammation and cholesterol levels naturally, you must address the items on this list.
So there you have it; the reasons why high cholesterol is a worry that many of you simply do not need to have, along with a simple plan to optimize yours.
If someone you love is currently taking cholesterol-lowering drugs, I urge you to share this information with them as well, and take advantage of the thousands of free pages of information on www.Mercola.com.
For the majority of you reading this right now, there”s no reason to risk your health with cholesterol-lowering drugs. With the plan I”ve just outlined, you”ll achieve the cholesterol levels you were meant to have, along with the very welcome “side effects” of increased energy, mood and mental clarity.
Too good to be true?
Hardly.
For the vast majority of people, making a few lifestyle changes causes healthy cholesterol levels to naturally occur.
As always, your health really is in your hands. Now it”s up to you to take control — and shape it into something great.
[i] American Heart Association January 23, 2008
[ii] Mercola.com, Cholesterol is NOT the Cause of Heart Disease, Ron Rosedale May 28, 2005
[iii] Fallon, S. and Mary Enig. “Dangers of Statin Drugs: What You Haven”t Been Told About Popular Cholesterol-Lowering Medicines,” The Weston A. Price Foundation
[iv] Psychosomatic Medicine 2000;62.
[v] Epidemiology 2001 Mar;12:168-72
[vi] Annals of Internal Medicine (1998;128(6):478-487) The Journal of the American Medical Association (1997;278:313-321)
[vii] Journal of the American College of Cardiology July 31, 2007; 50:409-418
[viii] Annals of Internal Medicine October 3, 2006; 145(7): 520-530
[ix] USAToday.com October 16, 2004
[x] American Heart Association, “What Your Cholesterol Level Means,” accessed May 22, 2008
[xi] MSNBC.com More than half of Americans on chronic meds May 14, 2008(accessed June 9, 2008)
[xii] BusinessWeek Do Cholesterol Drugs Do Any Good? January 17, 2008 (accessed June 9, 2008)
[xiii] The Journal of Clinical Investigation December 2007; 117(12):3940-51
[xiv] Mercola.com Sudden Memory Loss Linked to Cholesterol Drugs
[xv] Nature Medicine September, 2000;6:965-966, 1004-1010.
[xvi] Nature Medicine, December, 2000; 6: 1311-1312, 1399-1402
[xvii] Edwards, I. Ralph; Star, Kristina; Kiuru, Anne, “Statins, Neuromuscular Degenerative Disease and an Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis-Like Syndrome,” Drug Safety, Volume 30, Number 6, 2007 , pp. 515-525(11)
[xviii] IMS Heallth. IMS National Prescription Audit Plus July 2007.
[xix] BusinessWeek.com, “Do Cholesterol Drugs Do Any Good?” January 17, 2008 (accessed June 10, 2008)
[xx] New York Times, “Cardiologists Question Delay of Data on 2 Drugs,” November 21, 2007 (accessed June 10, 2008)
[xxi] New York Times, “Drug Has No Benefit in Trial, Makers Say,” January 14, 2008 (accessed June 10, 2008)
[xxii] Enig, M and Sally Fallon, “The Skinny on Fats,” The Weston A. Price Foundation,
[xxiii] Lackland, D T, et al, J Nutr, Nov 1990, 120:11S:1433-1436
[xxiv] Nutr Week, Mar 22, 1991, 21:12:2-3
I think it’s well worth a read. And if you’re interested in more great health information I highly recommend you get on Dr. Mercola’s email newsletter here
So here’s a very cool circuit that my son Noah came up with for you to try. I guess that ‘s what happens when you live with a crazy strongman who constantly exposes you to strength and conditioning and insane people who do it. It seeps down into your brain and you come up with unique ways to play this, “bull game.” Bonus points for anybody who can tell me in the comments section which movie the, “bull game,” phrase comes from.
So here’s the circuit:
Noahs’ Stone du Soleil Tire Flips: 5 reps
5 Heavy cleans preferably with a heavy log or odd object
100 Yard sprint or weighted sprint
Repeat this three to five times or until you’re satisfied that you’re tougher than a 14 year old.
