Strong. Lean. Fit.

Millions of students around the country start classes this month, and many will be well on their way to gaining the dreaded “freshmen 15″. Some see it as inevitable; people go to college and gain weight. It’s a fact of life, like death and taxes. I certainly made my share of mistakes during my 25 lb weight gain that started the first day of my freshman year in 2005. It’s easy to see why it happens: mommy and daddy aren’t around to make you food, everyone eats crap all day so it’s OK,you discover you really like partying, etc. However, there are some things you can do to avoid the weight gain, and none really require much discipline.

Don’t eat Ramen Noodles/Mac and Cheese/Chef Boyardee

Yeah I know, they’re beyond easy to make. Long study sessions and late night hanging out make these even more attractive as a snack. In spite of the convenience, there is nothing healthy about these heavily processed, low nutrient carb bombs. Avoid these at all costs. You can’t rationalize these, even now that you’re in college, and thus perceive yourself as “smart”. There are so many other alternatives if you are hungry. Walking to the dining room is always an option. If the dining hall is closed, or you don’t want to walk 5 minutes, eat some nuts or fruit. If you have a fridge (and you probably do, it is 2010), stock up on easy access snacks like cottage cheese, greek yogurt, beans and leftover lunches from the dining hall. It’s that simple. Don’t give your body low quality food, and weight gain can be kept in check.

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Thirteen High School football players in Oregon were diagnosed with a very rare condition called Compartment Syndrome several days ago. It involves intense pressure on blood vessels in muscles and leads to severe pain and swelling.

Now usually when a rare condition strikes such a closely connected group of people, doctors and experts look for the cause in order to prevent such a thing from occurring again. I get that; people want answers. However, what I don’t get is the reckless jumps in logic taken and the apparent intent to deter people from taking a safe supplement. I was casually browsing through the news yesterday and I came across this article. I was in complete disbelief. ABC News was singling out creatine, one of the most widely used and most research supplements in existence, as the leading cause for this odd medical mystery in Oregon.

Just to make something very clear, causation (i.e. when one variable directly leads to an outcome) is NOT the same as correlation (i.e. when two variables have a discernable relationship). As per our football player example, ABC is suggesting that since some of the football players used creatine (only three who had surgery were known to definitely have elevated levels), that creatine is the likely culprit in this case. Does anyone else see this as misleading? Yes, some of them used creatine. But ALL were teenage football players from the same geographical area, drinking and eating food that likely came from the same sources and went through the same practices and shared the same locker room. What I’m saying is the cause could have been literally anything they had in common. Those relationships look a little stronger than the creatine correlation, huh? Creatine looks like one of the few factors that was not even constant in all the cases. The most likely cause of the condition, in my opinion and several other expert’s, is an overly intense practice schedule coupled with a lack of preparation on the athletes’ parts, not a supplement used by so many people who have never ended up in such serious condition.

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The majority of modern day jobs involve a computer and a total absence of physical activity. We can thank modern technology, which limited the need for the heavy manual jobs of our nation’s past. Unfortunately, these modern advances have taken a toll on our health and well being. We are turning into a nation stricken with chronic lower back pain, horrible posture, and muscle imbalances.

What Happens When We Sit Too Much

The Cliff Notes Version:

Sitting inhibits your glutes (butt muscles) from performing optimally. You are taught how to get by without using them much. They are not engaged while sitting; the chair does the work for you. They then no longer assist you when moving and exercising, thus causing more stress to be put on your lower back and hamstrings. The glutes are one of the strongest muscles in your body, so if they are dysfunctional, other muscle groups will be negatively affected.

Your hip flexors also become extremely tight due to constantly being put in a shortened position (your legs are at 90 degrees with your torso for 8 hours a day). This prevents your lower body from reaching a full range of motion during many movements (especially running/sprinting), eventually causing pain and injury. Many hamstring pulls are due to the lack of glute involvement and tight hip flexors during sprinting (I can attest to this one!).

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Way too many people opt to use the smith machine over free weights in the gym. This nonsense has to stop immediately. Once weighing the risks vs. the rewards, I think you’ll agree with me. The majority of gym goers have jobs (limited time to train a week), are not on anabolic steroids, are not planning to be a competitive bodybuilder and mainly want to look and feel better. So why would anyone want to do the brunt of their gym work on a machine that promotes longer workouts, injury, poor form and less than optimal intensity?

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4th of July weekend is upon us. Gatherings of friends and family will enjoy the holiday across the country. Burgers and booze dominate the menu. Tomorrow should be a great day, but it has the recipe for diet disaster. Binge eating and drinking, coupled with an exotic array of deserts will ruin your beach body quicker than you can say “America”. Fortunately, there are ways you can enjoy yourself and still look and feel good.

Eat unlimited vegetables

Go right for the salads and pickles. Eat as much as you can and you will be a lot less likely to overeat on other foods.

Eat Some Protein

You still have to get your protein, but you can be a little less stringent as to the source of it. Chicken, steak and even a hot dog will do. However, there’s still no reason to eat the bun. It doesn’t taste that good. At the very least, rip half a bun and use it to hold the burger, minimizing the damage.

Stick to Light Beer/Avoid Sugary Mixed Drinks

Most BBQ’s have a ton of different drinking options. Some choices are a lot smarter than others. Having a regular beer won’t kill you, but limit them in quantity. Switch to the much lower calorie/lower carb choices after you have a regular beer. Don’t drink sugary mixers, and if you really want to drink hard alcohol, make sure you mix it with diet drinks that contain few calories.

