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Rog Law Fitness - The Art of Sexification

The Art of Sexification

Archives for October 2014

The Great Comparison Hoax

October 28, 2014 by Roger Lawson II 11 Comments

Comparison

Death by a thousand cuts.

Luckily I don’t mean a literal death, since that’s the least anabolic activity of all time and would surely negatively impact your gains. The death I’m speaking of is more sinister, capable of covering your otherwise great life with a general malaise that seems unshakable.

Most of us know objectively that to compare ourselves to others is an exercise in futility. We’re emotional creatures, and logic and rational thinking get drop kicked right out of the window when it comes to our wants and desires.

When it comes to how we look, how strong we are, how fast we’re progressing and everything in between, our emotions can push our rational minds out of the driver’s seat, take the wheel, and drive us straight towards Crazyville.

Like sticking a fork into an electrical socket, or taking a 3 hour nap while you’re cooking a steak in an oven (I’m not alone in the last one…right?), comparing ourselves to others is more often than not a horrible idea that no good can come from.

Much like a moth drawn to the flame, we just can’t help ourselves. None of us are truly immune to it.

Our Behind-The-Scenes VS Their Highlight Reel

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We’re with ourselves 24/7, and as a result we know more about us than any outside observer would; our motivations, goals and hot button issues. When we go into comparison mode, our brain wrangles up those demons and throws them right back into our faces, completely unfiltered.

The problem is that we aren’t comparing our demons to someone else’s – we’re pitting them against only what we can see on the surface, and given that people typically put their best foot forward in the public, this is rarely an accurate portrait of the situation.

Imagine yourself doing all that you can to get results in the gym. You’re logging your workouts, keeping track of your calories and nutrients, making time to prepare your meals when you would love nothing more than to ease up on the reigns just a little bit.

Then one day you see someone working out there with a physique that you would sell your first born child for, casually strolling through their session. And here’s what kicks you right in the junk: they’re eating a candy bar post workout.

All of a sudden, your inner comparison beast busts loose.

Why do they look like that and I don’t? They clearly don’t work as hard as I do. I train hard ERRYday. #BeastMode #NoDaysOff #AnotherRidiculousHashtagHere.

 I take my nutrition way more seriously and here they are eating a candy bar, looking like they just walked off the set of a photo shoot.

But you don’t know the full story. You don’t know what they sacrificed to get there, or anything about them. All you have to go off is this brief snapshot in time, and it’s easy for the comparing mind to take that and create a vivid picture that’s far from reality.

Getting caught in this trap can cause you to do things you otherwise wouldn’t do. I’m talking constant program hopping, ridiculous diets, setting unrealistic time frames for yourself, and setting out on a never-ending quest searching for “the secret”.

Our worst vs their best. Our inside vs their outside. It’s always a losing battle.

Welcome To The Black Hole Of Suck

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The appetite of a black hole is insatiable, feeding off of everything around it. When it comes to comparisons, this is the exact scenario that we find ourselves in – and it will drain your life dry if you let it.

In this mode, nothing is ever enough. You constantly feel inferior.

You’re never strong, because someone else is stronger.

You never feel truly feel comfortable in your skin, because someone is always leaner, has bigger biceps or more ab definition.

You aren’t making progress fast enough, because someone is always achieving more in a shorter amount of time.

Comparison feeds off of these types of thoughts., and it never ends.

I once dated a woman whose ex boyfriend was a UFC fighter. After a quick Google search to find out who he was, I went from being completely happy with my development and progress to feeling like Captain America pre-Soldier Serum.

Here I am, a guy who works out 3x a week, loves to eat ice cream by the pint, enjoys a good marathon video game session and more often than not falls asleep to a YouTube video because I stayed up way too late clicking my way through the internet rabbit hole, comparing myself to an Olympic champion with ungodly genetics who trains more hours in a week than I do in a single month and makes a living training to punch a hole through the soul of other elite athletes in front of thousands of people.

If I were looking for a recipe to help make myself feel like hot diggity dog shit, I hit the nail right on the head.