So I guess I should tell you exactly what that exercise is. Here’s the really inventive part of what he did. He put my 150lb Atlas stone about 3 feet away from my 500lb tire. He started with his back facing the tire, lifted the stone to his shoulder while supporting it with his same side hand, then took his opposite hand and pushed while twisting his body to throw the stone into the middle of the tire. Then he would flip the tire off of the stone and repeat that combination five times. That’s Noah’s Stone Du Soleil Tire Flip!
We’ll shoot a little video of this sometime soon, because it may be a little hard to visualize in print, but I think most of you will get it. Plus it’s just awesome.
Also have two questions for you and want to hear some comments on the blog so we know what’s up -
Big Announcement
So we’ve been holding you off on telling everybody this until we had the new website ready and until we were 100% ready to go with everything involved in this…
http://officialbudjeffries.com – The site will be completely launched by this evening.
Starting this September 13th – I will be going on a nationwide school tour speaking to schools. Elementary, junior high and high school speaking to them about fitness, being a champion in life and anti-bullying. Along with performing my strongman show. If the tour works out 100% correct I should be speaking at 300 schools following the nine month school year to about 100,000 kids. What a tremendous opportunity and I’m so grateful for this blessing!
There will be a possibility of having dual seminars or dual certifications with some other people along the way other strength teachers so if you wish to see something like that let me know and we will do our best to work that out. Specifically already scheduled is the Foundations of Super Human Strength Workshop with Andrew Durniat to be held at his gym in Wooster, OH on Sunday, September 12, 2010. Head over here to sign up now.
Hope to see many of you around as I tour the entire country. On the new website, “OfficialBudJeffries.com,” we have a skeleton schedule posted. That means as I move along the tour and as the summer fills up the schedule fill out, but this will give you the basics of about where I’ll be from week to week starting in northeast and following that area of the country through the fall and then to the Midwest and up into the northwest and then southwest, out to the west coast as the year progresses.
So in conjunction with this here’s some stuff you need to know – We will begin booking immediately for Strongman Training and other training seminars as well as private training along the way. We will be booking speaking engagements at churches as well. So if you own a gym and want to have me there to do a strongman training seminar as well as/or a seminar on any of the other types of fitness that we deal with then let me know, because I will need some advance notice to book ahead of time.
On the flip side you will get a massive benefit of the fact that I will already be in your area so it will cut down the expense of the seminar for everybody involved and allow you to begin an incredible product to both yourself and your clientele and community for a less expensive price.
If you wish to have some private training or consultation – one on one – look at the schedule and figure out when I’ll be in your area. Then we will work out what’s necessary for you to get that consultation. Again – because I’ll be in the area already it’ll be much cheaper than normal.
If you go to a church or any organization that would like to have me come and speak and do a motivational or strongman demonstration then let me know ahead of time. Once again the price is reduced since I’m already scheduled to be in the area.
I would love to speak to numerous churches as well as any organization that wants a powerful motivational tool.
If you work at or know of a school that would like to book me please follow the link. The website is: http://assemblyline.com Bureau of Lecturers and Performance Artists is the company that is booking for this amazing tour. They are an educational, motivational and entertainment group with performers who travel to and speak to schools. If you wish for me to visit your school then please contact them directly.
If any of the companies or people involved would like to be tour sponsors, remember that I will be speaking to about 100,000 children all across the nation and would love to work together in promoting your company, products as well as doing a great thing all across the country.
