Heat Seeking Missile and Fat Loss
HEAT SEEKING MISSILE AND FAT LOSS
Luckily, I got to snap this pick while waiting at a traffic light. What the F? It is a pitiful state when people get so damn fat and out of shape that they need to roll around town in an electric scooter. I do not feel bad for them and they are a burden to the health care system. I will be writing a follow up article on this entire article, but for those that say: maybe they don’t know what to eat. To that I say, listen to your body! If you feel like sh** two hours after you ate, something is wrong and your body is telling you something. I don’t want to hear thyroid and faulty metabolism, etc. AND, think about this, have you ever eaten anything by accident? My friend on the scooter put years and years of work into that physique. But with that said, I do have people in pretty bad shape that do seek me out to help and for them, I give them an ovation. Change is hard but riding around in a scooter because you are too fat/lazy/can’t move right, should be a clear sign that your body has had enough abuse.
Too fat to move
I am often astounded at the lack of effort you will see from an ordinary man. Many, many people are just happy to be average and ‘not stick out’. Let me ask you a question….did God or whatever you believe in not provide you with more than enough opportunity to do great things with? I pride Newell Strength on being a place where clients and athletes can be propelled on to do greater things in their life. If you don’t think kicking a workout’s ass and owning it have anything to do with the rest of your life, you are making a big mistake.
You need to take time every year, month, day, to be awesome. This means that you have to attack something with all your passion and become superior at it. That is one of the main reasons I always loved competing, because of the supreme focus it gave me and knowing I was doing something that 99% of people would be too soft to do.
As you may or may not know, right now I am in the process of getting my body fat down under 10%, nothing super compared to 5% but it’s a tangible goal and a place for me to start. I am not doing this for health reasons so much as I am for the simple idea of being awesome, doing something hard to get focused and to remind myself of what my athletes and clients are feeling. I do not mind being hungry or any of the side effects of dieting as I embrace them and when I feel them I put them back in their place.
When you are trying to achieve something out of the ordinary, you must expect balance to go out the window along with it. Don’t worry, you can regain your balanced life once you hit your goals, whatever they may be. This should add to your sense of urgency to reach your goals even faster. People have been asking me this week what I have been doing, since they can notice the change in my face and arms as I get leaner and I don’t really have a good answer for them. I simply envision myself as a heat-seeking missile and go after it. There are no options, no choices, I simply do!
Last weekend we went over to a birthday party for my niece but since it wasn’t cheat night for me, guess what? You got it, I didn’t have pizza or cake, although I would have loved to and I brought a bag of chicken to throw on the grill. You see, too many people have too many ‘wants’. You either want to be lean and lose fat or you don’t. If you want to have your cake a couple of times per week, then there is your answer. And no, don’t take it personally, it is what it is. When you make up your mind to do something you don’t also create an option B because it will only distract you.
As you may have seen in one of my other articles, I have an alter ego, some combination of Danny Trejo, Marshall Mathers and the Terminator and no I am not kidding. You have one too, even if you try to ignore it. Why is it important? Because you will be having conversations with yourself constantly when you are trying to do something hard that is going to push you outside your comfort zone. The alter ego(s) must be there to take a stand and not give in to your quibbling.
To be a heat seeking missile, you cannot let other people get in your way and more importantly you must get out of your own way. This goes for the athletes I train at Newell Strength that may have no concern for fat loss but who desire to be the best. Are you going to wake up early to practice? Are you going to take time to prepare your meals? Are you going to be that kid that leaves the party to go life (I was). If you aren’t, then there is your answer. Being awesome looks good and sounds good on paper but your actions will speak louder than your words.
One Year Anniversary and other Thoughts From Newell Strength
Well, its been one year since the knee injury and in the video below, I reflect and re-live. That knee injury has helped to help me become a much better Coach and it has propelled Newell Strength to the next level of physical preparation. Enjoy the video and check out some of the other random stuff below the video!
