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Chapter 1: How Smoothies Can Transform Your health

Imagine if you could wake up every morning feeling amazing. Instead of waking up with a headache, or struggling to open your eyes because you’re still so tired; you just leap out of bed full of life and ready to go and take on the day. This energy is then enough to carry you through workouts, through your office job and through the evenings when you still have enough left in the tank to chat to play with your family. You have enough to work on projects, to keep the house clean and tidy and to make the very most of every last hour. And imagine if you had the dream physique you’ve always wanted: flat abs, ripped muscle and skin that looks glowing and healthy. Of course, there’s no quick fix that can make all of this a reality, but it is a very good aim to have. And actually, there are just a few simple things you can do that will immediately take you a lot closer to that reality. One of them is just to start drinking a smoothie every day.

Really? A smoothie? A drink hat can improve your health, your mood, your appearance and your energy levels?

Definitely – and much more as well! In this book you’ll learn how smoothies can change your life and you’ll discover easy recipes for smoothies that boost immunity, fight stress, improve athletic performance, build muscle, fight cancer and MUCH more. Let’s take a look at just how it happens…

Why We Need Nutrients

A smoothie is of course a blend of different fruits and vegetables. You simply take a bunch of fruits, drop them into a blender and hit ‘go’ so that your drink will be ready to consume. It’s a simple process but it’s enough to give you a drink that not only tastes amazing but also provides you with a ton of nutrition. And this is the key word: nutrition. What is incredibly important for all of us, is that we eat a nutrient dense diet. That is to say that it isn’t good enough that we view our diet just as a source of fuel – it also must be a source of raw materials that provide us with enhanced performance and health. The old saying that you ‘are what you eat’ is literally true. Your muscles, your bones, your hormones, your brain cells, your immune system and your digestive enzymes are all made from nutrients in your food and that’s what makes it so important. When you consume fruits, meats or vegetables, your body will proceed to break them down and then use the constituent parts to perform numerous jobs throughout your system. These help you to grow, to develop, to fight illness and to function optimally. And it’s no coincidence that we need fruits, vegetables and other ingredients to thrive. After all, these are the things we evolved eating. It’s not that our biology forced us to seek out these foods – the foods were available and so our biology adapted to survive on them. We need these ingredients to thrive then and without them, we start to literally fall apart. We start to see signs of poor health such as difficulty sleeping, brittle hair and nails, weaker bones and lack of muscle tone. Our eyes aren’t quite as white and we lose the spring in our step. Our hormones fall out of whack and we eventually start to see serious illnesses and other conditions slowly arise. And this isn’t the exception. This isn’t a rare and unfortunate scenario that only some people experience… this is the norm.

Did you know that a huge number of the diseases and illnesses that affect us in old age are actually highly avoidable degenerative diseases? Your body was built to last you your entire life. In theory, you should be able to stay healthy, active and engaged right up until you keel over. But malnutrition allows all sorts of problems to slowly creep up on us from weak bones, to heart disease, to high blood pressure, to arthritis, to dementia. Not all of these conditions are avoidable but in many cases, they are. So what’s the problem with our modern diet?

The Problem With Modern Diets

The biggest issue is that we eat far too much processed food. What is processed food? Simply put, it’s food that has been manufactured and prepared in such a way that it bears little resemblance to the original ingredients. A good example might be a sausage role. Here, you think that you are getting some meat and pastry. The pastry is made from flower and egg but at least the sausage is real meat, filled with real amino acids and minerals, right? Wrong! That meat is most likely a combination of all the cast offs from countless other meals that have been blended together and mushed into a pulp. That means you’re getting the gristle and the parts of the meat that no one would eat in any other format. From there, the sausage meat then has copious amounts of sugar, salt and fat added. This helps to preserve the sausage and make sure it still looks that appetising grey color when you come to eat it. What about the fruits and vegetables you get in your cereal and your breakfast bars? Nope, they’re just as bad! These fruits have been ‘freeze dried’. That means that they have been subjected to a vacuum and sub-zero temperatures. The low temperature will have frozen the moisture to the point that it becomes tiny icicles and the low pressure will then have forcibly removed them from the fruit. You think that won’t bring with it some of the all important nutrients along the way? Apart from anything else, when you consume something containing vitamin C, you need the moisture in order to absorb it. Vitamin C is literally a ‘water soluble vitamin’ and you can’t use it if it’s not presented correctly. And once again, lots of sugar and other additives will be added which will make your fruit look colorful and remain edible. Something like crisps or chocolate bars meanwhile barely have any nutrients in them to begin with!