By constantly sucking in all of this outside stimuli without any filter, letting it bombard our inner world, all we do is diminish our own accomplishments, taking the wind out of our sails for no good reason.

The Only Way To Slay The Comparison Beast

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To be forewarned is to be forearmed.

The act of comparing may never really go away, but you can turn the tide in your favor.

When you notice in the moment that you’re falling victim to this mindset, stop immediately before the thoughts build any momentum.

Take a deep breath and relax. By doing this, you go from being reactionary to proactive, creating space to decide what you’re going to do next with the information you have.

This may sound woo woo as all hell, but give it a try. Your breath (that thing that keeps you alive) is intimately connected to controlling how you feel in any given moment.

Is your training partner progressing faster than you? Great – there’s something that you can learn from them. Maybe you won’t have the same results as them for a host of reasons, but if nothing else it shows you a vision of what is possible, and you can bring that energy and excitement to your workouts.

There will always be someone better than you out there, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. All that you can focus on and truly control is the effort that you bring to the task.

You’re the only person that you need to compare yourself to, and only to check-in and make sure that you’re improving at a rate that’s acceptable for you and your goals.

When this is the focus, what others are doing becomes irrelevant.

Let me be clear. I’m not saying that you can’t look at what others are doing and using that as fuel to push yourself forward.

Sometimes seeing others making progress towards their goals can be a healthy gut check for you, allowing you to reconnect and give yourself an honest assessment as to if you’re playing it safe or if you have more to give.

For others it does more harm than good. It’s like fire: you can use it to warm up your house or burn it to the ground. The devil is in the details, and it will take time to learn when to push forward and when to be kinder to yourself and pull back a bit.

Instead letting the accomplishments of others feel like a slight towards you, use them to build yourself up. Choose to be inspired by what others are doing, no longer making yourself the victim of outside forces, and tap into a constantly renewable source of motivation and energy – yourself.

Game Of Bones: 3 Ways To Crush Stiffness And Prepare Your Body For Battle (AKA Life)

October 21, 2014 by Roger Lawson II 2 Comments

Photo Credit: dot-dashlee

Today’s guest article is brought to you by the awesome Kate Galliett – enjoy!

It was a dark and stormy night. The candles had been lit and were flickering, casting dancing shadows against the stone walls. I, Kate Galliett, Queen of the land of Fit For Real Life, had settled in for an evening of movement studying & wine drinking. There was a knock at my door.

“Who’s there?”

“Tis I, Rog Law of House Cinnabon.”

Rog entered my castle with a look of despair on his face.

“M’lady, I am troubled.”

“What is the matter Sir Rog? Is there trouble at the Wall?”

“No . It’s much worse than that. It’s my people. They are being crushed by an unseen force! It’s said to be called “21st century living”. Have you heard of this thing? Their bodies are breaking down. I know I have what they need to be confident, sexy mo-fos, but I fear all will be lost if they lose the ability to move freely and without restriction!

I’ve come to ask your help. Please Lady Kate, join forces with me and help the good people of the Land of Sexification to move better, feel better, and be better.”

I sensed myself shift into battle-mode.

“Sir Rog, I only hope it is not too late. Come quickly, we must get to work drawing up battle plans immediately to fight the crushing force that is ‘21st century living’.”

What follows is what was born out of that dark, stormy evening.

These are the very best recommendations I could give to Sir Rog to help his people – you – to save yourself from the darkest of forces, that which sucks the life of you; unnecessary aches, pains, and injuries caused by modern-lifestyles which grind us into the ground if we aren’t actively working to fend it off and become truly unbreakable humans.

Commit To Practice Time Every Day 

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Do you think master swordsman, Syrio, teacher to young Arya Stark of the much-loved Stark Family of Kings’ Landing, became a master by practicing only on occasion? No-sir-ee-bob. He also would never have said “no-sir-ee-bob”.

The point is, by not actively working to improve your mobility, you’re actively allowing the sub-par soft-tissue quality and movement-capacity to remain. You don’t become a master overnight. You don’t become a master in 30 days. Depending on how long you’ve been carrying around soft tissue that is tight, rigid, and otherwise not bend-y, it might take a fair chunk of time to get your body moving fluidly again.