*Danny Peltack, starting tackle at Immaculata High School, has been training with us at Newell Strength for the past 3 months. He has his high school combine this weekend. When Danny started, he was benching 185 for 2, yesterday he got it for 14! He also took his vertical from 21.5″ to 26.25″! This is for a sophomore that is 6’5″ and now has his weight up to 280 pounds. Weight up, body fat lower=awesome!
*Newell Strength was mentioned in two different newspaper articles this week, kind of ironic since I never go out to seek these things. But people must be noticing what we have going on and when you follow your passion, only good things can happen. There articles are here and here
*One of our members, Casey Ransone, was recently named head football Coach at St. Joseph’s of Metuchen. The article is here
*Just thought I’d give my 2 cents on last week’s Rutgers debacle. I watched the press-conference and was disgusted by president Robert L. Barchi. It was pathetic to watch him squirm and use academic language to do everything but take responsibility. YOU sir, are in charge there, it falls on YOU! If that is who they want as a leader, good luck. I was also disgusted by Chris Christie coming out in support of Barchi while saying it was the right move for Pernetti to resign. Pernetti wanted Rice gone right away! I love Christie as a politician, but that shit made me sick. The world needs some real men to stand up and stop doing everything for the almighty dollar! I will be writing some articles coming up about being a MAN and will certainly cite this. Heck, this instance might even make it into my Manifesto.
*I will be speaking at Kean University this upcoming Monday and Raritan Valley Community College next Friday. I love going to speak to the students and give them some straight talk, no BS. I will be audio-recording it and they will be put into one of the other books I am working on.
Keep making yourself better, good things will happen…and oh yeah, happy anniversary knee:)
SWEAT EQUITY
No struggle, no education....
Today and Thursday, I am going to be writing about something I heard or saw in the USA vs. Spain Gold medal basketball game on Sunday morning. If you don’t know by now, I am a huge basketball fan, so of course I took the opportunity to watch our country’s best go out and capture the gold, with some of the best players in the world playing for one of the best collegiate coaches of all time.
What got me though was the player celebration after the game was over. It was a thing of beauty to see this grown men, who have seemingly everything in the world at their finger tips, dance and laugh. You see, much of the public know-it-alls kept saying we could just show up and win. Not so, the game is too international now to dominate like we once did. So these 12 players that gave up their time off and worked their butts off, after a condensed, long and furious NBA shortened season, time that their body’s sorely needed off. The sacrificed for US.
They put their all into their practices, much of which we will never get an inside glimpse of. However, these guys understood each other and that they all knew to win gold they would have to work hard and give up much. There was no glory to be had by them, because again, the know-it-alls kept saying we had to win or we were failures. Pretty much a lose, lose for our basketball team.
Sweat Equity
So then why did they celebrate like that? Simple, the put in sweat equity. They gave their all and will always have the experience and memory of that moment. They could have stayed home, like many of the NBA stars did, but they chose not to.
In the gym, no one is there to make sure you do your job. I never understood that when people say they need someone there to make sure they are doing what they should be doing. Coaching is one thing, babysitting is another. Put in the sweat equity and be rewarded. But remember, it takes 10,000 of sweat equity to become great. Can you go the distance?
P.S-If you are liking what I am writing, please sign up for my email list below. I am on a mission this year to create the Newell Strength Society-10,000 people strong. This will be hard work and I will need your help in spreading the message. I am promising to bring you some killer information in my emails, free gifts and first looks at some of the stuff I will be coming out with. Thanks! See below
COME HERE LITTLE PUSSY CAT
If there is one thing that I thrive on and constantly seek out, its competition. I have a fierce desire to compete because I know that it will only make me better in the long run. In the past day I have heard, “Look out, so and so is coming for you, they came to talk to us at practice today” to “Kyle, look out, so and so is gonna open up a spot and you will be in trouble.”
Both ideas made me laugh as I know that I have nothing to worry about. I have talked many times in the past about what it takes to succeed and it ain’t for the faint of heart. Just now, I was reading three different books, for the past hour (not all at once, although I’d be a bad ass if I could figure that out), two on back functioning and one on Zen philosophy. Both things which I will somehow implement into my knowledge and Newell Strength.