How Empty Calories Are Destroying Your Health

All this means that you are consuming empty calories. An empty calorie is food like sausage roles, like unhealthy breakfast cereals and like ready meals that contain lots of calories but very little actual nutrition. You’re temporarily filling yourself up and spiking your blood sugar but you’re not providing any actual sustenance. Plus, these empty calories take the form of simple carbs. Because there’s nothing ‘real’ left in them, you’ll digest them too quickly resulting in a spike in blood sugar. This provides a short energy burst but that then runs out just as quickly, leaving you craving real food. Moreover, you’ll be malnourished and fail to get the vitamins and minerals you need. And what’s more, is that this will eventually translate to the build-up of more serious diseases and conditions. Failing to get proper food in your diet is also what causes snacking behavior and weight gain. This is partly due to the fact that your blood sugar troughs so soon after it spikes and partly due to the fact that your body will ‘crave’ the things it needs. If you’re not getting enough vitamin C, then your body will tell you it wants something sweet. It’s trying to communicate that you need an orange or an apple – but years of training mean that you’ll interpret this as needing a chocolate bar! And even before that happens, you’ll find you gain weight easily and you have to drag yourself through the day like some kind of zombie! When you view food just as fuel and forget that it is also sustenance, that is when your body starts to fail you.

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Chapter 1

“FOCUS” Defined

Focus is integral to accomplishment. It may actually fall in the same category as ambition, motivation, leadership and other driving forces behind becoming successful, but does not necessarily get the attention that it deserves. Often downplayed, the role of focus cannot be sabotaged in an individual’s ability to be productive.
What all this basically means is that you need to be focused in order to achieve something or become successful in your endeavors. But before we go into that, here is a look at what focus really means.

By definition, focus is a skill that allows people to start a task without procrastination and then keep up their attention and effort until the job is complete. It is an ability to not only pay attention to things that they are engaged in but also avoid distractions that will impede the work they are trying to do.

In fact, focus is so important to getting anything done that you can’t really think without focus. When you hear about things like perception, memory, learning, reasoning, decision making and problem solving, you know that none of these can be done successfully unless you focus.

On the contrary, a wandering mind will make you less effective in your work and your productivity will suffer. The same will also compromise the quality of work giving you less than optimal results. Not to forget that you will also be wasting time every instance your mind drifts off.

Why do people suffer from a lack of focus?

In some cases, a lack of focus may be a matter of interest. Take your everyday to-do list for instance. Not everything on the list might be interesting to work on, but needs to get done anyways for you to move ahead. In these instances you may find yourself stuck, trapped doing something that you couldn’t care less about. Your only obligation may be the feeling that you need to get the job done to move on to other things. Not such a great motivator, but that’s reality; in the real world things need to get done to make way for other things.

It is only natural that your mind starts to drift off in these situations. You may end up finding excuses for not doing that particular thing, say by justifying that you don’t really need to do the job right then, or that it’s not really that important or even something like you’ve got better things to do than the job on hand. But any way you dress them up, they are all just excuses for procrastination.

Which brings us to another aspect of focus; procrastination. Procrastination is perhaps the biggest hurdle in the way of attaining good focus. When you use procrastination to get out of things what you are really saying is that you don’t want to do a particular task, or that you are secretly hoping that it will just go away on its own, or that you will eventually feel motivated to do it.

With so much going on, it is no wonder that focus gets sidelined and never surfaces to the forefront.

And while a lot more can be said on procrastination, we will cross that bridge when we come to it (in a later chapter). For now, it is sufficient to say that procrastination, in fact, is the granddaddy of all excuses and will never let you focus properly on any given task.

