Deadlift Week 9
then:
15 burpees
15 KB snatch
30 burpees
30 KB snatch

Pissing in the Gas Tank.

No, in this post, I’m not going to ask you to go piss in the gas tanks of all the big box gyms, Zoomba fanatics, and P90Xers.  Sorry.  And besides, you shouldn’t hate, because, in the words of Will Smith, “hate in your heart will consume you too.”  BUT I am going to tell you about an analogy that my good friend uses to describe a crappy diet.

We believe the power of clean eating cannot be understated – it will, without a doubt, have a leading, if not predominant, affect on your health, fitness, performance, life goals, happiness, and achievements.  Period.

Greg Glassman’s description of world class fitness in 100 words BEGINS with fueling (not fitness):

Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat. Practice and train major lifts: Deadlift, clean, squat, presses, C&J, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast. Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense. Regularly learn and play new sports.
~Greg Glassman

When we fuel our bodies with less than optimal food, it’s like pissing in a gas tank.  The crappy food will turn us into sputtering, misfiring, internally rusted machines set to implode years before our engineering was designed to fail.  When we fuel our insides with a high octane fuel source, we open the door for a well-oiled machine to race at a high level and become a classic.

The results of a crappy diet are sometimes hard to convey.  While some results are obvious and can easily be felt, others are more nuanced and harder to pick-up on initially.  What does it look like?  It’s a :20 second decrease in performance after a night filled with two glasses of wine.  It’s a mental state in a workout that focuses on the “pain and suffer” more than the “awesome and go” after a burger, fries, and beer the night before.  It’s an inability to fall asleep at night despite incredible fatigue but after a bagel or scone that morning at breakfast.  It’s an unexplained ache in your knee joint despite having done nothing out of the ordinary in your training but after eating a lot of cheese at a dinner party the week prior.  It’s the feeling of being swollen and puffy rather than a lean mean athletic machine after a breakfast of french toast and syrup.

For some, you have walked the hard line of 100% Paleo compliance for a month or more and know what it feels like to then dabble with a crappy diet here and there.  For others, it’s hard to know that this level of awareness exists because they have been living on a less than optimal gas quality for a long time.

Everyday you have the opportunity to come to a workout in one of two states – either battling against the physical and psychological struggles created by a crappy diet and try to overcome or offset them with a workout OR you can come to a workout primed and pumped up with quality fuel – and thrive.

Fuel has a lasting power.  How will you start today?