Start looking for opportunities to interject mobility work into your day. You will often catch me stretching the soft tissue of my well-worn gymnastics hands into the table, the steering wheel, the floor if I’m sitting on it…because I know, that if I reserve soft-tissue work for just once a week, my hands will be incapacitated, locked up from all of the strain that gymnastics and rock climbing puts on them.

Wherever you need to improve your soft-tissue quality, you must seek out ways to do that in your day. It could mean digging your foot into a lacrosse ball in the morning as you brush your teeth. It could mean standing up every hour at work and finding a doorway to stretch your chest out in.

Commit to it. Commit to yourself.

Do Your Research And Know Your Weak Spots

Martell

If you’re about to be double-crossed by the Kings’ Hand, it would serve you well to know ahead of time. But to do so, you’ve got to be looking below the surface of what you’re being told.

For example, if your IT Band is aching and hurting, your IT Band is fooling you into thinking that it is the cause of the issue. It’s not that things are never as they seem, sometimes, the IT Band truly is causing an issue – BUT – more often than not, the pain in the IT Band is coming from a root issue that lies elsewhere.

Here are a few reasons why the IT Band can be painful:

– The hips are unstable (read: weak) and the IT Band is trying to do the work of the other hip muscles.

– The glutes are weak, and when the glutes are weak that is a whole bunch of effort that has to be moved to other parts of the lower body, and the IT Band won’t be escaping the extra work load even though it will hate every second of it.

– Your running form is poor. Not everyone likes to run. But some people do. And those who do would be well-served to run with good form. Because anything done with poor form is just plain poor son.

– There’s an insane amount of “run form techniques” out there, but a simple one that easily moves you into better run form is hill running. The incline doesn’t allow you to over-stride, and you will automatically land more forefoot on the hill as you run up it. The grassy surface is a bonus! PS – just walk down, lest you be the fool who trips and goes rolling the rest of the day down.

– Your shoes are selling you out. No need to go crazy with minimalist shoes unless you’re into that sort of thing, but, when you have tight shoes on that don’t let your feet articulate with the ground very well (or at all), your foot becomes weaker, and in time that will negatively affect the stability of your knee. The IT Band inserts just below the knee, so what is happening with the knee, will eventually affect the IT Band as well.

Become The Leader Of Your Body

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(Writers’ note: there is a long-standing battle between myself & Rog Law regarding which man is better and obviously the answer to that is “Rob Stark”, but Mr Lawson feels that “Jon Snow” is our winner here, and yet we remain friends proving that friendship can be built despite fundamental differences of opinion.)

Rob Stark may be a young man still as he unites an army of men behind him as they engage in conflict with the Lannisters’ army, but unite them he does. (No need to lead your body into a Red Wedding though…ain’t nobody got time for that shit.)

It’s time to stop letting achy joints & injured bodies decide what your life-agenda is going to be.

How many things have you put off because your body was telling you “hey, we hurt”?

How much longer are you going to let the Lannisters rule your….oh, sorry, got carried away there for a sec. Your body, how long are you going to let your body decide whether you do ‘more’ or ‘less’ with life?

You, as a human, have the capability to do anything your mind and heart desires. But, you want your body to be physically capable of doing it, or else, those things you wish to do will remain but fantasies in your mind.

Here are 3 things you must do if you want to lead your body to glorious victory:

Get mobile. You need your soft-tissue to be pliable and move-able. If it’s not, your joints will take extra wear & tear, which not only hurts, but it also wears them down faster.

Get connected to your body. Don’t get lost in fitness by only looking at measurable things. There is value in looking to hard-to-quantify, but absolutely legit things like the mind-body connection (or to give you a ‘non-hippie’ term: proprioception & kinesthetic awareness).

Get your foundation strong. Strength training doesn’t just strengthen your muscles – it also strengthens every part of your skeleton, and having a strong structure means less risk of breaking the structure. Build the base of the structure strong and mighty and you’re going to have a structure that is durable for a lifetime of adventures.

