THINGS THAT HELP MY TRAINING, RECOVERY, HAPPINESS; LIFE IN GENERAL...AND MAY HELP YOU TOO!

PART IOr they might not.Not making any promises.Sorry.Honestly, most of the things that I will talk about are methods, strategies, “things” we recommend to our clients that have helped them with their training as well as life in general.I research and test everything before I recommend it. I don’t know if that makes you feel any better or not.Maybe they fit your lifestyle and you believe in them, maybe not.Maybe you’ll try them and love them.Maybe you will give me the finger.These are my opinions and experiences but all of them with the intent of making you more superhuman and more awesome.They’re in no particular order of importance so feel free to use any of these to make your life a little awesomererer (that’s a real word!)SAVE TIME AND MONEY BY HAVING SOMEONE COOK YOUR FOODThis has been a game changer!Most people have a tough time changing their nutrition and lifestyle because they are not prepared for it. If you wake up in the morning and say to yourself you’re going to eatgreat that day but haven’t prepped anything then you’re setting yourself up.You get hungry and there is nothing around that you “should” be eating so you revert to the “best food you can find” or just go for the kill with whatever you’re craving.So preparing your food will make your life easier. Tastier too.“I don’t have time for it Luka!”I will call B.S. on that!It will save you time AND money. You can make 3 to 4 days worth of delicious food (more on the delicious food later) in around an hour and a half. When you go out to lunch twice it takes you that long!“Healthy food is so expensive though.”This is another statement that kills me because people make this statement without ever being honest with themselves about where they spend their money on food. So they “assume” that buying healthy food and prepping itwill break the bank.I’m not even going to touch on the fact that it’s one of the best investments that you can make. Ummm, its what you put in your body that fuels you, feeds your cells, keeps you healthy, looking good, etc. Duh.The fact is that when you go out and eat a salad that is $10, you’ve overpaid x 3-4 (watch the reality TV restaurant shows and you’ll see how much they mark up the cost of goods to keep the business going). So they are spending around $3 to make that salad, maybe less.You can make a tastier, more nutritious salad for $6 yourself with all the best ingredients AND you’ll save 40%.You just have to check yourself before you wreck yourself.I checked myself and noticed I was spending waaayyyy too much money on eating out. I work long and late so I don’t feel like making food after working a long day. This led me to eat out a lot. I’d order healthy food but I was spending a ton of money.But I’m a solutions guy so...Italked to a friend that is an awesome cook and gave her a recipe book to cook from and negotiated on what I’d pay her to cook for me. The extra money helped her out and the cooking helped me out a ton.

Here’s the kicker!After buying the best quality food and paying my friend I still saved a couple of hundred bucks at the end of the month. I know this because I assessed my spending four months prior and it was just looking at the numbers and realizing I was dumb to not do this sooner.You can eat better, be more compliant, have your meals prepared and save money. I can prove it over and over again as I have advised multiple people to do this and they had success with it (after not believing me at first).A great way to check how much you’re spending on food, groceries, or anything else for that matter, is www.Mint.com.To make it easier for the person cooking for you, just have them make recipes from books you choose. My two are:1. Gourmet Nutrition Cook Book2. Caveman Feast E-BookThis makes so much senseand makes my life easier.There are multiple things you can take away from this:

• Preparing your food doesn’t take that much time or effort and will significantly help with your results and lifestyle.
• You are spending too much money on eating and drinking out.
• Getting someone tocook food for you may save you money.
• Food made at home tastes better than food in restaurants so cook more at home.

You can be stubborn and keep doing what you are doing or take some of these tips and get better results, have more time, eat better food and even save money.It also doesn’t hurt to feel like you have a chef.WHEN GETTING STABBED BY A NEEDLE ISN’T BAD AT ALL; IT’S GREAT!I’m a geek and I tend to spend too much time reading, studying and researching anything that can help you and me with looking, feeling and performing better.This is great for you.Because of it I come across some amazing new (or old) practices that can help you be more ninja-like.Vigor Ground Team during their leisure time...

In this case what I came across, used myself and seen seriously great changes from, is something called IMT (Intramuscular Manual Therapy)/dry needling.Sounds complex, but really its just smart people sticking needles in triggered up tissue the right way, making you feel way betteror even amazing.Hmmm, I will continue to use that explanation when asked what it is.You can also check out a deeper explanation on our friends and partners (Doctors of PT, Kirkland site): http://www.doctorsofpt.com/dry-needling.html.I have been a fan of ART (Active Release Therapy), Graston and other techniques and still use them and refer our clients to them. In all honesty though, I have never had such significant results with any of the methods as I have had with IMT!This is my personal experience but also the experience of many of our clients that we referred to this method.I am a believer that it’s not always that one method that is superior over another but rather the quality of the practitioner. In this case I believe the method is amazing and if you can find a quality practitioner to go with it you’ll be winning.If anyone tell you this is dry needling - run!

