Motivation from a Personal Ad

Write an Ad About Yourself for the Personal Section of the Paper -- Even If You're Happily Married

"Recognizing yourself is the beginning of success," says Burton Kaplan in his book "Winning People Over: 14 Days to Power and Confidence". "Before you can attract power, you've got to understand what you are doing and how to either correct it or work around it."

How do you do that?

A good exercise, says Kaplan, is to write a "personal" ad describing yourself -- like those you see in magazines and newspapers.

You'd probably want it to look something like this:

"Available: Attractive, sensitive, honest, healthy, faithful, respectful person who is successful but not a workaholic, adventurous but intimate, strong but tender, energetic yet warm. Appreciates, accepts, and approves of others, good sense of humor, ready to share."

Very nice. But that's not the kind of ad Kaplan is talking about.

Perhaps you ARE attractive, sensitive, honest, etc. -- but focusing only on your strengths isn't likely to do you any good. You almost certainly have a lot of negative qualities too. And until you identify those weaknesses, you're not going to be able to get rid of them.

Kaplan's recommendation is to tape a blank piece of paper to your bathroom mirror. Each morning for a week, take a long look in that mirror and write down a negative quality you see in yourself. Don't write a whole sentence; just a word for two. You might, for example, write "unaccepting."

At the end of the week, your list might look something like this:

angry
loser
complainer
at a dead end
moody
spineless
hard to get along with

Now . . . you're ready to write your ad.

Working with the words on your list, make the ad as direct as you can. The more outrageous, the better.

Here's the way an ad based on the above list might read:

"Available: Do you hate yourself? Do you hate the world? Angry loser long on potential but doing nothing seeks person who values empty promises and likes taking the blame for everything that goes wrong."

I did a shortcut version of this exercise. Instead of identifying my flaws over the course of a week, I just wrote down the first negatives about myself that came into my head.
Here's the way my ad read:

"Available: Critical, argumentative workaholic seeks impeccably perfect and beautiful person to alternately overwhelm and bore, badger and ignore, shower with every sort of gift except his time and attention. Must be able to provide non-stop praise and back rubs."
You get the point.

Seeing ourselves in such a negative light, the way other people sometimes see us, can be very disturbing. But that may be the only way we can motivate ourselves to make meaningful changes.

As Kaplan points out, problems generally don't reside "elsewhere." They are rooted inside us, in our minds and hearts, in how we set goals, create expectations, react to problems, and so on.

On the one hand, it's a psychological burden to recognize that improving your life is mostly about improving your self. On the other hand, it's liberating and empowering to realize that you don't need any outside help to make major changes.

Looking your nastiness straight in the eye may not make you happy -- at least in the near term. But if you have the will to change, Burton Kaplan's "personal ad" exercise will help you come up with some very specific things to work on.

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

God bless you,
SP

I swear, I just don't "get" bodybuilders....

As ashamed as I am to admit to it, at one time I aspired to be a bodybuilder. By that I mean I drank the Kool-Aid...by the gallon. I read all of the magazines, articles and watched “Pumping Iron” a hundred times. (I still own two copies)

There was always one thing that struck me as frustrating and odd at the same time. Why was it that I could lift more and work harder than some of the guys in the gym where I trained, but did not have the same quality of physique they had?

I always wanted a 19 inch set of “guns” to carry around and show off. At the height of my bodybuilding “career” I weighed 242 pounds and had 18 ¼ inch arms. I could squat a house and deadlift a small truck, but I also had about 20 percent body fat and couldn’t climb a flight of steps without resting at every fifth one.

You see, I was under the misguided belief that bodybuilders knew what they were doing when they spoke about muscle gains, or more technically, hypertrophy. For the bodybuilder, body part split training is the cornerstone “Bodybuilding 101.”

Every article you will ever read in a bodybuilding magazine (Muscle & Fiction, MuscleRag, Ironman, etc) espouses the virtues and supposed benefits of body part training versus full body routines. They preach the superiority of so-called “isolation exercise” versus compound movements. This entire view is based entirely upon one deeply misguided concept: muscle gain (hypertrophy) is magically and totally area specific.

Let’s be clear on this: Hypertrophy is a universal reaction and result, not an area specific one.

