Drink coffee, lift big then take a nap

If there is one supplement that does exactly what its suppose to do it is caffeine.

I’m not writing an article saying that drinking one cup of coffee before a work out is going to make you strong like Bill Kazimaier and ripped like Arnold Schwarzenegger but caffeine does have it’s advantages.

Personally, I don’t drink much of the stuff and when I do I usually stick to the basics coffee and tea (usually green tea).

Personally, I don’t like all the sugar that comes with drinking pop and energy drinks.

That being said caffeine is a wonderful supplement and something I recommend using on occasion.

Typically, when I use caffeine I use it when I am feeling tired, a little worn out and not very motivated to walk the two-feet from my house to the garage to work out.

First thing is first usually when I feel crummy like this it is from a lack of energy which boils down to two possible problems. Those problems typically are poor nutrition or a lack of sleep.

Like I said earlier in this article I don’t really care to drink caffeine but I hate even more to miss a work out. So, my solution is slug down a few cups of coffee or tea and whatever issues I am having.

Usually for me this would be going to bed earlier that night to make sure I am feeling ready to train tomorrow.

If your lack of energy continues after correcting your diet and sleeping more you may be getting dangerously close to over training.

If that’s the case it is time to consider a few days off from exercise completely to let your body recuperate.

As much as I hate taking extra days off I know that being over trained can lead to me getting sick. Something, I like to avoid and understand will cause more missed training sessions.

Remember caffeine is not a long term solution to correcting fatigue its simply a short term.

Use the stuff sparingly and try to use it as seldom as possible.

Caffeine is a stimulant and over time you can develop a tolerance (or so I’ve been told) so eventually the effectiveness is going to wear off.

For me one cup of coffee is enough. I use to drink no-Xplode before a work out and found that my body could hardly handle one scope full of the stuff.

I would experience caffeine overdose my speech would slur, I would have an extreme head ache, feel sick to my stomach and have the jitters.

Eventually, I got to the point where I could drink three scoops of the stuff but that was also when I could no longer discern whether the stuff was helping to boost my performance or not

Remember, moderation try to not be dependent. More is less with caffeine when I started using it constantly I found out that I wasn’t getting the energy or the performance enhancing qualities promised.

However, once I weened myself from using it again I found that on occasion a little bit would go a long way.

Diet versus "Diet"

To many the word diet is a short term change to ones eating patterns to get thin. The thing is that a diet should be so much more.
People should think of their diet as rules to eat by for their entire life.
You will often times here so and so say I feel so great now that I began eating healthy and lost all this weight. Next month that person returns to their regular eating habits and undoes months of hard work spent eating healthy and going to the gym.
The word diet should carry a little more weight in peoples vocabulary. When I tell my friends a McDonald's Big Mac is not part of my diet they know that I don’t eat it. I don’t eat McDonald’s and I haven’t since I was a junior in high school.
People that know me know that my diet is how I always eat. I have never had to lose weight never had to “diet” in the usual Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig sense of the word.
So do I diet?
Yes I diet I constantly diet. I change it to fit whatever I am trying to accomplish.
Sometimes I diet to gain weight. For some that is a concept that might be confusing which may be understandable because the average desk jockey with a bad back doesn’t understand the value of weight gain.
People, my family and friends included don’t always understand that their is such a thing as positive weight gain.
What I mean by positive weight gain is that you gain weight to gain muscle not gain weight to get fat.
Regardless of all that there is too much emphasis on the “diet” and not a diet. People allow themselves to much leniency when it comes to eating. The simple matter of it is there is to much positive re-enforcement and to much incentive to eat poorly in most diet plans.
Most diets work on calorie counting.
“Oh if I just eat 15 calories for lunch then I can eat this 100 calorie piece of cake.”
Wrong, complete crap maybe I am someone who was gifted with a fast metabolism but from my stand point it is about the quality of food you eat not the calories.
What is cake?
Cake is sugar and carbohydrates plain and simple. Obviously sugar and carbs is no-no in any diet. How can simply counting calories prevent the negative affects that sugar and carbs have on your insulin?
I don’t have the answer because I’m not a dietitian but I know that insulin plays a big role in body fat percentage. In my personal opinion it is probably a lot better to eat 100 calories of almonds then of cake.
Why? Almonds=Protein.
Not only do almonds have protein but they are rich in unsaturated fats which by the way is an appetite suppressant.
There is to much fat-free and reduced-fat this and that. Diet food is crap for the most part. They replace one ingredient with another just to reduce the calorie count of the food and in turn might be replacing it with something that does you more harm then good.
The biggest joke is diet tea.
How can there be such a thing as diet tea?
Tea if it is brewed actually helps you lose weight especially the green tea variety. So something labeled diet tea is obviously not real tea.
Look it is simple if you feel better about yourself and have more energy from eating healthy why sabotage that?
If you know you should be eating a chicken breast instead of eating pizza why reach for the pizza?
It’s simple you lack motivation and you need to get it.
We all know that eating healthy you feel better, you look better, and if your an athlete probably perform better. But looking at it from a financial standpoint if you eat healthy you are going to have less doctors visits and less medications to buy for things like high blood pressure and type-2 diabetes.
So with less doctors visits and less medicine to buy you are going to have more money.
Isn’t more money enough of an incentive to try and be healthy?
So what are the blueprints for a good diet?
Simple fresh fruits and vegetables, raw meat that you have to cook yourself, nuts, milk and minimal to no carbs
The more you have to prepare your food the healthier it is going to be for you to eat.