To go a little more in depth with what IMT/dry needlingis, we had a workshop at Vigor Ground Fitness and Performance to showcase the effectiveness of this method to our members.We took my great friend and partner in crime Steve Krebs, who is a train wreck and worked on him while explaining what Austin is doing.After his session Steve could move without pain, and better, than he had in the past 10 years (in his words).As with anything, I don’t believe one thing/method solves any and every issue but I’m always looking to add to my toolbox ofresources to make our clients (and myself) more bulletproof so that they can train hard and do anything else they want to do for as long as possible.BREATHING IS KIND OF IMPORTANT“Duh Luka! If we don’t breathe we die!”I wish that wasn’t the response I received after I mentioned it this past week.But itwas.I had two options after receiving this response:1. Bang my head against a wall (which sounded good at the time)2. Educate about breathing and hopefully inspire to have them implement some exercises into their lifestyle.

So we all know we need to breathe to live.Thing is breathing affects a lot of things, from stress, posture, conditioning, and more.For example, when it comes to the quality of your breathing:...Mike Robertson gave a great example in our in-staff training where he mentioned that people always complain about the recycled air in airplanes being the cause of getting sick. No one likes to be in a plane with hundreds of people, breathing that recycled air. Right?Well, when you don’t breathe right and don’t exhale fully you are actually trapping a lot of the bad air in your lungs. You are breathing recycled air.Breathing affects muscle tension in the shoulders, neck, upper and lower back, core. It affects mobility and stability.When you do something 20,000 times a day it can definitely make a difference, good or bad, in how we move and live.I’m always working on finding ways to improve performance and stay healthy so I can keep pushing my body to the next level.This was one of the reasons why I researched deeper on how breathing can help.But the main reason for me personally, honestly, was stress.I’ve been under a lot of stress lately (read, years), not just from training but business and life. I’m also an A-type person that is always go go GO. This means it’s harder for me to slow down and take it easy. Because of this reason I’ve been strategically implementing recovery/relaxation strategies such as:

• Russian bath house (cold/hot treatment)
• Massages
• Meditation
• Morning walks

This has all helped.But at the end of the day I also needed to focus on my breathing to take me from always being in “fight or flight” mode to a little more “rest and digest” mode at times.Try it out for yourself (check out the video I’ll post below) and you’ll notice multiple things happening, one of them being a reduced resting heart rate and being “way more chill” (scientific term, I know).Let’s look at what actually makes up effective breathing. There are three components (courtesy of Mike Robertson):1. The abdomen/core fills,2. The lower ribs expand, and3. The upper ribs fill (think upper chest into your shoulder)Unfortunately most breathing doesn’t look like this.The issues we’ll see with clients, one’s I had myself, and most people in general (I tend to assess everyone while walking around so if I’m starring at you its just an assessment) are:

• Inability to fully exhale. This goes back to what I mentioned earlier as far as breathing recycled air but what also happens is that you’ll have “air in your chest” and look puffed up, which makes your lats tight on a consistent basis. The air is pretty much trapped in your body.
• Ineffective breathing through the diaphragm.When you see people that fall into anterior pelvic tilt and have a big lumbar curve (lordosis) it has a lot to do with the diaphragm and pelvic floor not being aligned, which causes poor diaphragmatic function. This leads to the paraspinals and hip flexors helping with breathing. So it’s not just sitting that affects posture this way…
• Poor expansion of the chest (apical) when breathing. This means that the person cannot fill their chest full of air when taking a deep breath. You’d think this is easy but would be surprised how many people cannot do this at all. Improve this and you may also see some serious improvement inshoulder function. More intrigues huh?
• Excessive use of the neck muscles when breathing. I also call this the Gollum syndrome, which creates forward head posture and overly developed neck musculature.

Yep, I used to be like that too...

Apart from the issues that are listed above, improper breathing also makes us stay “tense.”You know when people look at you and you’re stressed and you look like you are tensed up?Well, it's because you are.We’re supposed to be able to tense up and relax at different times, for instance sleep and training (relax vs. tense). When you’re breathing patters are off then you are on the tense side most of the time, which is why you have a tough time sleeping and letting go.That is why so many practices hundreds of years old will remind you to focus on your breathing when you are going through something stressful. It works!There really are so many benefits to breathing better, beyond theone’s I discussed in this post. I wanted to discuss them because it’s something that we’ve started making a staple in our training programs and something that has helped me a ton personally, in training and in life.Without getting to deep into tests, here is something that will help youout with a breathing drill from my good friend and IFAST co-owner Mike Robertson:Make sure it’s something you’re actually addressing and not just saying “that’s cool” and then going on about your day like you have been. You have to actually DO it to make a change.And oh what a change it will make, especially if you’re stressed out a lot of the time.I hope that some of the things that have helped me out will help youout too. The great thing is there is more to come so keep your eyes peeled for Part II.If there’s something that has helped your training, recovery, happiness and life in general please share it below as I’d love to share it with others and try it out myself.Done be scurred and write!