How many other people do you think are out working you right now, or should I say, out reading you right now? If you are reading a book or two per year, I got news for you, you aren’t going to make it. These other so called competitors (apply this to your own situation, my life is merely an example for you) aren’t getting a book per day delivered to their house….seriously, the UPS guy knows me by name and we often bull shit.
These other people might be able to memorize an exercise or list of exercises or design a program on paper that looks perfect (another article of mine coming out soon) but I’ve been there, I know there is no perfect program and what works for my alpha males isn’t gonna work for most of my high school athletes. When someone tells me I better watch out because another coach has worked with a pro athlete I laugh because pro athletes are the easiest to work with, you are working with superior genetics and its hard to mess that up.
I have no competition in my area, you might think that’s cocky, but its a mindset you must start to believe in yourself. If you are sitting behind a desk working for someone else having a shell of the life you dreamt of, then you better start to believe it in a hurry. No, that said, I welcome all the competition to attack me and try to come at me because I know I have the heart of a champion, no one is gonna out work me. Do you believe that yourself?
I can outwork anyone, can you? I will and have gotten more work done on most days by 5 AM than people get done in an entire day. I have spent a good chunk of most people’s salaries this past year on coaching programs, education and seminars. No one is making me do it, its the warrior inside of me that desires to be great that makes it happen. I have been willing to experiment on myself and push myself further than the others are willing to go.
Competition brings out the best in people. It’s no wonder that at Westside Barbell they have random competitions on ordinary days. This is done to keep the athletes on their toes and to see who has what it takes when the fire gets hot. If you are scared of competition, you are a pussy, plain and simple.
The only competition is myself….our own fears and doubts are greater than any opponent we will ever face on the battlefield. The people that get this confused are fighting a fruitless battle. Its all about growth, not a destination. Too many peeps are scared to be a threat to me, scared to be wrong or take a chance or make a commitment, which is becoming and epidemic. Do you believe these things to be true about yourself? Never focus on competition because the greatest competition is looking at you in the mirror. Man up, face up and win!
How I develop my Mindset
The video below will explain a little bit about how I have developed my ‘never give up, optimistic’ mind-set over the years. I have heard from a number of men that have had similar knee injuries to mine and that is the aspect they are most interested in. With that, it gave me the nudge from Mother Nature to organize my first Newell Strength Success Seminar, which you will be hearing more about next week. But don’t worry, if you can’t make it, I will still be putting out a ton of content on mindset in the coming weeks.
As far as my rehab is going, I had a deep tissue massage this morning with some ART and I just rode the bike in the basement for 20 minutes, even took it down a notch at the end to finish on a high note. The past hour is the best my knee has felt. I spoke with a young soon to be physical therapist this morning and he said that the rate at which I am healing is almost super human, unheard of with an injury involving this much soft tissue. I have to remember this as I move forward so I don’t get discouraged like last week. They told me 12 months, I’ll do it in 6, still a great accomplishment. Doc told me this morning that it would never recover 100% (once again), but I’ll prove him wrong. I am on a mission now and daily steps lead to big gains over time (read that again, it is a lesson that you can use for everything in life). Also, I found it fitting that as I was finishing up my bike session an hour ago, I finally finished the movie ‘The Wrestler’, which I had been watching in bits and pieces since first attempting the bike 2 weeks ago. It was fitting because it reminded me to follow my heart and not give up, a champion will always be a champion because it the mind that makes them so….
I am not a gym….
Globo Gym
If I were to ask 10 people why they would choose to fly in the domestic United States from one spot to another, what do you think the most common answer would be? I am willing to bet that it would because it saves time….
