Category: learning and living
Myths about Health, Strength and Fitness
One of the myths about working for yourself is that you have tons and tons of freedom. Not really. Your schedule goes where the market goes and you’re always at work because you don’t really leave it behind.
In the back of my mind, I plan out new feats of strength. I got the idea for my “Strongman in the Box” feat by watching an escape artist a year or two ago when my wife took me to see the Illusionists 1903 show. It also dominates my mind everytime I go to Home Depot. With every bit of hardware I see I think to myself “Can I break it? and if so, would it be cool in a show?”
Strongman in the Box, I’m trapped inside of a wooden box constructed of 2×4’s and held shut with locks and chains. The only way out is using my strength and breaking out.
I also have a hard time leaving the personal trainer in me at home. A week or two ago, I was out with my wife and daughter and overheard a conversation about training and had to bite my tongue. I’ve been a personal trainer for around 15 years now, I’ve distinguished myself and was asked to teach at personal training certification courses nationally and internationally, given advice to celebrity trainers, trained people that were on MTV and am a world record holding professional performing strongman. Basically, I know a thing or two about training. They already know this but I kept quiet because I knew that even if I explained in detail, they simply wouldn’t be ready to hear it.
If you are open minded, keep reading 🙂
Myth
“Strength training makes you inflexible.”
Nope. Here’s the deal. Your strength and your flexibility aren’t really about the muscles themselves. Both of them are regulated by the central nervous system.
Just like this gif illustration shows the central nervous system telling the muscle fibers to “contract”, it can also tell them to “relax” into a longer length. They are like a yin and yang of each other. Your muscle fibers are already long enough to perform full splits and things that contortionists do, but what stops them is that your central nervous system doesn’t perceive what you are doing as being safe and hence puts the breaks on. Your nervous system remembers the positions you are in habitually (if you don’t use it you lose it). With regular strength training, alongside regular flexibility training, you don’t have to rob Peter to pay Paul.
Myth
“You need to do lots of different stuff”
Nope, variety in training is overrated. Everything you do, competes with every other thing you do for growth and adaptation. The jack of all trades is the master of none. The high bang for the buck exercises will carry over to the things you don’t regularly train (we call this transfer and it’s the reason athletes have strength and conditioning coaches and not just skill coaches). Doing heavy deadlifts, transfers to making you better at most things.
Myth, kind of
“You don’t need to lift more than 5lbs”
Technically, yes. You need food, water, air, and to a certain extent human connection. You don’t need to lift more than 5lbs to survive…but why just survive when you can thrive? Thriving is partially about growth, improvement, and expansion. If you want to change your body, you need to challenge your body. You need to do something that tells your body “Hey, we need to get stronger so that we are better equipped to handle this (the stimulus) in the future”. And strength carries over to multiple goals. Using weight loss as an example, heavier weights burn more calories than lighter weights. They also deplete more glycogen and tell your body to release more of those hormones that keep you lean. You don’t “need” to get stronger, but you “should” get stronger if you want to improve yourself.
I also find that many people come to me for weight loss, and they lose weight but are more excited about the all-purpose strength they gained training with me. And as Mark Rippetoe famously said;
Strong people are harder to kill and more useful in general
If you need help with this, I have a one-week trial membership available. Text me at 973 476 5328 to get started.
Eric Moss is a world record holding professional strongman, author, speaker and personal trainer. In the tradition of the strongmen during the turn of the century, he performs feats of strength such as bending steel and breaking chains as part of a show and speaks on goal achievement for corporations, nonprofits, government as well as for schools and universities. His exclusive personal training studio is in Boonton Township New Jersey with Lewandowski Chiropractic and is close to Mountain Lakes, Denville, and Parsippany New Jersey.
What we want to achieve vs. what we do to achieve it.
Often times following one of my strongman performances, when people find out I have a personal training studio they make the mistake in assuming that the clientele I typically work with are up and coming strongmen.
My demo vid so you know what I’m talking about.
This is not the case. It used to be that when people wanted me to teach them some of the classic feats of strength, I’d tell them “Do a Turkish get up with 100lbs, then come back to me and I will teach you.” Now I just send them to my coach Hairculese Chris Rider, because quite simply in my opinion he’s way better at teaching it than I am. And by the way, he’s coming to my studio on September 9th to run the Break Through Strength workshop.
The kind of people I work with aren’t normally up and coming strongmen, bodybuilders, or professional athletes. They are usually recreational exercisers that simply want to look, feel and perform better in life. There is a difference between “fitness” and “health” but that’s another topic for another day.
When I sit people down for the goal assessment interview, I dig into their goals to try to figure out what it is that they want to achieve. It’s quite simple really.
- Find out what they want to achieve.
- Figure out where they are, compared to where they would like to be.
- Based on the first 2, determine the actions necessary to bring them from where they are to where they want to be.
And when we’ve determined which actions are necessary to achieve said goals, then you simply do the things. And that’s the hard part really.
