Supplementing Health: Things to do BEFORE Visiting GNC*

Over a year has passed since my initial contact with athletes from Dominican High School, a private Catholic school on the north side of Milwaukee, WI. It's been a great experience working with the high school athletes from several sports and I'm excited to be kicking off the start of the school year as their Head Strength and Conditioning Coordinator. Since starting my personal training career (back in 2005 as the 11^th CrossFit affiliate), I learned very quickly from my mentors at the time the motivational power of the blog. It recognizes results, gets people talking and helps to generate excitement over the hard work being done and the achievements being made. Since there are certain issues in displaying pictures of scholarship bound athletes on the website of a private business, I took the route of creating a Facebook fan page dedicated solely to the students at the high school. This way I could provide good informational links, share some motivational material, post their pictures of their workouts, etc. without any conflict of interest. The fan page went live in August of 2011.

It only took a little over one month before it happened. One of my pet peeves. A person became a fan of the page and immediately made a post in regards to a service that he wanted to promote to the parents, coaches

Testimonial by Emiliano Lake-Herrera

OK, Gang - the next post is from one of my favorite former clients. A few months ago he and his wife moved out to Colorado so that she could pursue an awesome job opportunity. Their presence at the gym has been sorely missed as they are among the funniest, most positive, energizing people I know. That, and they had OUTSTANDING results training with us at CrossFit Milwaukee, and I want to reemphasize with my clients that they can achieve the same type of success that Emiliano had provided they 1.) adhere fairly strictly to a paleo diet, 2.) make strength training a paramount priority and 3.) emphasize consistency of training in their fitness lifestyle.

Karate, I'm Sorry For Being So Harsh..... Random Musings on Karate, MMA Training, Midline Fitness and Lessons Learned

During the course of life, important moments of growth are often preceded when fundamental beliefs are seriously challenged. Hopefully, if one is mature and ready enough, openness replaces dogmatism, new methods erode ingrained behavior and, in the end, an appreciation forms for the stepping stones and obstacles that necessitates true learning and growth. No one ever said this process was easy. Quite the contrary, sometimes one realizes that a colossal amount of time and effort have been spent on endeavors that are hugely counterproductive to our long-term goals and happiness. We see this in fitness (“I should have spent less time on curls, the pec deck; maybe more on pull-ups, dips....”). We see this in martial arts (“if only I wrestled in high school instead of taking karate class” - more on this later). We see this (perhaps) in relationships (“Man, I married the wrong woman” - Ok, maybe that's just me....) and I'm sure it pervades almost any series of events in life's endeavors. It's not unusual to look back on the activities we mistakenly pursued in disdain as 'a mistake' or 'a waste of time' to the point that we fail to notice the little gems of knowledge or experience we may have picked up without really consciously thinking of it. Another way of appreciating this viewpoint would be to look how Thomas Edison phrased things when confronted with adversity - “I have not failed, not once. I’ve discovered ten thousand ways that don’t work.”