Sexification Note: Earlier this year, Kate created a 12 week program to help people re-connect with their bodies while ridding themselves of nagging pains and annoying stiffness. I personally use Kate’s resource because I move as well as a hippo riding a skateboard and feel way too old before my time. Since it’s helping me get my groove back and then some, I want to pass it along to you as well.

Click here to learn how to free yourself from stiffness and random pains.

An Open Letter to People Struggling to Exercise

October 7, 2014 by Roger Lawson II 22 Comments

It’s hard to ignore, isn’t it?

That pulling sensation from somewhere deep inside. While the origin is unknown, this isn’t the first time that this feeling has crept up on you.

Maybe it was the game you watched. Seeing the athletes move their bodies with a sense of purpose, all towards a single objective, trigged your own desire to step into the arena.

It could’ve been that couple that ran past you, laughing with each other as they quickly changed from full-sized humans into tiny specks in the distance. You haven’t gone on a walk in awhile, and on any given day a set of stairs can leave you more winded than you care to admit. It feels like a finger thump straight to your heart.

Or perhaps it hit you as you flipped through the magazine in the checkout lane. On the cover, some “fit” model with abs for days. Page 26: lean legs and a butt that could stop a speeding bullet without so much as a flex.

Regardless of the source, the cause is the same. Your higher self, your own personal version of Jiminy Cricket, your inner voice (mind sounds like DMX, in case you were wondering), is throwing anything it can at you, trying to get you to pay attention to one thing: you’re not firing on all cylinders.

I’ve Been There Too

Back in the not too distant past, I was about as unhealthy as you could get.

Outside of organized sports until I was 12, moving around just wasn’t my thing. I took full advantage of every possible opportunity to lie down, sit in a chair or lean against a conveniently placed wall.

Exercise? Nope – it made me breath too hard. Then I’d sweat too much, which means I’d need more showers, which would cause me to run out of workout clothes, forcing me to continuously buy new ones. You can clearly see how if i kept exercising it would only lead to my financial ruin.

And eating healthy? French fries are technically a vegetable, and scientists have managed to cram every vitamin, mineral and nutrient that I need be a fully functioning human into chicken nuggets, so I didn’t need to bother with eating that green stuff.

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CC2

Does not include cash purchases or eating friends leftovers.

Lengthy gaming sessions that stretched from dusk till dawn were the norm. Food that I could buy and eat in five minutes or less became my main source of sustenance.

At 20, after years of these kinds of shenanigans, it’s no wonder that I slept horribly, was in a constant state of lethargy, had cholesterol levels over 350 and suffered from a boner that was as dependable as a narcoleptic security guard.

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Certified sex machine.

Looking to do something (pretty much anything) to turn things around, I stumbled my way into fitness thanks to a series of random events, and it sent my life in an entirely new direction.

The Benefits

You’ll probably live longer. Even if you don’t, your quality of life will undoubtedly be better when compared to doing nothing.

You’ll have less fat and more muscle, all contributing to a leaner you. Clothes will fit better.

You’ll be more resistant to random injuries and the normal wear and tear of life. Slipping on ice in the winter time is no longer an instant death sentence.

Everyday life become easier because you’re stronger and more prepared for the tasks.

Exercise can serve as a new outlet for your aggression, sadness, or simply become a way to wrangle and process your thoughts better. Empowerment is just one workout away.

You’ll have more energy and an increased sense of self-confidence, not only from your appearance changing, but from the act of pursuing a goal.

Less stress, sharper brain function and an increased sense of creativity all await you. Your sex life will be better too because you’re more aware of and connected to your body – hollaaaaaaa.

You’ll be better able to modulate your energy. Like a DJ doing their DJ thing (like Jon Snow, I know nothing), you’ll know your levels at all times, whether you’re giving a task your all, have a little more in the tank, or you’re just coasting. And you can adjust your faders – is that what they’re called? – accordingly.

Here’s the rub: it takes time & consistency for all of these benefits to come to fruition. The sooner you make peace with this fact, the smoother your ride will be.

I completely get the urge to want it all right NOW. I was there, too. I was stunned when my biceps didn’t explode through my Kmart t-shirt after my first curl, and my back didn’t grow wide enough to block out the Sun when I did my first chin up. You mean I have to come back tomorrow and do this whole exercise thing AGAIN?!

