Of course there’s a huge body of knowledge related to training and maintaining a good health. All aspects, how to train, how often, how long, cardio, resting, eating… are important. But for me, everything is moot if I don’t make sure the following one is firmly in place:

P e r s i s t e n c e .

(Or perseverance or anything you want to call it, but don’t give up.)

With a sound training program and good eating habits, persistence brings results. Other finer aspects will almost take care of themselves over time.

The thing is, with persistence, after a while at doing it, other issues will come in the way naturally. And because of the accumulated experience, fixing these issues will be easier.

Let’s take the aspect of recovery, for example. After a period of training with progressive poundage, overtraining (or plateau) symptoms will appear. The body needs some rest. But because of persistency, some solution will be put in place. A solution that excludes an interruption in training. After many cycle of hitting plateaus, the various ways to cope with them will be assimilated and they won’t be an issue anymore. Problem solved.

Until next post, Lift Consciously

This post was originally published on fxbros.com.

When my brother and I decided to start fxbros.com, we also wanted to find our own visual signature. One of the things I really wanted was to have a logo that would represents our mission/goal. After The Origin of “BKI”, here’s how we came up with the logo.

Our vision is about getting results, e.g. strength training in order to improve body composition (mostly lean mass/body weight ratio). A very good way to represent the information we are interested in is with graphs.

At that time, I bought Pumping Iron, 25th Anniversary DVD (you can see the original cover on IMDB). On the cover, there is Arnold showing is biceps (a side view of his arm). I saw it immediately: the contour of Arnold’s arm is the line of a graph! This is what the graph shows: a shoulder, biceps and forearm.

But the graph is more than a (famous) arm. The way to “read” the graph is by looking at the y-axis as results and the x-axis as time. The line shows 2 period of ups and downs (the gray or dark zone) and finally, the “hockey stick” (the white or light zone), where results skyrocket.

Of course, the transition from the dark zone into the light is happening when one discovers fxbros.com!

Until next post, Lift Consciously

This may sound simple and it is! Let me explain…

The way I see it, is if I’m out of shape, tired/no energy, depressed… Then, I cannot do anything worthwhile.

This is my belief that strength training help prevents all of the above. This works for me and for everybody on this planet.

Not only strength training help me having enough energy for today chore, but it is my best investment in making sure I will also have energy to whatever I feel like for… The rest of my life!

*Inspired by Steve Pavlina.

Until next post, Lift Consciously

When my brother and I started blogging some 3 years ago, it was for me a way to share stuff related to health and training. Strength training is a passion and since we started [more] seriously in 2000, I’ve always enjoyed researching and experimenting in this field.

For years I’ve stepped on the personal scale and log my body weight in my training log. When I got the habit of calculating my fat percentage, I then started a spreadsheet to keep the data and have basic formulas automation. At some point, I got this great idea to build a web application that would allow me to automate even more the process. And why not offer this application to everybody?

The project of building a web application, available for anybody wanting to follow their body weight online, was born.

Then, I was looking for a name. After giving it some thoughts, I made a link with “Key Performance Indicators”, used in the financial world. But I mixed the order of the letters by mistake and I end up with Body Key Indicators or BKI.

I went further a little… I was also looking for a tagline. I don’t exactly remember how I made it, but the “I, in my body” was there. And where this is becoming funny is if I take “BKI” and “I in”, mix them together, I end up with “bikini” (BiKinI)!

The last thing about bathing suit is more a joke than anything. I never tried to use it. Should I?

I will explained how I made the logo in a next post.

Finally, please note that the web application is still just a project… Hopefully, we’ll find some time to build it!

Until next post, Lift Consciously

The negative part of an exercise is the lowering motion. For example, the negative part of chin-up is lowering the body.

There are 3 phases to muscular failure:

1. The positive or concentric state, which is the lift itself,
2. The holding or isometric state,
3. And the negative.

The negative being the strongest state.

When I do an exercise, I will reach muscular failure on the positive first, then I can hold the weight for a moment and finally, I can still lower the weight slowly. With my chin-up example, I may perform 7 full reps, fail on the 8th, hold myself where I failed for some time and then fight gravity slowly. That way of training is what Stuart McRobert calls “brutally hard” training (Beyond Brawn book).

I use negative work on 2 exercises: dip and chin-up.

Currently, the way I train is to add a full set of only negatives after I reach positive failure. For example, again with my chin-up case, I do a set of 8 reps (target is 8 reps, but I will continue until I fail, so between 7-12 reps) and after a short pause, I repeat the same exercise, but only negative work (I use a step stool to reach arm extension).

After training like this for awhile, I feel a bit exhausted. I think that it is too much work and even if I use an abbreviated routine, I might be in an over-training state.

The change I want to introduce in my training is to remove the set of negative. I will just finish my sets with holding and negative on my last, to-failure rep. I will see if this helps me recover…

Until next post, Lift Consciously

This reason alone is, for me, more than enough to use this approach. It is very natural and almost a no-brainer. I don’t have to ask myself “should I do more?”. Or stop at some arbitrary moment, such as “3 sets of 10 reps per body part”.

I have other reasons why I train to failure. With this method:

• Workouts are short (around half an hour)
• And for recovery needs, infrequent (twice per week).

This is perfect because, like anybody, I simply have no time for anything but work and taking care of the little family.

I don’t train to failure on all of my exercises, though. The exceptions are legs exercices, where the poundage is high and dropping the bar can be dangerous or could damage my home gym floor. The other exception is flat bench dumbbell fly, where I would probably get injured because I train alone. So nobody can spot me for that last lift I won’t complete.

With a training to failure approach, I was also able to remove exercices that are just incompatible with it. In the end, I removed many single muscle exercises and I kept only compound exercises, such as deadlift, dip, chin (pull-up).

But training to failure is not easy. The last rep, the lift where the fail occurs, is very demanding mentally. I have to have a clear mind in the gym, otherwise I will under perform.

Finally, training to failure is safe for me. After years of properly using this method, I never got injured during a workout.

Until next post, Lift Consciously

Warning: fasting is not something to do without proper preparation. Anybody who consider fasting should reseach about the subject, seek doctor approval (not easy) and stop fasting if anything goes wrong.

M’s conclusions about his fasting experience

• In term of weight loss, the result is interesting: about 1 lbs per day!
• But, looking closly, we can see that almost half of the loss is muscle (46%).
• We can also see that the rate of loss is diminishing over time.

Overall, the experience is positive. But the cost in term of muslce loss is to much. There is no shortcut and I won’t do it again.

Until next post, Lift Consciously