Life Beyond Fife

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Fitness

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Get strong first
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Get strong first

Having learned about the different fitness types, and about to make a change for life, you may have ideas about the type of body or changes you want to make. Perhaps a large part of your exercise routine will include long walks, or gentle jogs. Maybe it could include a ten minute punishing routine on a bike or rowing machine in the gym. I'm going to ask you to reconsider that choice before starting, and focus on one specific fitness type first. Strength. When we looked at the archetype strong man, I chose Mariusz. I could have chosen any strong...

3 min readRead more →
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Preparation for training

We’ve already talked about how training is stress that the body can recover from. In order to make the gain from each session as impactful as possible, you need to prepare well. Preparation helps fuel your workout, and equally important, preparation for the next workout in the form of recovery also needs to be understood and practiced well. Food As far as workouts are concerned, food is fuel. Carbohydrates, especially complex carbohydrates, provide the energy needed for a workout. Sweet potato, wholewheat pasta, or wholewheat rice are good sources. Protein is good fuel too. White fish, shellfish, and chicken are...

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Increase calories

Conventional wisdom says that getting fit is losing fat. Losing fat requires more exercise, and fewer calories. What you’ve just learned in the previous posts though, is that fitness is more complex than just your weight on the scales. There are many other measures of fitness and achieving progress in some avenues may require not eating less, but instead eating more. To explain a situation where eating more calories could be beneficial, let’s look at a business analogy. When you purchase stock in a company, you’re taking a bigger risk than putting money in a bank and getting whatever interest...

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The body as an engine
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The body as an engine

Up to now you may have thought of fitness or looking good as simply losing weight. Or more specifically, losing fat. Everyone knows if you want to lose fat, the key to doing so is down to diet and exercise. Fat is one of the two important energy storage supplies that the body has access to, and by limiting the amount of food you eat, you give the body less raw material to turn into fat; likewise, exercising burns up more fat than being sedantry. You could even write it down as a formula: $$\partial fat = calories - exercise$$...

5 min readRead more →
Fitness types
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Fitness types

Fitness means different things to different people. Fitness means different things to different sports. The physical capabilities of humans are breathtaking in terms of the kind of achievements that are possible. For running, humans have completed 100m in under 10 seconds, one mile in under 4 minutes, a marathon in under 2 hours. Polar explorers, mountaineers, free divers etc. survive inspite of deadly conditions to reach famous global boundaries. Various other disciplines see fellow humans throw, jump, kick, and lift more and further than we've ever seen. The world's best in one category could be a rank amateur in another...

6 min readRead more →
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Systems not goals

You set yourself a fitness goal. This isn't the first time, you've set many in the past. Some of which you've made, some you're embarrassed to repeat because of how you never really got started. But you're going to go again, and in your head, you have an idea about what you could be capable of achieving; what you think will make you happy to say, "I reached that goal!" Regardless of what the goal is, run a marathon, complete an iron man, or tough mudder, bench press 80kg etc. it's going to take a while before you get there....

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