Go Swim!

Be active and you don’t have to worry as much about your caloric intake. It’s going to be a scorcher, so exercise tomorrow can be both refreshing and allow you to eat more.

Stick to Fruits for Dessert

The great thing about BBQs is that you are almost certainly going to see some great looking fruit. Watermelon, pineapple, mixed berries are the usual summer staples. All are great tasting, and much healthier for you than cookies and cake. The fruits will also help you eat less thanks to the high amounts of fiber and water.

Be Willing To Say No

You do not have an obligation to try every food your family and friends made. They will not cry if you don’t wat their cheesecake. You will be offered to eat a lot of food, and it’s up to you to limit yourself. Holidays are times you can get looser with your diet, but not loose. There are too many holidays and special occasions (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.) to go completely off your diet every time. That type of behavior soon becomes a habit, which means you will soon be eating crap every few weeks, then every weekend, etc. Know your limits, and do not go past them. Enjoy the day, but eat and drink in moderation.

Eating healthy is hard. If you are a little lacking in the willpower department, sticking to a diet may seem impossible. Even if you are committed to gutting it out for the long haul, temptations arise at a maddening rate. This makes weight loss one of the most desired, yet least obtained goals in our country.  However, there are little tricks you can use to make each day easier and easier to build new habits and tear down old ones.

One of the best tips I have ever heard and put into practice is to keep foods you shouldn’t be eating away from you. Sounds simple enough, right? Well it works! It has been well documented that people will eat whatever is put in front of them. Mindless snacking and binge eating all stem from having food conveniently near you. I don’t know too many people who go out of their way to run to the store and get a sleeve of cookies and then go home and eat the whole thing. Chances are it was sitting on your counter, you were hungry, and you like cookies. The perfect storm.

If you buy “cheat” snacks, make sure you store them in a hard to reach place. Store them in your highest cabinet or in a small nook in the fridge. Make it so that you would need to consciously go to the cabinet, maybe even with a step stool, and take the food. This ensures you do not consume the snacks mindlessly and impulsively. You must really want the snack in order to put the work in to get it.

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I just joined a new gym and I noticed a pattern. The guys here do the same things wrong as the guys at my old gym. Not surprisingly, everyone looks pretty average. Hopefully some of them change their ways. The following are some of the common things I see the common lifter do incorrectly in the gym:

1. Not Writing Down What They Do

OK, its probably asking a little too much to expect people to have a plan going into the gym other than saying “lets do chest and tris today”. But what boggles my mind is how every guy I see at the gym thinks he has this amazing memory where they can remember exactly what weights, sets and reps were used in every workout ever. Of course, they can’t remember all too well, and their lack of progress shows. Most guys just wing it, making it near impossible to consistently progress in the gym. Just bring a pen and paper with you, log everything you do and repeat. Each week try to improve over your previous workout. Eventually, you can even start planning your week and blocks of training in advance, eventually developing your own competent programs.

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According to a report by ABC News, the USDA has released their preliminary dietary recommendations for 2010. This report comes out every 5 years, and features several changes from the 2005.

Key Recommendations

• Saturated fat intake recommendations has been lowered from 10% to 7%
• Trans fat intake guidelines have been cut in half, from 1% to 0.5%
• Salt intake has been lowered from 2,300 mg to 1,500 mg
• Potassium intake has been raised
• People are urged to eat more plant based foods, and less sugars and refined grains
• Children should avoid sugary drinks and should exercise more

It remains to be seen if these recommendations will have any direct change on the rate of heart disease, obesity and diabetes, but it’s hard to argue with telling people to eat more fruits, vegetables and to cut sugar and refined foods!

Thousands of people everyday want and try to change for the better everyday. They may be fed up with how they perform on the field, or they may be unhappy with how they look or feel. Unfortunately, most fail, and end up deeper in their bad habits than ever before. While there are many, many reasons for this, one glaring reason for failure is overeagerness and the tendancy for people to attempt to get results as fast as possible. DON’T DO THIS if you want long lasting results. Crash diets and numerous, simultaneous changes will not allow you to maintain a lean and healthy physique (See: Oprah). You will lack all necessary skills in order to keep your body in top shape.

When people take this approach, they try to juggle too many new actions at once. This leaves these people constantly thinking about what they should be doing now, later and what they should have done 10 minutes ago. This is just not conducive to success. Nothing about this approach is on auto-pilot, meaning it is incredibly taxing on brainpower as well as willpower.

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Summer is finally here, and there has been no shortage of amazing hip-hop/rap songs to keep your iPod full for the next three months. Both Drake and Eminem drop their long awaited LP’s in June, Thank Me Later and Recovery (both of which have leaked already), and Fabolous also released a very solid mixtape, There Is No Competition 2. Kanye West decided to come out of exile and release a new song, “Power”, while LCD Soundsystem’s 9 minute opus “Dance Yrself Clean” will surely keep me going for the next few weeks.

My list may seem to be a little heavy on the Eminem songs, but everything he’s released this year has been nothing short of incredible. The angry, spit fire lyricist Eminem of the late 90′s and early 00′s has returned, and all music fans are better off for it. I highly recommend listening to everything he has put out this year.

Without further delay, here are the 10 songs that I’ve been playing on repeat:

10. Fabolous- “Body Ya”

9. T.I.- “Yeah Ya Know (Takers)”

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