Let’s take for example someone who wants to lose 50lbs. It’s quite simple really, the super secret yet effective combo diet and exercise has produced more success stories for weight loss than any other way of doing it.
Here’s how; train with an intense yet safe program consistently over time and follow a diet that works. I personally do intermittent fasting but for most people, I recommend the slow carb diet popularized in the book the 4hour Body by Tim Ferriss for most people (google it).
If you follow those actions consistently, you’ll lose weight. If you aren’t losing weight, or any other goal for that matter, then it’s time to look at the actions you’ve taken.
Were you training hard enough, often enough?
Did you follow your diet to the T (as in, all the rules all the time)?
Fat loss requires a full-time commitment which is a pain in the ass. I know, it’s a big commitment to do all the actions that it takes to achieve your goals which is why I ask people to rate how committed they are. On a scale from 1-10 if I get anything less than an 8, then it’s simply not enough and I send them away.
However, if someone simply wants to be all around healthy and strong, strength training and eating generally healthy foods can work wonders. This is a goal too, although not a very specific one and the program needed to achieve it is not nearly as harsh in its execution.
This is where most people are. Most of the ones I work with are along these lines. They simply want to know how to train safely so they can move through life stronger, a bit leaner and healthier without having to live inside of a gym off of nothing but boiled chicken, steamed broccoli and protein shakes.
What are your goals? Do you need help with them?
If so, give my trial membership a go by texting me at 973 476 5328. Just tell me who you are and what you’d like to achieve and I’ll see what I can do to help.
Eric Moss is a world record holding professional strongman, author, speaker and personal trainer. In the tradition of the strongmen during the turn of the century, he performs feats of strength such as bending steel and breaking chains as part of a show and speaks on goal achievement for corporations, nonprofits, government as well as for schools and universities. His exclusive personal training studio is in Boonton Township New Jersey with Lewandowski Chiropractic and is close to Mountain Lakes, Denville, and Parsippany New Jersey.
re: NY Times Weight Training May Help to Ease or Prevent Depression
About a week or so ago I saw one of my clients post an article from the New York Times on Facebook entitled Weight Training May Help to Ease or Prevent Depression. The topic of this article talked about how weight training can help with depression citing some scientific studies. I don’t need science to point this out because I’ve seen it with several of my personal training clients and I’ve lived it as well.
A while back I was depressed from a failed marriage. The marriage therapist that we had gone to offered to help me continue to which case I told him where to go and how to get there (I didn’t think much of him). Sometimes professional help is needed, but just like not all personal trainers are created equal, not all therapists are created equal either.
Besides, he failed me already. Instead of seeking professional help I googled how to cope with divorce. Â
The very first thing it had said was “get in shape.” Now I’ve been working in the fitness industry for about 15 years and was already in shape so I took it to the next level and started training to be a steel-bending strongman under the guidance of my first mentor.
Before that would happen, I had to sort out my head through what I like to call “Iron Therapy”.
Sometime ago punk rock legend and my celebrity look-alike Henry Rollins wrote an article called The Iron.
Henry Rollins
Yours truly
A well written and truthful article, I found myself agreeing with him and when that article by the New York Times came out and people started posting about it, I immediately thought of the Henry Rollins article and how it related to my own experiences.
Through the years, I have combined meditation, action, and the Iron into a single strength. I believe that when the body is strong, the mind thinks strong thoughts. Time spent away from the Iron makes my mind degenerate. I wallow in a thick depression. My body shuts down my mind.
The Iron is the best antidepressant I have ever found. There is no better way to fight weakness than with strength. Once the mind and body have been awakened to their true potential, it’s impossible to turn back.
Yes! Truth!
Every pharmaceutical drug before it hits the market has to be split tested against a placebo. The reasoning for this is because the power of the mind can influence the body to make it better. The placebo effect is a very real effect and I often times say that because of this “psychology can influence physiology”. You can in some cases literally think yourself well. And as the legendary Mighty Atom used to say, “Think you are strong and you are strong.”
On the opposite side of the coin is that physiology can influence psychology. You see when you train there are a ton of feel-good hormones and stuff that flood your body, it can almost be euphoric which is part of the reason people feel addicted to training. That and progress can be addicting as well. Lifting a weight with ease that previously felt impossible gives you a confidence that you can’t really get anywhere else.
In addition to this, when you see the changes in your body that occur from weight training it makes you feel good about yourself. When you feel good about yourself, you feel good. Plain and simple.
And isn’t feeling good what we really want in the end?
If you want my help with this, activate the one-week trial membership by texting me at 973 476 5328.
Eric Moss is a world record holding professional strongman, author, speaker and personal trainer. In the tradition of the strongmen during the turn of the century, he performs feats of strength such as bending steel and breaking chains as part of a show and speaks on goal achievement for corporations, nonprofits, government as well as for schools and universities. His exclusive personal training studio is in Boonton Township New Jersey with Lewandowski Chiropractic and is close to Mountain Lakes, Denville, and Parsippany New Jersey.