How can you counter a lack of focus?

Moving on, while you may be well aware of what is stopping you from focusing (think procrastination), you may not know how to tackle this problem. So here’s some help:

Address WHAT needs to be done

To make focus work for you, you need to have a clear cut goal; call it a grounded purpose towards which all your efforts are directed. When you have this reference point in sight, you can apply all your skillset and decision making to get the job done right. But with this crucial factor missing, you may as well go on a roller coaster ride.

It is these clear cut goals that define what needs to get done.

Clear cut goals also stop you from derailing and prevent you from going places where you never intended to go. Pick out a typical day in your life and think of all the fifty or so things you need to do. With your mind divided and scattered trying to deal with all fifty at the same time, you are likely not going to get much done. On the flip side, you may actually neglect to do some of the more important ones as you keep thinking about everything else instead.

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Introduction

Why do we read books is one of those vast questions that need no answer? As well ask, why ought we to be good? or, why do we believe in a God? The whole universe of wisdom answers. To attempt an answer in a single article would be like turning a spyglass for a moment toward the stars.

We take the great simple things for granted, like the air we breathe. In a country that holds popular education to be the foundation of all its liberties and fortunes, we do not find many people who need to be argued into the belief that the reading of books is good for us; even people who do not read much acknowledge vaguely that they ought to read more.

There are, to be sure, men of rough worldly wisdom, even endowed with spiritual insight, who distrust “book learning” and fall back on the obvious truth that experience of life is the great teacher. Such persons are in a measure justified in their conviction by the number of unwise human beings who have read much but to no purpose.

The book full blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head is a living argument against mere reading?

But we can meet such argument by pointing out that the blockhead who cannot learn from books cannot learn much from life, either. That sometimes useful citizen whom it is fashionable to call a Philistine, and who calls himself a “practical man,” often has under him a beginner fresh from the schools, who is glib and confident in repeating bookish theories, but is not yet skillful in applying them.

If the practical man is thoughtless, he sniffs at theory and points to his clumsy assistant as proof of the uselessness of what is to be got from books. If he is wise, the practical man realizes how much better off he would be, how much farther his hard work and experience might have carried him, if he had had the advantage of bookish training.

Moreover, the hard-headed skeptic, self-made and self-secure, who will not traffic with the literature that touches his life work, is seldom so confined to his own little shop that he will not, for recreation, take holiday tours into the literature of other men's lives and labors.

The man who does not like to read any books is, I am confident, seldom found, and at the risk of slandering a patriot, I will express the doubt whether he is a good citizen. Honest he may be, but certainly not wise. The human race for thousands of years has been writing its experiences, telling how it has met our everlasting problems, how it has struggled with darkness and rejoiced in light.

What fools we should be to try to live our lives without the guidance and inspiration of the generations that have gone before, without the joy, encouragement, and sympathy that the best imaginations of our generation are distilling into words. For literature is simply life selected and condensed into books. In a few hours we can follow all that is recorded of the life of Jesus—the best that He did in years of teaching and suffering all ours for a day of reading, and the more deeply ours for a lifetime of reading and meditation!

If the expression of life in words is strong and beautiful and true it outlives empires, like the oldest books of the Old Testament. If it is weak or trivial or untrue, it is forgotten like most of the “stories” in yesterday's newspaper, like most of the novels of last year. The expression of truth, the transmission of knowledge and emotions between man and man from generation to generation, these are the purposes of literature. Not to read books is like being shut up in a dungeon while life rushes by outside.

I happen to be writing in Christmas week, and I have read for the tenth time “A Christmas Carol,” by Dickens, that amazing allegory in which the hard, bitter facts of life are involved in a beautiful myth, that wizard's caldron in which humor bubbles and from which rise phantom figures of religion and poetry. Can anyone doubt that if this story were read by every man, woman, and child in the world, Christmas would be a happier time and the feelings of the race elevated and strengthened?