That is what I do for my athletes and clients at Newell Strength. You can go to a globo gym aka any of the big franchise models and flounder around for years without making any real progress and you can do the same at just about any pretender’s place. But at Newell Strength, I have in some cases taken years off of frustrated athletes quest for greatness and added years back to some of my clients live’s simply because I have the ability to read people’s bodies and I have hundreds of thousands of ‘coaching hours’ worth of experience to draw from.
In my opinion, 99% of the certifications out there are bullshit, corporations just trying to leach money out of your pockets. I actually chose not to renew my CSCS certification this past year.
Does my ‘gym’ cost more than an average gym? Yes, but I get sick to my stomach when people try to categorize me in the same way as a globo or copy cat facility. And NS is not average by any means. I do also understand that it’s not for everybody and that is fine too. The problem arises when people want to join the gym but want to try negotiate with me. My answer is always no.
When you come to NS you are investing in the expertise, the applied knowledge, the caring environment and so on. Make yourself valuable by following your dreams and becoming the best in your field. I still strive every day to one day reach the goal of becoming the best in the world at being a Coach.
If you’d every like, come in and see it in action one day at my facility and never sell yourself short. Develop a thick-skin because you are gonna have haters along the way. You are gonna have people that copy your ideas and that is really nothing more than flattery because you gotta realize that they can’t copy who YOU are.
Be unique, be true to yourself and have laser like focus and you will go far…..
Thinking it Makes it So
Its early in the week and that means you need a dose of ‘kick-ass’….
I find that too many people let life handle them, going with the flow and never fighting against the current or trying to swim. You only get out of life what you picture in your mind. Most people just have average thoughts and most people are therefore….you got it, just average.
I often picture myself sitting at a round table, talking with the idols of mine, picking their brains. Often at this table there is Arnold, Trump, Buddha, Jesus, 50 Cent, Martin Luther King, Lincoln and the characters often change. You might think this is crazy and you might stop reading right now, but can you imagine that I get to have these talks any time I want to?
This is one of the reasons that I am so big on reading about the greatest minds throughout history. It is like getting the chance to talk with them and as we know, physically this isn’t possible. But getting back to the talks I have in my mind…a researcher, Dr. Dennis Waitley showed way back that the nervous system can’t tell the difference between imagining something and actually doing it. This has been tested and proven in Olympic Athletes by the way. Read it again, I didn’t make it up.
So why the hell do most people never take advantage of this principle? If you want success, you must picture it in your mind over and over. When I was shooting 500 jump shots per day, I would picture many of the shots in my head before taking them and in bed at night, I would picture ‘nothing but net’. You know what happened? I could make jump shots without even being able to see the basket. Now, I can’t do that anymore because it simply is not a priority for me, but the principle remains. With bodybuilding, the same thing, pictured it in my mind day after day, all my actions went towards it and I won a championship. Same principle with my business, meeting Devon and marrying her.
I have used this principle every day of my life and it has served me well. Use it 10 minutes per day and get back to me in a month, a few months, a year and I bet you that you will be shocked about how much you accomplish…
What Makes an Athlete Great?
The GOAT
I can say with certainty that every athlete that comes to me wants to be great. Why else would they invest the time, money, sacrifice, hours and commitment? I also know that many people want to know the surest fire path getting what they want, so I thought it’d be cool to write about what makes a great athlete so great.
- Fearlessness-Great athletes don’t fear things such as injury, loss, failure or a shooting slump. I have never been as scared as I was the couple of days following my knee injury, but I then started thinking about this very question that I posed in this article and I realized that there can be no more fear of injury. It all starts in the mind, if you get hurt, go to the appropriate measures to make sure it doesn’t happen again if it is even preventable and then forget it. I spoke with Louie Simmons yesterday and he said, “Kyle, its all in the mind. Believe that you will come back and you will. There is no fear, that’s hogwash.” Great athletes also don’t fear losing because they know from their time and sacrifice that they’ve done everything they can to prepare and although no one wins every time, they have greatly increased their odds. Great athletes need an almost cocky swagger, much like Arnold Schwarzenegger had. Know that you are great, that you can win in the big spot, that you can hit the game winning shot and you will. It’s all about mind set. Fear nothing.