A group of researchers found this out a while back:

Rogers et alThe Effect of Supplemental Isolated Weight-Training Exercises on Upper-Arm Size and Upper-Body StrengthHuman Performance Laboratory, Ball State University, Muncie, IN.NSCA Conference Abstract (2000)

The subjects in question were divided into two groups, and the researchers compared the effects of a weight training program on 5 repetition maximum (5RM) strength and arm circumference.

The first group did four compound upper body exercises, like pull-ups, pushups, etc.

The second group did the same program AND included biceps curls and triceps extensions.

“What did they find out, Uncle Steve?”

Both groups made considerable gains in both arm strength and size.

Here’s the interesting part: the second group that did all of the extra specific, targeted arm work showed no added achievement on either strength or arm circumference. And the study lasted for 10 weeks!

In other words the group that simply performed multi-joint, compound exercises produced the same results as the group that did additional localized, area specific exercises. In my mind, group one got more bang for their buck and group two wasted a bunch of time and effort.

But enough about reality, let's talk hypothetically:

What if we had two brothers, twins even, who enjoyed the same exact eating habits and were attending the same college? Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the next year, without failure, they both go the local gym and lift. Their program is sound and they make progress in terms of weight, sets and repetition gains over the course of the year.

There is, however, one glaring dissimilarity.

Brother number one performs only dead-lifts.

Brother number two strictly and solely does biceps curls.

At the end of the year, who will have made more overall gains? Who do you believe will be bigger overall? Not just in terms of overall dimensions, but arm size as well?

If you said brother number one, have a slice of pie on me.

You see, he is the one who placed a greater emphasis overall through load bearing work on his ENTIRE system. The strange thing is, he never bent his elbow. Not once.

Canadian super coach Charles Poliquin has stated repeatedly that in order to gain an inch on your arm you must increase your overall muscle capacity by 10lbs. That being true (and I for one believe it is) it will come to fruition more quickly by performing exercises like the dead-lift in favor of “pretty boy” movements like dumbbell curls.

Let’s review: muscle acquisition and increase is a universal issue, not an area specific one. If I place a load exclusively on my calves, obviously they would grow. However, the growth would have its limits because the overall load is minimal. But if I performed a more complex movement, like squats or dead-lifts, the overall load is increased so dramatically that everything else would grow.

This applies also to those who inject or take steroids, growth hormone or any other muscle augmenting “supplement.” They are not simply injected into the individual muscle group and they aren’t rubbed onto the intended area of growth and enhancement.

Rather, they are injected or consumed into the body, the unit, the system. It stands to reason therefore that an increase in protein synthesis is an overall body occurrence.

The way I look at it these days is this: if I have a client who wants to gain muscle and “get big”, I do my best to develop a program for them that targets the entire system, and in that way kill several birds with just a few stones.

God bless you,
SP

When You Eat = How Much You Lose

Most people think that working out will make changes in your body. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.

The workout is simply a stimulus that allows the food you eat to re-create cells to change.

In other words, what we eat and when we eat it, is the key to change.

Your workout is simply the message that initiates change. The food actually does the work.
Many sources (and common misperceptions) instruct us not to eat immediately after a workout, but that's so far from the truth it's scary.

After any type of training, no matter the time of day, you have 30-45 minutes to put food into your muscle cells and not a single drop into your fat cells! It's called the "Golden Hour" and it is, seemingly, magical from a muscle development standpoint. Two hours later, hormonally, it is much more challenging to put nutrients into your muscles and much more will go to your fat cells!

"So Steve, how do I make a post-workout meal?"

Believe me when I say, it's okay if it contains some sugar as well as protein. Plenty of research has shown that sugar, while eaten at other times of the day is bad, can be very beneficial in that first 30-45 minutes after your workout.

Protein powder (10 grams) and sugar (Kool Aid or Gatorade works just fine - 40 grams) is ideal and easy to make: 1/2 scoop of vanilla protein powder in a small serving of Grape Kool-Aid is my fave!

And it does more than just build muscles!
It boosts your immune system, which typically takes a hit after a workout.
It dramatically speeds your recovery.
It increases fat oxidation (that's right, sugar can help you lose weight during this Golden Hour!)
It helps stabilize and regenerate potential lost muscle tissue.
It boosts the metabolism over the next 24 hours.

For more detailed info grab a copy of Nutrient Timing by John Ivy Ph.D. a respected and well known exercise physiologist from UT.

By avoiding or skipping this "meal" you are missing a golden opportunity to build some lean muscle and lose fat. In fact, if you skip this "meal" it is going to be that much harder to reach your goals.

God bless,
SP