The story has power enough to defeat armies, to make revolutions in the faith of men, and turn the cold markets of the world into festival scenes of charity. If you know any mean person you may be sure that he has not read “A Christmas Carol,” or that he read it long ago and has forgotten it. I know there are persons who pretend that the sentimentality of Dickens destroys their interest in him.

I once took a course with an over-refined, imperfectly educated professor of literature, who advised me that in time I should outgrow my liking for Dickens. It was only his way of recommending to me a kind of fiction that I had not learned to like. In time I did learn to like it, but I did not outgrow Dickens. A person who can read “A Christmas Carol" aloud to the end and keep his voice steady is, I suspect, not a safe person to trust with one's purse or one's honor.

Foreword

Nowadays, just about everybody wants to keep fit and healthy to walk around with an attractive body. All the same, most of the individuals do not get sufficient time to join training courses and visit a gymnasium. To make up for this issue, they may look for workout equipment that may assist them in losing a considerable amount of weight and getting in shape at home. Get all the info you need here.

TRX Training Extreme

How to use suspension training to train and tone your body

Chapter 1:

TRX Basics

The TRX suspension trainer is a piece of workout equipment which took an easy idea which may be utilized for complex and ambitious exercises and workouts. The suspension trainer itself is 2 six or seven foot super heavy nylon strips with handles and straps at the end.

The Basics

Every side is adjustable length and the handles are soft foam which allows for a great grip which is obviously crucial if it’s supporting your body weight. In all truth, you ought to be more worried of the support you have your TRX attached to breaking up than the TRX itself.

The TRX lets you perform body weight workouts for your whole body anyplace. It's small and compact to where you are able to pack it with you anyplace and get anyplace from beginner workouts with a few exercises, to elevated Navy SEAL style combat training workouts which is why the TRX is popular with fighter gymnasiums.

The TRX suspension training system was formulated by a SEAL who was tired of not having any workout equipment or space to execute exercises for his entire body while on tours of duty. You do not have to have a deficit of space or be half way across the Earth to utilize the TRX.

While there are a few exercises which the newbie, elderly, exceedingly overweight or weak exerciser can solely do with the TRX, most of the best suspension trainer only exercises are only good if the user has higher-ranking core and overall functional strength.

If you are not significantly heavy and have been working out, most workouts on the TRX have a little learning curve and with practice you will be able to use the TRX for whole workouts or change of pace for a part of your physical exercise.

Chapter 2:

Suspension Training

The field of suspension training is a sort of resistance training/strength training that includes bodyweight workouts in which an assortment of multi-planar, compound exercise motions may be performed. These are done with the ambition of developing strength, balance, flexibleness, and joint stability at the same time.

A Bit More In Depth

Strength training is the utilization of resistance to bring on muscular contraction which builds up the strength, anaerobic endurance, and size of striated muscles.
If decently performed, strength training will supply significant functional advantages and improvement in total health and well-being, including increased bone, muscle, tendon and ligament durability and toughness, bettered joint function, decreased potential for injury, expanded bone density, expanded metabolism, bettered cardiac function, and elevated HDL (good) cholesterol.

Training generally utilizes the technique of progressively increasing the force output of the muscle by incremental weight increases and utilizes an assortment of exercises and types of equipment to target particular muscle groups.

Strength training is chiefly an anaerobic activity, although a few proponents have adapted it to supply the benefits of aerobic exercise through circuit training.
Sports where strength training is central are bodybuilding, weight lifting, powerlifting, and strongman, Highland games, shot put, discus throw, and javelin throw.

A lot of other sports utilize strength training as part of their training regimen, notably football, wrestling, rugby football, track and field, rowing, lacrosse, basketball, hockey. Strength training for additional sports and physical activities is becoming progressively popular.

Bodyweight exercises are strength training exercises that don't call for free weights; the practitioner's own weight supplies the resistance for the movement. Movements like the push-up, the pull-up, and the sit-up are a few of the most common bodyweight exercises.

As a whole, increasing the amount of repetitions will focus on bettering endurance, while strength gains are made with increasing the intensity of the exercise with decreasing leverage and working at the ends of range of motion.