- Commitment- I remember taking a page out of Larry Bird’s book when I was in high school and I would take 500 jump shots per day. I did this for 2 years. The results were phenomenal and then I fell in love with weight lifting. Great athletes are committed to being great at their craft above all else. They are no different than someone like Steve Jobs that was obsessed with his craft. If you want to be great, you will lose balance much of the time, this is the price to pay. You can’t be half way pregnant. I am often in awe of how much great athletes need to sacrifice but at the same time I understand it because they are chasing a dream. Larry Bird used to show up 6 hours before game time to start shooting. Think about it.
- Coaching and Education- When you are coming up against a beast you don’t know, you need to arm yourself with education. In sport, this can be done through meticulous record keeping and a great coach or coaches. No great athlete ever got to be great without the help of a great coach. Great coaches have been there with other athletes before, they know what it takes. Learn and absorb as much as you can from great coaches. Become a sponge around them and become a sponge around athletes that have already done what you want to do. Don’t fall into the trap of the 99%ers, the people that have the chance to be around greatness but instead of learning, they just talk the whole time about what it is that they do great. Those athletes and people will never be great.
At Newell Strength, the athletes and members often comment how it isn’t a gym and it isn’t. It is a place where we lead by example, we preach the above things and we have phenomenal results. If an athlete is willing to put in the work, I will coach them all the way to eternity.
The Comeback Begins: What We Have Learned
As promised, I will be shooting a ton of video of this journey to share with you. Here is the morning right after the injury happened, probably 10 hours after it actually took place:
So the surgery was a success today. The surgery was much longer than expected, going on for 2 and a half hours. When Doctor Gecha came out to see Devon after the surgery, he said most people only tear the patella horizontally, I tore it both horizontally and vertically. To put it in his words: “It was completely shredded”. In addition to that, they found that ligaments on both the medial and lateral part of the knee were torn to shreds.
I am not sure of the exact ones, I will know tomorrow when I see Dr. Gecha in the morning. He did suture in a silver dollar size pad of my own platelet matrix to assist in the healing. This was something he and I had talked about, even though it is not standard in this surgery, but you know me, I’m a guinea pig:)
He told Devon he basically had to totally re-construct my knee. But to be honest, I am already quite grateful for this experience. I hope to God it never happens again, but I am grateful for the learning and teaching I will gain from it. I am no longer scared, I am excited. I know there will be ups and downs, but I also know that tomorrow is day one on the road back to being a champion. I will compete one day again, obviously this summer isn’t gonna happen, but I will do it!
So, what have we learned from this ordeal so far? As I always say, a stronger organism is harder to kill. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have the high level of strength in my right leg and upper body as far as functioning with this injury. Train the whole body, always! Don’t work on isolating your beach muscles.
Single leg work is superior for developing and activating your gluteus. This is only further confirmed for me by how much time I have spent on my right leg. I can palpate and feel my glute (medius) in particular firing away while I stand on the right side while shaving or washing myself while standing.
I have re-learned the value of visualization. Whether that be before a rep, a foul shot, a rehearsal or whatever. The nervous system and body don’t know the difference between picturing something in your head and actually doing it. This has been confirmed via studies with Olympic Down Hill Skiers. I used to lay there at night when I was competing routinely and picture myself as a champion. I would see it until it would become real, which it did. I used to picture a number of my jump shots (500 per day) before I would shoot them. It got to the point where I could literally make a jump shot from anywhere on the court even if I didn’t have a clear view of the basket. Tonight before I go to sleep, I will watch some of my YouTube videos of me squatting or some other lower body exercise. I will put my headphones on with my meditation music after that and fall asleep picturing my first step this summer, I will picture my knee healing at a super human rate, and it will. I have no doubts.
I will continue to write about what I learn from this ordeal so hopefully you can learn too. We all have our own challenges, lets be champion’s in our approach to how we find the opportunity in those challenges and in how we conquer them.