Yup.

NedFit

Do Something. Anything.

Do what you like. Yoga, running, weight lifting, break dancing or chasing ducks through the park like a crazy person. In the beginning, it really doesn’t matter.

If you’re new to exercise, pick something and get moving just to get the ball rolling. Remove as much friction as you possibly can between you and starting.

Do you need to have a solid plan when starting out? Not at all. Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good enough for the time being – you’ll learn what you need to along the way, refining your aim as you progress. Plus you’ll likely change course plenty of times as you figure out what’s important to you and what isn’t.

One of my first fitness fails was a run in the middle of winter wearing sweatpants, a hoodie, gym shoes and construction gloves because I just finished watching a Rocky montage. I slipped and bruised my tailbone and I gingerly limped my way back across campus while holding my buttcheeks in shame.

Sign Up For The Journey, Not The Destination

Some are motivated by the drive to succeed while others get pumped up when they’re trying their best not to lose. You may be someone who is motivated by outside rewards, or you forge ahead based on intrinsic factors. No matter which camp you more or less identify with, tap into your motivation style.

There’s no judgement on where you fall. This is a marathon, not a sprint. To avoid burnout, find something that you enjoy about the process outside of the end goal you’re looking to achieve. Regardless of where you want to go, the distance between point A and point Z is going to take time, and you can run yourself ragged grinding as fast as you can towards the finish line without actually enjoying anything along the way.

It’s like someone on a quest to make a million dollars. They can either become so focused on the destination that they only experience any kind of joy once they hit their goal, or they can create mini check points & rewards along the way, specific to how they roll, to keep them excited and make the road to dolla dollas far more enjoyable.

Abs Are Overrated

Last year I hired a coach and spent a few months dieting down for a photo shoot, something that I always wanted to do for the hell of it. I set the of goal of becoming leaner than I had ever been, and 20 pounds later I achieved just that.

And I was happy. For like 5.6 seconds in total.

AbsWomp

Mainly I was just hungry and I wanted cake.

That’s the thing nobody really tells you. Once you reach your coveted destination, the victory is short-lived and before you know it your brain is already focusing the next shiny object.

I wasn’t any happier when I reached complete ab-domination, but when I started I sure thought that I would be. That’s when I realized that it’s not necessarily about the goal that you pick, but more about what your goal represents, who you become in the process and the traits that you develop along the way.

Even if you don’t completely hit your target, you’ll still learn a ton in the process. Sometimes a goal isn’t meant to be hit, but it gives you something to aim at for the time being.

As tempting as it is to try and fix inside issues with outside solutions, don’t. You’re enough as is right now. Instead of aiming to fix yourself, or thinking that you’ll be happier once you have X, adopt the mindset that you’re just making upgrades to an already awesome design.

Work from the inside out, not the other way around.

You’re Gonna Mess Up

A lot.

Years later you’ll look back on the major fails made along the way and laugh at yourself, wondering if your brain was hijacked by aliens who controlled your body, making it do silly things for their enjoyment.

It’s part of the game, so chalk it up as nothing but feedback designed to help you learn, grow, and spin your wheels less in the future.

Don’t add unnecessary pressure by locking yourself into some arbitrary deadline from the start. Chances are it’ll be unrealistic to begin with anyway. This whole exercise thing is like a giant carousel. When you inevitably goof up, fall off your intended path or things don’t go as planned, don’t flip out – the next chance to make things right is moments ago.

Ready? Take a deep breath and get ready for a wild ride. I have no idea where you’ll end up, but I promise that it will change your life if you let it.

“You have exactly one life in which to do everything you’ll ever do. Act accordingly.” – Colin Wright

"What you can expect from Roger as a trainer is his visions the big picture. He doesn't see life, fitness, or Sexification through a narrow view. He takes the time to get to know his clients inside and out. He understands that the victory to their journey is one in more ways than just the workout. However, when it comes to that workout, he has the chops. He is the true epitome of Sexification."

— LEIGH PEELE

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