Check out http://officialbudjeffries.com
On this site you will be able to view the calendar for the year that I’ve been given thus far as my skeleton schedule. Under schools and links you will find the links to Assembly Line. You will also see video clips of the seminars we’re going to hold, what will be taught, what will be available there as well as an introduction. I really don’t need to explain this but I’m going to anyway because I rather feel like “Official Bud Jeffries,” sounds a little pretentious. It’s a web domain we purchased because years ago someone ripped up off my site name, budjeffries.com from us when it came up for renewal prior to companies offering, “Auto-renewal.” In less than 24 hours it was purchased and has been being held ever since. When we attempted to contact them to purchase it back they wanted an exorbitant price to sell it back. Occasionally we receive a notice from them offering to sell it back to us and this is a common practice in the web world. Essentially they’re holding my name address hostage. Thus we created “officialbudjeffries.com.”
On the site you will also see the last church that I performed at which was filmed at First Baptist at the Mall in Lakeland. It’s about 45 minutes of free video showing different strength feats and the message involved there. If you wish to have a performance at your school the message can be tailored to whatever you’re looking for in keeping with the understanding that a religious message cannot be conveyed in a public school. We can also tailor it for a corporate event.
Hope to see many of you around the US. Contact me if you’d like to get together as we go. I’m looking forward to it!
The seventh in a series on growing your own food. This one features tomatoes.
A new article has just been added to the site on how to make your own D handle for heavy duty kettlebell swings.
And if you missed the first part on the T Handle you can find that here.
The sixth in a series on growing your own food. This one features potatoes.
The strength philosophy we espouse here at Strongerman.com is ever expanding. It’s also ever expanding into areas of integration of total mind, body, spirit and health. Strength and endurance are incredible and wonderful qualities that everyone should have as well as being incredible indelible parts of health. However health and total being is an entirely greater subject. At some point we’ll be dealing what I’m about to mention here in a future book.
Read the new article on the 11 Pillars of Ultimate Strength and Health.
Plus Download Power Points Volume 1 For Super Size, Strength, Endurance and Health  |
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Super Muscle – Can you build it?
However recently research has shown that there are subtle muscle types and that they can be modified. I.e., muscle types which while it remains its own individual type will take on the qualities of other fiber types if you train for it. Actually that’s sort of a “Duh,” science moment. I mean – what you train for specifically is what you get out of life: If you train for health you get health, if you train for strength you get strength, if you train for endurance you get endurance. However at one time it was thought that you could be either one or the other, but never be both.
I believe I’ve come to some of the conclusions of how to get there, that you can be both incredibly enduring and incredibly strong. How can you do this? Can you change your muscle fiber types? If you’re very strong, but lack the ability to run across the parking lot without falling apart? Can you fix that? If you’re very enduring but can’t lift a sack of groceries can you fix that?
Obviously you can fix all of these things, but I’m talking about really an upper level of performance. I’m talking about the ability to go from doing any kind of aerobic or muscular endurance type exercise for long periods of time with incredible performances there and the ability to lift incredibly heavy things together at the same time. Not individually, not at different phases throughout the year, I’m talking about both at the same time.
Can you get that? Is it possible? I believe it’s completely possible and the molding of fiber types to do what you want them to do is to a significant extent within your control. So how do you do it? It’s actually pretty simple. You train for it.
Now there are certainly ways to make it maximize which I think I’ve found several of, but here are a couple of the keys. You have to train very heavy with repetition on several things. It’s simple. If you never do the power stuff, never get the maximum power strength exercises you’ll simply never build that ability into your muscles whether it comes naturally to you or not.
You have to do explosive endurance work. Now I believe that certainly any endurance work you do long slow distance style will produce endurance but it won’t produce the kind of endurance most people really want. That’s the ability to go hard for long periods of time not the ability to simply cruise for long periods of time. I believe it will interfere if you over do it with your maximum strength so if you do repetitive explosive long term training and especially if you mix it with heavy endurance training both in multiple formats one of which is to mix it into your actual individual workouts for instance five minutes of sets of kettlebell swings followed immediately by one to two heavy lifts repeated for a pre-set period of time is one of the secrets to building that particular super muscle. Building fiber types that are super strong and super enduring all at the same time.
Are you doing that in your training? For now be sure to get the Twisted Conditioning books as I’ve been telling you how to do this for years. Soon we’ll have my latest and greatest findings…